The Stars Made Me Do It

Why do people persist in believing in astrology?  Note that I don't say "why did people believe in astrology?" I said "Why do?".  It's the present tense that gets me, I'm not actually surprised that people used to believe in it once upon a time.  Some people may mock our ancestors for such things but not me.  Astrology, like religion, should be seen as an attempt by a group of not particularly well informed people to answer important questions.

Why did it rain today?  Why are people as they are?  Why did an earthquake suddenly kill twenty thousand largely blameless people?  Our ancestors grappled with all these questions and more and they didn't have much in their toolkit of understanding to help them out.  So they did a very logical and understandable thing.  They took the facts as they understood them and extrapolated what seemed like reasonable explanations for them.  In my opinion this was a thoroughly sensible thing to do.

No, I shan't blame our ancestors for believing in gods, spirits or the possibility that people's personality could be determined by a group of unrelated hydrogen explosions trillions of kilometres away.  I'll save all my derision for people who believe that stuff right now.  We know much more than our ancestors not merely in knowledge alone but in the ability, thanks to millenia of shared learning, to determine what is a plausible explanation for various phenomena.  Vengeful gods, interfering dead and far distant suns now seem like poor methods of determining anything.

So why do people do it?  Part of it is arrogance of course.  Underneath the belief in God, astrology or whatever is a small and scared child trying to convince itself that its important.  That somehow the stars, or a divine being of some kind consider us so worthy of interest that they build their entire existence around us.  Once the human race was reduced to the status of a chemical coincidence a lot of insecure people started getting very frightened indeed.  How could they not be important?  They certainly think they're important surely a god or a bunch of stars must think so too.

There is another reason too.  Humans like definite answers and "God did it" is about the most definite answer to a number of very perplexing questions.  Also of course if the answer is "God" then you don't have to spend any more time worrying about the question.  Certainty is provided and certainty is a highly desirable commodity.

Certainty is what most people crave even more than freedom or justice.  A tyranny has to get pretty bad before people will swap the reliability of the status quo for the vagaries of change.  Even when change does happen it is usually the result of a small group of people making the effort and the bulk of the population standing aside and letting them get on with it.  This in itself is an action against the status quo because to defeat a genuine uprising the government needs the support of the people.  Apathy isn't enough, it needs their wholehearted backing.  If the public won't actively support the government that tends to play into the hands of the rebels.  Achieving even this level of constructive apathy is difficult and it usually comes when a government is so moribund or itself so capriciously unreliable that the bulk of the people figure that one form of change might actually provide more stability.

This desire for certainty spurs us on in other ways as well.  The desire for knowledge is the desire for certainty.  Our desire for certainty spurs us onwards towards greater discoveries, greater knowledge and, perversely, greater uncertainty.  One of the first things we learn is how much we don't know.  For every piece of knowledge we gain comes the realisation that the goal posts have shifted and we are actually more aware of our general level of ignorance.  Not surprisingly this assuredness of uncertainty fails to satisfy many.  With science and rational thinking only making the problem worse it is hardly surprising that a portion of the population reaches back to ancient superstitions.  Their answers may have been useless but at least they were definite.

Definite answers have a certain appeal even when they're wrong.  In fact, taking into account the inherent perversity of the human race, it probably wouldn't be too far wrong to say definite answers have an appeal because they're wrong.  When accuracy and knowledge lead to more confusion and realisation of ignorance there is a logical simplicity in being confused and ignorant from the start and saving yourself a lot of time.  Well crafted ignorance can be surprisingly useful.  Most people don't need to know how the universe is designed or how it was created or by whom.  All most people need is enough certainty so that getting out of bed in the morning isn't an existential nightmare.

Incidentally, I'm a Pisces.  Pisceans are supposed to be imaginative, creative, emotional, self indulgent and morally ambivalent.  Not a bad call for a bunch of stars at the back end of the universe really.