Science and Superstition - May 27

I decided to watch daytime television today, which is generally a pretty questionable decision. Brothers Grimm, the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger and Matt Damon, was on. I began watching about halfway through, so all of the movie’s fantastical elements that hold the plot together appeared particularly unbelievable and ridiculous. During a commercial break, an ad came on for a set of beauty products endorsed by Cindy Crawford. The ad attempted to weave some sort of narrative that explained how these products were created by Crawford’s aging doctor: a French guru that caters to the rich and famous. He took his secret ingredient, (I kid you not) a rare melon grown in the south of France that is incredibly rich in antioxidants, and infused a bunch of creams with it. As one testimonial put it, “it’s like a face lift in a bottle!” The juxtaposition of this commercial with the film was fascinating. Brothers Grimm plays on the idea of superstition and fiction, exhorting us to have faith in fiction and the fantastic. The film casts the French Enlightenment as the force that made these terms pejorative and put a premium on truth and rationality.

Today, advertisers use science as a sort of superstition to sell their products. Watching the commercial for Cindy Crawford’s beauty products, I wondered how many people knew what antioxidants were, or what they did. Even assuming that the average viewer knows that antioxidants are chemicals that decrease the number of free radicals by preventing oxidation reactions, the theory that free radicals are what account for aging is certainly not absolutely accepted science (I’m sure it’s much more controversial than say, evolution). By mentioning antioxidants, the commercial invokes our blind belief in science in order to substantiate its own (probably outlandish) claims about the effect of the product it’s selling. In this way, science has become a location of superstition. I don’t want to go so far as to make the argument that science is a form of orthodoxy based on faith, &c. I just thought that the prevalence of superstition in areas of culture where it might not be expected was fascinating.