02.15.10
Booknotes: Ferris’ ‘Science of Liberty’
Freedom’s Laboratory
By GARY ROSEN
Published: February 12, 2010
This is from a review of Ferris’ new book The Science of Liberty. I am suspicious at once of this book: still another attempt to counter the ‘science of freedom’ argument in World History And The Eonic Effect? I have lost count of the books trying to attack me without mentioning me. Anyway, I think Ferris has missed the point and is spouting a science groupie argument, to the effect that science explains everything.
His argument is surely false. I will have to read the book but I will bet he never examines the history of the idea of the ‘science of freedom’, e.g. in Kant and Hegel.
Instead we get this hyped science propaganda.
The reality is that science, as Darwinism shows, is a misleading authoritarian propaganda system outside of basic physics, and the case of evolution shows that scientists are not trustworthy on cultural issues.
The question of the emergence of freedom is almost by definition no clarified by science, because science is causal analysis, and freedom is allergic to that kind of argument.
I need to get a hold of this book to see just how bad it is, so….
We live in an age of science domination, not science freedom. Any garbage like this gets advanced. The classic discourses puzzling over the antinomies of freedom and causality won’t even be mentioned in this book, I will wager. Pathetic.
Note: on the surface this is an engaging and cheery book. But the fatal dose of scientism operates in the background, in the tide of the science religion.
Check out the eonic effect for the issue of the ‘evolution of freedom’, the emergence of modern libreralism, and the course of democratic emergence across history.
http://history-and-evolution.com
To say that the scientific frame of mind has played an important part in the rise of the West is not exactly controversial. Science always gets its moment in the spotlight in “Whig history,” as historians (dismissively) call grand narratives of political and material progress. In “The Science of Liberty,” the veteran science writer Timothy Ferris makes a more extravagant claim, assigning not a mere supporting role but top billing to the celebrated experimenters and inventors of the past several centuries. As he sees it, the standard account of the history textbooks — with the Renaissance giving rise to the Scientific Revolution and thus preparing the way for the Enlightenment — fails to identify the primary causal relationship. Democratic governance and individual rights did not emerge from some amorphous “brew of humanistic and scientific thinking,” he argues, but were “sparked” by science itself — the crucial “innovative ingredient” that “continues to foster political freedom today.”