Astrology is inane, but I am fascinated by the social role it plays. I understand that the cognitive science of religion talks a...
Astrology is inane, but I am fascinated by the social role it plays. I understand that the cognitive science of religion talks a lot about how the human mind is predisposed to perceive order, especially agency, in random phenomena; the paradigm of trying to invoke or access divine agency, through prayer or ritual or cultic objects, to help with understanding the world and making sense of random data (various forms of divination being most prominent) is cross-culturally extremely common as a result, and while traditional religiosity is declining in OECD countries for a variety of reasons, that function of the human brain is still present. And our need to make sense of a disordered world is as strong as ever!
what’s most interesting to me is that modern, Western astrology seems not to be a substitute for divination or invoking divine power, but for psychology. it is used to understand the personality of the self, to provide a narrative for why you think and act and feel in the way you do, and to interpret the actions of people around you. and unfortunately for psychology, it doesn’t help that the pop-culture depiction of psychology, which is based on the real clinical practice of the discipline for decades, strongly features quacks like Freud, Jung, and Lacan, and even in its modern academic form suffers from difficulties in replication and lack of cohesive underlying theories. There are genuinely good-faith researchers in the field, but also there’s a lot of bullshit, and for the layperson, the two are very difficult to tell apart (it doesn’t help that science reporting sucks, and will loudly tout the results of experiments with tiny effect sizes and a sample size of like 12 college undergrads that has never been replicated as if it is a new law of physics)
astrology at least offers a structuring narrative and a framework for interpretation, and like trying to read entrails to predict the will of the ancestors, it might turn up bullshit most or even all of the time: but confirmation bias and separation between cause and effect allow the differences between prediction and reality to be papered over. Moreover, despite being basically explicitly supernatural, it sits in a secular cultural space; you used to find the astrology column in the Living section next to Dear Abby, it wasn’t something the preacher talked about on Sundays. So if you’re put off by religion but still sympathetic to the supernatural, it’s totally accessible. Not unlike ghosts and psychics and Bigfoot, tbh.
in this way it’s also like modern magic, witchcraft, and neopaganism, none of which are very like their historic predecessors (or even contemporary instances of historical polytheistic traditions), esp. insofar as they exist in a space of explicit repudiation of institutional religion (vs paganism that is institutional religion), have to cede a lot of implicit ground to phenomenological paradigms which are better at explaining the world as people experience it, and run parallel to other worldviews rather than trying desperately to shut them out (like fundies who teach evolution isn’t real, the earth is flat, and taking aspirin is evil).
Astrology always makes me feel a bit weird because I don’t feel I understand the self-justification, christian religion has god as an infallible entity who did various things so I can grasp why his instructions could matter, you can have something like “The Secret” which uses weird ideas of quantum connection to explain why it works, but I don’t understand the comparable part for astrology. OK you can read these stars but what even is the causal direction this is supposed to be, do the stars cause things or do things cause the stars?
I mean if you cornered someone who was big into astrology and demanded to know what causal mechanism connected the planets to them, they probably would just say something quantum or gravity or something nebulous. Since it’s more about building an interpretive framework for personal interactions and personalities than it is understanding the structure of the universe, it’s not surprising that that’s something practitioners don’t think about. And that’s fair, maybe? Quite a lot of people go day to day without knowing or caring about the arcane phenomenology of the universe.
I found the last comment about astrology amusing, but I’m actually into astrology so…
To be fair, though, the whole Covid thing seriously made me question how competent astrologers were.
Astrology as a predictive art, like any kind of divination, is unfortunately extremely testable, though at least most fortune-tellers have the good sense to keep their predictions vague so as to let confirmation bias do its work.
Remember the “collapse of meta-narrative” 90s and how nominally secular accounts of individual life like Freudian psychology and of history like the Marxist historical materialism had collapsed?