I don’t understand why there are so many people who consider themselves “Marxist feminists”, but at the same time are distracted by astrology.
The origin of feminism is working class, and as a working class movement, it is materialist. I don’t know if they at least know what dialectical materialism is, since they don’t see such an abysmal contradiction between astrology (pseudoscience) and feminism (materialism).
They remind me of the liberal “feminist” Gloria Steinem.
And the same with some anarchists.
What do you think about it?
I just see it as a way some people of all genders try to fill the space left by religion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be coded as an activity exclusive to one gender. I know plenty of guys into stuff like that. I’ve heard others describe this phenomenon as a way to question the accuracy of outcomes predicted by the secularization thesis.
Regardless, I still am diplomatic with people who like that stuff, despite me not believing in it. I don’t want to come off the same way the New Atheists did when discussing religion. That sort of militant attitude can be off-putting when trying to make the case for socialism.
I’d say the best way to discourage taking such practices too seriously, I’d suggest deconstructing such practices by reading about it’s history. Understanding the history of a topic helps one realize the fallible and changing nature of a supposedly unchanging process for discerning truth. I use the same approach with religion
This “space left by religion” shit never made sense to me. Is that a thing other people/normal people/neurotypicals actually experience?
This feels like you’re playing a little semantic trick with the ambiguity of the meaning of belief, conflating ideology and metaphysics.
Have you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future? I showed it to somebody who left religion decades earlier and could see what a gut punch it still was. I think he had basically substituted indefinite space exploration for heaven and finding out that even that’s not an option was like losing faith a second time.
Wakarimasen
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Asstrology
This isn’t necessarily related to the feminism part of your question, but I’ve read some about modern day Daoist divination practices in China that are essentially like tarot cards. One book (The Souls of China by Ian Johnson) had an interesting perspective because some of the priests said there wasn’t any magic involved and they weren’t literally predicting the future. At least in that context, people have specific questions they want answered, and they have answers that they want. The divination only provides yes/no answers.
Someone asking if they’re going to be successful some day isn’t helped in any way by saying “nah sorry you’ll be poor forever” nor are they helped by saying “yea you’ll be a hollywood star” and having their ego inflated, but what they’re looking for is some sort of comfort that their life won’t always be miserable or meaningless.
So the priest guides them through their questions like a conversation and tries to give them the comfort they’re looking for in the least harmful way possible. The yarrow root (or tarot cards, or whatever) are just the vehicle to have that conversation. You can say maybe that person should just go to a therapist, and maybe they should, but essentially the priest is trying to help people work through whatever issue it is they’re having so they can come to some sort of resolution. And that’s a role that existed before the contemporary therapist.
The idea is then that the ‘prediction’ part is just that person resolving to act in a way that would make it true. So if they ask if they’ll be successful, the priest guides them to some sort of action they can do to work toward that goal.
I can see people wanting to use stuff like new age astrology and tarot and all that kind of stuff in a similar way, but the difference is that unfortunately, the person conducting those ceremonies may not have those good intentions in mind or any sort of philosophical, cultural, or ethical training to guide people to beneficial actions. They’re not a community figure invested in the lives of the people talking to them, but a fortune teller with a building in the middle of town just advertising their services to random people for profit.
EDIT: As to how I feel about it, I obviously don’t believe in it but I try not to bash it too much unless that person uses it as an excuse to be discriminatory or justify their bad decisions. Especially in more ingrained cultural contexts like the above, but even for the ‘fairies and tarot’ folks.
This is a good understanding of divination.
I used to do tarot readings when I was a traveling bum. They really are just a way of talking through shit with someone while putting up a barrier so that you aren’t discussing your personal business with a total stranger. They don’t tell the future they let you hash out your own hopes and/or fears. Most of the time I wouldn’t even know what the person was asking about.
The cards give the reader something to say and the questioner responds to the prompts that the cards give. The reader keeps track of the responses and then parrots them all back to the questioner essentially telling the questioner what they told the reader to say.
i think shunting off non rational belief into a category of “bullshit not worth exploring or interrogating” is kind of, i dunno, itself ignorant? you can at least take the approach of people who study these matters academically, and separate your ego and emotional responses from the equation and seek to actually, not just approximating marx fourth hand, actually try to understand the phenomenon before jumping to this kind of shit.
astrology fits this category for me - it’s not remotely productive for anyone to silo yourselves off from understanding for a lack of “getting it” - you’re not omniscient, there’s shit you don’t know. Human tendencies towards these phenomena, whether imaginal or real, and you already know what you think about that, are not something to just go “lol i dont get it fuck all that noise” because you wanna actually reach people and find common cause with them, you refusing and even being hostile to this shit is gonna lose people who might, despite your assumptions, be radically useful.
I know it is difficult to know everything in depth, but it is easy to know when something is so irrational that it is even harmful to the movement itself (in this case, feminism).
In fact, it is anti-materialist to say “lol i dont get it f*ck all that noise” when you don’t know about a subject, since you are ignoring its history, the material conditions that produced that thought, idea, subject, etc.
I think such people distracted by astrology, sperituality and manifestation, are a problem within the movement. They are not radically useful. Capitalism wants you to be distracted by it, to believe that you, individually, can change the outside with your mentality, and not the outside (your material conditions) to your way of thinking.
It’s simply not your call or place to say something is “harmful to the movement” when you’re not a part of it, you can’t speak or know about it from experience. Saying stuff like that is a very easy way of getting dismissed entirely by basically every member of “the movement”, as I am doing now, i truly do not care about the topic of astrology.
Maybe go talk to feminists that like astrology and calmly ask questions, and maybe ask yourself why you care so much about something of such little consequence for a movement that is, materially speaking, probably in contradiction with your own position and benefits in the current system and will naturally tend to be seen as uncomfortable to you.
