The Other Real World

Where We Live While We Sleep

TRUE SKEPTICISM

Many rationalists adamantly believe there is no such thing as The Other Real World. Some are my friends! They think it’s delusional to converse with departed ancestors or consult with deities or consort with fairies or commingle with animal spirits.  

There’s no such thing as an invisible world, they assert, repudiating the convictions of most Indigenous people who have ever lived in every part of the world. Anyone who believes in such nonsense must be unintelligent, the scoffers proclaim—incapable of perceiving the truth about the nature of reality. 

Those who regard astrology as unmitigated bullshit are usually members of this club. To them, the subject I specialize in is a blight on culture. It has less than zero value. 

A term some of these fanatics use to describe themselves is “skeptic.”  

But I have found that the majority of those who pride themselves on being skeptics about astrology and The Other Real World are pseudo-skeptics. They are often fundamentalists, as well. Not fundamentalists in the religious sense, of course, but in the sense of believing their way of thinking is absolutely, dogmatically correct, and everyone else who doesn’t think like them is wrong and stupid. 

What is the difference between authentic skepticism and pseudo-skepticism? Here are my thoughts. 

True skepticism does not carry an undertone of anger, ridicule, derision, and pompous conceit. It is even-tempered, clear-minded, and full of equanimity, satisfied with simply showing what is illogical or mistaken in the perspective it critiques.  

A true skeptic does not use emotionally charged language in an effort to portray the person whose belief or position she is critiquing as an ignorant fool. 

A true skeptic has no attachment to proving that she is smarter than and superior to the person whose argument she is questioning. Rather, she is content to have her argument win on the strength of its adept and elegant reasoning. 

A true skeptic is willing to consider the possibility that there may be merit, however small, in the position of the person she is critiquing. She is not afraid that acknowledging this merit will undermine the unconditional truth she purports to possess. 

A true skeptic is not consumed with the arrogant certainty that she is always right. In other words, she resists the temptation to be a fundamentalist. 

A true skeptic has a respect for the fact that some questions don’t have definitive, incontrovertible answers. She recognizes how much about the world is mysterious. 

A true skeptic is as likely to be a non-male gender. (Ninety-five percent of the pseudo-skeptics are men.) 

A true skeptic shows humility, in the spirit that science popularizer Carl Sagan demonstrated when he said this:  

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.  

Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no God exists.  

To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.  

A wide range of intermediate positions seems admissible.  

Considering the enormous emotional energies with which the subject is invested, a questing, courageous, and open mind is, I think, the essential tool for narrowing the range of our collective ignorance on the subject of the existence of God. 

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THE 80-PERCENT RULE

Readers of my horoscope column are sometimes surprised when I testify I believe in astrology about 80 percent. “You’re a quack?!” they cry.  

Not at all, I explain. I have been an ardent student for my entire adult life. About the time my over­educated young brain was on the verge of desertification, unruly wisdom showed up in the guise of astrology, lyricizing my soul just in time. 

“But what about the other 20 percent?” they press on. “Are you saying your horoscopes are only partially true?” 

I assure them that my doubt proves my love. By cultivating a tender, cheerful skepticism, I inoculate myself against the virus of fanaticism. This ensures that astrology will be a supple tool in my hands, an adaptable art form, and not a rigid, explain-it-all dogma that over-literalizes and distorts the mysteries it seeks to illuminate. 

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During the question-and-answer segment of one of my performances, an audience member got hostile. “Why do you diss science so much?” he complained. 

My accuser had not read much of my work. Otherwise, he’d have gathered abundant clues that belied his theory. In my horoscopes, for instance, I often quote reverently from peer-reviewed scientific journals including Nature and Scientific American and Lancet. And I regularly extol the virtues of the scientific method. “Some of my best friends are scientists,” I teased the heckler. 

The fact is that I critique science no more than I do all the systems I respect and use. I believe in science about 80 percent—the same as I do in astrology, psychology, feminism, Qabalah, paganism, progressive political philosophy, and 23 others. 

I do think science needs extra doses of affectionate critique from people who love it, like me. As one of the dominant ideologies of our age, it has a magisterial reputation comparable to the infallibility accorded to the medieval Church. Some of its devotees promote it as the ultimate arbiter of truth, as an approach to gathering and evaluating information that makes all others unnecessary and irrelevant. 

Here’s another problem: Though science is an elegant method of understanding the world, not all its practitioners live up to its lofty standards. The field features many men motivated as much by careerism and egotism as by a rigorous quest for excellence. Another worrisome factor is that misogyny pervades every facet of scientific research. 

Careerism, egotism, and misogyny are common features in most spheres, of course. But it’s a special problem for a field that the intellectual elite touts as the premier purveyor of truth. 

There’s a further complication: Like the rest of us, scientists may harbor irrational biases and emotional fixations. They purport to do just the opposite, of course. But in fact, they may simply hide their unconscious motivations better, aided by the way the scientific establishment relentlessly promotes the myth that its practitioners are in pure service to objective knowledge.  

This discrepancy between the cover story and the actual state of things is, again, a universal tendency, not confined to science. But it’s especially unfortunate in a discipline that presents itself as the embodiment of dispassionate investigation. 

There are some scientists who, upon reading my words here, might discharge a blast of non-scientific derision in my direction. Like true believers everywhere, they can’t accept what they regard as half-hearted converts. If I won’t buy their whole package, then I must be a superstitious, fuzzy-brained goofball. 

To which I’d respond: I love the scientific approach to understanding the world. I aspire to appraise everything I experience with the relaxed yet eager curiosity and the skeptical yet open-minded lucidity characteristic of a true scientist.  

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A fellow astrologer asked me why I care about what science thinks about astrology. Here’s what I said:  

Because I love science and its methodology and because a lot of people who pay attention to what I write also love science and its methodology.  

I want to talk to these smart people about the excesses and distortions of science, in the hope that this will help in a small way to shore up the integrity of science and deepen its capacity to welcome other modes of intelligence as valid. 

In the US, science is under threat from theocratic and paranoid and delusional views of the world. We need science to be as strong and vital as possible in the face of that danger. 

The scientific method is a fantastic way of learning about the world, and I use it daily. But it’s not the only valid way to learn about the world. To dismiss other ways of learning about the world as pseudoscientific is reductionist and fundamentalist. And that damages the credibility of science. 

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YOU MUST EARN YOUR RIGHT TO CRITICIZE AND DEBUNK

Famous scientists like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson have tried to debunk astrology without having studied anything more than the most superficial expressions of astrology.  

Their efforts are akin to, say, a music critic who summarily belittles all music ever created based on his brief exposure to homeless street musicians he has heard playing in Walmart parking lots. 

Let’s hope that Tyson and Nye and their fellow skeptical soldiers do a better job if they ever turn their attention to debunking related areas of human inquiry. They might consider, for example, actually reading the books of Carl Jung before debunking Jungian psychology.  

Let’s hope they will research lucid dream studies before ridiculing them, and that they will gaze at a few of Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings before they inevitably trash his art as “unscientific.”  

The mythological thought of Joseph Campbell would be a fair target for their debunking crusade—as long as they first familiarized themselves with Campbell’s books. 

Here’s a template for how they might proceed—a debunking of the poetry of John Keats, as carried out by an anonymous critic who calls her blog “The Invisible Left Hand of Jesus”: 

"'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' a poem by John Keats, contains many egregious lies, distortions, and inaccuracies. Indeed, it is so replete with statements that are blatantly scientifically inaccurate that its overall veracity is extremely questionable.

"Note, for instance, the first two lines, 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.' The term 'unravished' is immediately worrisome. One certainly hopes that the urn has not been the victim of forcible sexual intercourse. Taking the effort to deny something so unlikely indicates that such things are, to Keats, within the realm of possibility.

"Furthermore, 'quietness' is an abstraction related to the relative absence of sound in a place—that is, compression waves traveling through a medium. As a sound wave cannot be married, and therefore cannot logically be called a "bride", it is that much more the case that its absence will never experience matrimony . . ."

The mini-essay above appear at https://tinyurl.com/2p8vhyww

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

Week of June 6

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