Christine Smallwood: Astrology in the Age of Uncertainty (New Yorker)
Millennials who see no contradiction between using astrology and believing in science are fueling a resurgence of the practice.
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It’s easy to name our own opaque and inscrutable systems—surveillance capitalism, a byzantine health-insurance system—but to say that we are no longer the self-determining subjects of our fate is also to recognize the many ways that our lives are governed by circumstances outside our control.
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It’s a commonplace to say that in uncertain times people crave certainty. But what astrology offers isn’t certainty—it’s distance. Just as a person may find it easier to accept things about herself when she decides she was born that way, astrology makes it possible to see world events from a less reactive position. It posits that history is not a linear story of upward progress but instead moves in cycles, and that historical actors—the ones running amok all around us—are archetypes. Alarming, yes; villainous, perhaps; but familiar, legible.
