Positive Liberty

In recent months, I’ve found myself reflecting on the achievements of Western culture–on what it is that makes it worthy of success against its enemies, domestic and foreign. And I’ve often thought of the first episode of James Burke’s The Day The Universe Changed, which I still think one of the best, most eloquent discussions of why Western civilization deserves to prevail. I’m delighted to see that it’s available on Google video (though split up into five parts; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It’s a brilliant exposition, showing how freedom–whether capitalism or freedom of inquiry in science–lie at the heart of the human values Western civilization has discovered. Check out especially part 2:

That’s the kind of thing we do. We try to take the universe apart to see how it works. We can’t leave anything alone without knowing what it is. We are insatiably curious. And that’s what we defend here, with all this military hardware. The right to be curious. To ask questions and get answers. To question authority and remove it from power if we don’t like what it’s telling us. And that’s why we’ve changed, constantly, throughout history, to become what we are today. Because we’ve never stopped asking questions. And what have we got as a result? Answers. A mountain of them, gathered over the centuries. So much, we’ve had to invent systems just to handle it. So big, information processing itself is now a science. So total, it’s generated the full entire complex of the modern Western world, a world based on information, that we can defend from a hole inside a mountain thanks to the knowledge we’ve accumulated, and that we want to go on being free to accumulate.

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