I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

388 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
my senior year of high school I had done a research paper on flood legends and myths from
around the world. I was amazed how prevalent variants of this story were. They existed all
over the world, from the Middle East and Eurasia to North America and the Far East, even
among Australian aborigines and other peoples who could not have had any contact with
one another for thousands of years. Sometimes, in these legends, it was a single family that
survived, as in the account of Noah, his wife and three sons (and three daughters-in-law)
in Genesis; sometimes a single couple, sometimes a larger group. The names of the survivors
were obviously different. But surely a legend this prevalent reflected a real event, possibly
on a global scale. Add to this any number of curious discoveries, including objects clearly
of human origin found buried in solid rock supposedly millions of years old (Charles Fort
offers primary sources for such reports), and it paints a picture of the remote past that ought
to disturb purveyors of the status quo.
The prevailing view in geology was then called uniformitarianism: “the present is the
key to the past.” It completely rejected the idea of geological catastrophes. Its author was
one of the founders of modern geology, Sir Charles Lyell, who lived in the early 1800s.
Charles Darwin studied Lyell, seeing in uniformitarianism the long-term ecological stability
necessary for evolution by natural selection to take place. In this view, there were no catastrophes.
Yet authors such as Fort and Hapgood seemed to have assembled evidence, apparently
unknown to my professors, that there had indeed been catastrophes. A variant on this
idea began to catch on in the 1980s—that the dinosaurs, for example, had been wiped out
by a global cataclysmic event such as a comet or asteroid strike on the Earth. The intellectual
problem of what to do about geological anomalies—facts that don’t fit—had stuck in my
mind as a kind of near-obsession that conflicted with my studies: studies whose working
premises seemed to me dubious at best. I was supposed to be studying geology, but what I
couldn’t take fully seriously, I couldn’t study. I considered taking a purely vocational attitude
toward the subject: f’getaboutit and learn to explore for oil! Goes without saying, that didn’t
fit my particular mindset, either.
I was miserable, and almost dropped out of college until the day of a conversation with
a local pastor. We didn’t talk about Christianity. That came much later. But we did talk
about ideas, especially questions about morality and its foundations, questions about science
and its authority—including whether science was the sole authority over such questions as
whether human beings really have free will. These, he pointed out, were problems of philosophy,
not science. I went back, looked at my library, and realized I’d already begun
collecting philosophical writings, especially the sort that would help sort out my questions
about the nature of science. These came to include Thomas S. Kuhn’s ever-fascinating The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s ideas about paradigms seemed to fit my own
observations, including the paradigm shift that began in geology around 1980. At some
point I resolved to change schools and change majors—from geology to philosophy. I would
specialize in the history and philosophy of science, because so many of my interests converged
on the epistemic authority of science in one way or another.
So where did libertarianism enter the picture? Actually, it never left. It subsisted as an
implicit demand from my mentors to be allowed to think for myself, even if this led to a
rejection of the dominant paradigm (to use the Kuhnian term). It emerged openly through