A common commitment to enlarging the circle of scientific knowledge

For probably three years now I have been periodically lugging around Tim Ferris's The Science of Liberty. Why? It's just that good. One of those books where nearly every page has some new information, some new perspective on something familiar, some attractive turn-of-phrase, some new idea completely unexpected. I love those sorts of books and don't want them to end. Counterproductively, I end up carrying them around, parcelling out a page here, a couple of paragraphs there. On the one hand, it makes it last longer. On the other, it does a disservice to the author who has an argument to make, an argument that can get dissipated when dosed out in teaspoon servings.

I now am about 60% through and all sorts of items from the fascinatingly trivial to the inspiringly significant. The argument is coming together and I now do really need to read it in continuous sittings no matter how little I want it to end. The first of many excerpts and quotations. Page 187.

In a deeper sense all economics is liberal anyway, inasmuch as economics is a science. Economists are liberal, notwithstanding their political differences, to the extent that their work promotes fact-finding over ideology. An image that comes to mind is that of Hayek and Keynes during World War II. The two disagreed with and distrusted each other - Hayek was an aristocratic Viennese war veteran, Keynes a Bloomsbury bisexual - but when Hayek fled London during the Blitz, Keynes put him up in his rooms at Cambridge and the two stood rooftop air-raid watches together, scanning the night skies for German warplanes while debating the relative merits of government intervention versus unfettered free markets. What makes such scientific collegiality possible is not just a shared interest in a particular discipline but a common commitment to enlarging the circle of scientific knowledge.

I like both the image of the two cerebral antagonists watching for bombers and I especially like that useful definition of a liberal as someone with a "common commitment to enlarging the circle of scientific knowledge." People bedaub themselves with all sorts of terms to mark themselves as part of one tribe or another despite the fact that the terms have come unmoored from the original meanings and no longer bear any resemblance. As an example, I would take it as axiomatic that anyone seeking to suppress freedom of speech under whatever auspices, but especially when seeking to avoid hurt feelings, has no basis for calling themselves liberal, and yet that seems to be a common habit today.