Closing thoughts on looking at astrology
Jan. 17th, 2011 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerI began this set of posts with an attempt, not (as I repeatedly said) to defend astrology as a science (which it is not), but to provide a more balanced view of how it might have originated. That was the conversation I wanted to have, limited in scope perhaps but reasonably uncontroversial. By a natural process, though, the discussion got shunted on to the more popular main line of "astrology; is it true or not?" and as usual, in dealing with the arguments as they cropped up I found myself being pushed into a position where my only alternatives were to assent by silence to a view I found flawed, or to defend something of whose virtues I am still uncertain. This, coupled with a feeling that it would have been nice to talk about what I wanted to talk about, caused some anger, and I apologise for that.
So, this.
The world is full of false information, and it is our task to distinguish the false from the true when making our judgments. This is not always easy, but some days it's easier than others.
If you were to see a man looking at, say, cheap mass-produced greeting cards, or elementary school finger painting projects, or the graffiti in a men's room, and he were to look up and say "well, if that's Western art, I don't think much of it," you would be quick to point him at the nearest gallery, or book on art, or website, so that he could make a more balanced judgment.
Likewise you would correct his negative judgment on classical music, if it were only based on the endlessly repeated few bars of Vivaldi played by a phone on hold, or on television programming, if he had only ever seen one episode of "Gilligan's Island" during a severe thunderstorm, or (though you might be getting a little tired of him by now) on science, if it were based on what journalists or creationists say about it. You would tell him that what he had seen was not the whole story, that there was more to it. And if he refused to take in what you said, if he still chose to make his judgment of the whole based on the worst or most misleading examples, you would begin to suspect that there was more going on here than simple ignorance.
I find myself in that position relative to the people who have, here and elsewhere, voiced their judgments on astrology.
There are an abundance of hucksters and hustlers using astrology to make money. There are newspaper horoscopes and premium phone lines and TV shows on the more desperate channels and loads of books and sites full of thumbnail descriptions of what your sun sign tells you about yourself. There are people who will tell you that astrology can map out your future and find you the perfect lover, can fillet your personality and lay it out for anyone to read, can tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
That is not true, and those people are either misinformed or lying...but the fact that it is not true does not mean that astrology is useless. That is not the whole story. There is more to it.
Astrologers have mapped a complex network of interlocking influences, based on legitimate astronomical observation of planetary motion, that make every minute of every hour of every day of every year a slightly different astrological picture. The sun sign is just the beginning, and the obvious fact that one Sagittarian is not exactly like another is nothing to do with anything. I did in fact cast my birth horoscope, somewhat inexpertly using a kit I got from a newspaper offer, back when I was young, and, unsurprisingly, not everything it said about me was right...but even where I disagreed with it, I learned something about myself that I hadn't known before. Not everything in anyone's astrological chart will be accurate, because, as I pointed out in an earlier post, we are more complex than any one system of categorisation can encompass. Anyone who tells you different is as much a liar as the chap who tells you science has got all the answers, or the Bible has, or Robert Anton Wilson has.
But...if you prefer not to look at actual astrology, but to make your judgment of the whole based on the thumbnail sun-sign sketches and the newspaper horoscopes and the liars, I can't stop you. If you prefer to take the precession of the equinoxes, and the fact that astrologers have known about it for centuries and not changed their system, and the fact that some astrologer has voiced the obvious logical deduction that the actual constellations don't matter and probably never did, as evidence that astrology is rubbish, I won't stand in your way. If you prefer to make a joke out of it, that's good. Laughter is therapeutic, and fills the awkward silences, and when it dies away astrology will still be there.
As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on whether astrology has anything useful to teach us. For me the evidence doesn't add up to a neat conclusion, true or not true. The prosecution's case is circumstantial at best, and there's too much testimony for the defence that I can't in honesty rule out, even though it's variable in quality and hard to pin down.
Astrology is not a science, and won't be till scientists discover (or even start to wonder) exactly what if anything is behind it. (But then, I've never believed that science was capable of telling us the whole story about anything.) It is, perhaps, in some ways an art. It was suggested in the discussion that Western and Chinese astrology cannot both be right, but can both be wrong; perhaps this is like saying that Botticelli and Hokusai, because they would paint the same scene very differently, cannot both be good painters but can both be bad.
Yes, the jury is still out for me, and probably always will be. As it is on God, and aliens, and many other things that for others have long been decided, one way or the other. And maybe that's a harder mindset to get into than one where the mind is made up.
And this is where I stop. Anyone who wants the last word is very welcome to it. Otherwise, we're movin' on.
So, this.
The world is full of false information, and it is our task to distinguish the false from the true when making our judgments. This is not always easy, but some days it's easier than others.
If you were to see a man looking at, say, cheap mass-produced greeting cards, or elementary school finger painting projects, or the graffiti in a men's room, and he were to look up and say "well, if that's Western art, I don't think much of it," you would be quick to point him at the nearest gallery, or book on art, or website, so that he could make a more balanced judgment.
Likewise you would correct his negative judgment on classical music, if it were only based on the endlessly repeated few bars of Vivaldi played by a phone on hold, or on television programming, if he had only ever seen one episode of "Gilligan's Island" during a severe thunderstorm, or (though you might be getting a little tired of him by now) on science, if it were based on what journalists or creationists say about it. You would tell him that what he had seen was not the whole story, that there was more to it. And if he refused to take in what you said, if he still chose to make his judgment of the whole based on the worst or most misleading examples, you would begin to suspect that there was more going on here than simple ignorance.
I find myself in that position relative to the people who have, here and elsewhere, voiced their judgments on astrology.
There are an abundance of hucksters and hustlers using astrology to make money. There are newspaper horoscopes and premium phone lines and TV shows on the more desperate channels and loads of books and sites full of thumbnail descriptions of what your sun sign tells you about yourself. There are people who will tell you that astrology can map out your future and find you the perfect lover, can fillet your personality and lay it out for anyone to read, can tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
That is not true, and those people are either misinformed or lying...but the fact that it is not true does not mean that astrology is useless. That is not the whole story. There is more to it.
Astrologers have mapped a complex network of interlocking influences, based on legitimate astronomical observation of planetary motion, that make every minute of every hour of every day of every year a slightly different astrological picture. The sun sign is just the beginning, and the obvious fact that one Sagittarian is not exactly like another is nothing to do with anything. I did in fact cast my birth horoscope, somewhat inexpertly using a kit I got from a newspaper offer, back when I was young, and, unsurprisingly, not everything it said about me was right...but even where I disagreed with it, I learned something about myself that I hadn't known before. Not everything in anyone's astrological chart will be accurate, because, as I pointed out in an earlier post, we are more complex than any one system of categorisation can encompass. Anyone who tells you different is as much a liar as the chap who tells you science has got all the answers, or the Bible has, or Robert Anton Wilson has.
But...if you prefer not to look at actual astrology, but to make your judgment of the whole based on the thumbnail sun-sign sketches and the newspaper horoscopes and the liars, I can't stop you. If you prefer to take the precession of the equinoxes, and the fact that astrologers have known about it for centuries and not changed their system, and the fact that some astrologer has voiced the obvious logical deduction that the actual constellations don't matter and probably never did, as evidence that astrology is rubbish, I won't stand in your way. If you prefer to make a joke out of it, that's good. Laughter is therapeutic, and fills the awkward silences, and when it dies away astrology will still be there.
As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on whether astrology has anything useful to teach us. For me the evidence doesn't add up to a neat conclusion, true or not true. The prosecution's case is circumstantial at best, and there's too much testimony for the defence that I can't in honesty rule out, even though it's variable in quality and hard to pin down.
Astrology is not a science, and won't be till scientists discover (or even start to wonder) exactly what if anything is behind it. (But then, I've never believed that science was capable of telling us the whole story about anything.) It is, perhaps, in some ways an art. It was suggested in the discussion that Western and Chinese astrology cannot both be right, but can both be wrong; perhaps this is like saying that Botticelli and Hokusai, because they would paint the same scene very differently, cannot both be good painters but can both be bad.
Yes, the jury is still out for me, and probably always will be. As it is on God, and aliens, and many other things that for others have long been decided, one way or the other. And maybe that's a harder mindset to get into than one where the mind is made up.
And this is where I stop. Anyone who wants the last word is very welcome to it. Otherwise, we're movin' on.