The Crime of Reason - Excerpt

Prof. Robert B. Laughlin
Department of Physics
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

(Basic Books, New York, 2008)
PDF Version

When we are young, we learn that knowledge is a beautiful, logical thing that anyone can use as he likes - provided, of course, he has the patience to read and think. This idea partly comes from parents, who never tire of inventing reasons for us to study more, excel in exams, and so forth, but it's also something we usually conclude on our own. Most of us decide in young adulthood that the ability to reason and understand is natural, human and rightfully ours.

Unfortunately, this conclusion is erroneous. While some information is indeed available for free and even forced upon us in school, most economically valuable knowledge is private property and secret. The owners of this knowledge do not want it made public, and certainly do not want the state paying people to "discover" it. One can argue endlessly about whether "no trespassing" signs in libraries and schools are good things, but the debate is academic. As a practical matter, our rights to learn have already been circumscribed.

People often have trouble speaking about this problem because it's a worldly matter, like the practicalities of having children, that polite individuals don't discuss. Instead they smile and insist that education is golden and that the various ways of withholding knowledge - intentional generation of confusion, stonewalling, lying, disinforming - are obnoxious but not conspiratorial. They then deflect the discussion in a new direction by declaring the concerned person to be paranoid.

This denial is extremely irresponsible. The issue is the criminalization of learning. It's important. It's something we need to think about.

Our tendency to underestimate the danger of knowledge sequestration is partly a side effect of our otherwise sensible practice of separating knowledge into "technical" and "non-technical" categories, rather like social class divisions, and then dismissing sequestration of the former because it's unimportant. Unfortunately, the reasoning behind this practice is exactly backward. We don't really accept sequestration of knowledge because it's technical. We redefine knowledge to be technical when it becomes sequestered. That is to say, when intellectual activity becomes valuable enough to be bought and sold, it changes character. The owner doesn't bother to explain it clearly to you anymore, and you don't bother to ask him for details. You just buy his product - or not, as you choose. That's why repairing your car is technical while driving your car is not. Both involve knowing how cars work, but repair is something you can buy relatively cheaply on the open market, whereas getting where you want to go is expensive unless you do it yourself. On purely intellectual grounds, however, there is no difference between technical and non-technical knowledge.

Once you accept that the issue might be economic rather than cultural, you are forced to rethink some legal fundamentals. Refusing to apply traditions of free speech and free inquiry to things because they're property is different from doing so because they don't matter. A tiresome discussion about technical detail suddenly becomes a deadly serious one about the conflict between personal freedom and property rights. [1] The freedom in question is not the familiar one of political speech, instituted to discourage the consolidation of power by governments, but the freedom to learn and understand things relevant to making your living. In the past nobody worried about protecting this freedom because the major problems of the day were political, and technical property issues didn't obstruct personal economic betterment.

But now we have entered the Information Age, a time when access to understanding has become more important, in many instances, than access to physical means. [2] The growing efforts of governments, corporations and individuals to prevent competitors from knowing certain things that they themselves know has led to a stunning expansion of intellectual property rights and the strengthening of state classification powers. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 and EU Copyright Directive of 2001, for example, make it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures (understand encrypted communication) and distribute code-cracking devices (tell other people about it). [3] The Bayh-Dole and Stevenson-Wydler Acts of 1980 redefine the mission of government-supported research to be the generation of intellectual property. [4] The Microsoft antitrust decision institutionalizes corporate monopolization of communication. [5] Courts now sustain patent claims for hiring strategies, real estate sales techniques, the discovery of chemical correlations in the body, and gene sequences. [6] Broad areas of two sciences, physics and biology, are now off limits to public discourse because they are national security risks. [7] Our society is sequestering knowledge more extensively, rapidly and thoroughly than any before it in history. Indeed, the Information Age should probably be called the Age of Amnesia because it has meant, in practice, a steep decline in public accessibility of important information. [8] This is particularly ironic given the rise of the Internet, which appears to spectacularly increase access to information but actually doesn't. [9]

The attitudes about knowledge implicit in this development raise profoundly troubling questions about human beings' fundamental rights to question and know. More and more the ``flash of insight'' that we so admired in Galileo and Newton - the sudden understanding of a thing and its implications - is turning out to be a patent infringement or a state security danger. [10,11] More and more, the act of reasoning something out for yourself is potentially a crime.

The increasingly conservative legal interpretation of invention as theft echos our society's growing ambiguity over how it feels about technical power. We sympathize with the young genius who, in an impetuous act of reason, breaks through the confusion and makes a glorious contribution to knowledge. [12] We also fear the genetic manipulation, nuclear conflict, usurpation of airplanes by terrorists, job export and so forth that his contributions might facilitate. Unable to decide which is more important to us, we label his acts as criminal or not after the fact, according to principles that shift over time and that he didn't understand when he did his work. [13] He is like the soldier making brave decisions on the battlefield without knowing whether he will receive a commendation or a court-martial. We respect what he stands for but absolutely will not grant him full creative license. Too much is at stake. The irresponsible publication of a trade secret or military technology "discovered" by accident could mean death for a corporation, chaos in the streets, or loss of life in war. [14]

Thus at the dawn of the Information Age we find ourselves dealing with the bizarre concept of the "crime of reason," the unsocial nature or outright illegality of understanding certain things. Legislatures, with our tacit blessing, have begun writing laws that criminalize understanding and speech because it is easier than criminalizing the behavior they engender. [15] The argument they make, echoing that of previous eras, is that incremental curtailment of freedom is a reasonable price to pay for continued safety and prosperity. We will regulate and censor certain things for your own good. Don't worry about the details. They're technical. But who will the censors be? To whom will they report? [16]

Unfortunately, the simplistic reflexive response technically informed people make, ``liberty or death,'' falls on deaf ears. It simply isn't workable. Our society has already decided, quite firmly, that a growing body of technical understanding shouldn't be accessible to everybody. [17] We have no option other than to sit down and plan, as best we can, what the rules of knowledge containment will be. That requires informing ourselves of the facts and thinking hard about them, since things you understand incompletely are easy to dismiss as confusing, boring and irrelevant, even when they aren't. [18] Sanitized knowledge is also deliberately designed to look this way. [19]

Meanwhile the wiser heads are sorrowful and silent, for they understand the full significance of this moment. It marks the final, terrible demise of Enlightenment optimism. Descartes's brave declaration, "I think, therefore I am," has become a satire. We have collectively resolved to relinquish our intellectual rights, to vote them out of existence on the grounds that they are too inconvenient and frightening to live with. The "technical" nature of the banned knowledge is irrelevant. Knowledge is knowledge. Once we accept that some of it is too important for ordinary people to have, we are no longer at Orwell's doorstep but sitting together in his parlor discussing proper placement of the furniture. That's not the way many of us wanted it, but that's the way it is.

This is an authorized excerpt from R. B. Laughlin, The Crime of Reason (Basic Books, New York, 2008).

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