My horoscope, as provided by a British astrologer of some repute, says my year will get markedly better starting this week. I hope he’s right; it’s been as close to horrid as I can conceive without death or bankruptcy so far, so I could use a lift. That being said, I don’t put much faith in astrology – or I should say, I view it with extreme skepticism. To the extent it’s telling me that life will improve, though, at this point, I’ll grab at anything I can find.
So far this week the forecast has been off. I’m at a four-star corporate hotel near the Philadelphia airport writing this. I should be in Seattle; I had a flight to get there on Tuesday but it was cancelled. I was rebooked for a flight Wednesday morning, which was also cancelled, and I had to pull rank with my airline to have them book me on a different airline in the afternoon. I connected in Philly but the flight was two hours late and I blew my connection. So now I’m flying out tomorrow morning – insh’Allah – and will pick up the son from the Boys and Girls Club of Wallingford in the evening. For now, I’m typing away in a hotel bar with several airline crews, an Izuzu truck sales conference, and assorted other east coast travelers who have also been stranded by air traffic control stops. If this is the start of a turnaround in my life, it’s doing a striking impression of otherwise.
Astrology seems like an apropos topic for me today, though, as I’ve been rereading Max Weber’s thesis on the disenchantment of Western society, while starting Charles Taylor’s counterpoint work on the rise of secularism, and simultaneously pondering the fact that I know more people than I would have expected at my age who are, actually, astrologers. Not just people who read their horoscopes, mind you, but actual astrologers – they can do star chart readings. They also are the types of people who would read Max Weber or Charles Taylor, and in many respects I find them as insightful and intellectual as anyone else I know. But they’re also deeply into understanding the influence of celestial positions and movements on our being. This is, to me, quite remarkable, because most of the people I know think astrology is absolutely bunk – and in fact, they will likely mercilessly make fun of me for what I’m about to write.
I view astrology in roughly the same plane as I view statements of faith, but I actually give astrology slightly more credence. Both astrology and faith are premised in a similar first principle: there operates in the universe a kind of presence that directly influences us, which is beyond us but still matters to us as individuals on this planet. I’ve said before that I think there is an order to the universe but it is beyond our understanding and beyond any capability of being understood by finite individuals or a finitely bound species such as ourselves, so my basic view is that any presumed “comprehension” of that other-order is false on the surface. At best it is a criminally impoverished analogy of what the actual order may be; more typically and at worst, it is a purely human invention and thus simply exists to reconfirm what we want to believe. I’d put most faith on that latter score, but my conversations with the astrologers in my life make me think that they are more of the former variety.
Seriously, people, hear me out on this.
The astrologers have surprising respect for scientific method, or at least, for statistical observation. Like almost all social scientists they far too readily assume causality when all that really exists is correlation. But they really are captured by the uncanniness of those forecasts – or readings; they do a lot of chart readings – to describe connections that they observe even without the astrology. As I’ve described my own views on that kind of connection – that I observe that it seems to exist, but like other matters of the soul, the truth of that connection seems to be beyond human comprehension – and largely they agree, but they view their use of astrology as being a kind of window into that connection. Sure, it’s probably not “correct”, in the same way that any simplification of a complex system will break down and fail on some level – but it doesn’t make the exercise of trying to use that simplified cast of the underlying complexity if it seems to make sense to do so.
This is, indeed, no different than what actual science is. Science has constructed a very reliable and very well tuned picture of how the world works, particularly at the sub-atomic level, and scientific method offers a pathway to continue to hone and improve our descriptions of how the world works. Scientists “believe” they have demonstrated the superiority of their method, but that is a statement of belief. But good scientists – Richard Feynman, say, or Einstein – know that that what they are doing is just an approximation. They know that what they’re doing isn’t “right” – it’s not. The universe is too complex to be subject to a binding, simplified model – even if the rules which govern it are discernible, the universe itself is not modelable. The understanding of the rules will enable us to make better decisions about how to be instrumentally human within that world – how to build more efficient machines, how to transmit and use information, how to respond to changes in the universe as we experience them – but it will not give us the eye of God, it will not express to us what path the universe will take.
Indeed, our models are increasingly telling us that our notions of time, of causality, may be limited to certain very localized conditions that we experience in our little corner of the universe, in the Andromeda supercluster approximately 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang. Causality may not be constant, and time may be a false impression that we experience because of how the universe has evolved in our piece of it, not something that exists as a necessary part of the ruleset which governs the operation of the universe in toto. In that light, astrology – assuming it uses some scientific method in building its models, and is open to ideas which could change it, and the astrologers I know seem to maintain some of this discipline so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt – could very well be useful to us as a model for how our little corner of space-time works.
Moreover, we don’t have any reasonable conception – at least, not one that is tractable for testing and verification – of what consciousness even is. We experience it but can’t describe it. Astrology describes how celestial mechanics influence conscious beings, sentient beings of a certain type. Psychology uses a different set of tools to describe what influences conscious beings. Neurochemistry and biochemistry do the same. All of them operate against a thing – consciousness – which we can’t currently describe, let alone understand. What makes “science” think it has any particular truck in this regard, other than institutional hubris, when it’s laboring under the same handicap of trying to measure physical or social impacts on an object that evades description? I’m somewhat famous among my friends for being skeptical of these disciplines as well for exactly this reason – even though I can recognize that each of these disciplines, astrology included, often yields uncannily accurate results, and I have to acknowledge their efficacy from time to time.
So while I’m skeptical of astrology, I have come to follow it out of habit (and, to be wholly transparent, out of maintaining it as one of the dwindling virtual connections I have left to the ex-girlfriend). But as I think about the generally held belief that Western society has become disenchanted, as stated by Weber and those that follow in his tradition, I’m struck by the fact that there is a persistent thread of enchantment in our world. We have, largely, left God behind – but we haven’t left spiritualism behind. Taylor describes this using the word “nostalgia” – we have killed God but we regret the act, and we can’t help but look at the world as, really, criminally less vital as a result of our act of murder. So we preserve things that connect us to that enchantment – religion, for example, or faith writ more broadly – as well as our more Romantic attachments to nature and the like.
Astrology preserves some of the enchantment of the universe, and I think that speaks strongly to why it is so widely followed. And given the existential state of being conscious and aware of our existence, we need some enchantment simply to exist. We can’t totally let go of all belief; we have to have faith in our own existence and, if we’re to be sane, the existence of other sentient beings with whom we can communicate and collaborate, who we can love.
I don’t believe astrology will give me the answers to my future, but I also don’t believe science will. I don’t believe religion will, either. But each of them gives me direction to exist. Science is the mechanism by which I can understand the world analytically, and offers a host of tools for acting instrumentally. While I’m no longer religious at all myself, religion taught me the binding power of radical, open love, and that has given me a mechanism by which I can understand other conscious beings, including the potential for conscious beings that are beyond my understanding. Astrology – well, astrology has taught me to look out for certain people while Mercury is retrograde, and that May 15 should be the start of something better in my life. And the astrologers in my life have reminded me of the gentle strength of staying connected to the enchantment of living in this universe. At this point, sitting in a sterile lounge in an airport hotel in Philadelphia, drinking gin and eating a bad cheesesteak, I’ll take what I can get.