Insane Clown Posse and the miracles of nature

A couple weeks ago a music video called "Miracles" went viral. It was produced by a hip-hop duo named Insane Clown Posse, heretofore best known for their face-paint and such classic songs as "I stab you" (and a follow-up song: "Still stabbin'.") "Miracles" rode to fame on a wave of the kind of bemused buzz that tends to follow things like two dudes named Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope rapping about rainbows and giraffes.

The song features lines like "Plant a little seed and nature grows!" and is either profound or profoundly stupid, depending on whether or not you think they're in on the joke. I honestly can't tell -- others have speculated -- but it doesn't really matter for our purposes. Whether they know it or not, Violent and Shaggy have something important to teach us about science, so listen up.

At first, "Miracles" sounds like a paean to scientific curiosity, urging us to appreciate the wonders all around us instead of dismissing the natural world as prosaic and mooning over the imaginary supernatural. I wholeheartedly agree with this. The "magic" we marvel over in stories is not inherently any more marvelous than what already exists in our world -- it just seems that way because we're so used to the real stuff. After all, are dragons and wizards really any more amazing than real things like -- well, let me hand the mike to Shaggy and Violent: "The sun and the moon, even Mars! The Milky Way! F-ckin' shooting stars!" Well said. Thanks guys.

There's a fun thought experiment you can do to bring this fact into clearer focus. Just pick something ubiquitous, something you take for granted because you're so familiar with it, and imagine how you would react if it didn't exist and you were reading about it in a fantasy tale. Eliezer Yudkowsky over at Less Wrong demonstrates: "For example, suppose that instead of one eye, you possessed a magical second eye embedded in your forehead. And this second eye enabled you to see into the third dimension - so that you could somehow tell how far away things were - where an ordinary eye would see only a two-dimensional shadow of the true world. Only the possessors of this ability can accurately aim the legendary distance-weapons that kill at ranges far beyond a sword, or use to their fullest potential the shells of ultrafast machinery called 'cars'."

This is something I really do think is important to keep in mind, because getting excited only by the supernatural isn't simply unjustified, it's also a recipe for unhappiness. "Sooner or later you're going to be disappointed in everything," Yudkowsky writes. "Either it will turn out not to exist, or even worse, it will turn out to be real."

Okay, so far, so good. I am cheering on Violent and Shaggy as they wonder about the world around them ( "F-ckin' magnets, how do they work?"), and I'm chair-dancing to the catchy hook ("Do you notice and appreciate miracles, miracles, miracles...").

But then I hear two lines that completely change the meaning of the song: "And I don't wanna talk to a scientist/ y'all motherf-ckers lyin' and getting me pissed." Wait, what? So they're wondering about how rainbows and shooting stars and magnets work, but they don't want to hear the explanation? Now I get it: this song isn't an ode to investigating mysteries. It's an ode to mystery for the sake of mystery.

Once I realize what the song is really about, I'm reminded of a poem I learned in high school English class, which I remember hating even then:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

-When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomers, by Walt Whitman

Man, just copying and pasting that poem is setting my teeth on edge again. Look at how the lines get longer and clunkier, and the language duller, when you're with the scientist. Then once you leave that tedious ol' lecture-room, the language finally starts sounding poetic, with words like gliding, and mystical, and the meter evolves out of shapelessness into a lyrical iambic pentameter.

Whitman was one of many Romantic poets who wrote breathlessly about the natural world but found science's attempts at explanation to be a buzzkill. Keats and Blake are two other well-known examples. Blake complained, "Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things," and Keats famously blamed science for "unweaving the rainbow." Clearly, Insane Clown Posse's stance is nothing new. It's just the anti-science attitude of the 19th-century Romantics all over again, albeit with a little extra synthesizer and "motherf-cker"s.

Charismatic science popularizers like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson have argued again and again that understanding the world scientifically should increase our sense of wonder, not decrease it. And listening to them waxing rhapsodic about the universe, it's hard not to ask yourself, "How can people think there's no poetry in science?" Or as Richard Feynman put it, "What men are poets who may speak of Jupiter if he is a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

But I've been making an effort recently not to get stuck on the rhetorical question, "How can people think that?" and instead push onward to the earnest question, "Why do people think that?" If a belief is widespread, even if it's a mistaken belief, it cries out for some explanation. Hence, I ask: why are so many people with an innate curiosity about the natural world so uninterested in, even hostile to, scientific explanation?

Part of the problem is that grasping scientific explanations well enough to feel awed by them can require some pretty abstract thinking, the sort our brains aren't built for. It frequently requires a better sense of relative scale than we naturally have to appreciate how big the universe really is, how hot the sun is, or how dense a neutron star is. Our brains react pretty much the same to "million" as they do to "trillion." Being awed by the universe also often requires some familiarity with mathematical equations, in order to appreciate how elegant they are and to feel your breath catch in your throat at the knowledge that the universe follows those laws. And as Neil deGrasse Tyson describes in Death by Black Hole, scientific explanations can require multiple layers of abstraction, each of which takes people successively farther away from the immediacy of the phenomenon. "[To] explain how we know the speed of a receding star requires five nested levels of abstraction," Tyson writes:

Level 0: Star

Level 1: Picture of a star

Level 2: Light from the picture of a star

Level 3: Spectrum from the light from the picture of a star

Level 4: Patterns of lines lacing the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star

Level 5: Shifts in the patterns of lines lacing the spectrum from the light from the picture of a star

... by the time your explanation reaches level 5, the audience is either befuddled or just fast asleep," he laments.

Another obstacle scientific explanations face is that for many people, "poetry" and "romance" require some kind of emotion or human feeling they can identify with. It's understandable; our brains are wired to be excited by human narratives, and it's harder to feel moved by the world if we can't anthropomorphize it. Immense spinning spheres of methane and ammonia can't be proud, or angry, or despairing. Yudkowsky makes this point too: "So one can see why John 'Unweave a rainbow' Keats might feel something had been lost, on being told that the rainbow was sunlight scattered from raindrops... The Biblical story of the rainbow is a tale of bloodthirsty murder and smiling insanity. How could anything about raindrops and refraction properly replace that? Raindrops don't scream when they die."

And as for the hostility that some people feel towards scientific explanations, that might have something to do with the fact that unlike magic, science doesn't allow humans to be special. The anti-materialist notion that the universe is shaped around us, or that our thoughts and feelings can produce tangible effects in the world has a particular kind of romance to it that people find appealing. Scientific explanations, for all their objective beauty, take that away from us.

Nevertheless, I think the perfect quote to close with is this one, from 18th-century bishop Samuel Horsley: "Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discovery... but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot." A great quote, and one I would wholeheartedly endorse, except for that fact that I'm a little skittish about calling Violent and Shaggy idiots. I hear they stab people.