Axis of Decency

It's been a while since I posted here, and this is as much of a stopgap post as anything (though I may write a longer one later today). I increasingly think that if you want to understand certain aspects of Decency you should check out (I don't say 'read') Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World (link goes to my own short write-up). For one thing, that book and its theme ('Things are really not what they were once in the land of lost content; the country really has gone to the dogs, what?') and even its essay style (chapters which cover more or unrelated examples of contempory rottenness segued together for the sake of seeming weight) seems the very template of Nick's "You're All Bastards (Even My Mother)."

One of that book's notable bete noirs was astrology. Wheen seemed to think that Paul Feyerabend (dread forrin postmoderenist) defended astrology (a closer reading would reveal that he didn't). Now, Comrade Hitchens has heard the news, it's not in the stars: Astrology Not the Only Cosmic Hoax.

Astrology is widely considered to be discredited because of certain very obvious objections:

1) It gives people the impression that they are the center of the universe and that the constellations are somehow arranged with them in mind.

2) It suggests that there is a supernatural supervision of our daily lives, and that this influence can be detected and expounded by mere humans.

3) It bases itself on the idea that our character and personality are irrevocably formed at the moment of birth or even of conception.

Now, if Wheen or Hitchens were at all aware of Feyerabend or a little more intellectual history, they'd know that the discredit of astrology goes back rather further than the Enlightenment. A bit googling finds this attack with some notable quotes:

Learn not the way of the unbelievers, nor be dismayed at the signs of the stars because the nations are dismayed at them, for the beliefs of these people are false.

Jeremiah Chapter 10 verse 2. But the most celebrated objection I know is summarised here.

[Augustine] is finally convinced that astrology is false, after he hears the story of a rich man and a beggar born at exactly the same moment, so that their horoscopes must be the same.

That's been the core rational objection to astrology - well that along with any explanation of the mechanism of cosmic influence being so airy. I believe that Augustine certainly subscribed to Hitchens' first two objections to astrology and possibly to the third.

Hitchens, Wheen, and Cohen all seem to think that rationality is somehow recent, and that the rot in society set in at some point in their adult lives (Cohen: the left was cool when I were a lad, but look at it now) - though unlike many Daily Mail reactionaries (like Paul Johnson) they don't see these as connected. Further, they seem to view history as not only plastic, but like a dictionary or an atheist's bible: something to have examples selected from, with any context discarded.

I regard astrology as nonsense as well: but Hitchens yet again demonstrates his unfailing talent for finding terrible reasons for coming to his conclusion.