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richness of human personality. I am talking about the facile and potentially damaging way in which astrologers divide humans into 12 categories. Scorpios are cheerful, outgoing types, Leos with their methodical personalities go well with Libras (or whatever it is).
My wife, Lalla Ward, recalls an occasion when a more than usually brainless hanger on approached the director of the film they were working on with a "Gee, Mr Preminger, what sign are you?" and received the immortal rebuff, "I am a do not disturb sign."
We love an opportunity to pigeonhole each other but we should resist the temptation. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Does your body shape betray an endomorphic, a mesomorphic or an ectomorphic personality? "The ectomorph is much more of an introvert and more shrewd and calculating." Personality is a real phenomenon and psychologists (real, scientific psychologists, not Freudians or Jungians) have had some success in developing mathematical models to handle many dimensions of personality variation.
The initially large number of dimensions can be mathematically collapsed into fewer dimensions the measurable, and for some purposes conscionable, loss in predictive power. These fewer derived dimensions sometimes correspond to the dimensions that we intuitively think we recognise - aggressiveness, obstinacy, affectionateness and so on. Summarising an individual's personality as a point in multidimensional space is a serviceable approximation whose limitations can be measured and are known.
IT is a far cry from any mutually exclusive categorisation, certainly from the preposterous fiction of astrology's 12 dumpbins. It is based upon genuinely relevant data about people themselves, not their birthdays. The psychologist's multidimensional scaling can be useful in deciding whether a person is suited to a particular career, or a couple to each other. The astrologer's 12 pigeonholes are, if nothing worse, a costly and irrelevant distraction.
Lonely hearts advertisers frequently insert astrological references alongside relevant information such as musical tastes or sporting interests, and may even insist that the partner they are looking for must be, for instance, Taurus. Think what this means. The whole point of advertising in such columns is to increase the catchment area for meeting sexual partners (and indeed the circle provided by the workplace and by friends of friends is meagre and needs enriching). It is nothing short of ludicrous then to go out of your way to divide the available number of potential partners by 12.
There are some stupid people out there, and they should be pitied not exploited. On a famous occasion a few years ago a newspaper hack, who had drawn the short straw and been told to make up the day's astrological advice, relieved his boredom by writing under one star sign the following portentous lines: "All the sorrows of yesteryear are as nothing compared to what will befall you today." He was fired after the switchboard was jammed with panic stricken readers, pathetic testimony to the simple trust people can place in astrology.
The American conjuror James Randi recounts in his book Flim Flam how as a young man he briefly got the astrology job on a Montreal newspaper, making up the horoscopes under the name Zo-ran. His method was to cut out the forecasts from old astrology magazines, shuffle them in a hat, distribute them at random among the 12 zodiacal signs and print the results.
This was very successful of course (because all astrology works on the "Barnum principle" of saying things so vague and general that all readers think it applies to them). He describes how he overheard in a cafe a pair of office workers eagerly scanning Zo-ran's column in the paper.
"They squealed with delight on seeing their future so well laid out, and in response to my query said that Zo-ran had been right smack on last week. I did not identify myself as Zo-ran ... Reaction in the mail to the column had been quite interesting, too, and sufficient for me to decide that many people will accept and rationalise almost any pronouncement made by someone they believe to be an authority with mystic powers. At this point, Zo ran hung up his scissors, put away the paste pot, and went out of business."
My case is that Randi was morally right to hang up his scissors, that serious newspapers should never give named astrologers the oxygen of publicity, that astrology is neither harmless nor fun, and that we should fight it seriously as an enemy of truth. We have a Trade Descriptions Act which protects us from manufacturers making false claims for their products.
The law has not so far been invoked in defence of simple, scientific truth. Why not? Astrologers provide as good a test case as could be desired.
They make claims to forecast the future, and they take payment for this, as well as for professional advice to individuals on important decisions.
A pharmaceuticals manufacturer who marketed a birth control pill that had not the slightest demonstrable effect upon fertility would be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act, and sued by trusting customers who found themselves pregnant. If astrologers cannot be sued by individuals misadvised, say, into taking disastrous business decisions, why at least are they not prosecuted for false representation under the Trade Descriptions Act and driven out of business? Why, actually, are professional astrologers not in jail?