Month: January 2005

I’ve been reading the Introduction to Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon, by Roy Willis and Patrick Curry. Patrick Curry teaches in the astrology programme at Bath Spa University College which you may have noticed in Flashback. The introduction is truly fascinating, in the way a gangrenous wound might be fascinating to its owner. I’ll quote from it a little, so that you can see what I mean.

Very little in the debate about astrology is entirely new. The word itself means the ‘word’ (logos) or ‘language’ of the stars, and is now customarily
contrasted, as a pathetic remnant of primitive superstition, with the academically respectable science of astronomy. This latter term means
‘measurement of the stars’, and accurately reflects Galileo’s famous contention that only that which can be measured is truly real. Quantity is primary, quality secondary. This book maintains the converse proposition, daring to privilege sensory quality over a row of digits, and is devoted to investigating and recovering a stellar language of apparently immemorial antiquity; a mode of communication that is part of our common heritage as human beings..This is a primal faculty that seems to be embedded in our genes, ironically the very entities now commonly presented, in the current version of reductive materialism, as the sole and invisible masters of our personal and collective destinies (cf. Dawkins 1989).

That’s in the first paragraph, and it’s admirably representative of what the introduction is like. The self-attribution of ‘daring’ for instance. Always check your wallet when academics start telling you how brave and daring and bold and fearless they are. The chances are good that that’s the preface to a piece of nonsense. And then that ‘row of digits’ – oh that’s clever. Original, too. I used to say things like that in the 4th grade (and the 7th, and the 10th, and the 12th) to explain why I was so stupid at math. I didn’t want to think it was just because I was stupid at math, now did I.

And then the absurdity about this ‘primal faculty’ that seems to be embedded in our genes. Eh? It does? It ‘seems’? To whom? You? And anyone else? You just made it up, that’s all. So where does the ‘ironically’ come in? First you invent the idea that chatting with the stars is ’embedded’ in our genes, then you say how ironic when genes are usually such a horrid reductivematerialist item on the scientistic agenda. And then what do you mean ‘sole’? And what’s ‘invisible’ got to do with anything? And what do you mean ‘destinies’? Nothing; you don’t mean anything; you just want to take a very hackneyed slap at a usual suspect.

Another bit. I’ll leave you to ponder its wonders for yourselves.

Here let us note certain fundamental consequences of our dialogical
reading of human nature. In its essential, necessary openness – the
inherent duality of dialogue which is also, and most fundamentally, a
many-voiced plurality – this reading permanently guarantees us against
any possibility of collapse into monolithic solipsism. However, it also
means we must perforce abandon for ever all ambition to theoretical
closure, the dream – or nightmare – of a final, all-embracing theory of
everything, the breathtakingly arrogant project so dear to materialist
and reductionist science.

Openness and many-voiced plurality, hurrah; materialist and reductionist science, boo. Isn’t rhetoric great?

Interesting developments. And people sometimes ask me, whether plaintively or (more often) crossly, why I insist on trying to argue with metaphysical beliefs, which is a futile and even meaningless thing to do. Well, this sort of thing is one reason. Because ‘metaphysical’ beliefs seem to be the kind that prompt people to feel outraged, ‘offended,’ attacked, insulted, disrespected, challenged in the very core of their identity. I think that’s not a mere coincidence, I think it’s kind of the whole point. When people can’t point to evidence in reply to critics and skeptics of their beliefs, what can they do instead? They can of course do nothing, or they can shake their heads over the benighted ways of the heathen and then go on with their lives. But they can also get very worked up. They can find the home phone numbers of BBC executives on the ‘Christian Voice’ website and use them to make threatening and abusive phone calls. And then other believers can express a certain amount of approbation .

And although I don’t have strong feelings about blasphemy myself – Catholics are used to being scoffed at, and learn to be robust about it – I am glad that many Christians did make their feelings known about the transmission. I don’t say I like to see Roly Keating, the controller of BBC2, having to flee with his wife and family from his home, lest he be subjected to threats or unpleasantness. But it is gratifying when the BBC panjandrums have their cages rattled a little.

Hmm.

There is a penalty to be paid if you insult Islam; you may, like Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, end up with your own mocking words pinned bloodily to your chest. But there is no penalty for insulting Christianity – Christians will meekly accept it all (which, inconveniently, is just what the New Testament commands). When Sikh militants successfully got Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti closed at the Birmingham Rep last month, it was certainly an encouragement to offended Christians whose anger against the desecration of their taboos has been simmering away over the years…There is still a big debate to be had on how a society combines freedom of speech with respect for the values of others. An artist has to push boundaries, and offend sometimes; but the artist also has to recognise that there will be consequences of his actions.

Yeah, like getting stabbed in the chest and then having Mary Kenny gloating over the fact. Now that’s what I call respect for the values of others!

Here’s something to make you think, to shake your comfortable old positivist assumptions down to their roots, to alert you to the fact that there are deeper levels of reality that you’ve been forgetting to take into account…

I am glad to see that this page is being read by the press. On 6th December, Catherine Bennett of the Guardian (UK national newspaper and dyed-in-the-wool astrological sceptic) writes: On the Astrology News website, there is already speculation that the tsunami “because it involves destruction originating from a submarine source … appears to fall in line with the mythological themes of Sedna”. Suggesting that the California Institute of Technology scientists whose decision it was, last year, to name the planet after the Inuit sea goddess, may be more competent in the divination department than all the UK’s astrologers put together. I suspect that Bennett writes about esoteric subjects without reading about them. She would benefit by studying the writings of Carl Jung. Jung’s notion of synchronicity is that there is an acausal (non-linear) principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. He claimed that there is a synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception. Though I am not sure if every coincidence has deep meaning, the naming of a planet is a significant and symbolic event that affects the world. As such, I cannot rule out a connection between the choice of the name and the nature of the planet.

An acausal principle that links events – how cool is that? And it’s non-linear, too, which is even cooler. Not that I have the faintest idea what the astrologists mean by that, and I bet they don’t either, but that’s exactly why it’s so cool. If we understood it that would take the mystification I mean mystery out of it, and that’s no fun.

So events are ‘linked’ (what does linked mean? linked how, linked in what sense, linked with what result, linked according to what evidence or logic?) if they have a similar meaning. Oh. What does meaning mean? What kind of meaning, and according to whom? They’re linked by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. Oh – but since we don’t understand what ‘linked’ means, and so don’t understand how they’re linked, and we don’t understand what ‘meaning’ means, and so don’t understand what meaning has to do with the non-understood ‘linking’ (except that we’ve been told that it’s acausal, which helps remarkably little, in fact hinders), the information that they are ‘linked’ in a non-understood way by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially…really doesn’t get us much farther. But it sounds kind of deep, maybe. Either that or kind of daft.

I’ll show you something that links though. Not sequentially, but by meaning. But I, pedantically or literally enough, will explain in what sense the two items ‘link’ – I will explain that they ‘link’ in my own mind because I see a connection between them, which I will endeavour to explain to that large majority of the world’s population that doesn’t share a brain with me.

The scientific profession possesses considerable cognitive authority in modern societies…Such authority is of course of inestimable value to individual scientists, and they have a vested interest in its maintenance. They can be expected to police the existing boundaries of science, to avoid the intrusion of whatever may detract from its reputation and to seek to dispel anything potentially disreputable which arises within it.

That’s from the opening of chapter 6, ‘Drawing Boundaries,’ of Scientific Knowledge by Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry, page 140. Here is a bit from the end of the same chapter, page 168:

The boundaries of science are conventional. To reify those boundaries, and to see them as hard-and-fast divisions between inherently different subject areas or disciplines is simply a mistake. The demarcation of science from pseudo-science, or of science from scientism or even physics from chemistry, can be fully understood only in sociological terms…Scientific boundaries are defined and maintained by social groups concerned to protect and promote their cognitive authority, intellectual hegemony, professional integrity, and whatever political and economic power they might be able to command by attaining these things.

Both of those statements have some truth to them as far as they go – but they leave a lot out. They also seem to carry a wealth of implication, which is probably what Barnes, Bloor and Henry have in mind, given the leaving a lot out aspect. The link I see between the two sets of quotations is that the kind of rhetorical skepticism we find in the last two tends to work as an enabler of the woolly thinking in the first one – at least I think so. The knowing stuff about policing boundaries and dispelling the disreputable is very popular with astrology fans and New Agers of all kinds. In other words, sociologists of knowledge who write sly comments like that without qualifying them (except sometimes in other books or far distant chapters) are just promoting the fashion for childish irrationalism we see all around the place.