Mercury Is In Retrograde, Should You Care?
Today marks the start of Mercury retrograde, an event that holds astrological significance, but very little astronomical importance. Frankly, it's complete nonsense, but still slightly fun to indulge in. Here's some helpful things to read surrounding this pretend crisis.
It Is, Astronomically Speaking, Literally An Illusion
As you can guess, the various planets of our solar system rotate around the sun at different speeds. As such, there are times when the planets appear to be moving backwards — for Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, this happens three times per year. Here, NASA explains why planets would suddenly appear to alter their orbit:
Retrograde motion is an APPARENT change in the movement of the planet through the sky. It is not REAL in that the planet does not physically start moving backwards in its orbit. It just appears to do so because of the relative positions of the planet and Earth and how they are moving around the Sun.
[NASA]
The most common comparison drawn is to that of cars on a highway. As you approach slower-moving vehicles, they appear to slow down, stop and then as you pass them, move backwards.
So Why Are All The Astrologists So Flustered About This?
Without delving too much into the meanings that astrology ascribes to the heavens, Mercury is seen as a messenger. When it moves backwards in the sky, Astrologists claim this phenomenon is responsible for a rise in miscommunications. The Washington Posts' Ellen McCarthy sums it up thusly:
It happens three or four times a year — has always happened three or four times a year — that for a few weeks, the planet Mercury appears to move backward in the sky. Astrologers ascribe to this event a period of communication flubs, technology breakdowns and relationship turmoil.
Like most belief systems formed at the dawn of humanity, fear and a desire to explain the unknowable led to us fretting about Mercury's apparent motion in the sky. In the New York Times Magazine Kristin Dombek explains:
The astrological belief that Mercury retrograde leads to confusion and breakdown is inherited from the time before we understood that Earth is not the center of the cosmos. From our perspective, Mercury appears to move quickly and erratically, so the ancients called it a messenger and a trickster. It took three millenniums to figure out that this was an illusion.
More People Believe In Mercury Retrograde Than Ever
How could so many people believe something so very silly? It turns out, if your friends and neighbors and Twitter feed believes in it, why shouldn't you? Here, Chris Mooney in Mother Jones details the rise of astrology's popularity amongst Americans:
In particular, the NSF reports that the percentage of Americans who think astrology is "not at all scientific" declined from 62 percent in 2010 to just 55 percent in 2012 (the last year for which data is available). As a result, NSF reports that Americans are apparently less skeptical of astrology than they have been at any time since 1983… a substantial minority of Americans, ranging from 31 to 45 percent depending on the year, say consider astrology either "very scientific" or "sort of scientific."
And, as Katie Heaney writes in Pacific Standard, it's a minor relief — and seemingly harmless — to just ascribe our personal failings to the machinations of the cosmos:
So what makes Mercury Retrograde easier to swallow? Friends of mine with similarly selective astrology beliefs say it's because the evidence just keeps stacking up. "When there is something happening and it affects a lot of people, it's something I notice," Melanie says. Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way; we see more and more people talking about it, so we pay more and more attention to the bad or mixed-up things that happen during those few weeks.
And then, too, it's a perverse kind of fun to resign oneself to short-term cosmic doom.
Though, Jokingly Blaming Mercury Retrograde Isn't Exactly Victimless
For one, Phil Plait explains that the relationship between astronomy and astrology is a zero-sum game, belief in the former is a detriment to the latter:
Astrology promotes the worst thing in the world: uncritical thinking. The more we teach people to simply accept anecdotal stories, hearsay, cherry-picked data (picking out what supports your claims but ignoring what doesn't), and, frankly, out-and-out lies, the harder it gets for people to think clearly. If you cannot think clearly, you cannot function as a human being. I cannot stress this enough. Uncritical thinking is tearing this world to pieces, and while astrology may not be at the heart of that, it has its role.
For a third, and this one irritates me personally, astrology takes away from the real grandeur of the Universe. We live in an amazing place, this Universe of ours, and it's quite fantastic enough without needing people to make up things about it. Astrology dims the beauty of nature, cheapens it.
It's also a tool of the patriarchy, as George Dvorsky explains in io9:
Other surveys have shown that women are more drawn to astrology than men. A 2005 Gallup poll revealed that 28% of women believe in astrology, compared to 23% of men. In Canada it's even worse, where 33% of women buy into it.
But as York University sociologist Julia Hemphill tells io9, there's more to this statistic than meets the eye: women are specifically targeted by the popular media.
"Astrology is an unempirical epistemology that's peddled to women as a way of understanding themselves and the world," she says. "All you have to do is open a 'women's magazine', and you'll inevitably see at least one or two pages devoted to astrology
[io9]
So, in short: Mercury looks like it's moving backwards in the sky. Some people believe this will affect your ability to communicate with others, among other things. It really doesn't, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to communicate well with others, nor should you go on pro-science rants for those who publicly curse the first planet from the sun for their failings. Then, Mercury retrograde would literally be interfering with your ability to communicate.
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