In a Beijing hotel I inhabited for a few days, a note on the sink politely informed me that drinking the tap water would probably mean a speedy trip to the hospital. Oddly, the warning was awkwardly cushioned with a promise that the water, though poisonous if drunk, was great for the skin. I’m still not entirely sure whether this was meant seriously, or just as an idle pleasantry, but if you take this kind of promise of good health at face value, you quickly realise that the Chinese are barraged continually with health, happiness and longevity, to name only the most generic.

Food and drink are rarely sold without reference to health; one brand of tea keeps it simple, with ‘drink often and you will be healthy’, while another goes for ‘every drop makes you healthier’.  A friend informed me in a sagely tone that the quivering blob of fungus on my plate was good for the skin. Sure, health and diet go hand in hand in the West, but China has taken the next step: even supermarket products regularly claim to improve one’s emotional state. ‘Relaxation’ is a particularly popular effect, promised by countless brands of tea. One article on the Xinhua news site prescribes rose tea as a cure for anger, or, failing that, an ice-cold beer.

More specific requests can be catered for as well. The Health section of the Beijing Youth Daily claims today that jujube berries, whatever they may be, are able to help you sleep when stewed, to keep you thin, curvaceous and in good colour when eaten with ‘an appropriate amount of crystallised sugar’, to ‘enrich the blood’ and function as a laxative when boiled with rice (why anyone would need those two effects at the same time is beyond me), and to smooth the skin when mashed to a paste with ginger and liquorice, among other uses. A sterner note is dropped in at the end for a bit of gravitas, with a warning that such effects apply only to women, and that those with ‘moist phlegm’ should think long and hard before trying the berries as well.

The few explanations offered for these miraculous effects give some insight into the popularity of the remedies themselves. The West has its fair share of health crazes, but we tend to prefer ours smothered in scientific jargon that few fully understand, credible by virtue of their complexity (do you know what an antioxidant does?). Chinese health crazes tend instead to wear their folksy anti-intellectualism on their sleeve, either simply asserting their claims without going into the details, or drawing on the mess of pseudoscience that makes up Chinese medicine, which tends to prefer analogy to explanation. Zhang Wuben, a self-styled nutritionist so popular that his recommendations sparked panic buying, claimed that aubergines could reduce one’s level of body fat. His reasoning? Aubergines soak up a lot of oil when cooked, and thus, if eaten raw, can soak up fat from the body.

Much like alternative medicine in the West, the appeal of the absurd is the sense of empowerment it brings, a fact nowhere better shown than in the remarkably fast turnover in Chinese health fads. Countless past miracle-cures have been forgotten, or even ridiculed (notably the craze for chicken blood injections in the 60s – I kid you not), without weakening the demand for new remedies. What the people really want are not herbs and leaves of any particular kind, but simplicity and control. The fads are emotional, not rational in origin.

Simplicity brings comfort, as the Party knows well: a statement released at the height of the bird flue crisis reassured the People that ‘traditional Chinese  medicine has, after five months of clinical trials, been proven effective in curing and preventing bird flue’. End of sentence. No citations, no specifications of which of a huge number of remedies did exactly what. Just a simple order to boil your leaves and don’t swarm the hospitals in a panicking mob.

At the same time, peddlers of the miraculous are regularly imprisoned or censured, but in general only if they are actually dangerous, such as one Hu Wanlin who about ten years ago tried to cure colds with sodium sulphate and killed over a hundred people. Cannier quacks like Zhang Wuben buttress their more eye-catching claims with plenty of quite reasonable advice: drink plenty of water, eat red meat in moderation and so on, and most get away with it. Jujube berries, though no miracle cure, are still pretty good for you. Thus, China’s officials seem content to let people play doctor, so long as no one gets hurt.

There are plenty of fairly prosaic reasons for the endlessness of the health craze – lightly regulated advertising; a government that exploits superstition for short-term stability; an inadequate healthcare system that makes self-medication more attractive. Yet that desire to have control, no matter how fantastical, is something different, having survived campaigns against superstition and a steadily growing standard of education. Most likely, it speaks volumes about the lack of trust in figures of authority prevalent in China. Even  relatively patriotic Chinese have little faith in the character of the local health officials they interact with day to day, and even doctors, past class enemies, can be viewed with suspicion. Trust may be built one day, but until then life in China will continue to be saturated with promises of instant solutions to problems great and small, and no one, bar the odd grumpy scientist, has the heart to prove them wrong. 

Philosopher (and scientist, mathematician, logician, etc.) Charles Peirce, in a well-known 1877 essay, tried to defend the scientific method on pragmatic grounds alone, saying it’s the most successful way, given our peculiar status as rational animals, to cure doubt and fix belief. But if what I’ve been going on about is true—namely that science grates on human nature, and that relatively few people are motivated to doubt their beliefs in the first place—then Peirce can’t be right, and we’d have no independent reason to endorse the scientific method over and above other means of settling opinion. ‘It just works’ is a bad argument if it doesn’t work.

So where do we stand? Let’s say we hold to our analysis and decide that Peirce has missed the mark. Let’s say he’s wrong about human nature. Do we have to give up on science, then, and say it’s no better than alternative routes to belief? Is there really nothing that sets it apart? You can guess that my answer is ‘no’. But so too, I think, is Peirce’s—despite his superficially pragmatist narrative. Science is better than alternative routes to belief because the path it charts wends toward truth.

So say I. But I want to convince you that Peirce too, deep-down, regards science as truth-sensitive in this way—connected to objective reality—and that it is this fact which gives it its special potency in doing away with doubt. Peirce understands that we humans care about truth, and he thinks that science can deliver it best.

What makes me so sure? Start with this. On the way to explaining why science-based beliefs alone can withstand the seeping erosion of doubt, Peirce writes: ‘it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing human, but by some external permanency—by something upon which our thinking has no effect’. What external permanency can he mean, if not a stable state of affairs—a real world—to which science has special access? Actually, shortly after the quote I’ve just given, Peirce spells out, and even seems to endorse, the keystone hypothesis of the scientific worldview: ‘There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and … we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are’. Finally, he writes that if ‘a man … wishes his opinions to coincide with [fact], [it will be] the prerogative of [science]’ to produce the desired effect. This appears to be scientific realism plain as day. How can Peirce defend such a view in the course of an otherwise insistent pragmatism?

To answer this, let’s give Peirce’s train of thought another look. Doubt, he says, arises from the irritating friction of two (or more) incompatible propositions. But then someone who doubts must believe that there is some one state of affairs against which the competing propositions could be decided—in other words, an external, objective reality. Now, we all doubt; so we must all believe in an external, objective reality. So we are all by nature realists. The scientific method—Peirce then suggests—is the sole contender that posits an external reality or objective truth, so it is the only one that can calm the friction of our doubt.

Let me be careful now. Peirce is not (strictly) saying that the central tenet of science—realism—is true. That would be decidedly un-pragmatic. Instead he is saying that it happens to be the case that we believe it to be true, and cannot help ourselves. That Peirce himself believes this along with the rest of us, and that this belief bolsters his commitment to science, I still have to show. But let’s pause here to consider in more detail Peirce’s reference to folk realism, in order to work out its role in his argument.

This is the claim. We are most of us naïve realists. That much is probably uncontroversial: a quick humanity-wide Gallup poll would certainly reveal an overwhelming bias toward belief in some version of external reality. But it’s a long way around the isthmus from this observation to Peirce’s main point, namely that science is the surest practical way to conquer doubt. After all, I may believe, along with just about everyone else, in the existence of an objective, mind-independent reality—without necessarily endorsing the scientific method for everyday belief-formation, or finding it particularly compelling in general. Expert disciples of the method of tenacity (see Part II), for instance, are very likely realists. They think that the world exists. They think that their own beliefs about the world are objectively true. And they think that the competing beliefs of other people are objectively false. So if what I’ve said in earlier posts is correct—namely that most people practice some form of this tenacious method—then Peirce would still be wrong to say that the scientific one triumphs on pragmatic grounds. To put it another way, since both the method of tenacity and the scientific method are compatible with everyday, man-on-the-street realism, belief in an external world is poor evidence for the exclusive power of science to relieve doubt.

Why, then, is Peirce so loyal to the scientific method? I think—if I may resort to something halfway between textual analysis and psychoanalytic speculation—that it’s because Peirce himself is a scientist. He is enamored with science, and thinks you should be too. ‘All the followers of science’, he writes, ‘are fully persuaded that [its methods] will give one certain solution to every question to which it can be applied’. 

Or consider that different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion.

Here is a man in love. Peirce is expressing in hushed, adoring phrases that same reverence for science which I once knew myself (see Part I). But ‘most of us … are naturally more sanguine and hopeful than logic would justify’ and Peirce’s own optimism may be a case in point. His argument for the practical grounding and palliative effects of science seems to groan under the weight of so much counter-evidence: provincialism, tribalism, ideological indoctrination, and partisan hollering, just to start. The virtuous social impulse that he credits to our species’ inmost nature—that tendency to fundamentally doubt our own beliefs when we see that others think differently from us—if it ever was essential, may now be vestigial at best. And science, I’ve tried to show, is more bewildering than bewitching.

But Peirce could still be right in the long-run, for he tunes his optimism to the arc of infinity. ‘Our perversity’, he writes, ‘may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. Yet even that would not change the nature of [a true] belief, which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigation, that true opinion must be the one which they would ultimately come to.’

This is realism. Even for Peirce, that is, some one truth exists. The world really is a certain way—whatever that way may be; and though it may take us an infinity to see it, it is out there nonetheless. Science, Peirce believes, is the only vehicle capable of making the trip (whether we choose to embark or not). So we must come to the following conclusion. For the father of pragmatism, the answer to our question about science and reality is yes. Science can—and can exclusively—tell us what is objectively true about our world.

After collections were over, I along with numerous other Oxford students paused prior to commencing celebrations in order to watch our friends, members of the a capella group Out of the Blue, perform on Britain’s Got Talent. Receiving three “yes” votes from the judges, they were a resounding success.

But until approximately three hours before seeing them on television, I hadn’t head of Britain’s Got Talent. I’d vaguely understood that we had America’s Got Talent back home, but didn’t know anyone who’d watched it; in fact, it always seemed like the redheaded stepchild to American Idol, mirrored in Britain by The X Factor and a staple of the reality television lexicon since Kelly Clarkson won when I was only nine years old.

Actually, I think that was the last time I watched American Idol. Since then, such reality programming has exponentially exploded, a new show seeming to pop out of the woodwork every time you turn on the television. Whether they showcase singers, dancers, baton twirlers, or even primary-school-aged snake charmers, like the little girl who performed before Out of the Blue, there seems to be a show for every endeavour, ranging from the popular to the tremendously obscure.

Some strike a sardonic note, as in Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?, in which American ten-year-olds compete against adults in contests of knowledge, with predictable results skewed towards highlighting the dwindling intellectualism of the nation. Others draw attention to personal journeys, turning weight loss into a competition just as they do artistic performances.

Still others don’t show viewers very much at all except for the lives of other ordinary people, made extraordinary (well, at least notorious) by the fact that cameras follow them around. Pretty much anything on MTV, from Jersey Shore to every season of the Real World, fits this description, as do their British alter egos filming the lives of young adults in Essex and Chelsea. 

In the end, though, those which promote talent still pull in the highest ratings, which leaves us with only one question to answer – whether Britain or America’s got more talent? I’ll leave it up to you to decide!