Some Thoughts on Chi

Good ole chi! About fifteen million different ways to spell it, all of which add up to bullshit. Total nonsense. Thanks! Goodbye!

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Oh, you want more detail? Greedy bastards. Alright, here you go.

If I came up to you on the street and told you that I’d just discovered this wonderful, magic energy that controls everything in the universe, that I can manipulate it and that science can’t even vaguely detect it, you’d think I was a loon or a con artist trying to get between you and your money, and rightly so. Yet around the world millions of people believe in just such a thing, and they call it chi.

The fundamental concept behind chi (for the record, it’s pronounced “chee”), is that it’s a life-energy that flows through all living beings. It surrounds us, penetrates us, holds the universe together, etc.

The idea, according to proponents of anything involving chi, is that its an energy field that can have its flow manipulated to sort out illness (btw: I’ll be ripping apart “traditional Chinese medicine” in great detail in a future post), restore your spirit, redecorate your house, and, according to some, its even what gives martial arts experts the ability to break boards and bricks with only their bare hands or feet. From what I understand, tai chi (aka: the art of moving very slowly), makes use of this concept, and I believe yoga (aka: stretching!), uses something similar.

Needless to say, this energy field is undetectable using any sort of scientific means. I recall at least one believer of the concept telling me that it’s something you have to sense with your mind, and that science will never be able to detect it anymore than science can detect love.

Well, ok, fine and dandy. It’s true that science cannot detect emotions (though from what I understand we are able to see the changes in the brain that happen when certain emotions are experienced). On the other hand, emotions don’t generate an energy field that we can manipulate to heal people and break bricks with our heads.

See, here’s the thing: if there’s energy out there that can be manipulated, it should be able to be detected. If it can’t be, and you’re manipulating it anyhow, how do you know you aren’t causing more harm than good? Logically, if it can do good, it can also do harm, and so shouldn’t you leave it alone until we have some actual academic studies on it that show you scientifically how to use it?

I’m not entirely sure why people want to waste their time believing in this patently obviously fake concept. I know part of it in the Western world is what Terry Pratchett refers to as “the attractiveness of distant wisdom”. That’s the idea that if something as come so far across the world to reach you, it must be better than the wisdom laying around your place gathering dust. The example he cites is along the lines of saffron-robed youths leaving their monastaries, throwing out the rancid yak butter tea their ancestors drank, and going to Ankh-Morpork to study the Way of Mrs Cosmopolite. I think that very concept plays a huge role in explaining why this idea has started to take hold among people in the Western world.

But really, I think the reason it’s become popular is because it offers a fairly easy explanation (your enegery levels are out of balance), for complex things (you’re stressed out because of all the crap going on in your life and you need to deal with them). It puts me in mind of the ancient notions that all our physical problems were caused by an imbalance in our humours. Well, the people who believed that were wrong, and eventually science proved it. The people who believe in chi are also wrong, science has proved it, and they just don’t want to accept reality.

One final, off-topic note here. I don’t know why people insist on translitterating words from non-Latin alphabets in such a way as to render them unpronouncable phonetically. It’s not like English is suffering from a lack of such things to start with. Having a word like “qi” and pronouncing it as “chee” is just silly. Same with things that should be spelled as “fung shway”, “chee gung” and the like. It’s hardly limited to Chinese, either. Look at “phở”, which is apparently pronounced “fuh”.

If you’re going to translitterate things using the Latin alphabet, please do so in a way that allows us to spell them the way they are pronounced.