On Reading my Horoscope: Being and Nothingness and Virgo

I’ve added an embarrassing daily habit to my Indianapolis routine. Every morning, I scan the newspapers delivered at my parents’ houses (the WSJ and Indianapolis Star at my dad’s; the Indpls Star at my mom’s) while I eat my cereal and drink some coffee. The papers shield me from pre-caffeinated morning small-talk, and they feed my infomania. The accumulation of knowledge, newsbites, trivia and gossip staves a certain modern desperation, I think… But the confession I’m dragging toward is this: after reading the latest on health reform, Obama’s Mideast peace overtures and latenight comedy appearances, and Indy’s asinine resistance to public transportation, I make my chagrined way to the middle of the Extra section in the Star, and I read my horoscope. Yesterday, according to Holiday Mathis (the "Rock 'n' Roll Astrologer"), I was typically funny and finally getting recognition for my wit; today, in a turnabout, I’m dangerously obsessive. On my birthday, I was told that I’d (finally!) find love and financial success, some time between now and December. Sounds like the stars are promising an auspicious love affair with a young Viscount in England. Perhaps he’ll come from a family of book publishers, too.

Now, I don’t really believe in horoscopes or astrology. I don’t quite believe in “free will,” either, but my sense of the nature/nurture soup of predestination doesn’t accommodate the additional ingredient of celestial gradients. The most appealing element of so-called natal, sun-sign astrology is its foundation of something called the “Law of Beginnings,” which declares that all forces and events that will act on a being are present in the moment of that being’s birth. I can embrace this notion if I look at it as a sort of philosophical collapsing of time, a view that time is not simply linear. If you’re an “Eternalist,” you believe that all things that have already happened, that are presently happening, and that will happen in the future, are equally real. Time does not flow in a single direction, gobbling up the past and rendering it obsolete. And the fact that we have not yet subjectively experienced the future toward which time hurtles us does nothing to change the content of that future. Our ignorance doesn’t invalidate that of which we are ignorant. The future is contained in the present, as is the past, the present is also in the future, which will become the present, etc.

In a certain sense, an Eternalist could believe in the potential for fortune telling. What if there were a way for us to become unbounded by space-time, dislodged from the prison of subjectivity and able to perceive a “truth” not corralled by human perception?

And human perception isn’t exactly linear, either. The narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time demonstrates as much with his flashback-inducing Madeleine. The magical cake dipped in tea sends him into his childhoods in Combray, into rambling walks with his parents, his cravings for his mother’s attention, his fear of sleeping alone, and his glimpse of the aspect of a church steeple. And just like the immortal Marcel, you might yourself be driving down Pennsylvania Avenue with the radio on, thinking about the people you’re headed to meet or the email you need to send, when a song from your College glory days comes into the car, and suddenly you’re flushed with the emotions of senior year, when you drank gallons of Carlo Rossi with your best friends and heard the song incessantly because your roommate was one of those people who plays a favorite song on a continual, exhausting but wonderful loop. Or you might be visiting your parents’ house for Thanksgiving, and you escape the potato-mashing frenzy in the kitchen for a stroll around the block, and you think you see your old neighborhood crush on his fixed-gear bike, and your heart pounds as though you haven’t fallen in and out of love with numerous other people since that autumn of bicycle expeditions and chocolate chip cookies. We often exist somewhere other than the present, and understanding this obscurity of time doesn’t require SyFy-worthy allowances of credibility.

Although time doesn’t appear to be a solid, fixed, arrow-like entity, we still experience events linearly, even if they swim wildly in the disarray of our minds after the fact. And according to my skeptical metaphysics, we certainly don’t have the ability to release ourselves from the chain of experience and catch premature glimpses of the links to come. Moreover, the notion that details about future-links are hinted in the angles the stars made at the moments of our births strikes me as particularly unreasonable.

So, why do I read what Holiday Mathis has to say every morning? And why did President Reagan plan his schedule according to recommendations from an astrologer? (that second question is a more perilous one than I’ll undertake here)

A response comes serendipitously to me through my headphones. Josh Ritter just sang to me, “You need faith for the same reasons that it’s so hard to find.” I’ve turned down most varieties of faith, but I’m still an animal with a need, and there’s something exquisitely pleasing about a watered-down spiritualism I can absorb passively and with smirking irony. The horoscope is there in the paper, and I don’t need to jump any hoops to seek its prophesies, so I can allow a bit of self-deception and pretend that my perusal of this notable strip of the newspaper doesn’t contradict my hyper-educated suspicion of irrational belief systems. In those columns, I get the boon of ceding some personal responsibility (Holiday tells us that of course we play a role in our destinies, but I’d welcome the implied celestial nudge toward the fulfillment of my quixotic fantasies; come on, retrograde Mercury, please?). And everyone loves a spiritualism that implies some central significance to our wit and our obsessions, our romantic and financial prospects. We’re the protagonists in the narratives of the zodiac, and that consoles both our vanity and our fear of the absurd.

One interpretation of our impulse to consult horoscopes that especially interests me comes from the old Frankfurter, Theodor Adorno, in his 1953 essay “The Stars Down to Earth.” Adorno did a close reading of three months of daily horoscopes published in the LA Times, and decided (characteristically) that these pieces of “commercialized occult” were part of the totalitarian capitalist culture industry, footsoldiers in the seductions of capitalism, reinforcements to the general mythology required to sustain the marginalizing economic status quo. Adorno agrees with me, Josh Ritter, Satre et al., that we human beasts are at a loss in the world, but he doesn’t chalk this up to standard existential dread. He says it’s because we subject ourselves more-or-less willfully to a system that contradicts our own interests, and that exerts control over our lives in a bewildering, alienating way. We enroll for the subjections and degradations of enterprise because we buy into the mythology that goes along with Big Business: the American Dream. If you just work hard, you too might end up with the corner office and your own CrackBerry and Starbucks Gold Card. Adorno argued that the language used in horoscopes reinforces this mythology of the American Dream by addressing a “vice presidential” reader: the little descriptions and forecasts appeal to the reader as though s/he is moving up the corporate ladder, is important, but not quite sovereign (else, why would s/he be reading a horoscope?). Horoscopes, Adorno said, provide an underlying message to comfort people in the midst of working malaise and reassure them that the system is to their benefit. Endure your current state of helpless dread, because there’s a scheme that you need to conform to, and if you follow some simple celestial suggestions and stay within the lines of the design, you’ll advance into the ranks of the designers.

So is Holiday Mathis really The Man? And how should we interpret the namesake of Reaganomics deferring to his wife’s favorite astrologer when deciding the precise moment to meet with that pinko, Gobachev?

I think I’m most aligned with the sentiment of Josh Ritter’s speck of poetry. We’re animals in need of faith because of our evolved self-consciousness and advanced analytic capacities, because of our love of stories and our fear of meaninglessness; and the self-consciousness and analytic capacities are responsible for making us suspicious of the things those faculties make us crave. And yes, the feeling of angst probably spills past our metaphysical views and into other areas of our lives, like work. I lean pinko, so I'll even say that I've felt alienated by labor, resentful and mystified by the transformation of my self into a means of enhancing corporate productivity. I’ve felt simultaneous waves of existentialist and Marxist nausea when making copies, listening to the melodies of telephone holds, and contemplating who I should include in my “cc” line in an email to the person whose nonchalant approach to replacing my boss’ malfunctioning BlackBerry was making my day particularly miserable. I wasn’t especially screened from these gusts of dread by Holiday’s promises of recognition at work, but maybe I kept reading those promises because I thought they might yet offer some consolation. Plus, I got to sneer at the vague language and feel (il)logically superior to both Holiday and her credulous disciples, and that’s fun.

Tomorrow, I’ll read my horoscope again. But first I’ll read the parts of the paper that talk about Senator Baucus, President Ahmadinejad, Ben Bernanke, environmental reform and the UN, which are more pertinent – though complex – hints about the shape of the future.

Buccaneers of the world, unite!

Since some feared that Obama’s message to schoolchildren yesterday would turn out to be sly socialist indoctrination (his insidious “work hard in school” agenda is probably groundwork priming our children for soviet-style work camps), and others are concerned that healthcare reform is hurtling us toward socialism, it's a good time to give serious consideration to ... piracy. Forget Somalia. The true urgency of surveying the historical tradition of piracy is signaled in an essay in last week’s New Yorker. Caleb Crain’s review of literature on the pirate life reveals that these seafaring gangs were, in addition to torturers and thieves, egalitarian socialists with universal healthcare, of a sort. If we’re really headed toward socialism, I say we ought to take some notes from the pirates of yore, who may have come closest historically to that elusive feat of establishing a thriving society based on communal ownership and regulation.

First, a quick guide to the pirate life: To belong to the nautical bandit brotherhood, you start by signing onto the pirate code of ethics. In the 17th Century, this was suggestively titled the Custom of the Brothers of the Coast, and the creed was upheld by the various ships in the region, which maintained friendly relations with each other in a sort of borderless society of pirates. The Custom established some constitutional basics for the Brothers: every ship Captain was democratically elected, and his authority was only absolute during periods of “engagement.” Otherwise, the whole crew participated equally in decision-making, just as the Captain participated equally in the labors of pillaging and sailing. Spoils were divvied equitably, with bonuses awarded to those who demonstrated particular valor during the given raid. The creed set down certain rules and established the basis for a “court of honor” in which to try individuals of dubious conduct or character. No women were allowed in the brotherhood or on the ships, but I propose that we drop this bit of the Pirate Code if we do pattern the new constitution of the United Socialist States of America after the Brothers of the Coast (and for the record, a few cross-dressing women did in fact manage to circumvent this bit of besmirching chauvinism).

Once all that’s settled, the pirate life is a paragon of simplicity: You plunder, you torture or reprieve (according to the dictates of justice), you share the booty, you squander your portion of the booty on booze and revelry, and then you repeat the whole process. Maritime brothers don’t have to work all that much (pirating vessels generally require a crew of 16-20, while humble accommodations allow pirate crew sizes to average about 80), so there’s plenty of time for the famed pirate antics and playful mischief. A final virtue that some of the pirate ships of yore could boast is that they were racially tolerant and empowering, and tended to mostly raid slave ships and other arms of The Man.

The success of pirating ventures (before penal repression) did not arise in spite of the socialist organization of pirating society; rather, it grew directly from the pirate system of communal ownership and responsibility. This, at least, is the case made (more or less cognizantly) in the economically-oriented book Crain reviews in the New Yorker piece.

The Invisible Hook, written by U of Chicago visiting Professor in Economics Peter Leeson, explains the way that these socialist brothers actually had incentives to work hard and well, contrary to the accepted wisdom that socialism breeds universal laziness. Leeson argues that, in fact, it is the sharing of booty and responsibility that makes the pirate experiment dodge a standard business pitfall that economists call the “principal-agent problem.” Because all pirates own a stake in their pirating, and because ships don’t divide the Captain from his Crew with a resentment-cultivating hierarchy, every member of the crew is both principal and agent. You’ve got the conditions for an egalitarian self-management system impossible in corporations where the agents are marginalized. Or, as Crain paraphrases, on a standard, non-pirating ship like the Pequod, “a certain amount of surveillance and coercion is necessary to persuade Ishmael to hunt whales instead of spending all day in his hammock with Queequeg.” Give Ishmael an ownership stake and a non-authoritarian Captain, and he just might want to catch the great white sperm whale. After which, he and Queequeg can canoodle to their hearts’ delights.

Leeson makes a point to counteract his apparent endorsement of certain tenets of socialism. He asserts that the pirate model can be mobilized to demonstrate, rather discordantly, the capitalist precept that entrepreneurial operations thrive best when left to regulate themselves. And I'd add a reminder that pirate raids aren’t exactly business ventures in the most traditional sense. They require someone else to produce the goods that the pirates then plunder. And I’m afraid that our closest heirs today to the pirating kind of business have raised some doubts about their ability to regulate themselves.

So we might not be headed toward adopting a national or international Custom of the Siblings of the Earth, after all. Outside of the thieving industry, most people still have to be involved in a hierarchical system of labor that breeds discord, trespasses on impish leisure, and impedes participatory self-government. I don’t see a simple solution to this (but I don’t claim omniscience), unless global warming and a robotic coup create auspicious conditions for us to morph into seafaring rebels. But maybe the pirates can still teach us a few lessons about solidarity, sharing, and carousing.

On the Eco-Stunts

Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent New Yorker commentary on the vogue of “eco-stunt” books is worth reading. It helped me clarify an obscure but persistent discomfort I have with certain trimmings of the Green Movement: these “eco-stunt” books can seem self-promoting, smug, short-sighted, and ultimately ineffective as agents of social change; they’re about the hip eco-consciousness of their writers, rather than about the environment. Yet Kolbert overlooks their gentle redemptive gleam: yes, “eco-stunt” books contribute to the new trendiness of Green, but despite the vanity inherent to such fads, this one is not - we hope - in vain.

"Eco-stunt” books are those books describing the authors’ crazy, nouveau-Thoreauvian “experiments,” such as eating only self- and locally-grown food , divesting from fossil fuels, adopting daily “green” resolutions for a year, etc. The authors are often yuppies with your standard-issue guilty conscience of well-educated and moderately affluent American liberals (yes, I know, I fit this description exactly…), and they’re naturally eager to grab a share of the only literary celebrity our culture begrudgingly continues to grant. So they get a gimmick, package themselves and their social progressivism into something that might titillate attention-deficit readers, and write a blog that will eventually evolve into a book, which they’ll energetically promote on a tour whose fossil fuel wake they’ll counterbalance with high-profile carbon offsetting.

Kolbert begins her essay with the story of the genesis of one of the latest eco-stunt books, Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes about Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process: Back in 2006, Beavan wanted to write a book “about what’s important,” and some coeds flaunting bare arms in Manhattan in January helped him pin down the content of this elusively vague subject. Global warming! Impending environmental doom! Seasonally-inappropriate clothing and pastimes (but maybe this is not such a bad thing)! Since his agent thought the theme was a downer that wouldn’t sell books, Beavan came up with the stunt by which to cloak the environmental agenda: he and his family would spend a year shaving their environmental impact down to zero, at least in terms of their diet and domestics.

This means no disposable diapers for the Beavan baby. It means no plastic bags, or bags of chips, or milk cartons. The family works up to shutting off the electricity in their apartment, they abjure the building’s elevator and use the stairs every time they travel between their 9^th floor apartment and the sidewalk. They don’t consume foods or beverages shipped from faraway (which means no coffee for Beavan’s poor, neuralgic wife), don’t buy newspapers, and Beavan even encourages this valiant wife to forgo tampons.

Of course, having money and living in a leaky society whose excess energy you can easily soak in are two important assets to the Beavan Clan’s elected deprivation. Their apartment building is poorly insulated, so they stay plenty warm off of their neighbor’s heating during winter months. Beavan pays the fee to belong to the Writer’s Room near Astor Place, where he can plug in his laptop and connect to the wireless; his wife can get her technological fixes at her midtown BusinessWeek office; and while the parents work, baby Isabella spends wayward days luxuriating in the electricity at the sitter’s apartment.

In fairness, I think we should forgive the Beavan experiment for these inescapable lapses. Other literary eco-stunts have run aground by conceding the inevitable pitfalls and compromises, and at least in Beaven we witness no blinding hypocrisies like flying across North America to participate in an environmentalist bike trip. There are nonetheless some serious flaws inherent to the eco-stunt model of alleged environmental activism (but maybe no one alleges these books are environmental activism; maybe, as aforementioned bicyclist Vanessa Farquharson suggests in a blog response to Kolbert’s article, these books are truly and simply experiments testing the meaning and value of elements of environmental activism – a rejoinder that seems a little disingenuous to me, but still worth considering). First of all, the stunts all run so far outside the mainstream of first-world society that the chroniclers can’t sincerely consider them potential models for their readers. And, as Kolbert and others have pointed out, even at the triumphant culmination of these eco-stunt experiments - even when the power’s been turned off in the Fifth Avenue apartment, and the uncooked food on the dinner plates comes from a rooftop garden in Harlem – the stuntman/writer is being outshone by over two billion human beings who never intentionally set out on the same quest. And these men, women, and children squatting in catholes outside slums in Mumbai, or panhandling on the sidewalk below Beavan’s conveniently-warm-without-rule-defying-heat apartment, certainly don’t beg us to emulate their ecological preeminence. This latter observation illuminates the awkward feature of just about all liberal political causes: they require a certain arbitrary privilege in order to take them up in the first place. All of which remarking appears to have the insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question: What, then, is the point of these exercises?

The point, of course, is self-promotion rather than social change. And, cynic (aka disappointed idealist) that I am, I think Beavan’s agent was right when he warned Beavan off of writing an earnest reproof of his readers’ wasteful habits. No one would have read that. We book-buyers want teenage romances and politicians’ memoirs. We’re not interested in reading about how we should change our lifestyles. Your best chance for kindling our interest is to look like a teenage vampire, a spy, or a celebrity, and these eco-stunt books are crafted in recognition of this cultural imperative, their writers courting fame for a good cause, ish. But as Kolbert’s essay points out, the fame of a few middle-class white American liberals who forswear Starbucks and toilet paper is probably not what the cause most needs (though in the name of fairness, once again, I’d like to suggest that these eco-stunts do inspire temporary, small, but possibly cumulative behavioral changes in readers).

Kolbert concludes her article by suggesting that what the cause actually needs is a new book, which she suggests could be called Impact Man. It would be about working with your neighbors to install an efficient heating and cooling system in your own building, and about provoking local politicians to improve our public transportation. In addition to what Kolbert mentioned, Impact Man could be about investing in alternative sources of energy, and efficiently and humanely distributing food and water resources. It could be about innovative architects and city planners, fairly-remunerated farmers, and sustainable housing projects for disadvantaged populations. It could be about lobbying for climate legislation, about urging your Senators to follow the House in passing climate change legislation (healthcare reform, after all, is not the only progressive issue facing Congress when it resumes this week).

In this final paragraph, Kolbert perhaps unconsciously revives a very interesting question writers have often asked, once framed by Sartre as What is Literature? By suggesting that Beavan’s next project could be to campaign for social and political change, and then to write about it, Kolbert forces us to wonder what the role of writing is, after all. If Beaven’s best work would be to affect legislative change, what would be the point of chronicling it, except perhaps to inspire some emulation? Some people are writers (or doctors, or teachers, lawyers, bankers, mechanics, social workers, composers, landscapers, etc) rather than politicians. I, for one, predict that any impact I might have on the world will come primarily through words. And I also care about politics. Am I deluded to think I might mix the two together?

As a journalist, Kolbert has the chance to instigate change by chafing the complacency of her readers and inciting them to take action once they lay down the magazine. She can be the pest that prompts readers to remind politicians of their commitments, and the reporter whose disclosures move constituents to demand these commitments in the first place. But not every writer is a journalist. Maybe some writers do best by taking a turn as a celebrity, by going on the Colbert Report and submitting their personal lives to a documentary film crew. If Beavan’s stunt of asceticism just inspires a few people to survey their own lives for modest ways they can shave off some waste, we’ll probably still face environmental catastrophe. But Beavan is nevertheless pestering people’s complacency, and this is worthy, and maybe even constructive.