Judea Pearl, the father of kidnapped and murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, has made me and millions another take notice. Since the death of his son, Dr. Pearl has spoken out to bring peace to the world. As an Israeli, his demands for tolerance of Muslims are especially welcome. His partnership with Professor Akbar Ahmed as co-founders of the Daniel Pearl Dialog for Muslim-Jewish Understanding not only demonstrates his philosophy, but advance peace processes worldwide.
Of course, we all must feel empathy for a man whose son was assassinated and we should all admire this man who sublimates his grief by seeking peace and understanding among men. However, I feel some other bonds with Judea Pearl. He is interested in knowledge and truth. He is a computer scientist with an interest in cognitive systems as I once was. He is a professor at my alma mater, the University of California at Los Angeles. Indeed, he is not to far from my own age, and I too have a son.
Pearl was recently awarded an honorary degree from the University of Toronto. He used the award as the occasion for a wonderful speech. That speech is directly relevant to the theme of this blog. In that speech he said:
Galileo always reminds me of the inextricable connection between science and freedom.Pearl quotes from Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia and co-founder of the LibForAll Foundation, and Israel Lau, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp and the former Chief Rabbi of Israel. They said:How? Because Galileo showed that to be a scientist you must have both: respect for the truth, and the audacity to believe that you can find it.
This might sound trivial -- science, by definition, is about truth, so what's all this talk about freedom.
It is not so trivial. Truth can be elusive, even in our times, covered by the heavy fog of fear and hidden agenda. It is only after the murder of my son Danny that I came to appreciate how hard it is, even in the age of Internet, to stay the course of truth.
Today, the countries in which Holocaust denial is most rampant also tend to be the ones that are most economically backward and politically repressive. This should not be surprising: Dishonest when it comes to the truth of the past, these countries are hardly in a position to reckon honestly with the problems of the present. Yes, the short-term purposes of unscrupulous rulers can always be served by whipping up mass hysteria and duping their people with lurid conspiracy theories. In the long term, however, truth is the essential ingredient in all competent policy making. Those who tell big lies about the Holocaust are bound to tell smaller lies about nearly everything else.Pearl concludes that section of his address, saying:
What Galileo taught us is that permission to read, translate, observe and use fancy equipment is not enough; the development of Science requires a restless and rebellious spirit, a spirit that puts the individual at the center of the universe and proclaims: "I don’t care about Aristotle and his fancy books, I want to see these two rocks dropped from the tower of Pisa, and I want to see them with my own two eyes."Pearl is right that knowledge is not enough, one needs freedom. Indeed one needs an inquiring spirit. Galileo, his hero, did not simple read, think and write, he went out to solve problems himself. It should be remembered that the telescope was not only important for astronomy, it was a boon to all the maritime trades and arts.
In other words, what Galileo showed us is that you cannot truly search for the truth unless you are free to rebel against the detractors of truth: conventional wisdom, peer pressure, sacred cows, wishful thinking, revered authority and hidden agenda, in short, free to perceive yourself as an AGENT, in control of your destiny, not an OBJECT, at the mercy of destiny.
Remarkably, this Western perception of man as a free agent, sometimes called the "scientific philosophy", it not always taken for granted, even today.
Developing countries will not benefit from knowledge if their people do not have the freedom to inquire and the ability to benefit from their inquiries.
Wahid and Lau are also right to point out the correlation between those countries lead by people who deny the past and ignore truth in favor of propaganda and those countries which have prospered least economically and socially!
1 comment:
Good post John....I could not help but think of another topic of your blog -- the denigration of science by the Bush administration. I don't think that would fit in the correlation. But, it is a sign of unscrupulous rulers. If it were to become a broader trend, we would likely see American decline. I hope the next election will reverse the tendency of our rulers to denigrate science.
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