Liberalism fosters science, which expands the intellectual and material universe, and liberalism can best cope with the changes that it and science have engendered.

From The Science of Liberty by Timothy Ferris.  Page 26.

The rapid changes in knowledge, power, and preference produced by the rise of science and technology have spotlighted the value of creativity. Back when the pace of change was glacially slow, the average person had scant opportunity to imagine, much less live, a life greatly different from that of his parents and grandparents: If you were the child of a peasant or a serf you almost certainly were going to remain in a similar station. Science and liberalism changed this dynamic. They opened up economic opportunities—if you could invent an improved clock or steam engine, or discover the universal laws of gravitation and inertia, you could become rich and famous regardless of whether your father was a carpenter, as was James Watt’s, or a farmer, as was Isaac Newton’s—and created a dynamic of progress that benefited not just the inventors but the general public. “In an advancing society,” noted the mathematician H. B. Phillips, “any restriction on liberty reduces the number of things tried and so reduces the rate of progress. In such a society freedom of action is granted to the individual, not because it gives him greater satisfaction but because if allowed to go his own way he will on the average serve the rest of us better than under any orders we know how to give.” This wasn’t clear in the old days, when few individuals enjoyed many benefits from creativity beyond hearing a stirring sermon from the pulpit or a new song produced by a bard from a faraway court. Today, the value of individual creativity is much more evident: Starting with the rise of literacy and libraries, and now expanding in a world of mobile phones and the Internet, people can appreciate that their well-being is enhanced by the creativity of others, and that the world’s total expertise far exceeds the personal understanding of any one individual. Hence the benefits of everyone’s being free to come up with new ideas and inventions become increasingly clear, even if most of their work is often too specialized for the rest of us to comprehend. Liberalism fosters science, which expands the intellectual and material universe, and liberalism can best cope with the changes that it and science have engendered.