Feng Shui: Teaching about Science and
Pseudoscience. By Michael R. Matthews. Berlin, Germany: Springer.
2019. ISBN 978-3-030-18821-4. 340 pp. Hardcover,
$119.99.
If you think of feng shui (which translates literally as “wind water”) as nothing more than a silly furniture-arranging gimmick gussied up with bogus Eastern trappings, you’ll be surprised, as I was, that anyone could write a 340-page critical book on the topic. Michael R. Matthews, a professor of education at the University of New South Wales (who also recently wrote the obituary of centenarian philosopher Mario Bunge in the July/August 2020 SI), has written a comprehensive review of the history and practice of feng shui. Feng shui “is a multibillion-dollar industry, affecting millions of people. It has medical, health, architectural, building construction, town planning, interior design, and divination components” (269).
The first section, “Feng Shui: Educational Responsibilities and Opportunities” contains two chapters. The first is a brief introduction showing that feng shui is
concerned with identifying, manipulating, and utilizing the supposed all-encompassing flow of chi, the putative universal life force (sometimes rendered as “vital force”), so that people’s environments, homes, workplaces, social places, and, indeed, their own bodies can be brought into harmony with it and thus made more natural and healthy. (5)
In the second chapter, Matthews argues that including feng shui in discussions of what is and is not science can be an important learning experience.
Section two is titled “Feng Shui: Its Theory and Practice.” Feng shui has a history in China going back some 3,000 years and is still widely influential there where “countless millions have relied on feng shui astrological guides to make business decisions … the timing of significant personal and family events” and to “guide their decisions in romantic and personal life” (65). Huge sums are spent on feng shui consultants by architectural and construction companies. Several buildings in Hong Kong had to be designed with huge holes in the upper stories so as not to interfere with the passage of chi from one location to another as required by feng shui (see photo below). Feng shui consultants have been sued when a building built to their specifications was not as financially successful as hoped. What amounts to extortion has occurred because of claims that new construction has interfered with someone’s chi. (For more on this, see Stuart Vyse’s “Superstition and Real Estate, Part I: The Chinese Market” in the May/June 2020 Skeptical Inquirer.)
The second section also describes the relationship between feng shui and the I Ching, the yin-yang dichotomy, and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The latter is largely based on manipulating chi, a practice known as qigong. Chapter 5 covers two of the most popular traditional Chinese medicine practices: reiki and acupuncture. The chapter provides a short review of the results of studies of these techniques. The official support that the Chinese government has given to traditional Chinese medicine has led to outright suppression of skepticism regarding its benefits. Matthews rightly attributes the fact that nearly 100 percent of Chinese studies of TCM report positive results to fakery and government pressure to provide positive results.
The third section, “Feng Shui: A Historical-Philosophical Narrative,” contains four chapters. Chapter 6 concerns Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), a Jesuit missionary in China who was close to the imperial court and “one of the first Europeans to give an informed and detailed appraisal of feng shui” (116). Chapter 7 deals with Ernst Johann Eitel (1838–1908), who spent considerable time in China and commented at length on feng shui. He noted that when Europeans began building structures in Hong Kong, they were initially thought to have knowledge of feng shui because they built in places that a feng shui practitioner would have built. They in fact relied on common sense: don’t build your house in a swamp, for example, and don’t build a railroad on a mountain side where there is likely to be an avalanche. So feng shui may have started as nothing more than the common sense and experience of skilled craftsmen.
Eitel attributes, as does Matthews, the staying power of feng shui to the lack of experimental research in traditional Chinese science. That science was geared toward extremely practical solutions to problems, and little time or effort went into explorations of theoretical aspects of science that lead to real understanding. After this major point is made, chapter 7 wanders a bit with discussions of several topics only tangentially related to feng shui.
Chapter 8, “Science, Westernization, and Feng Shui in Early Twentieth-Century China,” says very little about feng shui. Chapter 9 outlines the changing government attitude about feng shui. In the 1940s, no less a personage than Mao Tse-tung banned the practice. But feng shui is now widely used and supported by the government in China due to its connection to chi.
The four chapters in section 4, “Feng Shui: Considerations from Philosophy of Science,” are an uneven group. The first, chapter 10, “Joseph Needham on Feng Shui and Traditional Chinese Science,” continues the discussion of why Chinese science did not embrace the experimental approach as seen in the West. It is an interesting chapter, but feng shui is little mentioned until the end—and then only in passing.
Chapter 11, “The Science and Teaching of Energy,” contains more discussions of topics minimally related to feng shui and chi. It starts with a brief history of the definition of energy, conservation of energy, and momentum. This is relevant only to the extent to which the usual translation of chi is the English word energy, but that extent is small. The discovery of oxygen is also described. These discussions are largely irrelevant and are out of place in a book on feng shui. At the very end, there is a discussion of using the example of feng shui in courses on the history and philosophy of science and the multicultural issues that could arise when using feng shui as an example of pseudoscience.
Chapter 12, “Scientific Testing of Chi (Qi) Claims,” raises the question that will probably be foremost in the minds of readers of the Skeptical Inquirer: Have there been adequately controlled tests of feng shui and related chi, and, if so, what are the results? Briefly, there have been no such tests. There were, in the 1980s and 1990s, extravagant claims for the powers of chi made in China by “Dr.” Yan Xin. During a U.S. tour in 1990, he was said to have “projected his qi power to make two wheelchair-bound people walk for the first time in many years” (250). It was claimed that “Yan’s self-generated qi affects molecular structure and behaviour at a distance of 10,000 km, across a continent and across the Pacific Ocean. Remarkably scientists from half-a-dozen reputable universities signed off on this, and it was published in a supposedly scientific journal” (252).
No proof has ever been produced for qi in general or feng shui in particular. If this type of energy were so powerful, it would be child’s play to demonstrate its reality. Why did no Chinese James Randi emerge to challenge these claims and put them to the test? (As Randi himself did in 1988 in CSICOP’s visit to China, see “Testing Psi Claims in China: Visit of CSICOP Delegation,” SI, Summer 1988.) Because the concept of qi had then (and still has) the backing of the Chinese government, any would-be Chinese version of Randi would have been fired, banished, imprisoned, or killed by the government for any attempt to discredit Yan, similar frauds, qi, or feng shui. One way of testing feng shui would be to see if different practitioners come to the same conclusions about, say, the proper arrangement of buildings in a new development or furniture in a house. Despite the simplicity of doing so, no such formal study seems to have been done. I doubt that any feng shui practitioners would agree to take part because practitioners have an “aversion to testing” (8), a characteristic of a pseudoscience.
Matthews largely ignores the basis for the judgments made by feng shui practitioners. Is it all based just on intuition? Or are there rules involved that might, at least partially, result in agreement between different practitioners? It would have been important to have a discussion of how practitioners arrive at their conclusions.
The penultimate chapter considers whether feng shui is a pseudoscience and begins with a discussion of how to separate real science from pseudoscience. Matthews considers feng shui using the criteria for pseudoscience advanced by philosophers who believe it is both useful and possible to make such a distinction. He concludes that feng shui “practitioners individually and as a community do not have a scientific habit of mind” and that “historical, sociological, economic, and psychological perspectives on feng shui show the whole belief system has been and is exploited for fraudulent purposes” and that feng shui “is pseudoscience not science” (288–289).
Matthews has produced an important book. His coverage of the historical and cultural aspects of feng shui, especially the early Western evaluations, is excellent. The book is not without its flaws; as noted, some sections are irrelevant, and a stronger editorial hand would have eliminated them.