Reagan's Starry-Eyed Idealism

DONALD Regan, in the latest of the kiss-and-tell books on the Reagan Administration, revealed the regular use of astrology by the man who once said "trees cause pollution, too." Coverage in the media focused first on the practice's humorous aspects, the absurd images of Nancy Reagan and her faithful seer organizing the President's daily schedules according to the movements of the planets. I laughed until I cried.

By simply trying to explain astrology rather than criticizing it, however, the media has begun to unwittingly spread the President's foolishness rather than combat it. This frightens me far more than the revelation itself, for it is as if noone cares that the leader of the country believed this ridiculous stuff. Nobody asks what this says about the kinds of criteria Reagan is willing to use in his everyday--or even world shaking--decisions. If we begin by accepting astrology as an innocuous eccentricity, we will be more likely to accept a government run on ignorance, and give "equal time" for wrong and right.

Ellen Goodman recently reported a "debate" over the legitimacy of astrology on PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and I have heard Dan Rather proclaim that "astrology has been given a new legitmacy," as if it were a neutral fact. I think this new boom in superstition is bad news of the first order. Television coverage of late has been limited to interviews with psuedoscientists and their devotees, who naturally are gleeful about the recent turn of events. The press seems afraid to point out how stupid a belief in astrology is, how discredited a "science" it is, and how silly it is of Reagan to be mixed up with it.

What this situation illustrates is the power nonsense can hold over people. While relatively harmless in itself, the use of astrology is symptomatic of a widespread--and growing--fear of facts and reality in America.

In a recent poll in New Scientist, Americans were found to have the most positive image of science and progress of any industrialized nation. Yet 42 percent of the public in the United States does not believe in human evolution! While we apparently have a desire to succeed, it's clear we lack the intellectual tools to do so. Widespread belief in astrology is a similar problem. We use the fruits of science gladly--none of us would part with our microwaves or television sets--yet scientific advances have not fundamentally reordered our view of the way the world works. Unless they do we are destined to fall behind in the science and technology race.

WITHOUT a general, basic acceptance of the scientific method, education can only do so much. But people seem genuinely apathetic towards gaining any real understanding of the scientific view of the world. Just compare: the proporation of Japanese who deny evolution is only 13 percent.

Perhaps the American space program, currently languishing under a scarcity of both public money and goodwill, is a victim of a President who believes more can be learned about the heavens from a back alley palm reader than from an orbiting telescope. Perhaps Reagan believes that exploring the stars will upset the delicate balance of planetary influence. It seems that as belief in astrology rises, belief in astronomy is sure to fall. That is the kind of harm Reagan's connection with pseudoscience can inflict on this nation.

But this sort of thing harms more than just America's scientific competitiveness. Astrology defames the whole enterprise of rationality, and threatens to warp our view of national and international problems. We cannot call an exorcist to scare the deficit away. We cannot wait for the moon to come into Jupiter to resolve the conflict in the Middle East. A pragmatic, hard-headed approach is the only thing that will save this country, and it has not been much in evidence lately.

Historically, retreats into the occult and the mystic have often been correlated with times of social stress, such as during the height of the Dark Ages, and I fear this is one more sign of a "malaise" we have been trying to deny. The casual acceptance of ignorant superstition at the highest political level speaks of an intellectual retreat, for which the Reagan Administration has often been criticized. We have seen the emergence of a blind faith that "it"--the debt, the decaying environment, the nuclear menance, the drug trade--will all work out somehow, as if by magic; perhaps by the same kind of primitive sorcery that designates propitious and unpropitious days for the President.

It is not just the responsibility of the professional community to speak out against all of Reagan's idiocies, including the apathy and mysticism now sapping our country's strength. Nor is it simply the duty of the media to carry this message, though they have so far failed in that task. Every rational person must join in a battle, in our schools, in our legislatures, in our national priorities, between reason and unreason, reality and fantasy. The foolish, stubborn old man who leads the opposing side must go, and all his ilk with him. We will never be able to confront our difficulties squarely with a President who thinks ketchup is a vegetable, Ed Meese is honest, and who guides the ship of state by the stars.