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insights.
    Modern science really developed from a willingness to question things that had always been taken for granted. If I have a cup in my hand full of boiling water, and I let go with both hands, the steam rises and the cup falls. Why? Well, for millennia there was a good answer from the best scientists: the cup and steam are both going to their natural place. The natural place of the steam is up there, and the natural place for the cup is down there. End of discussion. But Galileo and others decided that they were puzzled by this event. Why does this happen? And as soon as they started to be puzzled, the question turned out to be significant. As soon as you look carefully, you find that all your intuitions are wrong. Our intuition is that a heavy ball and a light ball will fall at different rates. They don’t. In fact, just about all intuitions are wrong. Modern science comes out of that understanding.
    When you go to the social and political domain, there are certain doctrines that are just taken for granted, like things go to their natural place. For example, the United States is a benign actor. It makes mistakes, but its leaders are trying to do good in the world. People make mistakes, it’s a complicated world, but we’re promoting democracy. We love democracy. If you don’t accept these dogmas, you’re just not part of the discourse. That’s true of ordinary discourse. That’s true of professional scholarship to a remarkable degree. That’s true of the media overwhelmingly. You can find case after case.
    Take a look at an article in the New York Times by Bill Keller, the paper’s former executive editor, on our inherent benign character. 2 He points out there are very troubling exceptions: we supported and are supporting serious atrocities in Bahrain, and we don’t do anything about the most reactionary state in the region, Saudi Arabia. He says these exceptions are troubling because they don’t fit our general nature. That’s about at the level of “things go to their natural place.”
    It doesn’t take much brilliance to recognize that this is not schizophrenia and there’s nothing surprising about it. It’s exactly the way great powers operate. They have domestic power structures that determine policy. There are a lot of other factors, but they’re not overwhelmingly significant. If you look at the goals and intentions of political elites, everything falls into place. Of course, if you take that stand, you’re excluded from polite discourse—just as, incidentally, Galileo was. He couldn’t convince the funders, the aristocrats, that any of his ideas made any sense because they were so counter to common sense. He suffered for it under the Inquisition, as dissidents commonly do suffer. He was forced to renounce formally everything he believed. Legend has it that under his breath he said, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”). Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.
    Almost every society I’ve ever heard of, back to the earliest records, treats those we call dissidents, people who depart from the established consensus, pretty harshly. How harshly depends on the society. Another interesting thing about our culture is that we are very outraged by the harsh treatment of dissidents in enemy states. So the treatment of, say, Václav Havel or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is considered an utter outrage quite rightly. You can find countless articles in the New York Times about the horrible way in which dissidents are treated elsewhere. But, if you look at the facts, dissidents in U.S. domains are treated far more harshly. So you can read in the standard Cambridge History of the Cold War that since 1960 the record of torture, assassination, and other atrocities in U.S. domains vastly exceeds anything in the Soviet and Russian domains. 3 It’s obviously true. So yes, Havel was imprisoned. Very bad. Six Jesuit