You Could Do Other

Thinking things over…Is there anything in that so very different from the ancient (and modern) practice of consulting “spirits”? Waiting for a revelation from a tilting table, a deck of cards, an idol, or a tranced, groaning medium—or else from what one calls one’s Self?

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

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The purpose of horoscopes, and of divination in general, is simply to make a fellow look at his life in a different way. When your mind is a seething mass of deadlines, breadlines and overdrafts, the bland, vacuous recommendation that:

Neptune is the ascendant, so today is a good day to tell someone close to you how you really feel about them.

Could actually be the commandment that you required. It might make you run through all the people that are close to you and wonder which it is, and what it is that you should tell them. And that is a thought that, otherwise, might not have occurred to you all year.

Thus the contradictions at the beginning of this little essay are all cleared up. The stars are irrelevant; or, if they are relevant, it is only because they are random.

— Mark Forysth, “A Defence of Horoscopes” (From Somebody Who Doesn’t Believe in Them)

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Indeed, an exponent of the I Ching might give us quite a tough argument about the relative merits of our ways for making important decisions. We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend upon such irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or cracks in a shell. Yet he might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by utterly unforeseen incidents. He might ask how we know when we have collected enough information upon which to decide. If we were rigorously “scientific” in collecting information for our decisions, it would take us so long to collect the data that the time for action would have passed long before the work had been completed. So how do we know when we have enough? Does the information itself tell us that it is enough? On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just because of a hunch, or because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act. He would ask whether this is not depending just as much upon “irrelevant trifles” as if we had been casting the yarrow stalks.

In other words, the “rigorously scientific” method of predicting the future can be applied only in special cases–where prompt action is not urgent, where the factors involved are largely mechanical, or in circumstances so restricted as to be trivial. By far the greater part of our important decisions depend upon “hunch”– in other words, upon the “peripheral vision” of the mind. Thus the reliability of our decisions rests ultimately upon our ability to “feel” the situation, upon the degree to which this “peripheral vision” has been developed.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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The obvious counter-argument would be that rationality is a more targeted and efficient means of finding the relevant variables that weigh on your decision, whereas tarot, astrology, or the I Ching bring a lot of false positives or pure irrelevance into the decision-making process. As useful as a random prompt or provocation can be, you still have to make the choice to incorporate it or rule it out. But the rebuttal would then be that rationality is very good at examining variables you have identified. It is less effective at ensuring that you have identified all the variables worth examining. A lot of cognition seems to exist first as disposition, image, bodily unease, attraction, aversion, pattern-recognition, or half-formed analogy — something more like a shape than a proposition. The bulk of the “thought” remains underwater, like the body of an iceberg. Finding it would be like doing a text search for a keyword that never made it past being an image. We have blind spots, habitual framings, suppressed preferences, things we simply haven’t thought to ask. A random prompt can occasionally expose one. But as Watts says, time is the limiting factor. At some point, there is no more of it available for gathering evidence and weighing it. You must choose, now.

Another attraction can be that the oracle doesn’t merely generate possibilities; it can also redistribute responsibility. People generally find it easier to submit to necessity than to exercise naked preference. The burden of agency and all that.  “This is what must happen” relieves you of having to say, “This is what I choose.” An oracle introduces a third party, even when you know perfectly well that the third party is fictitious or random. The cards said this, the hexagram came up that way, Mercury is doing whatever Mercury does. This can feel like external authorization, and that may be psychologically valuable independently of whether you believe in the system. Imagine someone who already half-wants to leave a relationship but cannot quite permit himself to say, “I want to leave.” A tarot reading that produces some suggestive card may allow him to think “Apparently this is telling me it’s time to move on.” That sentence is less weighty than “I have decided that the reasons for leaving outweigh the reasons for staying.”

Damon Linker pointed to a version of the same paradox in Antonio García Martínez’s conversion to Judaism. Martínez was drawn, in part, to the possibility of escaping modernity’s endless menu of optional commitments by submitting himself to a thick moral tradition whose obligations would no longer be his to invent. But Linker’s point was that Martínez had first to choose the tradition to which he would submit: to survey the intellectual bazaar, stop at this stall, and say, in effect, Here. This is where I will stop choosing. There is something Buddhist about the difficulty — you desire to stop desiring; you choose to stop choosing. Watts, elsewhere, made a similar point: when you choose a therapist, guru, book, or system as an authority, you chose it. Saying “the Bible is the Word of God” doesn’t escape the problem, because it remains your judgment that the Bible, or the Church authenticating it, is trustworthy. You can subsequently describe that submission as compulsory — “the truth was undeniable; I had no choice” — but Watts’s reply would be: you still recognized that thing as undeniable rather than the rival claim sitting beside it. And however sincere the commitment, the original capacity remains. The modern convert knows that another choice was possible, and therefore knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that another choice remains possible. You can bind yourself, but you cannot quite unknow that you tied the knot.