Episode 32 - Astrology

Transcript

Ellie: 0:00

We're so excited to share today's episode with you. Before we get started, we just wanted to share with you that David was traveling while we recorded this episode, so you may find his audio, a little funkier than usual. All the same, we love this episode and can't wait to over-think with you.

David: 0:21

I'm David Pena-Guzman.

Ellie: 0:23

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:26

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:28

who are also professors.

David: 0:29

Put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:33

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, what's your sign?

David: 0:46

I am a Sagittarius.

Ellie: 0:48

Ooh. Okay. I have no idea what that means, except that you were born between November 22nd and December 21st.

David: 0:57

You're like, I don't know anything about it, except all of the following hyper-specific details.

Ellie: 1:03

No the reason that I know that Sagittarius is between November 22nd and December 21st is because I am currently on a horoscope website, that of renowned astrologer Jessica Lanyadoo, who's based in San Francisco. And I'm going to read you your horoscope for this week.

David: 1:19

please do.

Ellie: 1:21

Are you ready? What you don't know or yet understand is not evidence of things being bad. If there's something you need to grieve, then give yourself the gift of honoring those emotions. Staying present, even with upsets, is not only a healthy move, but also an investment in your own future. Investing in the present requires you to at least on some level embrace all of it, not just the good parts. Be here now, Sagittarius.

David: 1:51

I am here. I am now. Including the badness of that horoscope, I embrace it.

Ellie: 1:58

Okay. So what do you think David does this horoscope resonate with you this week?

David: 2:03

I don't know. I think that I have bad things happen all the time and I do try to embrace them whenever I can. And so it's easy for me to see how that can apply to me, but it's even easier for me to see how it can apply to literally every person that tries to find some meaning in it, but, you know, I can take something from it and move forward with my life and never look at it again.

Ellie: 2:28

Well, hold on because this is just like platitudes. Let's get into the details here. What I find really interesting is that there is a sentence in here that says, if there's something you need to grieve, then give yourself the gift of honoring those emotions. So this astrologer is not telling you, there is something you need to grieve. She's sort of covering her bases and saying, if there is something you need to grieve, give yourself space for that.

David: 2:52

Yeah, and I just don't understand how that's a horoscope. Isn't a horoscope supposed to be predictive in nature. And I'm just getting these like abstract conditionals where if, if A then B, but I'm not going to tell you if A. Is it, am I wrong in thinking that are supposed to tell you something about your future that you don't currently know.

Ellie: 3:13

Yeah, I think so. We can use mine as a comparison. I'm Libra. So mine is, this week, it's wise to slow down and gather yourself up. There's enough going on in your life that if you get swept up in the energy of it, you'll find yourself responding before you're ready and potentially making a mess of things by doing what you think you should instead of what's right for you. Okay. So this one weirdly does resonate with me because I'm currently at home for a week in between trips and I am letting myself, in a very rare move for me, just like not be too serious about work this week. And so this idea of it's wise to slow down and gather yourself up does definitely resonate.

David: 3:52

Ellie. No, don't drink the juice. Okay. So this horoscope tells you Yeah, don't drink the juice.

Ellie: 3:58

Don't drink the green juice. It's not Kool-Aid.

David: 4:01

It's the celestial juice, don't drink it. It's not from this Earth.

Ellie: 4:06

I'll say why I chose Jessica Lanyadoo's horoscope for us. And it's because I heard her on another podcast, the podcasts from my local LA radio station, KCRW, where she had like, quite an interesting perspective on astrology. And I wasn't ready to kind of dismiss her out of hand. So I didn't choose a strawman astrologer for us to take down. I chose somebody that I actually thought had a pretty interesting take on astrology from a different podcast. But I have to say these horoscopes really do seem like they're hedging their bets. It's just like the vaguest possible advice that could apply to anybody.

David: 4:40

Yes. It's like, how can I say something in a way that not a single person can become the exception that disproves. And so it's like, Okay. I'm going to use some modal language over here about possibility. I'm going to use some logical language over here of conditionals. And then I'm just going to give this advice who's negation would never make sense in any situation. So again, I would find it really interesting if she gave a horoscope in which she said, it's time for you to think without acting and to rush into things without actually having a plan. That's the kind of horoscope that I want. I want something that rationalizes all my preexisting neuroses.

Ellie: 5:24

Well, and David, what you're talking about is actually two things that I want to discuss on the podcast today. One is what is known as the Barnum effect, which is the idea that when somebody is giving really vaguely applicable advice, everybody's going to see themselves in it. And the other thing is that a lot of astrologers end up asserting pretty basic psychological advice rather than things that actually have to do with the metaphysics behind astrology. So to what extent does this actually depend on the movements of the stars?

David: 5:55

And the movements of which stars? You know, like I want details. I want the mechanics behind my horoscope.

Ellie: 6:03

Well, hopefully our listeners are still tuned in at this point because we have a lot of millennial and gen Z listeners. And it just turns out that those generations, especially millennials, tend to be super into astrology. There's very much been a resurgence of it recently. And so today we want to figure out why is that? What's the deal?

David: 6:23

Today, we're talking about astrology.

Ellie: 6:26

Where does astrology come from? And at what point in history does it split off from its sister discipline, astronomy?

David: 6:33

And is astrology, as it is practiced today, a harmless spiritual system, or is it as the German philosopher for Theodor Adorno argues, a dangerous expression of pseudo rationality?

Ellie: 6:46

And to what extent do other discourses in the present, such as statistics and election predictions actually prove similar to astrology, although they're rarely recognized as such? So David, in preparation for this episode, I called a bunch of LA bookstores looking for books on the history of astrology. I targeted, as you might expect, the metaphysical and or new age-y spiritual bookstores in LA of which there are many.

David: 7:14

Are there any bookstores in LA that don't fall into that category?

Ellie: 7:19

There's like the two Marxist bookstores and then all of the rest are new age spiritual ones, but I found something really surprising. And that was that not a single one of these bookstores had a book in stock on the history of astrology. They had books on astrology, but they had no books on its history.

David: 7:38

This doesn't surprise me, because I do think that a lot of the appeal today for astrology is really divorced from a good understanding of the origins and the history of astrology.

Ellie: 7:51

Let's give this to our listeners. Let's break down the history a little bit. Where does astrology come from?

David: 7:56

The history of astrology is quite long and complicated, but by most accounts, it dates back to ancient Mesopotamia at around 4000 to 3000 BCE, where people try to interpret the behaviors of various celestial bodies as omens of world events. So, for example, if a planet was in a certain position in relation to the rest of the visible celestial bodies, it could indicate a coming drought or a famine or the inevitable fall of a kingdom or an empire or some other worldly event. And two things that are really interesting to me about the history, the deep history of astrology, are one that originally astrology was meant exclusively for kings. So people would specialize in the study of celestial bodies as a way of giving political advice to kings. And that meant that not everybody had access to astrology. And in fact, it had a bit of a cultic dimension to it, where those initiated into the science of interpreting the celestial omens had the right to speak to the person wearing the crown about what to do and what choices to make for the future of the state or the kingdom or whatever the case might be.

Ellie: 9:11

And so astrologers in ancient Babylonian society had a pretty high status and they were civil servants.

David: 9:18

And they were all men. So that's, I think an important point. Women did not have the opportunities for entering this kind of scientific, prophetic discourse. Now the second thing that's important about the history of astrology is that originally in Mesopotamia, it really only predicted external events like the rise and fall of political regimes, natural disasters, and so on and so on. And it's only much later, at around the sixth century BCE, that you have the rise of what is called personal astrology, especially with the creation of birth charts. And that's when we get for the first time this belief that the position of the celestial bodies can tell us something about particular individuals on the basis of their birth date, you know, which is basically what you just read to me from this millennial astrologer.

Ellie: 10:10

Okay, that's interesting. And maybe we can also say what astrology is in its broadest sense, whether you're looking at omen astrology or what you described as personal astrology of which there are also many forms. And then there's like a lot of other branches of astrology too. I went down a really, really deep research rabbit hole on that.

David: 10:30

Okay.

Ellie: 10:30

Despite my inability to find a hard copy book of the history of astrology. But in any case, I think we can broadly say that astrology is a system of beliefs and practices that are based on the idea that there's a meaningful relationship between celestial bodies and human events. What exactly that meaningful relationship looks like is debated. Is it just that celestial bodies positions indicate human events or is it that they actually cause human events? We can talk about that a little bit later, but the bottom line is really that there is such a meaningful relationship.

David: 11:05

Yeah, and I've always thought about astrology as having a commitment to causality, but I can see why maybe there are strands of astrology in which the celestial events don't really cause, in a one-to-one relationship, the events that they, as you say, indicate, they just sort of, both of them are potentially caused by something else, but they just relate to one another as sign and signified.

Ellie: 11:29

Yeah, there would be a relationship of correlation rather than of causation. One thing you hear a lot from millennials is complaints about mercury in retrograde, right? Everything goes to the dogs when Mercury is in retrograde. People feel terrible, bad things happen. And then the question is, well, is Mercury in retrograde causing those bad things? Or is it just a sign that bad things are going to happen during this particular period?

David: 11:52

I know, I'm so reactive against astrology that whenever I hear people my age talk about mercury in retrograde, my first instinct is to be like, oh, really define retrograde. I want an-

Ellie: 12:04

Do you hear it? Do you hear it a lot from your friends?

David: 12:08

Not from my friends. You know, where I hear it a lot in dating apps. And I have to confess that whenever somebody brings up astrology, if they are really serious about it and committed to it, I immediately kind of block them, because I just don't know how to process that.

Ellie: 12:25

Wait you immediately kind of block them? You can't kind of block somebody. Do you block them or do you not block them?

David: 12:31

It's kind of true and kind of also maybe not true. No, it's true. I've done it in the past and I know it's my problem not theirs, obviously. I just I'm so reactive about it, but it comes precisely from how widespread this lackadasical embrace of astrology is among millennials, but that's neither here nor there.

Ellie: 12:51

Yeah, I hear it a lot from friends and you know, many of them are friends I really respect. And so it's been kind of interesting for me to witness the rise in astrological discourse among people whose intellect I really respect and, you know, a lot of times they're not fully buying into the metaphysics behind it, which we'll talk about a little bit later, but they often say that I'm a really classic Libra. And I will say, I find that most of the people I date are Aries. I don't know what that means or what that says about me or them, but it is a weird coincidence.

David: 13:25

Am I totally a Sagittarius?

Ellie: 13:27

I don't know, like I told you, but I will say one thing also that's interesting is that the actual signs that we go off of now and their association with the birth date is actually about a month off.

David: 13:40

Oh, I've heard that. I've heard that it all depends on like when you begin counting. So this is actually the best thing, because it means that everybody who is so sure about seeing themselves in their astrological sign has been a hundred percent wrong. Okay. Everybody believes it.

Ellie: 13:57

Yeah. So in the past 2000 years, our position relative to the various constellations on which the Zodiac are based has drifted by about 30 degrees. This means one whole month. So that actually means that if you think that you're an Aries, you're probably really a Pisces.

David: 14:17

Wow.

Ellie: 14:19

Yeah.

David: 14:21

Crisis in astrology.

Ellie: 14:25

Sorry, let's get back to the history though, after this, you know, diversion. So astrology develops out of ancient Babylonian society and into Egyptian, Greek, and ancient Roman societies, where it has a huge role to play. Interestingly, independently of the Babylonian trajectory, you also have systems of astrology developed in China, Japan, and in the Americas. And astrology continues to exercise a big influence on medieval society, especially in Europe, where it's not different from astronomy. There's no distinction for thousands of years in human history between astrology and astronomy.

David: 15:05

No, that's right. And I think that's something that we need to spend a little bit of time on because even though we tend to think of astrology as something that is ascientific or even anti-scientific, that's not historically the case. And the historian of science Thomas Kuhn wrote a very famous book called The Copernican Revolution, which is a history of astronomical physics, where he traces these relationships between what we now call astrology and what we now call astronomy and shows that for a very long time, astrology had legitimate reasons for being considered scientific, because people did have some grounds for believing that there can be a kind of causal relationship between the celestial and the terrestrial realm. So for instance, Kuhn talks about how we know that there is a kind of relationship between the position of the sun and the seasons on Earth, right? So for example, when the sun is in the constellation Cancer, it's hot, because it's summer, or when it is in a different constellation, it's a different kind of temperature or he talks about the coincidence between the menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle, which historically people interpret it as sort of referencing one another. Okay. Or there is also the causal connection between the height of the tide and the faces of the moon. So people were looking at the world around them on Earth and realizing that all sorts of events sort of cling to celestial phenomena. And so before the Copernican Revolution, there are good reasons for thinking that maybe there is a causal influence between these realms.

Ellie: 16:48

Yeah, that makes sense.

David: 16:49

And the funny thing is that up until the 1600s, the names that we gave these disciplines related to one another. So we used to call astronomy natural astrology, because it was the astrology of natural phenomenon. So if you just were interested in studying the planets without really making any predictions about like the rise and falls of kings or, you know, the future of individual persons, you were still called an astrologer, just a natural one. And if you were casting horoscopes left and right, you were called a judicial astrologer. And so scientists and astrologers were called by the same name, just with a different qualifier. And, you know, ultimately of course, with the rise of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century and the rise of Copernicanism, that's when the split happens between astrology and astronomy, and astronomy asserts itself as the true science of the two and astrology sort of gets relegated into this realm of the occult and the pre-mortem.

Ellie: 17:55

Yeah. One thing that I found really interesting in doing some research for this, cause a lot of this was new to me, David, unlike for you, is that people like Johannes Kepler, who's one of the major figures of the Scientific Revolution and part of the reason that we know that the Earth revolves around the sun and all the other way around was himself an astrologer. So it's less than 500 years ago that the distinction between astrology and astronomy as we would call them today develops, in Europe.

David: 18:23

Yeah, this is a point that I've made before that I want to repeat here, that even though now we differentiate science from the occult and assume that there is an absolute abyss between them, that's actually not the case when you look through the annals of the history of science. And so not only Kepler is throwing horoscopes, but so is Tycho Brahe and a number of other very famous scientists in the 17th century. Even Ptolemy in the second century AD was the father of the Ptolemaic system that eventually gets toppled by Copernicus.

Ellie: 18:55

Hmm.

David: 18:55

He's remembered sort of as the father of mathematical. And even he was casting horoscopes and wrote a book called The Tetrabiblos, where he has this whole theory about the relationship between astrology, geography, and human events.

Ellie: 19:14

Ooh, that sounds like a fun summer read while the- while we're in Cancer, going to the beach.

David: 19:20

Yeah.

Ellie: 19:21

Well, let me ask you, David, since you just mentioned Ptolemy, obviously what happens in the Scientific Revolution is that we get verifiable proof of heliocentrism, so we move away from the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth, which of course was what Ptolemy's system of physics was based on. So to what extent does the new heliocentric hypothesis dislodge astrology? Is astrology based on the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe?

David: 19:49

It does require that belief. And in particular, it requires a kind of commitment to what historians of science called the two sphere cosmology of antiquity. So for the Greeks, the universe is made up of two spheres. You have the earth, which is the first sphere, the terrestrial realm and that includes the Earth's atmosphere. Like all the way up to where the atmosphere touches the moon. That's the dividing line. And then you have an outer sphere, like a gigantic sphere, which is the sphere of the stars. And that means that there is an absolute distinction between the terrestrial realm and the celestial realm. The important point for thinking about the connection between these two realms is that the celestial realm is eternal and incorruptible. There is no change. There's just eternal movement. The repetition of the same. And that means that that external realm can influence the Earth, but the Earth, which is lowly and corruptible, cannot exert the same power because it doesn't rise to the same metaphysical worth as the superlunary realm. And so when Copernicus comes around and says, actually this distinction doesn't make a lot of sense because the Earth is not the center, the sun is. That's when that distinction between the terrestrial and the celestial breaks down and you no longer have any reason for believing that causation between these realms is unidirectional, right? So now we know for example, that the earth exercises as much of a gravitational pool on the sun as the Sun on the Earth. So there is no reason why the causal influence would only be in our direction and that's at the base of astrology.

Ellie: 21:34

Yeah. And that's interesting because I did hear that some astrologers will say, no, we're using the Earth as a point of observation. And so we can preserve a heliocentric hypothesis. We're not going to be like holding onto this old idea that the Earth is in the center of the universe while also saying that, yeah, we're going to create our calculations based on our point of observation, which is the Earth. But it sounds like what you're saying, David, is actually that astrology depends upon a much bigger metaphysical picture of the relationship between the Earth and other celestial bodies that just doesn't hold water. And why would we think, for instance, that Venus is affecting us in a way that, you know, I was talking with one of my friends about recording this episode, Robin Mueller. And she was like, why would I think that a planet is affecting me more than you are affecting me right now, sitting next to me at the bar, you know. If we really think that Venus is exerting an influence on me, then we also have to take into account all of these other things that are affecting us way, way, way more. Cause they're way closer to us than the stars or the planets.

David: 22:43

And I think this is where astrologers paint themselves into a corner, into a 30 degree corner, which is that they have to choose between making a purely descriptive claim about creating a system that is based on an observational point of reference located on earth, period, and talking about a system that actually presupposes influence. Influence is not something that is purely based on observation. It requires the material relations to actually hold in the real world. And so if there is going to be causation or even correlation, you do have to be committed to a worldview that, after the 1600s, is really no longer sustained.

Ellie: 23:25

Yeah. And I think in particular, traditionally has- astrology involves four different aspects. It involves the Zodiac, so the signs, the 12 signs. It involves the planet, Sun, and moon. It involves houses. And it involves aspects. But I think a lot of times today we focus, especially on the Zodiac. And I was reading one of the books I was able to find at least a PDF of, it was Roger Beck's Brief History of Astrology. And I thought it was interesting the way that he put our emphasis on astrological horoscopes. He said, because they're based on 12 Zodiac signs, we've accepted a 12 size fits all approach.

David: 24:03

Hmm, what's the deal with our over-reliance on the 12 point system?

Ellie: 24:09

Well, it's more or less this idea that when we focus on the 12 signs of the Zodiac, we're really classifying humans into 12 different categories, or we might even say personality types, because I think there's a lot of overlap today between astrology and personality typologies.

David: 24:26

No, I think that's right. And the funny thing about this whole division into 12 is that of course the 12 signs are just 30 degrees of the movement of the stars around the Earth, according to the old geocentric model, but that movement is kind of continuous and smooth. There's no reason why we divide at the 30 degree mark any more than dividing it at the 10 degree mark or the one degree mark.

Ellie: 24:54

Well, yeah, and as, as we said a little bit ago, now we're 30 degrees off, actually, from the original calculations. And so we're actually in a different Zodiac sign than, than most of us tend to think, but that's where people interested in astrology will say. Okay. Yeah. But that's where I want to bring in the houses, the aspects and the planet, Sun, and moon. So me being a Libra born in October 6th, I would have a different personality typology than your mom, who was born on a different day at a different time in Libra.

David: 25:24

Yeah. So it seems like this is just epicycles upon epicycles of explanations that try to save one another as a way of preventing the entire system from collapsing into pieces, which is, you know, what happened to Ptolemaic astronomy by the 1700s.

Ellie: 25:41

And astrology really occupies this interesting space in contemporary culture, because a lot of what we've been saying, David, is sort of knocking the metaphysics behind astrology and the physics actually behind-

David: 25:52

And the logic.

Ellie: 25:55

Yeah. And of course, astrology is pretty universally reviled by scientists today, especially in the 20th century there were a lot of studies undertaken, quote, debunking astrology, and it continues to be super popular, even as a lot of people who are interested in it will say, yeah, I don't really buy the metaphysics and I don't really buy the physics of it. And so that's something I really want to dive into more. What's going on when people say, oh yeah, I'm into astrology, but I don't really believe in it?

David: 26:23

Yeah. If you're not buying the physics or the metaphysics, then what exactly are you buying?

Ellie: 26:28

Yeah, I think that's a great question. Before we dive into this, I want to just make one more historical point, which was that as I started doing research on astrology, one thing I found was an argument from feminists and especially decolonial feminists suggesting that astrology is a kind of subjugated knowledge that has been unfairly vilified by the predominantly male and colonialist scientific community. So for instance, in her book Caliban and the Witch, Marxist feminist Sylvia Federici suggests that astrology represented a threat to the capitalist and patriarchal system that emerges after the middle ages and so it was repressed and subjugated as a knowledge because of that. And now the rise in astrology comes along with the fact that it's no longer a social threat. It's now something that people can be interested in because the capitalist system has been so entrenched that it's not a danger to it anymore. But I have to say, as I was doing research on this, I didn't really find the idea that astrology is a traditionally subjugated knowledge among women and colonized peoples to be true. For one, David, as you said, most of the early astrologers were men and astrology was huge in extremely imperialist societies like Greece and Rome. So I just want to get that out of the way, because I just didn't find a lot of historical evidence for this argument that I've heard some feminist and decolonial thinkers make.

David: 27:54

Yeah, and I think we also need to be very careful about the distinction between a subjugated knowledge, a knowledge that has been pushed underground by power relations, and, uh, what the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, calls an obsolete knowledge, a knowledge that has sort of been put out of circulation by later developments that grew out of it, because that is one of the defining features of scientific knowledge, right, progress, things change. And previous theories are sort of cast out as we realize that better ones come along and explain more phenomena. And so I'm tempted to say that astrology is an obsolete knowledge, more than a subjugation. So Ellie, you mentioned the work of the philosopher Sylvia Federici who argues that astrology is a threat to capitalism, yet the German critical theorist, Theodor Adorno wrote a book called The Stars Down to Earth in which he makes exactly the opposite argument, which is that in fact, astrology feeds capitalism and makes sure that capitalism is not challenged by the people who live under it.

Ellie: 29:29

And this is such a fun book because it's one of the foremost philosophers of his day writing about the LA Times weekly horoscope from 1952 to 1953 and just like unpacking all of the philosophies that are latent within and arguing, essentially, that astrology leads to totalitarian thinking.

David: 29:51

Yeah. So let's look at the book in more detail because I think it is one of the most impressive philosophical rather than scientific take-downs of astrology. One of Adorno's concerns in this book is that people in the 1950s, who claim to be into astrology and especially into horoscopes, are not even very serious about their commitment to the thing that they claim to be committed to. And he sees in this kind of dilly-dallying a really dangerous attitude that allows people to attach themselves to a structure, like astrological thinking, without really taking a serious subjective stance in relation to it, to its history, or to its validity, even.

Ellie: 30:38

Yeah, I actually did an Instagram poll asking friends if they were into astrology or not. If they were, then why? And I got a lot of responses to the effect of, well, I don't really believe in it, but it makes me feel good or it feels nice to know that there is something out there. And I certainly don't want to put my friends on blast because I was taken in earlier this episode by my own horoscope, it felt very on point. So I'm not on a moral high ground here, I'm in a similar boat, but I do think that is precisely the viewpoint that Adorno is really concerned about, what we might call a metaphysical irony, the idea that you're like, yeah, I don't really believe in this thing, but I'm still going to use it to base my decisions off of, or to organize my understanding of how my week is going or of when I should start a new job.

David: 31:27

Yeah. And Adorno talks about astrology as a pseudo science or as a system of pseudo rationality. And I think this is tied to his critique of the irrationality of capitalism, where he says, look, capitalism is filled with so many inconsistencies that it produces anti rational or irrational effects. And one of those effects is that people living under capitalism flock to anything that seems even minimally rational, like the system of belief that is somewhat internally consistent, but doesn't actually have an anchor in reality. And so he interprets astrology as symptomatic of people's need for some kind of order in a capitalist world that denies them that

Ellie: 32:13

Yeah, because there are all of these forces shaping our lives that we don't have control over. And that we don't understand. And that is true, right. But the need to identify those forces through the stars, he thinks is a pretty irrational move. And he says that the conditions for this are provided by disoriented agnosticism. We live in a far less religious society nowadays than we might have a few hundred years ago, and so people are seeking for something to believe, and especially as something to assuage fears and anxieties, and in particular, he says that astrology gives people comfort because it makes what is totally senseless appear as if there were some hidden plan behind it while also suggesting that this hidden plan can't be sought in the realm of humans. We have to seek it in the external world beyond us, right. In the realm of nature or the sky.

David: 33:10

And I think this is where astrology enters the realm of de-politicization, because if the answer to our earthly problems is to be found in an extra terrestrial domain, it means that political action in the here and now is sort of put off the table. And he's also particularly concerned with the nihilism and the passivism that might emerge from the determinism. There's a lot of isms here, but he's really worried about the way in which the deterministic nature of a lot of astrological predictions turns into a de-politicization of the subject that consumes that knowledge, because if your future is in fact written in the stars, you can't do anything about it. So it really kills any kind of revolutionary energy that might emerge from people coming to the recognition that the world is without meaning. And without order under capitalism, it's a kind of a - Ellie: Yeah. And if you look at the average horoscopes, for instance, the ones we looked at at the beginning of the episode, you'll see that the advice is advice for actions. So I don't think it's totally fair to say that it's just telling people you have no control over your life, but it's telling people, you have a very limited control over your life based on the movements of the stars. And so it actually allows people to feel like they're doing the most that they can do, even as they are accepting the status quo. And this is really the most damning part of Adorno's critique of astrology. He says it fosters an ideology of dependence that ultimately is no different from totalitarian thinking. For Adorno, there probably wouldn't be that much of a difference between astrology and Q Anon. Yeah. And I think there are two ways in which we can think about this connection. The first one is that even though there is some room for action under astrological predictions, that action is always presented as individual rather than collective and as subservient to the logic of self-interest, right. What do I need to do to get on with my life, to improve my lot and my station in life? You'll never get the kind of collective action advice that maybe for Adorno, given his Marxist orientation, would be needed in order for it to give it even a semblence of political relevance.

Ellie: 35:23

And in light of that, David, I'm looking back at our horoscopes for the week. And the first sentence of yours is what you don't know or yet understand is not evidence of things being bad. That horoscope is such an encapsulation of this idea. It's, embrace the fact that you don't know things and also embrace the fact that the universe has your back. And Adorno also talks about this fact that there is a tendency for astrological advice to ultimately give a happy ending.

David: 35:55

Yes. Yes. I, and I think this is what I meant by passivism, which is not a word, which is that it, it really is sort of the opium of the masses after a religion, right? So once religion cannot really fulfill that function, we turn to other pseudo religious systems like astrology that pacify us and that make us believe that all we need to do is sort of submit to external forces. And this logic of submission is precisely his concern with totalitarianism. And this is the second way in which I think we can think about it, which is that for Adorno the biggest problem with astrology, the reason that he, a very famous philosopher, writes a book about the 1952 horoscope column in the LA times, is because he's worried that what draws people to astrology is a purely abstract authority and it means that astrology ultimately satisfies our need for subservience. And that's what makes astrology ultimately fascist.

Ellie: 36:57

Yeah. I want to just say here, too, that this account isn't to condemn individuals who are interested in astrology.

David: 37:06

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Its structural.

Ellie: 37:08

If you're into astrology and you're still listening to this episode, know that we're not saying like, never look at your horoscope.

David: 37:14

We're not saying you're a fascist either.

Ellie: 37:16

Yeah, because it's precisely the putting of responsibility onto the individual rather than seeing the collective conditions of responsibility that is the capitalist lie Adorno is attending to. And so, you know, I'll say in my own experience, I've never been into astrology but I have gotten a lot out of personality typologies, such as the Myers-Briggs Test and the Enneagram, which are perhaps equally pseudo-scientific. Maybe not equally actually, because they don't depend on this whole system of celestial bodies, but I've learned a lot from those personality typologies. I'm not ready to throw them away, but I'm also willing to accept the fact that maybe that implies that I'm succumbing to totalitarian thinking.

David: 37:55

Yeah. And I think the way in which Adorno would respond to that is don't confuse meaning with satisfaction. It's satisfying a kind of impulse that you feel, and that impulse is historically constructed by capitalism itself, which is why there is a very direct connection between astrology, capitalism, and fascism. And you know, one of the things now thinking about this claim that Silvia Federici makes about the power of the occult is that Adorno specifically talks about that and he says, in fact, astrology is the opposite of the occult. He says, look, people who are into horoscopes think they're into the occult, but in fact they're not. And the reason for this is because their experience of astrology is entirely mediated by external forces like magazines and famous horoscope dealers.

Ellie: 38:48

Today, Instagram accounts, podcasts, books.

David: 38:51

And this mediation means that you don't even have the raw force or the raw potential of something like the occult, which historically has drawn its power from the testimony of lived experience. So think about something like people having a near death experience where that's transformative or think about people saying that they see visions, or that they're touched by an angel, you know, any kind of occultism typically draws its force from living something in the flesh that reorients your worldview. And Adorno says you won't find a consumer of astrology for whom that's true. It's like occultism lite, occultism mediated through the LA Times horoscope column. So it's extremely superficial.

Ellie: 39:37

And I wonder if contemporary astrologers or people interested in astrology might take issue with that in as much as the social media has provided individuals with the chance to create communities around astrology, for instance, like a random person on Instagram might send a DM to Chani Nicholas, a super famous millennial astrologer, and might get a response from her. And that would actually be, even though it's mediated through social media, pretty close to the direct experience that Adorno is talking about because he describes going to an astrologer as a form of direct experience of the occult. But I think either way, the point stands that astrology is it's practiced today, as it was when Adorno was writing in the 1950s, is really a bringing together of the science of astronomy and the science of personality.

David: 40:22

Well, and I think that's precisely what makes astrology ideological on some readings, that it combines two different scientific discourses without any concern for the limits of each or the effects of the combination as if you can just take scientific concepts from one domain and apply them in any other domain that is called scientific and the result is therefore scientific.

Ellie: 40:43

Rather than an actual bridging of the science of astronomy and the science of psychology, astrology is a mashing of them together with no clear mechanism of-

David: 40:51

Yeah. It's like a Frankenstein of scientific concepts, but the other point here about the ideology of astrology has to do with its historical timeline. So Adorno is very clear. He says, look, back in the 1400s, even back in the pre-Christian era, astrology made sense. It was our best account of why things happened the way they did. It was our inference to the best explanation, as philosophers of science would say, but he says, but now conditions have changed. And if you ignore historical change, then you are forced into what he calls a psychological regression or retrogression. So astrology itself is in retrograde because in order for you to b- in order for you to believe in astrology nowadays in the 20th and 21st century, you actually have to move backwards.

Ellie: 41:44

Yeah, in order to buy astrology, it sounds like what you're saying, David, you have to reject contemporary physics and that's a large pill to swallow, right. That opens us up to all kinds of anti-scientific sentiments.

David: 41:58

That's right. And he says, in no uncertain terms, by now that in compatibility between astrology and physics is bleak. blatant.

Ellie: 42:07

So this leaves us in the following position. According to Adorno, if you accept the metaphysical system of astrology, you are rejecting hundreds of years of scientific findings about physics and astronomy. If you reject the metaphysics behind astrology, but you still enjoy astrology in your everyday life, you are participating in an ideology of dependence that opens itself up to totalitarian thinking. Those are pretty scary alternatives.

David: 42:36

Yeah. And the disjunction always lands you in irrationality. So if you participate and believe, you're irrational, if you participate and don't really believe, you're irrational. Either way, you're irrational.

Ellie: 42:49

But if you're into astrology, listen on because as we'll find out, what counts as a pseudoscience is not always objective.

David: 43:05

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other fellow listeners through our Facebook page and Facebook group or on Twitter and Instagram at @overthink_pod. Even though I tend to have a very strong knee-jerk reaction against astrology, Ellie, which I've now confessed, which extends from my friendships through my dating patterns, I think, I think it's really important to note that astrology is a discourse that ultimately seeks to find some kind of pattern in root data. And it really isn't the only scientific or pseudo-scientific or para scientific discourse that tries to do this. In fact, there are many other social discourses that are astrological in nature, or at least astrological in that sense, but that don't get recognized as such.

Ellie: 44:06

Whoa. Okay.

David: 44:09

So, for example, the physicist Alexander Boxer recently wrote a

book called A Scheme of Heaven: 44:12

The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Data, in which he makes precisely this argument. And he says that our desire to find patterns in data is what best explains the origins and the evolution and even eventually the collapse of astrology. But even though we tend to think that astrology was the only discourse to do that, there are many other ones that functioning that exact same way. So I want to read a very short quote from the introduction.

Ellie: 44:46

We love a quote read.

David: 44:47

Yeah, where he sort of presents his thesis. And he says, "Although it took a while for the rest of the world to catch on." and by that, he means to catch on to the fact that astrology is built on bad foundations. So, "Although it took a while for the rest of the world to catch on, the art of weaving a story out of numbers and figures, often to encourage a specific course of action, is used everywhere today, from financial forecasts to dieting advice, to weathermen." End quotes. And I recently listened to an interview with him in which he also adds election predictions to that list. And he says all these different kind of statistically driven practices where we try to predict the future or find pattern in a bunch of data points are kind of astrological, they're not fundamentally different, but they don't yet get recognized as pseudo-scientific, but he says there's a kind of connection.

Ellie: 45:48

Okay but wait a second, I'm going to leave election predictions out of it, cause I don't know that much about those, but financial forecasts and especially weather models, those are based on actual data, right, that is accurate as opposed to astrology, which as we've discussed, depends on an outmoded notion of physics and is therefore pseudo-scientific. So wouldn't there be a difference in kind between weather prediction and astrology?

David: 46:13

Maybe. So weather modeling is a really complicated phenomenon which is why you can still have really wrong weather prediction, so the weather person on your evening news can say, we have a 99% chance of a sunny Sunday, and then, you know, God is raining on everybody's parade. And so the point here is that when you enter into the domain of statistical prediction, you enter into an epistemically strange place where we don't really know exactly how to assess knowledge points. Or think about finance forecasts.They're not as objective as people claim they are. I think about something like, uh, derivatives or hedge funds where-

Ellie: 46:54

Yeah, we can- we'll- let's let those go. I can throw those out. I want to hold onto my weather forecast though, because I live my life based on what the weather is going to be

David: 47:02

that day. Yeah. And so here I think what we're getting are examples of discourses that maybe claim for themselves more scientific capital and more predictive power than they should. So think about, for example, dieting advice. Anybody who tells you that they can sort of fix your diet and fix all your health problems just through a few or many dietary choices, chances are that you're dealing with a modern day horoscope caster, you know, somebody who is trying to read a pattern into a set of data that just does not actually bear out that pattern.

Ellie: 47:35

Yeah, but what all of these things have in common is that they are predictive and nothing predictive, unless it has to do with straight up mathematical predictions is ever going to be immune to error, right?

David: 47:48

So let me make the following observation, which is that Alexander Boxer, the author of this book, makes the claim that he doesn't believe that modern statistical modeling techniques are problematic is, as you know, some of them are really exciting, but he really worries about the hype that grows around them. And in the majority of the book where he walks us through the history of astrology from the Mesopotamian period all the way through the Greeks and the Romans and the medievals all the way through the 17th century, he says, you see a similar kind of hype and a similar kind of commitment to the belief that you can somehow determine our destiny based on data. So that's what all these things have in common, that some kind of data gives you access to destiny. So of course it's not as if financial forecast or dieting advice or weather models are really on the same epistemic level as astrology, but they share this kind of data-fied approach to the future that he said, because of the openness of the future, will always leave us dissatisfied and they will always promise more than they can.

Ellie: 49:02

Mm. And that likely comes from this desire for security that we have from our fears and anxieties and a wish to allay those fears and anxieties through predictions.

David: 49:12

Yeah and I think it's ultimately a refusal to embrace the contingency of the world and the contingency of the future, right. That's why he puts the term destiny in the title of his book. If you think that data will fix your destiny for you, you know, good luck. You're going to be relying on a pretty shitty horoscope, uh, modern day shitty horoscope.

Ellie: 49:35

Well, I want to shift gears slightly from thinking about predictive sciences to thinking about personality science. Because as I mentioned before, I think there is a lot of similarity between astrology as it's practiced today and various personality typologies. We mentioned at the beginning of the episode what's known as the Barnum effect and the Barnum effect is the tendency for people to give high accuracy ratings to personality descriptions that can actually apply to the general population but is presented as if they are unique. So I resonated with my Libra horoscope, but perhaps if your Sagittarius horoscope had been listed as Libra, I would have identified just as much with that. And this is what a lot of people say about astrology. What astrologers do is just offer such general advice that anyone and everyone can hear themselves in it. And Adorno discusses that in his account as well. He says that the astrologer must be vague enough not to out himself as a fraud. And this tendency of the Barnum effect has famously been studied by the psychologist Bertram Forer. Basically Bertram Forer did a study in 1949 where he gave a personality test to 39 students in his intro to psychology class. And a week later he gave the same students personality descriptions. They were basically like, according to your responses on this personality quiz, you are XYZ type of personality. And the students were asked to rate how accurate they thought their personality description was. The rating was out of five where a five was this perfectly matches my personality and a zero was this doesn't match me at all. And 34 out of the 39 students rated the personality ranking a four or a five. So they were almost all like, oh wow, this really describes me well, and nobody rated it less than a two. So nobody's said it doesn't describe me at all. The trick is that each student got exactly the same psychological profile. And so Forer used this as a way to debunk standard personality typologies by saying actually if we give them a certain level of vagueness, everybody's going to see themselves in this.

David: 51:46

Yeah. And I think I would put personality science in the same list that Alexander Boxer puts, you know, all of these other things like financial forecast and weather models and election predictions, because I do think there is an air of pseudo-scientificity to psychometrics of all kinds. The idea that our internal mental states and our dispositions can be measured objectively and classified, according to some taxonomic scheme. And here I can plug in the work of the philosopher, Colin Koopman, who just wrote a book not too long ago called How We Became Our Data, where he says all these personality tests that emerged in the 20th century, they grew out of a movement called psychometrics, which was an attempt to project onto psychology the methods of physics as a way of making psychology seem like a real science, you know, like I'm a psychologist, but look, I'm also measuring things with numbers. And the interesting thing is that the very concept of personality emerges in the early 20th century. It's a very recent historical construction. And it actually replaces the previous concept that people use to talk about themselves, which was character. So in the 19th century, people talked about having like a good or a bad character. Suddenly, in the early 20th century, people started talking about having this or that personality type. And one of the arguments that Koopman makes is that there is a lot of fidgeting that has to go into personality science in order to give it any kind of epistemic validity and predictive power but nonetheless, it suddenly took over in the middle of the 20th century, largely because it dressed itself with a lot of scientific language and statistics. So this is what I meant earlier when I said that there are a lot of scientific discourses or discourses that claim to be scientific that are in fact pseudo-scientific, but don't get recognized as such. So I think we would need to broaden our critique of astrology to include personality science.

Ellie: 53:58

Yeah. And I think, although they may be pseudo-scientific, people really feel recognized both by astrology and by personality science. And just a point on this, I found myself at an event last year that is for a quasi astrological personality typology called The Human Design. And I was really skeptical when I went in and there all these people who are completely obsessed with Human Design there and I'm just sitting like, oh God, I don't know how I found myself here. I don't really know what this is. And the human design system is based on your specific birth time and location. And I was super skeptical until I found out that there are five basic personality types in human design. And one of them is only one to 2% of the population. This is the reflector. The reflector is a very special personality because it's so rare. And when I found out that I was the only reflector in the room, I was all in.

David: 54:54

I'm so special.

Ellie: 54:56

Do you remember what story I wrote when I was a kid that I talked about in our genius episode, that was called Ellie: The Brilliant Girl? Getting described as a reflector in the Human Design workshop just really made me feel brilliant again. And so then I was just all in.

David: 55:11

Okay.

Ellie: 55:11

Okay. But real question, aside from my ego stroking, if people derive a lot of psychological benefit, according to their own reports from astrology, what's the harm?

David: 55:22

Well, the harm is totalitarianism according to Adorno.

Ellie: 55:28

But aren't there all kinds of, of other forces that are also encouraging totalitarian thinking in our society, like, I might not be into astrology, but I'm such a consumerist when it comes to clothing or when it comes to TV shows. My Netflix habits are probably just as totalitarian as people's interest in astrology.

David: 55:46

Yeah. And Adorno, you know, say what you will about him. He did see totalitarianism everywhere. There is a part in book, Minima Moralia, where he talks about the totalitarianism and the fascism of sandals.

Ellie: 56:00

No.

David: 56:00

Yes. Because he says they are a monument to the refusal of bending down to tie your shoes.

Ellie: 56:11

That's awesome. That sounds like the opposite of totalitarian to me. I do think what we described as metaphysical irony is something to consider here though, which is what are the stakes of living your life according to something that's based on a pseudo-scientific system that you don't really buy?

David: 56:28

And what I really like about Adorno's analysis, which is largely framed through his reading of Freud and psychoanalysis, is that we have to ask the question of what psychological needs and impulses this is actually addressing, because until we do that, we will be left with a certain social practice that is somewhat irrational or arational that we cannot really make sense of.

Ellie: 56:54

Is checking your horoscope one innocuous way among others of allaying anxiety, or might it be preventing you from starting the revolution?

David: 57:03

Okay. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 57:13

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.

David: 57:20

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Ross Harris, and our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Lokyi

Ellie: 57:29

Ho. Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.