Written In The Stars?

Just about every daily newspaper in the western world contains a horoscope page. It’s usually near the back after the news, editorials, gossip columns, TV listings, agony aunt and crossword. It’s often located just before the horse-racing form guide – something which seems deliciously appropriate to me. Women’s magazines always carry horoscopes. There is usually a dedicated area in your local bookshop (remember those?) with shelves creaking under the weight of astrological tomes. Astrology is big business. But is it a bafflingly popular pseudo-science or an efficient and accurate way of determining a person’s personality and, more importantly, their future?

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I’m a sceptic. Without conducting any form of research I can come up with a whole battery of reasons why astrology is bullshit. So here’s a few to get us started:

• If astrology were based on science and fact, all daily horoscopes would be the same. They might be worded differently but ought to contain roughly the same message. They do not.

• If astrology is true, there are only twelve character types, meaning that an accident of birth means that I am destined to share the same personality traits as the people born in the same thirty day period as myself. This is demonstrably not the case. People are far more complicated than that.

• If the position of the stars and planets led to my path being decided for me, I would not ever be acting independently and with free will. My choices would have already been made for me, rendering my consciousness an irrelevance. I don’t want lasagne because it tastes good: I want it because I was born under a waning moon. Clearly nonsense.

But maybe I’m being unfair? Let’s assume that the people who produce the meaningless drivel in the back of your Sunday supplements are merely hoping to cash in on the true science behind astrology. I once heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about a newspaper that made the poorest performing journalist each week write the ‘stars’. And that wouldn’t surprise me given the appallingly predictable and general nature of those meaningless paragraphs of piffle.

True astrologers who have honed and perfected their art through years of practice and study would presumably distance themselves from the second-rate claptrap in the back of your tabloid newspaper. Instead, they would provide an individual with a tailored reading, drawn up only after ascertaining your specific date, place and time of birth and then consulting their mystical charts...

So can a scientific reading of the position of the planets provide a personal perspective on your life? Does the position of the sun when you were born (which ultimately reveals which constellation you were born under) have a determining influence on your fate? Does the position of far away planets and balls of burning gas matter?

Of course it doesn’t. Regardless of what your astrologer might think, there is no way that celestial bodies can influence your future. How could they? They are so far away that it takes millions of years for the light from them to reach Earth. Just looking at the sun is tantamount to looking back in time eight minutes. And the sun is huge. Its gravitational pull is so enormous that it keeps all the other planets in the solar system orbiting it. How can any of those other planets affect an individual life form on Earth? They don’t exert an influence over Earth itself, so to assume that they can make a difference to a human being is an insane notion. We’re not just the product of nature, but also of nurture. You really think that the time you were born is more relevant that the person who gave birth to you? You’re an idiot.

I don’t doubt that there are some people out there performing readings who genuinely believe that there is some science behind their actions. And some of them are evangelical about their beliefs. But so are people who believe in the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs and Ouija boards. People believe in all kinds of strange stuff. And I think a lot of the reason for that is that they want to believe. Not all chart-reading astrologists are charlatans: some of them are just misguided. But not as misguided as the poor fools who swallow this nonsense hook, line and sinker.

Here’s a revelation which will come as no surprise to anyone... people believe what they want to believe. But here’s one which is only slightly more surprising... people ignore evidence which doesn’t support their beliefs! Shocking, isn’t it?
Think about your astrological personality type. Let’s use mine as a template. I’m a Scorpio so I just Googled ‘typical Scorpio’ and went to the first suggested website (you can play along at home if you wish). The site displays a table of sixteen ‘positive’ and sixteen ‘negative’ attributes. Some of these describe me enormously accurately (intolerant and quick tempered being my favourites). Some of them don’t describe me all that well. But I would say that at some points all of them describe me to some degree. I am rarely jealous of anyone or anything – but rarely doesn’t mean I’m never jealous.

If I was a suggestible person, what I would take from that list would be the words which resonate with me. And what would I do with the words that I don’t feel a relationship to? I’d forget them, of course. And what I’d be left with was a feeling that I was, indeed, a fairly typical Scorpio with typical Scorpio traits – throw enough shit and some of it sticks!

This is how people choose to listen to those who read astrological charts. During a conversation or a reading with an astrologer irrelevant or unwanted information is discarded. People simply don’t remember the blind alleys which their reader wandered up. They don’t recall the three or four possibilities which are offered because their inclination is to seize on the salient pieces of information and to disregard the detritus. They hear what they want to hear and are deaf to what they don’t. And this is accentuated after the event when they tell their friends, selecting the three or four most amazingly accurate pieces of info and sharing those with their associates.

Another technique widely used to dupe suggestible people is to offer two opposing pieces of information. Let’s say, for argument’s sake that someone was to tell me that, ‘you can be outgoing but at times you are quiet and introverted’. Does it hold true for me? Yes, it definitely does. Sometimes, in the right company I am ebullient – the life and soul of the party! At other times I’d prefer to lock myself in my room and cry into a handkerchief rather than share my time with anyone. But does that make it an accurate assessment of my character or a sweeping generalisation which applies to anyone and everyone? Think about it in terms of your own character - I’m 99% certain that it could be accurately said about any of you.

If you have any doubts about the veracity of what I’m saying here, consider the following experiment...

A group of people (students ideally) are asked to write on a piece of card their name, a random series of characters and one sentence which describes themselves. The cards are then fed into a machine which reads them and produces an assessment of each participants’ personality. These are then rated for accuracy according as either: poor, fair, good or excellent. The machine has an amazing track record – over 17 years it has been rated as good or excellent by 70% of subjects.

It goes without saying that there is no such machine. In fact, unbeknown to each other, the participants are all given exactly the same character assessment. It’s full of sweeping generalisations which can be interpreted in any number of ways. People have an awful lot in common, and the social nature of being human ensures that most of share a core of extremely similar attributes and characteristics. But the really clever part is that every single sentence in the assessment is taken directly from an actual horoscope. If you have any doubts about how this experiment works, Derren Brown once did a version for TV which I’m sure you could track down on YouTube or you can visit James Randi’s website – he invented the test and just loves debunking anything he sees as fraudulent!

Why do I even care? It’s just harmless fun! Isn’t it? Well I’m not so sure. If people placed no stock in what astrologists said, why would they pay good money to go and see them? Impressionable people are easily impressed. Vulnerable people are easily misled. People who are lost can easily be taken advantage of. That’s not to say that any of the advice or predictions given by astrologers is intended to be anything other than beneficial. They mean well, I’m sure. But given their lack of knowledge about an individual is it responsible for them to offer any information which might affect important decisions in their lives? Does a prediction of the future absolve people from taking responsibility for their own actions? Maybe. And I certainly wouldn’t wanna think that Russell Grant had influenced anybody to ever do anything other than change the TV channel.