Today's Flaws Will Be Left for Young People to Fix. What Have We Done to Prepare Them? | Is This Society Too Good to Young People? ③

QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, the media and publishing. What they share is a long-standing attention to public questions, and what they hope to pass on is a "good society." The question we put to them: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream of society, is that the future world we want?

Once you get used to fast economic growth, many things start to look like laws of nature — that life will get "richer," for instance, or that "this generation of young people will have a much easier time living well than the last one did." Look at the past ten or twenty years of economic development and, to some extent, that has been true. But people soon realize it may be nothing more than a wish.

Japan, often held up against China and likewise the product of decades of high growth, is a reminder that reality doesn't always work out that way. Leung Man-tao, a writer and media commentator, told QDaily in an interview that in Japan young people don't matter. Why?

First, there are few of them. Second, they're poor.

China's problem also includes a younger generation that grew up too centered on itself — the one-child policy had an enormous amount to do with that. Wu Wanyu says that when six adults are fussing over one child, it becomes hard for that child to see a question fully from anyone else's side. She is the editor-in-chief of CommonWealth Magazine, and her job is to understand what the young people of Taiwan who are speaking up are thinking, and to watch how they speak. In our interview she came back again and again to "communication" and "standing where other people stand."

Growth — an economy expanding fast — can hide all these contradictions. But what if it doesn't?

Christian Caryl, a columnist for The New York Review of Books, writes in Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century that Iran in the 1970s resembled China in the early 21st century: a high growth rate, rising oil revenue driving an industrial boom, a well-built education system, strong national power. Many countries saw it as a model of successful authoritarian development.

But the trouble came right behind. Three problems in particular dogged the country: the urbanization set off when factory jobs pulled people off the land; rapid economic change that hurt the "traditional elite" (in Iran, the bazaar merchants); and an education system turning out graduates faster than the economy could create jobs for them.

Those are, in the main, the problems ahead of us.

As with the Japan that Leung Man-tao describes, when a growth curve that does not always run up and to the right finally bends, the problems it produces are more tangled than we imagine — and a China past its growth period may face a far messier reality than Japan did.

These are the problems that today's young Chinese may be the ones left to face.

Caryl describes a young Iranian woman who became a devout Muslim while studying in the United States and began wearing a headscarf and veil. Her secular father, meeting her at the airport in Iran, was aghast: "I thought I was sending you to America to study, not to Qom." Qom is a holy city of Islam in Iran. Caryl argues that we always take religion in the Middle East to be a cause, when it may only be an effect — the effect of a middle class whose rise was interrupted and broken off.

So what will our own future look like?

It is what Wu Wanyu said: "In the future you have to be a responsible person." "Say you promote a certain opinion. If one day that opinion becomes policy, it will shape your daily life, and you'll have to live with it. Everything a person says and does has consequences — for the people around them, for their company, for society — and in the end those consequences come back around to the very environment you live in. Whether you let it keep getting worse or push it upward, that is in fact your responsibility."

This is a question no one gets out of, and today's young generation will have to face it alone. But the reality may be, as Wu Wanyu puts it, that "you didn't grow up in an environment that required communication, so you don't know how to communicate"; or it may be, as Leung Man-tao puts it, that "your numbers are small against the whole population, and you're poor" ... Either way, if you want to persuade more people, you will have to work harder at it.

This is the third piece in QDaily's series, and it is about communication and consensus.

(One more thing worth saying. After the first two pieces in this series ran, the newsroom argued about whether we were providing any value. The people who already share QDaily's values don't need us to restate them; the people we hope to reach are the larger group who don't agree with those values — and will they try to think it through, or simply throw up their hands and walk off, or blow us up where we stand?

Put simply, this series hopes to have exactly one kind of "effect": we believe that knowing the method matters more than knowing the answer. We want to open up the possibility of thinking — to show that these things can be thought about, not that they are off-limits to thought.

Our own doubts about QDaily are bound up with this article's subject, communication and consensus.)

22. Is It a Good Thing When a Society Has No Consensus?

Chow Po-chung

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong

First, in any society people will hold different views on any question. That is normal, and it is necessary. A free society is bound to have a plurality of opinion. Our values differ, our religious beliefs differ, our views of the world differ, so different views are certain to appear. Never assume a plurality of views is a bad thing — I think it is a good thing. We cannot ask a society to hold one view, one opinion; that would be the unhealthy state.

If a society has many voices and many arguments, the next question is how you respond to that. Ideally there would be a decent platform, a space for speech, where people who disagree could use discussion, dialogue and debate to help all of us work out what is right and wrong, true and false.

The second point is that having such a platform matters a great deal. Without one, if differing views have no way to surface, then first, we have no way to judge what is right and what is wrong; and second, the opposition between people grows sharper and we lose the chance to understand one another. In that state, things can turn into conflict, hatred or prejudice. This is especially so with race and religion: with no space for dialogue and discussion, a society's rifts and tensions only deepen.

Third, you might say that many people don't know how to discuss anything, and conversations break down easily. So learning how to discuss — how to hold a good public discussion — matters, rather than clinging to your own view with no respect or tolerance between people. So the third point is that we have to learn how to hold public discussions and how to respect other opinions. That is a fairly hard process, and it takes effort from everyone.

23. Even an Unknown Now Has More Chances to Be Heard. That's a Good Thing.

Zhang Tiezhi

Writer, media commentator

The first thing, of course, is the democratization of opinion: everyone has plenty of opinions now, and I do think a whole new set of elites has come out of it.

In Taiwan this is obvious. People like us used to write commentary for the media — a byline in a newspaper and you could make a name. Then in the past few years, in the age of social media, I've watched new grassroots commentators appear in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the mainland alike, and once they have influence they gradually become media commentators too. The barrier has dropped. If someone keeps publishing good work on their own platform, they can make a name as well. That's the clearest thing right now: a lot of people can enter a field of speech that the elite used to monopolize.

My first reaction is that there is nothing wrong with this, because it simply means more channels. It's no longer true that you had to get into Southern Metropolis Daily to become a well-known commentator; now anyone has a chance, as long as they write well. In a sense I still see it positively, because I've noticed that even someone who has kept their ability hidden can write enough good pieces to finally be recognized. They write on their own Facebook page or on Weibo, but if the writing really is good, I find there are still plenty of chances to be seen, even for a complete unknown. So this is a positive thing: more and more people, if they work at it and have good ideas and good writing, will be seen.

The more negative side is that while this really is an age of democratized speech, democracy needs mechanisms for communication and dialogue.

24. They Thought They Were Flattering Young People. They Didn't Understand Them, and It Failed.

Zhang Tiezhi

Writer, media commentator

Some mainstream media in Taiwan simply flatter young people, borrowing their language, as if acting cute were the answer, as if playing adorable counted as talking to young people. We don't think it works that way.

We should be paying attention to the new social change. What Taiwan cares about right now is the question of values behind same-sex marriage, not some surface question of vocabulary.

Every era has its own sensibility — or rather, every generation has its own sensibility, its own way of perceiving the world. So perhaps the media has to catch the sensibility of this era, the way it understands society. But you can't flatter it completely either; flattering the market in everything is pointless, right? What I mean is that we should hold to journalistic professionalism and to in-depth dialogue, while perhaps using the ways of communicating that young people prefer, visual presentation included — without flattering them outright.

On rebellion: over the past 30 years this land, China, has had a hard time growing a culture of rebellion. As I once wrote, rock music has gotten more and more popular over the past decade, right? But back to our subject — it was commercialized very fast. Since 2008 music festivals have sprung up everywhere, and the festival turned into a carnival party. Originally, though, I'd say that so-called counterculture spirit did exist to a degree around the turn of the century, back when China's independent music, rock and folk scenes were still weak; there was a spirit of resistance, an unwillingness to go along with the system. But the temptations now are too great — from music festivals to singing contests, China's commercial force is simply too strong, so you really cannot find that homegrown culture of rebellious youth anymore.

I'd say China's commercial force is the most extreme in the world. Or rather, that isn't quite accurate — I should say "the force of commodification": everything can be sold, and money becomes the principle by which everything is measured.

25. Why Aren't Young People in Japan Taken Seriously?

Leung Man-tao

Writer, media commentator

It's very natural. It's the force of the market. It's the same all over the world: whichever class holds the spending power, or whichever class is most conspicuous, everyone else falls in behind it. In China right now, young people are the most active group in online media, so they are the most visible, and mainstream society therefore attends to their views and their feelings. Young people today also have higher average incomes than in the past, and they're willing to spend — they really are the main consuming group, so everyone accommodates them. It's a very natural thing.

In Japan, though, young people don't matter. Japan is unlike the rest of the world in this: several of its fashion magazines are made for people in their fifties and sixties. Japanese fashion is unlike other countries' too — its domestic labels, and even foreign luxury houses once they arrive in Japan, will put out lines for older people. Because, first, Japan has few young people, and second, they're poor. The country's gap between rich and poor shows up as a gap between generations.

So there's something here that lets us see the world changing. In recent years, more and more of the models on the runways at the annual shows in Europe and Japan have been middle-aged. I used to think fashion models were always young and good-looking, or fit young men; not anymore. Now it's white-haired people walking the runway. Why? Because those are the people in that market with the money to buy things. China too will move gradually toward an aging society, but for now our main consuming class is still young people.

Second — and this isn't only China; sociologists abroad have criticized it for a long time — the whole world is becoming more childlike, skewing younger in its behavior. The reason is simple: the entire stage of adulthood has been pushed back. In the past a person might reach adulthood at twelve or thirteen — in ancient China, that's when the capping ceremony took place. At fifteen they started a family and had children; after ten they were already helping at home, working, farming. People became adults very early. Among mammals, of course, the adult stage does tend to come late — an orangutan doesn't leave its mother until after eight, and humans are the same. As culture developed, our adult stage kept getting pushed back, because the time we spend learning keeps getting longer. From the 20th century on, once primary school became a requirement, adulthood began to be delayed; then people felt you had to at least finish middle school; then that a high school graduate counted as an educated person; then that everyone had to get through college or a technical school; and now college isn't enough either and you have to sit the graduate entrance exam. So the stage of adulthood keeps getting pushed back. The reason so many people say that someone in their twenties today is less mature than a teenager used to be is that the whole adult stage has been delayed.

But I don't think this is a problem. To me it's a trend.

26. Why Do We Seem to Have Grown Narrower Even as We Have More Ways of Seeing the World?

Liu Hailong

Professor, School of Journalism, Renmin University of China

We tend to think the younger generation has more channels of information, that they are not an ignorant generation. But you find that as things grow more open, people's field of vision can actually narrow.

This is a counter-force, and it shows up with particular clarity in online nationalist episodes like the "Diba expedition."

The reasons are complicated. One is that our long-running education has left us with a very simple view of politics: the nation comes first, institutions or human rights come second. Our history teaching has always stressed this, and it has formed an emotional memory of humiliation. That was clear in 2008: events like the earthquake, or the disruption of the Olympic torch relay, would activate this collective memory of humiliation, and it would burst out all at once. At commemorations of the Wenchuan earthquake, for instance, crowds in Tiananmen Square would suddenly and angrily chant "Go, China!" as a kind of release, linking a natural disaster in an instant to the whole history of grievance since modern times began.

The Diba expedition is another form of the same thing. The other side of humiliation in our education is the fear of not being strong, or a blind self-importance. China is powerful now, even the US fears us, and tiny Taiwan dares to defy us? It goes straight from extreme inferiority to extreme conceit; the two are two sides of one coin. We need to ask whether our education has been cultivating this psychological structure all along, and how we might cultivate a healthier one in the citizens of a large country. Because when a structure like this is prodded from outside, it produces an extreme reaction very easily.

I think this is also a reaction against globalization. The more globalized things become, the easier it is to blame your own problems on other regions. Globalization was supposed to lead toward tolerance, toward building consensus, toward getting past existing ways of thinking; in reality it may lead back to a traditional, isolationist realism and to populism worldwide, to intolerance of other cultures and the pursuit of narrow, short-term gain. This intolerance bred by cultural conflict is visible in the drift of opinion in the US election too: intolerant feeling and populism are rising all over the world, China included.

27. When You Promote Your Ideas, Have You Thought About Being Responsible for Them?

Wu Wanyu

Editor-in-Chief, CommonWealth Magazine, Taiwan

In mainland China, because of the one-child policy, of course they're especially good to young people — you might have six adults giving one child everything it asks for.

Taiwan is certainly not too good to young people. Young people in Taiwan actually have real influence on politics, because they are very willing to state their opinions, they are willing to take to the streets, they hold values they believe in, and they have overturned some of the old established forces. So if you ask why the Kuomintang lost, it's because it understood young people so poorly.

So in Taiwan it isn't a matter of flattery; young people simply have real influence. They use online media too, and they have the ability to reason and to express themselves. But I think — well, many of our own reporters are young. We have people under 30, or two or three years out of school, and I find that once they enter the workforce they're still very willing to learn. Society may teach them different things, different values, different angles on the same matter.

I think it's also a process of learning and being tempered. But there is a real price along the way — it can be quite painful.

For this generation of young people, I think it comes to this: say you promote a certain opinion. If one day that opinion becomes policy, it will shape your daily life, and you have to live with it. Everything a person says and does has all kinds of effects — on the people around them, on their company, on society — and in the end it comes back around to the very environment you live in. Whether you let it keep getting worse or push it upward, that is in fact your responsibility.

And with the things you disagree with, you should start with yourself and simply not do them. That sounds simple. I know perfectly well that a lot of media today work on the logic of "it feels good to say this," "I'll vent however I please," and that this can also stir up a following, gathering people to curse whatever thing, person or issue they dislike — that frenzied state.

But I think that five years from now internet users may increasingly understand that they can't go on this way, that it doesn't get them what they want, that the backlash is severe and society will keep getting worse, or that some force will pull things back. I think it just needs some time.

28. Why Is Consensus Getting Harder to Reach? Is That a Bad Thing?

Liu Qing

Professor of Politics, East China Normal University

Consensus matters a great deal now, but consensus is hard. It depends which consensus you mean. Some minimal consensus is still reachable: that people have to survive, that society needs basic order, that we should obey the law, that modern people should, at the level of norms and ideals, agree on common prosperity, and so on. Those basic things are fairly easy to agree on. But apply them to a specific matter and the split appears at once. What do you mean by "common prosperity"? What do you mean by "equality"? What do you mean by "law"?

I think this split has two sides. One is that once modern society appeared, so did cultural diversity. And I don't mean ethnic culture — I mean diversity in ways of life and in values. In China today you have Confucians, Christians, Buddhists, liberals, individualists, statists. Their beliefs, their ideals, their values are all different. That is to say, compared with traditional society, modern society is far more diverse and heterogeneous, whereas traditional society was a community, a homogeneous society, where consensus came easily. Everyone had the same background, everything the same, the same worldview, watching the same things. Now, if you watch American TV shows all day and I watch CCTV all day, the two of us end up with completely different views of the world. That's the level of ideas. Ideas, of course, are shaped by personal experience and much else.

Li Yinhe

Former researcher, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

I think the lack of consensus is a natural phenomenon where speech is free. The left says one thing, the right says another, this person says one thing, that person another; accounts of the very same event come out completely different. It's normal that people have no consensus. What people should do is look for ways to get at the truth and, in the end, uncover it. Take the Lei Yang case: one side says he solicited a prostitute, the other says he didn't. Don't delete posts by design. The more you delete, the more people think you're hiding something — even if you happen to be right, even if the truth is on your side and the other side has only emotion.

You absolutely should not keep deleting posts and closing accounts at the drop of a hat; that is not where the effort should go. The truth gets clearer the more it is argued over. When everyone is talking about the same thing, some accounts will fit the truth better than others. Let all the voices come out, and then let people tell them apart.

29. Why Are People Always Glad to Accept the Grand Principles, but Lost When It Comes to Their Own Case?

Zheng Ge

Professor, KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

On abstract grand principles — that everyone is free and equal, say — no one in our society today objects. But bring it down to the individual: would you be willing to let your daughter marry a Black man? Would you be all right with your child being gay? Could you really live calmly beside a hepatitis B carrier or an AIDS patient without discriminating against them? The moment you get down to individuals and details, the disagreement appears.

Part of it is that there is no public discussion to gather consensus. And then there is the question of who decides. Because rule of law, in the end, is also rule by people; it's only a question of which people. In a traditional rule-by-man society the monarch decides, or the president, or the "top leader." In a rule-of-law society it is basically the judges who decide.

But in Chinese society, judges are also a group of people nobody trusts. On abstract principle no one opposes freedom, equality or justice; but in a specific case — and a specific case exists precisely because there is a dispute — one side says it is in the right and the other says it is not.

30. Why, for Instance, Do Our Parents Find Homosexuality Harder to Accept?

Zheng Ge

Professor, KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Tolerance of homosexuality is in fact tied to culture. We Chinese generally assume that Chinese-style parents cannot allow a child of theirs to be gay; Chinese-style parents' tolerance really is very low.

Western societies are the same, in fact — their tolerance of homosexuality is not as high as we imagine. What it comes down to is the structure of the society: how far adult children still live with their parents and are influenced by them. In Western societies people become independent fairly early, and there is no tradition of supporting your parents in old age or of obeying them once you are grown. So basically, once children are adults, their parents can no longer control them. That is what gives gay people more room to live in the West. In the US, for instance, it's very hard to find a case where reaching a certain age unmarried gets you pressured by your parents into marriage. Even if they do press you, the pressure is very light, because each person's degree of independence is very high.

That isn't the situation in China, especially since it's bound up with many socioeconomic factors. Besides supporting your parents, there's the fact that once a child is born the parents help raise it, and there are the sky-high housing prices, which mean anyone living on a salary can't afford to buy. To buy, you have to mobilize the whole extended family, borrowing from every direction to manage it. And that in turn gathers a family idea that had already come apart back together again.

31. If There Really Is "No Consensus," as Some Say, Then How Does Mainstream Opinion Form?

Guo Ting

Postdoctoral researcher in religious studies, Purdue University

I think the question of "mainstream opinion" is itself a rather paradoxical one, because it's hard to say what a society's mainstream opinion even is. In the US, in Britain, in other societies, people can go to different sites and different social media and hold discussions in different places, but no one can say "my voice is the mainstream voice." Because people have different political positions and belong to different social groups, and every voice that comes out is different.

And what they call "the mainstream" may not be mainstream opinion at all, but rather an institutional protection of certain values. Mainstream American culture may be under challenge right now, and it does contain racism and sexism — so-called "white culture" is the mainstream culture now under challenge. But the reason people can discuss these questions and reflect on these values is that institutions provide certain guarantees on human rights, so people have something to compare against and can offer feedback.

So I think a mainstream ideology may be a fairly paradoxical thing.

32. Then What Are the Things We Should Have Consensus On?

Guo Ting

Postdoctoral researcher in religious studies, Purdue University

That kind of consensus, I think, should be guaranteed by law or by institutions.

What schools need to teach, for instance, which things school should teach, which things everyone ought to know. Or whether there should be press freedom, so that people can give this kind of feedback. And whether values can be secured — whether institutions can actually protect human rights. I think these are part of a society's so-called consensus, rather than one group's values, carried by the loudest voices, knocking down everyone else's opinions.

So what is probably needed is institutional guarantees for these baselines, along with mechanisms that let everyone speak, and the environment and conditions for that feedback.

As for the formal baseline, I think everyone probably knows it and I have nothing to add. The baseline for public discussion, I think, is respect: listen to all sides and you'll see clearly, and don't take an attacking posture. Keep some wariness both when you spread information and when you read it. And try to widen your own circle and look at different voices; that probably helps in forming your own opinions.

33. The World Can't Have Only One Voice, but It Can Have Some Shared Points of Reference.

Zhang Tiezhi

Writer, media commentator

Getting people to communicate — honestly, there's no cure-all. The whole world faces this. When everyone is like this, what can you do? From where I stand it really is an extremely hard problem, and it is the biggest crisis of our time: a crisis of communication. All I can say is that as a media person, as a writer, all you can do is supply more facts and more truth to counter what is false, whether you write it yourself or pass it on yourself.

But I don't think society should have consensus in the first place. Because when we talk about a democratic system, it presupposes that society has conflict; democracy is simply a mechanism that lets that conflict run inside an institutional frame.

So what we're talking about isn't consensus but shared values on certain things — so-called universal values. Hoping that young people also care about freedom and about democracy, for instance; hoping there is a body of people who hold these values.

Dialogue may get harder and harder now, because people may no longer have common points of reference. In the past, looking at the same things, we might have had shared reference points; now things are splintering more and more. Too much splintering is of course a different danger. I don't think the world can ever have only one voice, but you also can't have no possibility of dialogue.

But right now it seems many people in China no longer believe much in universal values either. That's the problem. As I said, in this era you have no reference point left, and for Chinese people the only reference point left is patriotism. If you have several different values compromising with and checking one another, that's still all right; but when nobody believes in anything at all, that's another kind of danger. I believe in nothing, only in money and the national interest — that, I think, is China's larger crisis.

If all that's left to believe in is patriotism and money, it's very dangerous.

34. Without a Good Mechanism for Communication, You End Up at "the Biggest Leader."

Zheng Ge

Professor, KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

There's a recent film, I Am Not Madame Bovary. You stage a fake divorce; one side genuinely means it to be fake, the other actually wants a real one. But the divorce certificate you obtain is real and legally binding. That's where the dispute comes from. And in that situation the question becomes: if the court hands down a ruling, do you accept it or not?

In a mature rule-of-law society there is a tradition of respecting judges. Even if you don't accept it in your heart, once the judge has ruled, you won't go on petitioning.

But in Chinese society nobody accepts anybody. Not the judge, not the local officials. In the end people still want a solution that matches their own understanding of justice. That is a fundamental problem in Chinese society: there is no dispute-resolution mechanism that everyone accepts. In the end everyone feels they have to find the biggest leader. And when she goes looking for that biggest leader, it isn't that she accepts his authority either; she is still looking for a resolution that finally fits her own idea of justice. This makes it very hard for disputes in Chinese society to find any effective resolution.

Different understandings of justice in a specific case exist in every society, of course. What I meant to point out is that in a mature rule-of-law society people trust a certain institution, a certain group of people — judges, for example. Whatever ruling they hand down, people accept it in the end.

But because an authority separate from force has not yet been established in China, the ultimate authority people recognize is still some form of force. Once it has spoken, you have no way to resist; that is why you accept it. This is the fundamental problem we will have to solve as we move toward a society ruled by law.

35. On Specialized Scientific Questions Like Smog, Why Is There No Authoritative Voice?

Gao Quanxi

Chair Professor, KoGuan School of Law, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

In the West there is in fact a group of people who do this job:

Highly specialized matters are beyond ordinary people, and there's no need for them to follow the details; that's normal. The problem is that these questions have social spillover, economic spillover, even moral spillover. That gives rise to a class of commentators on science — people with independent standing, an independent profession and an independent income. On one hand they have the knowledge and the ability to judge what a given scientific or technological event means and what it spills over into, which gives them a basis for judgment; on the other they can convey that to ordinary people in a form they can follow. Through this mechanism, such things can be made to happen less often.

This intermediary mechanism, this group, is usually supplied by scientific and technical associations or by specialist media. But our media are all subordinate; they have not taken up any public role. These events have public spillover that these groups ought to answer for, but they produce no voice people trust — or no voice at all.

Without that kind of public assessment, how are ordinary people supposed to judge? And scientists themselves have no way of making an assessment for the public either.

36. Yet Plenty of People Believed in a Preposterous "Frontier Technology" Like the Transit Elevated Bus. Where Did That Go Wrong?

Leung Man-tao

Writer, media commentator

Something like the Transit Elevated Bus happens because everyone is lazy — even government departments are lazy, so lazy that even basic judgment disappears. So today we have no grounds to call ourselves incapable. The only word for it is lazy.

Frankly, for me this isn't a problem. There are far too many tools and channels now to help us understand public events that turn on science and technology we don't ourselves know. There's a WeChat official account called The Intellectual, started by a group of people who do serious scientific research. It carries a great deal on how the scientific community sees these questions, on what scientists are arguing about. So today, if you have the will, there is nothing you can't figure out; it's only a question of whether you'll spend the time, whether you have the energy.

What strikes me as progress compared with a few years ago is that people who hold scientific and technical knowledge are more willing than before to share their views and their knowledge with the public — which is why something like Guokr or Zhihu exists at all. Those people had the will, and they built those things. If you have the will too, you can find them. When it comes to knowledge, in other words, we can equip ourselves better than before.

37. The Scientific Spirit Is a Way of Thinking: Always Being Willing to Revise Your Views.

Liu Bo

Editor of Comment and Public Policy, FT Chinese

The scientific spirit isn't simply a matter of knowledge; it's a way of thinking. The scientific way of thinking means you can't decide a judgment in advance; everything has to be tested, checked with others, looked up on Google. Nothing can be settled beforehand — you go and find the evidence, think it through, get hold of the whole picture. Presuppose no conclusion, keep an open mind, and always revise your views when there is evidence to revise them.

Scientific literacy isn't something popular science alone can fix; philosophy and a general education come into it too. You find that people from the humanities sometimes have more of the scientific spirit, while people from the sciences can be stubborn and mechanical. When the public reads literature and philosophy, it helps build the capacity for critical thinking.

Science never had complete answers to begin with. It is a way of looking at the world in which everything has to be verified and nothing is absolute. In science, two scientists can hold completely contradictory views. Scientists, like intellectuals in general, need more generosity, I think, and should work to spread scientific knowledge. They shouldn't write ordinary people off as hopeless just because of their everyday doubts and criticisms.

Su Qi

Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Caijing magazine

Some especially interesting things happened this year — the US election, Brexit. On the surface we discussed them at length, but the information was far from complete, and some points may never have been reached at all. After all the clamor, people are left not knowing what to make of it. How should we see this? One round of discussion has barely begun when something else comes along and dilutes it.

(More installments in this series to follow.)

People featured in this report: