Reflections on September 11 three years laterA bedrock principle of the open-access movement is that freedom promotes science. We mean freedom of information --freedom from price barriers, freedom from needless licensing restrictions, freedom from censorship. But this is just one facet of a wider and deeper thesis that can be traced back through Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper to John Stuart Mill, namely, that science can only thrive in a free society where individual inquirers are free to defend disfavored or despised ideas and free to challenge orthodoxy and ideology.
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #77
September 2, 2004
by Peter Suber
But we don't often hear the converse thesis: that science promotes freedom. Consider the kind of freedom described by Daniel Dennett in _Freedom Evolves_ (Viking, 2003). This is the freedom that arises from cognition and understanding, in particular, from understanding the effects of causes. This kind of understanding helps us anticipate harm and plan our actions in order to avert it. To use Dennett's example, when someone throws a brick at my head, and I duck to avoid it, then I have used my understanding to escape harm. There are several layers to this understanding. I have the sense of sight, not just touch; I don't have wait to be hit in order to know that the brick is coming. I understand that the brick will hit and hurt me if I don't move. I am able to turn this understanding into action that increases rather than decreases my chances of escaping injury.
This kind of understanding makes the inevitable "evitable". The brick that would inevitably have hit the uncomprehending creature failed to hit me. We can anticipate and control our future to a fairly high degree, at least compared to entities with primitive brains, like snails, or without brains, like ponds. This kind of anticipation and control is a large part of what we call freedom, perhaps the whole of it. As far as we possess it, we owe it to our sense organs, our brains, our science, and the culture that supports our science --our biological and cultural nervous systems. Science is like another, highly-refined sense organ telling us what's coming, whether it's harmful, and what might be done to avert it. The point is not that it's perfect, merely that it improves over time, amplifies our ability to convert the inevitable into the evitable, and thereby enhances our freedom.
Here's an example. We won't make ourselves free from the threat of terrorism simply by ratcheting up security at borders and buildings. On the contrary, even if that kind of surveillance effectively strengthens our security or negative freedom (from danger), it reduces our liberty or positive freedom (as citizens). Moreover, it only addresses symptoms, not causes, and therefore does not fully harness the understanding that fosters evitability. To enhance our freedom in the face of hatred we must diminish hatred itself. The snag is that we have no idea how to do this, or we have only feeble guesses. Our understanding itself is limited, partly because hatred is diffuse and elusive, and partly because we're implicated in it, both as objects of hatred and as haters. In the face of a large and complicated challenge like this, we can only start where we find ourselves and take modest steps. We may not know how to do the whole job (and we may suspect anyone who pretends to know), but we know a few elements that are sure to play a part: overcoming ignorance, sharing knowledge, and building new forms of cooperation.
If science doesn't play a part in the freedom we are trying to build, then we can be sure that we've misconceived that freedom, just as we would if free travel and free speech did not play their part in it as well.
Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, Viking, 2003
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z2BD25529
Reflections on September 11, 2001
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4315923/suber_news9-14-01.html#911
Reflections on September 11, 2002
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4732069/suber_911ann1.htm
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