TheAdvocate's Full Review: Richard Feynman - The Meaning of it All: Thoughts ...
Richard Feynman's posthumous collection, "The Meaning of It All," is actually a series of three lectures he gave back in 1963 at the University of Washington. The collection addresses how science might inform our understanding of politics and religion.
His recurrent theme is freedom of thought: the freedom to doubt, to investigate, and to believe. For example, when noting the two legacies of western civilization - the "scientific spirit of adventure" and "Christian ethics" - Feynman concludes that these two legacies are "logically, thoroughly, consistent." We must be free to doubt and question to find new answers, and we must be free to believe and base our actions in a morality larger than ourselves. Both are necessary freedoms in a just society.
Feynman came to believe, as a result of his own scientific methods, that with certainty comes stagnation. Perhaps this is why he found inspiration in religious pursuits. After all, faith is the antithesis of certainty, and the catalyst for discovery.
He applied the same reasoning to politics. Why, for example, is communism probably a bad way to go? Because it assumes absolute certainty. "I think that Russia represents danger in saying that the solution to human problems is known, that all effort should be for the state, for that means there is no novelty. The human machine is not allowed to develop its potentialities, its surprises, its varieties, its new solutions for difficult problems, its new points of view." He was arguing that certainty was not only a threat to freedom, but to the diversity of ideas.
When Feynman writes, "The government of the United States was developed under the idea that nobody knew how to make a government, or how to govern," he's getting at the idea that our government is open-ended; it welcomes new ideas and can adapt to changing concerns, technologies, and improvements in our understanding. It's dynamic, whereas socialist and communist governments, with their tight central control mechanisms of both the culture and economy, are static and fixed.
So why should we care what a physicist has to say about politics and religion? Feynman recognized the value in applying our knowledge from one field onto another. It's a process E.O. Wilson calls "consilience," or the synthesis of knowledge. In his book, Feynman says that "all life is interconnected with all other life." So, too, are categories of knowledge.
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