This summer I got to hear astrology promoted on my local NPR station. I was driving in my car, with my radio on, when what came over the airwaves but an advertisement for an upcoming episode of Latino USA featuring astrology. It sure did not sound like it would be a skeptical treatment. I think the torque produced from rolling my eyes at that moment slowed the rotation of the Earth and added a millisecond to the day!
But then I thought, “Wait a second, Graney. Don’t pre-judge. Listen to the show.” Therefore, I eventually downloaded it and listened.
The episode was “More Than a Meme: Astrology Today with Isa Nakazawa” (July 21, 2024). In it, Maria Hinojosa of Latino USA interviewed Nakazawa, who is an astrologer of Uruguayan and Japanese ancestry. She is based in Oakland, California.
The show was not a skeptical treatment of astrology.
On the contrary, it was a complete endorsement of astrology. Nakazawa urged that astrology is “not gimmicks, not just silly stuff [at the 12:25 mark in the show]”; it involves “hard-core” mathematics (21:30); it gives real results (22:20). Meanwhile, Hinojosa, who has received a lot of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, showed no skepticism at all (in fact, her Futuro Media Group is running Nakazawa’s astrology podcast, “Stars and Stars with Isa”). While Nakazawa told Hinojosa about her “birth chart”, Hinojosa responded with, “honestly, I’m freaking out [25:00]” about how revelatory it was; “I just want to call Isa every week [25:25]”, she said.
I have discussed astrology in a relatively recent post. That post was about books from prominent publishers that promote astrology, particularly to young women, and about how those books are now found in the collection of my public library. There I go into some detail about astrology and its “Sun sign” (the zodiac sign the Sun is moving through on the day a person is born), “Rising sign” or “Ascendant” (the sign that was rising over the Eastern horizon at birth), and “Moon sign” (what the Moon was moving through). I also discuss how astrology is essentially a religion — a system of belief based on the ancient idea that the Earth is the center of the universe; composed of the Aristotelian elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire; and surrounded by a realm of ethereal lights that communicate to us what the gods, or whatever, have decided about us — and how astrology has nothing to do with modern science or even basic visual astronomy, but how it taps into science (or fakes tapping in to it, anyway).
That fakery is present in “More Than a Meme”. Nakazawa wraps up the last couple minutes of the show by invoking Carl Sagan’s idea (as regards stellar nucleosynthesis) that we are all made of “star stuff”. She does this to say that astrology is “not a metaphor”, but rather we are connected to the stars, we are “part of something bigger” and we “don’t walk alone”. Of course, she is invoking here a modern scientific idea about the synthesis of heavier elements from hydrogen and helium, an idea that stands in complete opposition to the language of five Aristotelian elements (the four on Earth plus the ethereal “fifth element”) that underpins astrology and that she used throughout the show.
Moreover, despite all the discussion of Sun, Moon, planets, etc., there was no reference, in 35+ minutes of show, to the most basic sort of real science — to actually looking at the real sky, seeing the real stars. When Nakazawa tells Hinojosa that she is a “Virgo rising”, Hinojosa says “I have no idea what that means [21:40]”. And it’s not explained.
Why would it be? Anyone with interest in the real stars would quickly find that what Nakazawa tells Hinojosa is bogus.
Nakazawa tells Hinojosa that, at her birth, Virgo was rising, the Sun and Mercury were in Cancer (23:15) and the Moon was in Pisces (25:45). Nakazawa emphasizes the “Cancer Mercury”, in fact.
Wikipedia says Hinojosa was born on July 2, 1961. It does not give her time of birth, so I can’t use the Stellarium planetarium app to see what Zodiac constellation was rising when she was born. But I can use it to see that the Sun and Mercury (below, red crosshairs) were not in Cancer on that date. They were both deep in Gemini (and Mercury was in retrograde).
The Moon was not in Pisces. It was smack in the middle of Aquarius. So even if the locations of these bodies could have had some impact on Hinojosa at her birth, they were not located where Nakazawa said, so the information she was giving Hinojosa would be bogus anyway.
And, as I explain in that earlier post, they have no impact. They are not ethereal lights that circle Earth and communicate to us the intent of that “something bigger” that somehow “walks” with us. They are bodies made of the same stuff as Earth, like silicon, iron, hydrogen, and oxygen. Thus they would have the same sorts of effects on a newborn Hinojosa as, say, a glass of water in a delivery room would have had — but they are so far away that the effect of the glass of water, and of everything else anywhere near the baby Hinojosa, would have been far, far larger.
None of what I say here is new. The case against astrology is available to anyone who spends a few minutes doing a little research — and thanks to the internet, there is always a good research library on hand. But the award-winning journalist did not question astrology. Rather, she expressed a desire to call Nakazawa every week. It seems no one in Hinojosa’s operation questioned any of this stuff, either. Thus, this uncritical endorsement and promotion of astrology went on the air via my local NPR station, via PRX, via WNYC in New York, etc.
Would these stations air an uncritical 35 minutes on what a climate change denier had to say? Would it do that for a vaccine denier, especially as regards the COVID pandemic? Those deniers may not have much science behind the stuff they say, but they have more than an astrologer has!
If we endorse some system of belief like astrology that rejects basic science, the sort of science that all people who have eyes can walk out and do for themselves, we cannot then credibly endorse more complex science that is not so easily verified. At least, we cannot endorse it as science. We might still embrace it, but it becomes clear that we are doing so not because we understand or value science itself, but just because at the moment it serves a useful purpose for us — and when our purpose requires, we will toss science aside, and promote and endorse bogus stuff like astrology (and maybe still claim science all the while).
Let us instead consistently stick with actual science. That’s what is worth endorsing and promoting, and I wish Pulitzer-winning journalists and major media outlets thought so, too.
