Thursday, January 04, 2007

Astrology - A Rant

I began learning astrology in college and on into grad school. Astrology is an elegant and comprehensive language of the soul and at that time several Jungian astrologers were prominent, the foremost being Liz Greene. It was a great match with the depth psychology I was studying.

That was way back in the early 80's and I slowly come to realize that I didn't want to become a professional astrologer. I certainly did a lot of charts for folks. But I rarely enjoyed interpreting them. I saw astrology as a psycho-therapeutic tool, but few people wanted to dive in deep to explore their own psyche. At least not with me--a more or less untrained beginner. I got tired of being asked superficial questions and trying to explain the basic ideas over and over. Ugh.

But last month Meredith called us up all excited. She's an aunt! Her brother had just had his first baby, and that she was going to visit them in Manhattan over the holidays. It just seemed natural to do the baby's natal chart as a gift. We have beautiful blank chart forms (they were our first unsuccesful business venture) and we can make a chart look pretty cool.

But Meredith wanted more! She wanted to be able to explain the chart, at least somewhat, to her uptight stockbroker brother and sister-in-law. So I typed up a brief explanation of astrology using the baby's chart for examples, and sat down with Meredith for about an hour to explain.

It was intense! Meredith goes after new information like a hungry tiger goes for a slow moving villager. She listened so intently and asked so many excellent questions that foutains of information just flowed right out of my creaky old brain. By the end of our hour she was clutching her head and groaning, saying she had had no idea astrology was so complex and deep.
Later on she called me and asked if we could do a trade. I could teach her astrology in exchange for her tutoring of India. Somewhat hesitantly, I agreed. I'm not sure I have enough insight and knowledge to make it a fair trade, but I'm going to give it a shot.

When she got back from Manhattan she told me of her father's reaction to the whole chart thing. He yelled at her! "You don't really believe this crap? It's bullshit! It's totally unscientific!" She had obviously enjoyed provoking her dad and was amused by his ranting. Her East Coast relatives think she's too "crunchy" anyway. A kook from the woo woo 'left coast'. I suspect she likes to rub their noses in it once in a while.

Well, I didn't find the story amusing. Her dad's attitude is all too familiar and I'm sick of it.
In my opinion, it's the attitude of insecure people who don't understand science and have made of it a religion. They believe in "scientism" in order to feel safely grounded in the current consensus paradigm. Only vaguely aware of the "scientific method"--the very basis of science, they glom onto the trappings, the glamour of it.

Instead of peasants gawping at the priest in his vestments, speaking incomprehensible latin, we've got psuedo-intellectuals nodding their heads at researchers in lab coats publishing incomprehensible studies. They read about 'findings' in women's magazines and The New York Times.
I don't like religion in general, but scientism seems especially repulsive to me. The peasant's sense of awe and wonder has been replaced with smugness and superiority. I don't see that as an improvement!

I will admit that most people have no clue whatsoever that astrology is anything more than the daily horoscope one finds in the newspapers. They've never even heard the term 'natal chart'. Still, for the follower of scientism, astrology is has served as strawman and whipping boy far too long.

Clearly astrology is "unscientific" because we can't explain how the alignment of planets and stars can have anything to do with human behavior.
By the same token, the Moon obviously has nothing to do with tides, or women's menstrual cycles (or lunacy for that matter). Any apparent connection is mere coincidence. Or used to be before we could measure gravitation.

Gravitation. Now there's a nice scientific term. It describes something we can't really see or feel and which I certainly can't explain. I doubt you can either. But physicists came up with clever ways of measuring it though and now we feel so scientific when we drop something and it breaks. "Oh, that was gravity, that was."

But unlike the Moon's gravitation causing the tides, and synchronising mentrual cycles, and filling the psych wards once a month, astrologers don't suggest that the planetary alignments "cause" anything. Rather they seem to mirror human behavior. As above, so below.
And yes, we can't explain why. Yet.
Jung invented the term 'synchronicity'--an acausal connecting principle. (Also an album by The Police). It comes back to that word 'co incidence' which simply means things happening at the same time. If we can't ascribe a clear cause then there simply cannot be any meaningful connection. That's Scientism.

In reality, there's no particular reason why the scientific method can't be applied to synchronicity. No scientific reason. But there are plenty of cultural reasons.
I should know. I was a Psych major.
Poor old Psychology has been trying so hard for so long to be taken seriously it's been humping the leg of 18th century Newtonian science for about a hundred years. Sort of barking up the wrong tree of life. This desperate longing for respectibility seems to have blinded most psychological researchers to newer (20th Century) develpments in the hard sciences.

But consider this: virtually all scientific studies use statistical analysis to determine if their results are "statistically significant". But statistics is based entirely on faith. Faith in a concept called randomness or chance. If your results occur more often than random chance would suggest, then we can be pretty sure they are due to whatever it was you were studying.
But where did this idea of 'random chance' come from? It really is a religious idea. I'm pretty sure it came into prominence around the time that Descartes tossed God outside of matter and the Earth became dead.

Quantum physics seems to suggest that there really is no such thing as "random chance". Every electron in the universe seems to know what every other electron is up to. Seriously.
Things look random to us, from our limited perspective. It's a bit arrogant, I think, to automatically assume that they are. And that's a key difference between Science and Scientism. Science requires an open mind in seeking for what's real. Scientism doesn't bother with that sort of messiness. We know what's what. We'll just throw a lab coat over it and smugly nod our heads.

Okay. So in the end, if there is no real randomness in the Universe--if nothing is really happening just by chance, then why the hell shouldn't the alignment of the planets at the moment of a baby's birth have significance?
Honestly, I think certain people would do well to put away their New York Times and pick up a quantum physics book.

There. Rant over.

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