we’ve been having several discussions over at _42 about astrology, mayan astrology, blood type divination and so on. i thought i’d give my opinion on it. i’m going with astrology because i know a bit about it. it is also coinciding with the every-now-and-then wave of “astrology is bullshit” in the media, followed by an uproar of astrologers and other like minded mystics.
but i am not going to talk about how it is wrong, scientifically speaking. let’s be clear. there is no evidence backing astrology whatsoever. read this paper if you want to know more about it, or just google science blogs for it.
this is about a different thing. let’s forget the fact that we are dealing with something that isn’t “real”, in a scientific sense, i.e., there is no possible physical connection between the stars and our own fate. to quote carl sagan, the gravitational effect of mars is nowhere near as big as the effect of the doctor that conducts the birth. most forces in nature fall with r² anyway. but as i said before, we are not driven by fact alone. human beings have other, sometimes more important, ways of asserting truth and falsehood. i call them stories, but they are mostly a way of testing each individual’s cognitive bubble.
to an individual that believes astrology is true, it will be true, not because it is factually correct, but because in their own mind it is true. a falsehood it may be, but since this individual is not willing to question its beliefs, a side effect of confirmation bias and cherry picking, it will work to prove its own perception anyway, regardless of what is testable.
so that individual will conduct its life like as usual, but using astrology as a tool like every other, regardless of whether it is real or not. faith, superstition, are all part of this human tendency to be uncritical. but in practice, being critical is not only rare, it is even misunderstood.
so someone that believes they don’t get along with a leo will, once they know someone is a leo, feel an instinctive, irrational, preconceived notion about that individual. this is a seed for prejudice. prejudice on who they are, what they do, and sometimes, even on how they live and they love. but if the two individuals engaged in this interaction share the misconception, i.e., believe in astrology, they will also believe that there is something beyond them that unites them. in a way, it will promote togetherness more than it would in some other case. in this case, the prejudice is a positive one. like arranged marriages in india, if an astrological culture is ingrained enough, and the fact that individuals share a common (yet false) belief, allows for that belief to have measurable effects on reality. one of my favorites is when two people are attracted to each other, they will cherry pick compatibility points between their signs, and once their relationship gets into trouble, it gets blamed again on some cherry picked points on their chart. the job of the chart itself is neutral. it is an endless pool of nonsense to justify intolerance and self worth.
but this makes astrology real, in the sense that its effects are measurable, but not true, in the sense that it is not the cause of the effect. the cause of the effect is human subjectivity itself. so the effect of astrology is there, but astrology itself is meaningless in this process. it could be zodiac, but it could also be blood types (very popular in japan but not elsewhere), mayan astrology, or just race or hair color.
now, this is interesting and overlooked. critical thinkers will respond to astrology believers with facts, numbers, even by doing simple tests (like the one me and a guest did, by trying to guess each other’s sign, coming out worse than a coin toss). but the fact is that astrology itself, being a story, has little to do with facts. someone that has accepted it as true for years in their life will have tremendous difficulty accepting that it is false. so much, in fact, that realizing it is not true is not enough to change the opinion of the involved. this is smugged as ignorance by critical thinkers. but what are they offering in return? what is to replace years of study of the harmony of the stars and their relationships, how mars in taurus is so different from it being in gemini? how do we tell someone that believes they are on an earthly mission given by the celestial divine, mapped out in constellations and orbits, that in fact they are just another human being on a mote of dust?
this is why we fail. this is why i fail whenever i bring up the facts on some long held belief. i have nothing to replace it with. it reminds me of the native american (and chinese) proverb tell me and i will forget, show me and i will learn, involve me and i will understand. showing and telling are easy. this is what i do. and it might even seed doubt in faithful minds. but i can never inject my years of scientific inquiry, or my deep understanding of the marvels of nature. they would have to walk with me, all those years, to understand how astrology is bullshit and how the world is better without it.
but in doing so, they would become a copy of myself, and i couldn’t learn a single new thing from a cognitive clone. talking with like minded people is, essentially, talking to oneself, a covert narcissism. it is easy to out these things as rubbish. what is hard is to understand them, why they exist, why they are necessary, and, more importantly, what can we offer that is a good alternative to it. i called it exuberantism, but there are many ways. but the most important thing is not to dismiss false beliefs entirely, since your employer might some day fire you because of some coming quadrature on his business.