It is the diviner’s job to guide people who are confused and to teach the ignorant. And when one is dealing with confused and ignorant people, how can one make them understand in a word or two?

— attributed to “Master Jizi” (Sima Jizhu)

Somewhere in Suburbia

A woman dressed as a retro-Eighties mix of Stevie Nicks and Cher (or maybe Dame Edna) drives an SUV with personalized auto plates proclaiming “Feng Shui.” She meets the owners of a house and settles down in their living room for four hours of meditation.

When she awakens, she says something about a “money corner” needing “activation.” She sells the owners the world’s most expensive red Avery labels to stick on walls and furniture. This will “harmonize” the house with the environment.

Film at eleven

Live news coverage shows the bloody aftermath of a murder-suicide that engulfed a family. The police announce the case as solved: detectives intuited that the spiritual harmony of the living room was upset by the placement of a couch. It created cutting chi that set off the chain of events.

What is this, the Cartoon Channel? The Onion? No, it’s real life (the feng shui lady) and its logical conclusion (murder-suicide by cutting chi).

False hope springs eternal.

— Ron Rosenbaum: The Secret Parts of Fortune

Predigested feng shui primers like Feng Shui Made Easy, The Western Guide to Feng Shui, and Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life are popular because they market what is essentially a get-rich-quick scheme.

These books (and many others) form part of a capitalist self-help plan that avoids nagging confrontations with reality. The plan speaks to deep fantasies of personal power, plus an all-embracing faith that promises relief from spiritual distress and some kind of connection with the universe — even it if is mostly greenwash.

Most importantly, the books and their writers promote concepts of an “exotic” practice — but one that is not too exotic.

Pundits of PoMo Feng Shui proclaim traditional (Chinese) Feng Shui as restrictive, irrational, and unnecessary — as if channeling Francis Fukuyama:

• William Spear claims that much of what we received from ancient cultures is “dogmatic and limiting.”
• Jami Lin says traditional Feng Shui methods strand you in a “culture gap,” but if you discard the cultural gap’s guidelines and rules “you become free to experiment.”
• David Johnstone chants the New Age mantra about traditional feng shui: “compass school” is “too complicated” and “form school” is “superstitious” and “too simplistic.”

You can’t claim to be an expert in feng shui and denounce the basis of your expertise. It’s like going to a doctor who spends most of your visit telling you that medicine is confusing and stupid.

Yet this is how New Age entrepreneurs appropriated what scientists call traditional ecological knowledge — in this case, from China.

New Agers sound smug about traditional feng shui because their marketing is heavily influenced by the writings of Victorian missionaries in China. One Belgian missionary derided what he called Chinese geomancy as “a chaos of childish absurdities, a cloud of ignorance” that demonstrated how superstitious, backward and decadent Chinese civilization was in comparison to his little corner of the world.

Today we identify this self-congratulatory bombast by its true name: racism. (And after 1957, only the foolish believe a Luopan is backward.)

Paul Devereaux thinks that New Age entrepreneurs rush their products to market without checking their facts.

With feng shui, the entrepreneurs could not be bothered to check the facts. The facts would get in the way of sales.

The marketing is very simple. Here is Carl Sagan’s version:

Don’t think. Buy.