Science is incapable of ever being truthful because every scientist is an amoral wannabee friend of Jeffrey Epstein. These nerds literally take lessons in school to learn how to beg for patronage to do research. Of course their studies usually end up being about managerial bourgeois praxis like using skull shape measurements to categorize workers. That's what personality psychology is about at the end of the day, Brave New World style eugenics with humane empathy for wage slaves.

    • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      There are absolutely a lot of traditions of astrology. But the one under discussion was the one that's practiced commonly in the West. I'm also not talking about the Middle Ages, I'm talking about the Renaissance, which is the same time that scientific rationalism emerged. In some cases, early on, there weren't even clear demarcations between the two. Isaac Newton, a scientific pioneer, was also famously a devotee of Hermetism. My point is not that antiquity or being indigenous makes something more respectable, but that astrology, as practiced in the west, emerges out of the exact same cultural milleu that produced rationalism and only over the long term did rationalism win out to become the dominant ideology.

      Criticizing rationalism being rooted in a white, male, European worldview is valid, juxtaposing astrology as it's antithesis is not. If you're curious about this stuff I highly recommend Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates

        • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I’m very aware of Hermeticism, as my parents were in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

          Woah, that's wild

          Don’t think that’s a fair framing. Astrology is not dominant nor supported by the current predominant power structures. Again, a lot has changed even since the Renaissance.

          I mean every newspaper in the US publishes horoscopes. It's not completely subversive or marginalized either. When did astrology stop being a fundamentally Western, white phenomenon?

            • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I have "Caliban and the Witch" on my list as well. I can't really get down with spirituality of any kind. It's just not my bag. At the same time, I tend to come at this stuff from the perspective of postmodernism, which teaches us to critique any hegemonic narrative or ideology, many truths, no Truth. I don't think scientific rationalism is any more than one frame for understanding the world, albeit one that has a lot of utility.