In The Stars

[And now for something completely different...]

[My new favorite blogger has been giving me all kinds of juicy things to think about lately. Something about his latest, in praise of pre-modern ways of looking at the world, tickled my neurons. I've always been a big fan of the scientific method, of scientiae over gnosis. Hell, my favorite writer in college wasn't Marx, Derrida, Gramsci or Foucault, or even Anne Rice; it was Robert Heinlein, the good ol' jingoistic, libertarian writer of science fiction. Causation was all for me, and the words "supernatural" and "artificial" just created false polarities. Everything, whether known or unknown, manmade or not, was "natural," and, eventually, knowable.]

[(Oh, by the way, I never bought into those jingoistic, libertarian strains; for a better defense of Heinlein than I could ever write, see "RAH, RAH, R.A.H." by Spider Robinson, probably findable somewhere on the Web, but first read by me in his book Time Travelers Strictly Cash.]

[Anyway, Dean's praise of horological natal horoscopy specifically, and of superstition in general as a way to understand the world we live in, would be, I think, anathema to Heinlein and to my college self. While I've learned to be a lot more relaxed about these things ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio..." and so on.), I still wonder WHY Dean finds the vocabulary "useful." (I won't debate its beauty, elegance or immanent attractiveness; Breszny's a very entertaining writer whom I never miss). If we know that the stars don't REALLY influence our actions, especially in the way astrologers tell us, how is it of use?]

[And what's wrong, or off-putting, about causation, anyway? If its only drawback is that it slays "astrology's pre-modern appeal" (i.e. the same comfort that superstition has given humans since we cowered around the fire worried about sabertoothed tigers), isn't that a good thing? WHY "explanation without causation?"]

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