I recently watched an ancient (that is, mid-eighties) PBS special on Chinese medicine. It was part of a series exploring the relationship between mind and health. It included the standard "alternative" medical practices: herbs, acupuncture, massage, meditation, etc. All of these practices depend on the existence of "chi," or life-energy. The most fascinating segment depicted a Tai Chi master who could more or less subdue would-be assailants by wiggling his finger: in his words, directing his Chi outside of his body, overcoming his opponents by life-energy alone.
I have puzzled over these things before. I know quite a number of people who swear by "alternative" (they call it "complementary") medicine. One friend of mine leads yoga classes and uses the Chinese vocabulary constantly. I instinctively ask two questions: First, does this stuff actually work, and second, if so, how?
The fact that I raise these questions gives rise to accusations along the lines that I am terminally Western and that, as such, I demand that everything fit into my perfect scientific picture of the world. Are such accusations founded? Yes and no,I think.
Yes, in the sense that we modern Westerners do tend to ignore things that our scientific picture of the world cannot explain. I recall as a teenager relating a story about someone I know well who claims he used to practice sorcery: he would summon demons, he claims, and then order them to perform tasks for him (such as puncturing someone's tires while driving), and they would do his bidding. The person to whom I was telling all of this exclaimed, "I would bet my life that never happened." His reason? "Believing in that stuff is irrational." By "irrational" I assume he meant "unscientific," or even "against science." He had been trained by modernity to count as outright lies any claims that didn't fit into his worldview. I fully admit that I share this same tendency. To a certain extent, we moderns can't help it: we've seen what an incredibly good job science does in debunking superstitions; we can't help believing that science will eventually debunk ALL superstitions. But we have to do something incredibly irrational in order to hang on to that hope--deny or ignore the countless, perfectly credible reports of phenomena not currently explained by science. It's a kind of scientific fundamentalism.
But with all that said, I think the allegation that I am an imperialistic Westerner simply for raising the questions I raise is too strong. The reason is simple. I need not patronize the Chinese by insisting that Chi is a figment of their imagination. (Frankly, while skeptical, I am also kind of excited about the prospect of their existing a life-energy whose physical effects could actually be measured.) But I cannot patronize Western science, either. The discipline that has mapped the Universe, split the atom, vaccinated disease, and made possible lasers and computers is nothing to be trifled with. When I ask that Chinese medicine be put to the scientific test, I am dignifying both. I refuse to choose between them. Chinese medicine is too fascinating to dismiss; Science is too powerful to patronize.
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Hey Phil, this was a great post to read, and the conclusion was good. It is dignifying to recommend something be submitted to a scientific investigation. The tools of science certainly carry some authority and it would elevate Chinese medicine if the results could be quantified through the use of biochemistry, etc.
If something clearly produces results but no scientific explanation can be found, the majority of the scientific community would still believe it to be explainable by science - we just haven't found the explanation yet. However, if we could somehow know that a type of medicine produced results and these results were achieved by a mechanism which could not be measured or described by science, then I would find this even more fascinating. It suggest that reality is more aptly described by Phantastes or Till We Have Faces than my acoustics or chemistry textbook.
By the way - thanks for the comment on my elfwood website. I need to paint something for Aaron Allen's wedding, but yeah, cover art. How is the album coming?
I just had a conversation with a friend about astrology. She's fairly convinced that the arrangement of the celestial bodies at the time of a person's birth has a significant effect on that person's temperament. (That's my vocabulary, of course, but it gets the gist of her way of thinking.) I can't make sense of that idea--it sounds just as absurd to me as saying that an arrangement of rocks near my mother's bedside when I was born has significantly affected my temperament. The reason it sounds absurd is that causation of that sort seems to fall pretty far outside the parameters of scientific lawlike behavior. Science speaks in generalities, describing the sun as "collection of particles of such-and-such size at such-and-such temperature," and explains its causal powers in terms of those generalities. (And, according to science, anything that fit that general description would have the same causal powers.) According to astrology (I think anyway), the sun has causal powers by virtue of being The Sun, this particular, unique object. And that is not to mention other peculiar issues such as action-at-a-distance, and so on.
But what if scientific studies concluded that The Sun, qua The Sun, altered temperaments of new borns depending on its location? That would be very interesting indeed. It would indicate that, when we reduce our universe to combinations of particles, we're missing the uniqueness of whole objects.
I'm terribly skeptical of all of this, of course. But the business about Chi does make one think.
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