From The Archive: Staring Up At The Stars

From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).

Staring Up At The Stars - 06/06/05

Alun in - the relatively new to me, but so far seems very good indeed- Archeoastronomy (old link no longer valid – newer site here) says this:

the people who are interested in Astrology are not likely to answer something that’s overtly scientific. What I’ve done is start a new vote on Mister Poll, Astrology and You which reads more positively to encourage pro-Astrology voters to take part. I’m interested in seeing why people take it seriously.

My guess is that it’s a narcissistic pleasure. It’s nice to think there’s a bit of the paper that’s about you, even if it’s badly written. *

Recently, I read somewhere - I can't remember where - that people who have just bought that particular model of car are the ones who pay most attention to the specific adverts for that car afterwards. Personally, I have no idea about that as I find cars only marginally more interesting than the people who are interested in them and I loathe all adverts on principle. But I do know that when I used to buy albums I would nearly always dig out the NME, or whatever, review and see if the reviewer thought the same as me about my recent purchase. The same applies - but to a lesser extent - with books, TV programmes, even films for many of us. I think we are looking for something like confirmation, agreement, approval even.

Maybe it is this sort of existential fear that things like astrology, and by extension, all superstitions - up to and including religion - are tapping into. There is an increasing realisation, as we grow older, of the tension between our individual self-awareness, and self-consciousness, which put us all at the centres of our own individual universes, and our actual contingency in an indifferent and unknowing universe. Rather than coming to the realisation that this means that each individual life is a precious thing, these superstitious folk try to create a meaning, a system out of the arbitrary, the contingent, the unconnected. They attempt to use this construction - either one of their own making, or more usually, bought off the shelf - to create a sort of extension to their own individual universe, by incorporating (necessarily arbitrary) aspects of the universe as a whole into it, using such spurious connections as the positions of planets and stars. So, they, like the car adverts, the reviews, the how much 'celebrities' lives are - at heart - much like our own nonsense, and so on create this illusion of meaning, purpose, direction.

I have the feeling that the rise in the irrational, the anti-scientific, the anti-western and this self-loathing guilt of the 'caring' liberals in the developed west, can all be tied - if only rather loosely - together.

The rise of the (everyone is a) victim culture has grown up alongside, and off, the self-help, self-esteem industry in a sort of symbiosis. The rise of our contemporary shallow culture is an escape from the difficulties of true self-exploration into the trite banalities of psycho-babble of the self-esteem we are all a victim pseudo-culture we now inhabit.

We now live in a world where the utterances of intellectual lightweights like rock stars and film stars are taken seriously, treated seriously - while true artists are ignored and scientists dismissed as nerds - for if film stars are, as Hitchcock avowed, cattle, then rock stars must be seriously dim sheep.

So we have the trivialities of celebrities and their inane lifestyles treated earnestly instead of any awareness and appreciation of those prepared to take part in the constant struggle to go deeper into the nature of the universe and deeper into humanity itself in search of real understanding.

Instead of taking arms against this sea of outrageous trivia, the intelligentsia, and the academy, has abdicated from its time-honoured responsibility into Post modernism et al, and its rather trite banal obsession with superficialities. Its mollified infatuation with the shiny surfaces of the products of the increasingly over-hyped but also increasingly hollow ephemera promulgated by the global entertainment mega-corporations, while also marinating all its glib pseudo-profundities in an over-whelming indulgence in empty rhetoric (purely for surface effect), makes it all tumble into self-parody and irrelevance. Just more tenured bores at the 'cutting edge' of nowhere taking nonsense to no-one but themselves and congratulating themselves for their 'courage' to do so.

They are no different from the astrology, alternative therapy, crystal-gazing believers. All of these things are just strategies for avoiding having to face the big questions. That is the purpose behind all these superstitions, a form of comfort in the face of a complex world. Personally, I have always seen religion as a cop-out like this - that there are things these people see as the business of the gods and it is not for us to poke our noses into it. But I believe ignorance is never the answer and to abrogate moral responsibility to abstract entities is to avoid the question of ethics almost altogether. A form of denial.

Religions, and the other superstitions, are not only a denial of wonder and a denial of meaning, they are also a denial of responsibility. So, being religious makes you less moral than not being religious, because like all these other superstitions, religions take the agency for decisions away from the individual person and gives it to some other 'more powerful' and 'mysterious' force. In which case even something as abhorrent as blowing up a bus full of schoolchildren can be made morally 'justifiable' because the voices from the sky (or the alignment of the stars, or your spirit guide, or your person crystal, or whatever you want to believe in) said it was all right.

So, excuse my snort of derision when you claim that the Your Stars column in you daily paper is 'just a bit of harmless fun'.

*I did look for a link to this original article on the new Archaeastronomy site, but couldn’t find it – sorry.