The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [134]
5. Freedom of speech and the press.
6. Freedom of association.
7. Mass education.
8. Protection of civil liberties.
9. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.
10. A potent police force for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state.
11. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws.
12. An effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.
These essentials incorporate the moral values embraced by both liberals and conservatives, and as such form the foundation for a bridge between the Left and the Right. Will the Libertarian Party ever grow large enough to challenge the two dominant political parties and form a viable three-party system? I doubt it, for the very reason that libertarians tend to dislike large and powerful political parties. Organizing libertarians is like herding cats. Nevertheless, in the context of the pattern of political parties and the moral values on which they are based, the libertarian position is just a reshuffling of the foundations of the other two. Nothing new needs to be invented or introduced into the system. These are values deeply ingrained in our nature and thus will likely remain a relatively permanent part of future political patterns.
Belief and Truth
Belief statements in politics are not always the same as belief statements in science. When I say, “I believe in evolution” or “I believe in the big bang,” this is something different than when I say, “I believe in a flat tax” or “I believe in liberal democracy.” Either evolution and the big bang happened or they did not, and the overwhelming evidence is that they did. The matter of the origin of species and the origin of the universe are, in principle, puzzles that can be solved with more data and better theory. But the matter of the right form of taxation or governmental structure depends on the overall goals to be accomplished, and for that more data and better theory can help us only once the goal has been established. The determination of that overarching political goal, however, depends on the very subjective process of political debate in which both sides build a case for what they think is the better way to live. I happen to think that a flat tax is a much fairer system than a progressive tax, because I don’t think that people should be punished with higher taxes just because they earn more income through hard work and creativity. But my liberal friends argue that a progressive tax is fairer because people lower on the income scale are hit harder by the same tax rate than people higher on the income scale.
Although science may not be able to adjudicate such issues of fairness to everyone’s satisfaction, a case can and should be made for science informing political beliefs—sometimes belief statements in politics are not dissimilar from belief statements in science. I have crossed this boundary myself many times, most notably in The Science of Good and Evil and The Mind of the Market. I reject in practice the naturalistic fallacy (sometimes called the is-ought fallacy), which holds that the is should not determine the ought; that the way things are is not necessarily how they should be, or that just because something is natural does not make it right. Sometimes that is the case, but sometimes it is not the case. I firmly believe that how we structure society should be informed by and even based on a Realistic Vision of human nature and the twelve lines of evidence I presented for it; the failed communist and socialist experiments demonstrate what happens when you ignore the way things are naturally—people die by the hundreds of millions.
Another example of crossing the is-ought divide can be found in Timothy Ferris’s book The Science of Liberty, in which he weds democracy and science.26 Ferris argues, for example, that the political belief of John Locke that people should be treated equally under the law—which factored heavily