I’ve been going through Yahoo’s ergo process to get my cube all set up.* The more I get into it, and all its little changes to make sure I’m sitting properly and everything’s at the right height, I can’t help but think (what little I know) about Qi — an (I think) Ancient Chinese way of understanding how metaphysical energy flows. It all sounds like a load of hooey until you realize the long-term physical ramifications of not sitting up straight.
And it made me think of this quote from a late-1990’s speech by Douglas Adams about atheism:
The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It’s all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, ‘Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you’re, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other’. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, ‘Screw it, we’re going back to the temple calendar!’ and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly.
And I think that how people use religion to do all sorts of things that they know to be intuitively right even if they can’t explain how or why it works at the time is all terribly interesting.
* Thanks to new OSHA standards, every new employee has to be compliant.
