Webster Leone

But I really don't particularly like the "learn feng shui and blame the furniture" joke. I get it, it's not like I genuinely believe in feng shui and some of these traditional beliefs can go from "incoherent woo" to "you know that one astrology person who's turned their spirituality into another avenue of discriminatory profiling? yeah, that." I can plausibly see an outcome where this meme is largely targeting the faux pop-feng shui that white people in America were getting silly with in the 80s or 90s or whenever that was.¹

But also like. Even though this is a thread of cultural belief that had my parents blaming my sister's dorm room for her depression in college (I suspect that statement was more fed by standard parental denial around these things in addition to lack of knowledge around mental health). I see genuine merit in the idea that you can cultivate and design a space in a way that is beneficial to you and your life. Like that's kind of a basic tenet of interior design, homemaking, architecture, and landscaping. Yeah, I would rather it be driven by ergonomics and environmental science instead of "does this make your qi good". But especially after all that orientalism talk, this stings a little. It hits me in the "this thing from your culture (and therefore your culture) is silly, trivial, and backwards."

I'd be lying if I said I couldn't see some of the humor in it. But like. If you're gonna go rechosting that joke, I would at least ask you to look up feng shui a little, and learn about it in slightly more detail than "funny interior decoration trend", and the ways it got appropriated in the US.

Turns out, it started in the 70s after Nixon visited, which. Yeah okay that makes sense. Maybe should've expected that.

#dO talks

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in reply to @dismallyOriented's post:

Shel @shel7/14/2024, 12:48 AM

I feel like the Feng Shui Modern guy does a good job of illustrating how like, arranging furniture good does just make one's living space a lot nicer and feel better and that can improve your mental health. People who came up with stuff like this a very very long time ago just had different ways of explaining things that I feel aren't particularly unusual if you just like, talk about it using less archaic word-choice.

Like, replace "qi" with Human Activity and suddenly all of the feng shui stuff about the flow of qi through a house makes perfect intuitive sense like yeah having people walking behind you all the time makes you feel stressed out and that low-level stress is gonna suck and affect you.

I see it as very similar to ancient talmudic teachings that "washing your hands wards off demons" or "leaving stagnant water out over night attracts demons" like yeah it sounds really superstitious when you put it that way but "washing you hands wards off illness" and "leaving stagnant water out over night attracts mosquito-borne illness" are completely normal modern beliefs. The ancient rabbis just used "demons" instead of "illness" because of the time they lived in when they wrote it down.

And sure "put gold in this corner of the room" feels a little less modern but neither does "don't cook fish and meat in the same pot." Some of the things our ancestors came up with turned out to be rooted in good advice and others less so, and it's a matter of personal choice how much we adhere to them. A lot of Jews still won't cook meat and fish in the same pot even though they know it doesn't cause leprosy. But... the washing hands thing turned out to be backed by science... so... idk.

Just seems like, willfully dismissive and mean to dismiss all of feng shui for similar reasons imho.

@dismallyOriented7/15/2024, 12:55 AM

Very belated reply, but yeah, thank you for sharing your thoughts. I'm a little mad but moreso tired - I know some of this is just from people not having been exposed to feng shui outside of haha weird interior decoration trend. Yeah some of it is in never thinking beyond this, and I'd like more people to extend that kind of thought but. World's big and everybody has shit they overlook.

It is interesting trying to engage seriously with traditional beliefs because like. So one of the classes I took in undergrad that was really interesting and foundational to me was a "History of Science" class. Which wasn't actually about the development of the scientific paradigm that now exists, as I'd thought, but was instead looking at systematized modes of knowledge that ancient civilizations created. So, math, astrology/divination, and medicine. I was only an undergrad so I can't really comment on the framing of the class, but my impression was that the professor was trying hard to impress upon us that "even though these systems of knowledge are unsubstantiated and inaccurate, they are still systems that were built by thinking human beings, trying to organize societies and make sense of a chaotic world". Talking about the purposes these systems served, the principles behind the math (really cool learning base 60 from mesopotamia), the chain of astrology from mesopotamia to egypt and greece that eventually started to resemble modern astrology with the zodiac that we know, etc. That class I think also did a good job of like, both talking about belief in magic as a framework to make sense of things from (like you described with the demons) but also like, as something they sincerely believed in to one degree or another.

Sometimes I worry about being reductionist about framing it as "no look, this whole time they were actually talking about [xyz rational Western thing], so it's cool!" It's a rhetorical move I take to reframe how others might look at it, and to see some of the like, rationale and values in play behind a given system of belief. But also like, people don't hire divination workers because they disbelieve in the magic. You cannot use feng shui to convince people to tear down colonial missionary buildings if they don't believe in qi as something to cultivate or protect (as per the wikipedia article). And even if I don't believe in it outside of the cultural phenomenon I don't wanna just paper my framing over it either.

Shel @shel7/15/2024, 1:29 AM

mhm mhm I think it's also important to recognize that until the second half of the 20th century "western science" wasn't always imperial and evidence based either. IMHO the modern scientific method does not belong to the west nor does the west get to claim total credit for it

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Webster Leone

@WebsterLeone

putting the "big" in "big cat"

this is maybe me being petty

in reply to @dismallyOriented's post: