actually, in a sense, started to report science, of all things. They proved very popular in combination with coffee, which was just coming in from Turkey at that time. So you had a place to go, a coffeehouse, where you could read the papers and drink a cup of coffee and turn around and talk to your neighbors about what you read in the papers. This combination proved seditious in every jurisdiction in which it was established, and leaders from Cairo to London attempted, without success, to make coffeehouses illegal. In 1687, [Isaac] Newton published his Principia, which changed the world by beginning to show the tremendous predictive power of science. I would suggest that the Enlightenment, usually dated from the following year – the beginning of the Glorious Revolution, which established parliamentary authority in England – should instead be dated from the publication of the Principia. [After that], a lot of things happen, including Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776, which has had tremendous consequences, the American Declaration of Independence that same year, and the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The term liberal democracy means a democracy; people vote to elect their leaders. The liberal part is that, however, they are not free by simple majority vote to abridge anybody’s human rights. [Look at] the impact this combination of liberal democracy and science has had on the world since their inception back in the 1600s, 1700s. The first has been the spread of liberal democracy itself. Circa 1800, you had maybe three liberal democracies in the world, and that’s if you’re willing to put up with suffrage barriers that only allow a minority of people to vote. By 1850, there were five. By 1900, around 13. In 1950, there were 22 liberal democracies in the world. Today, there are 89. Forty-six percent of all human beings now live in liberal democracies, and it is the stated preference of the majority of the human species. A poll just released the other day of 2,000 Arab youths, aged 18 to 24, interviewed at length in nine Middle Eastern nations, showed that their top priority was living in a democracy. They didn’t want to give up their culture, they didn’t want to go someplace else, and they wanted to have democracy there. You get similar results when you poll anybody in the world who is not totally subjugated by a controlled press. I looked at the attainments of science and liberty in terms of three broad categories that everyone could agree are good things for people: health, wealth and happiness. Life expectancy at birth for all of humanity has doubled since the year 1800. World population has increased by a factor of 10 since 1700. Despite that increase, world food production has more than kept the pace with the rising population. Food production, just from 1961 to 2001, was up 52 percent per person worldwide, despite the rapidly increasing population. In terms of wealth, the world per-capita GDP in 1800 was a little under $700 a year; the growth rate was 1 percent. Today, that number is closer to $7,000 – another factor of 10 increase – and the growth rate, averaged over enough times that we’re not looking at the recent recession, is about 3 perj u ne/j u ly 2010
THE COMMO N WE AL TH
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Photo by Jeff Henshaw / Flickr
Now, how is science symbiotic with liberalism? Both are antiauthoritarian. Science has always been antiauthoritarian, because experimental results have a tendency to disprove even great authorities, and that’s built into science. All scientists, even the greatest ones, are wrong about some things. One of the reasons citizens in liberal democracies are able to abide by terrible, traumatic election results – where their tribe loses even though they won the majority of the votes through a Supreme Court decision – is that they know that in the long run, it won’t matter that much. Both science and liberalism are selfcorrecting systems: liberalism through the methods I’ve been describing and science through the fact that as long as science is an ongoing enterprise, you have young scientists coming up, many of whom are eager to make a reputation by proving that their elders were wrong about something. They’re both powerful; they’re both social. Both liberalism and science require maximizing intellectual resources, which means public education. When John Locke was inventing liberalism, he wrote extensively about public education, and did so in terms that sound very modern today. It’s clear that science benefits this way, because we need, in science, maximum brainpower. Science, therefore, has certain liberal imperatives, such as not arbitrarily excluding people who can provide brainpower on irrelevant bases, such as whether they’re women. In liberalism you have a similar injunction to maximize intellectual resources, because people are going to vote and you would prefer that they be educated and have a better sense of what’s going on and be a little more invested in the country than that they be ignorant and alien. Science incited the Enlightenment – caused is perhaps not too strong a word – which in turn, everyone agrees, led to the democratic revolution. Around 1605, Francis Bacon began to glimpse the real power of induction and experiment and wrote influential books that this system would trump the highly reasoned philosophical systems that had preceded it. In 1609, Galileo published his telescopic observations, showing that just looking through the telescope could prove that ancient authorities, even Aristotle, were wrong about, at least, some things. The oldest surviving printed newspapers in Europe, which were started in Germany, started in 1609; they started because there was such public [controversy about] Galileo’s findings that people wanted to read more about science. Newspapers