| An Interview with Cate Bramble |
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How did your interest in Feng Shui come about?
Lucky for me, as a child I was exposed to traditional Chinese gardens and life ways through friends of my parents. They transformed their house and back yard into the most amazing traditional environment. They were not a young couple at the time my parents knew them; they wanted the ‘taste of heaven’ they remembered from their homeland. I have fond memories of these lovely people and their home - especially their garden!
I attended art school during the day and went to college at night. One of the things I studied was anthropology, which fueled my fascination with Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic cultures, especially their traditional methods of science (called protoscience, traditional knowledge or ethnoscience, depending on who’s talking). Somehow I stumbled onto Joseph Needham’s “Science and Civilization in China,” and tracked down everything I could find at a university level that mentioned Feng Shui or anything related. That was about 30 years ago. My, how time flies.
Which Feng Shui Masters have you specifically studied with? And any other qualifications you may have taken professionally or otherwise?
I completed advanced courses with Master Larry Sang in the 1990s and have recently completed a couple of modules with Grandmaster Yap Cheng Hai’s Centre of Excellence. My real job is as a technical writer. I spent a little more than a decade working in aerospace on advanced projects (including the Space Shuttle, B-1B, stealth technology, drones, and “Star Wars”), at least another decade hopping around in the graphic arts industry, and the last five years I’ve been writing manuals for tax software used by Fortune 100 companies. I’m also a member of the Society for Technical Communication.
Has learning and practicing Feng Shui changed your life and if so, in what way?
I spend more time researching than I used to, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And I’ve met some really amazing and wonderful people!
Your website (www.qi-whiz.com) is quite in-depth and extensive. Did you put it up all by yourself? Surely there must have been a lot of research done to cover so many subjects.
Yes, I’m responsible for the site and what’s on it. However, I’ve had some terrific advisors and I’m extremely grateful for their assistance. Where my knowledge is not as comprehensive they provide the necessary depth to craft truly compelling arguments. (They don’t want to be named, because that is not the point: they want the truth to be known.)
What kind of feedback do you usually get from readers? Any particular feedback that stands out from the rest?
All but an insignificant fraction (like one percent, if that) is thankful that the site exists. I’ve had many readers supply personal tales of horror and chicanery. Some go so far as to suggest books for me to review, or individuals and organizations they feel I should analyze. Others say the site gave them courage to use their own expertise to publicize fraud.
Probably the most amazing people are the relatives who confide that a family member is a Feng Shui con artist and have the facts at their disposal to back up their assertions. They are perhaps the most grateful for FSUR. Their sense of moral and personal outrage is palpable; I do what I can to accommodate their desire to expose the charlatan while doing my best to hide their identity.
I came across the terms ‘McFengshui’ and ‘McBagua’ on your website. What do they mean?
Wow, this one is sure to put people to sleep, but it’s an important aspect of the Feng Shui fad. McFengshui and McBagua are meant to suggest McDonalds, thanks to the work of George Ritzer. He coined the term “McDonaldization” to identify the insidious creep of fast-food culture into our lives. This is a process of rationalization, a sociological term. With rationalization you replace common sense, tradition, or conventional wisdom with a logically consistent set of rules. To work, the rules don’t have to have anything to do with reality - they just have to be consistent (sorry, that’s how humans are). In McDonaldization almost any task is rationalized. The result is a well-organized, systematic process that can be completed the same way every time to produce a desired outcome.
The principles of McDonaldization are efficiency (the most favorable method —from the institution’s viewpoint—to complete a task), calculability (assessment of outcomes by quantity not quality—the point is that you sell a trillion hamburgers, not that the hamburger was nutritious or contained quality ingredients or was created by satisfied workers), predictability (standardized outcomes and uniformity), and control (dumbing-down and eliminating skills through indoctrination and automation).
You have no choice in this matter—these principles are forced on you. This leads to a passive acceptance of whatever the group or institution believes is efficient, not necessarily what you believe to be efficient, accurate—or anything else.
A rationalized system can create events and outcomes you didn’t anticipate or want—they may be irrational, that is, not so good in the long run. In business this is the Law of Unintended Consequences, otherwise known as the “revenge effect.”
When people repeatedly perform one rationalized task they’ll eventually burn out, get repetitive strain injuries, and suffer any number of ills (personal, ethical, social, environmental). People hired for a task that requires an insignificant amount of ability and focus can be quickly and easily trained, paid poorly because it’s “unskilled labor”—and just as easily eliminated. Many McDonaldized institutions also trick consumers into being unpaid employees by performing work traditionally completed by a company. Typical examples range from drive-thru service to salad bars, ATMs, and pumping your own gas. (To this list of examples I add telling a Feng Shui practitioner about your life aspirations.)
Ritzer also makes a compelling argument that the Holocaust was McDonaldization carried to its logical conclusion. Modern slaughterhouses to me imply Isaac Bashevis Singer’s remark about animals’ “eternal Treblinka,” and here we are back at McDonaldization.
Think of all those hundreds of books on the market that contain variants of the “eight corners’ meme. Read any one of them again after you learn about McDonaldization and you can readily spot the meme. I just shortened it to McFengshui, and used McBagua for the methodology. People who don’t know McDonaldization somehow know what I mean when I use those terms, and that meme is starting to catch on.
You are well-known in the Feng Shui industry to openly challenge those whom in your opinion endorse ‘McFengshui’. You also gave a speech on ‘New Age Feng Shui’ at the World Classical Feng Shui Conference held in Cologne, Germany last March. Why do you go the extra mile to deconstruct this following?
Because of its inherent dangers; McDonaldization is just one of them. The more you know of this stuff, the more you realize it’s a vampire: it feeds on people and doesn’t like exposure to the light. Can anyone possibly be proud of its avowed racism, its embrace of fascism, its rewriting of archeology and history and pretty much everything else? So many books on Feng Shui repeat and embellish this insidious material; in many cases it’s hard to know if the effort is an unconscious one. Either way, everyone should take a hard look at what they’re reading, thinking and believing.
Anyone glued to their television or their computer for news of the events in Iraq knows that Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf repeatedly made statements that were contradicted by events. This lent a farcical, even surreal touch to reporting—many people thought he was downright funny. Yet plenty of folks were shocked and angry when Baghdad fell. Was Saeed lying, and why? Or was he so far into his personal belief system that he was unable to acknowledge facts?
In an open, democratic society people have a right to know what they are really buying (and buying into). That’s why there are consumer-rights organizations for just about everything - except New Age products. It’s well known as a field full of scams and con artists - you can buy self-help books that tell you how to create scams with popular New Age themes! That some Feng Shui books and enthusiasts suggest the same ideas should come as no surprise. What seems to surprise everyone is applying typical consumer-rights standards and methods to New Age products, especially McFengshui.
In your web site, you mentioned several people who are somewhat famous in the Feng Shui industry by virtue of their classes and books. Aren’t you worried about offending certain big names in the industry?
Peter R. Huston is grinning all the way to the bank with his royalties from Scams from the Great Beyond. James Randi keeps right on laughing every time he exposes another McFengshui personality. Same with Penn and Teller—and nobody is concerned about them. Han Ong wrote a stellar portrayal of a McFengshui master in Fixer Chao that he based on a practitioner he saw on TV in New York, and it doesn’t even raise eyebrows.
What does apparently offend is that, as some sort of “insider,” I would break the unwritten code of silence and expose the scams, thus possibly damaging someone’s livelihood. In that sense I stand accused of breaking the code of silence in the so-called “Feng Shui family.” But I happen to believe that “blood is thicker than water” was invented by undeserving relatives.
If this code of silence is leading to people getting the wrong information and subserviently make changes that jeopardize their lives, shouldn’t this ‘Feng Shui family’ be made aware of the dangers they are causing and be held responsible?
From the public’s perspective that should absolutely be our first consideration. The public wants us to police ourselves and throw out the quacks and cranks. But because New Age is the Wild West of cons and scams, many people believe they aren’t accountable and should not be held accountable.
Recently someone protested my disparagement of a current article; in their defense they said the article wasn’t written to explain the truth. However, such sophistry is this writer’s stock in trade—until I showed up, no one had ever publicly challenged their shameless negligence.
What made it sinister was that this person knew better but wasn’t willing to write better. The implication I gleaned from this confession was that the article was written to deceive. I read that between the lines of the article, and that is just what I seized upon and denounced. The writer is outraged that I would bring the facts to the world’s attention, and wants me denounced for doing so.
If you publicize the truth behind questionable concepts and practices, people who have invested enormous amounts of personal energy and advertising dollars in these schemes do not want anyone revealing the truth to the public. They’ll do whatever they can to stop that. The public has just the opposite mindset: they want to know the truth and they don’t care whether you want to give it up or not. There’s more of the public than there are of us: in a democracy, they have the winning vote.
Currently there are many who equal Feng Shui with Chinese culture, astrology, spiritual and intuitive practices and so on. What is your take on all this?
Feng Shui is quintessentially Chinese. It has a basis in ancient astronomy—and astronomy, astrology, and mathematics developed simultaneously. That’s sensible and factual. If you want to make something more of it, the best you can do is get your facts straight. There are a lot of experts in the world on this stuff: you make it up, someone is going to notice and probably call it to your (and the world’s) attention. That is potentially far more damaging than telling the truth in the first place!
“Intuitive practices” is just a term—it makes no sense to anyone outside of a particular (New Age) marketing niche. Scientifically, “intuition” is merely the human ability to detect patterns. Somebody made up this term “intuitive practices” within the last 20 or 25 years and it now comes loaded with a lot of extras. It really does mean nothing in particular. People say stuff like that and I hear noise. If they can’t define their terms, I know it’s a smokescreen and I start looking for the curtain to see what or who is really running the show.
What are your thoughts on the future of classical Feng Shui? Do you suppose the current trend of ‘New Age’ Feng Shui will make way for traditional Feng Shui in, say the next 5 years?
The future of Feng Shui rests on our ability to extricate the scams and tricksters from our midst. Mainstream America already thinks that Feng Shui is a joke—it’s a joke in print, sitcoms, and movies, another scam that separates Hollyweirdos and New Age affluenzites from their stock options. The perpetuation of crackpot ideas, sloppy writing, and pseudoscience in Feng Shui is at the expense of every honest and conscientious practitioner of traditional techniques.
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Any additional words of advice for our readers?
Stay away from the pseudoscience and psychobabble, which means staying away from the New Age sections of bookstores. Don’t make things up; extra points for originality are available only in a creative writing class. If you don’t know, ask someone who does. And then get a second and perhaps third opinion.
About Cate Bramble
Cate Bramble is a Feng Shui practitioner, a member of the New Zealand Feng Shui Society, runs a free advice and coaching service for parrots and their caregivers, volunteers her time as one of the original members of the Council of Israeli Community's Writers' Bureau, and is a member of the international Society for Technical Communication. As a professional writer-researcher and practitioner she currently invests her time addressing the dynamics of Feng Shui, the effects of nutrition on parrot behavior and immunology, and investigating the arcane mechanisms of corporate tax software.
She is the author of the “Architect’s Guide to Feng Shui (ISBN : 0750656069) published by Architectural Press, 2003.
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Suan Tew
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