In Defense (and Ridicule) of the Insane Clown Posse

[tongodeon]

Despite the video and its ridicule going viral, my initial reaction to the Insane Clown Posse "Miracles" video was actually quite positive. It may have helped that I found it right after my post about numinous experience, but I interpreted the song in the same spirit. If I was going to make a list of the things that bring me joy as a naturalist/

Comments

[mmcirvin]

I really doubt that whole episode had much of an effect on anything. I think the general attitude was always there in the culture; it just manifests in various ways at different times.

Modern major-league attacks on science are basically in three categories.

First, there's the anti-environmentalist stuff, whose methods and tactics basically come from two sources: the chemical industry's counterattack against Rachel Carson starting in the 1960s, and--to a really surprising degree--from the tobacco industry's attempts to confuse people about smoking and cancer (which extended to smearing the World Health Organization, and by extension other UN-affiliated research organizations). There's no weird philosophy of science needed here, it's all powered by money and about money, and much of it is masquerading as scientific rationalism. To some degree they even managed to infiltrate the skeptic community.

Second, there are the religion-associated movements, specifically creationism. Creationism comes and goes and was almost dead in the industrialized West at mid-20th century, but the modern wave is associated with the entry of American Protestant evangelicals into political activism. The lore today is that that was motivated by Roe v. Wade, but that's not true; early on in the movement, abortion wasn't their issue at all (opposition to abortion was a Catholic thing). It seems to have been more a reaction to various other things, most notably the move to withdraw tax-free status from religious schools that were whites-only, and the ban on state-mandated prayer in public schools. So this was ultimately sparked by the reaction to the civil rights movement and other Warren Courtish stuff, definitely pre-1980s.

And then there's alt-med, which is a form of charlatanry as old as humanity; it predates real-med.

[mmcirvin]

Creationism comes and goes and was almost dead in the industrialized West at mid-20th century

I should add, I doubt it was actually dead then as a belief in the general population--but it was dead in the sense that there weren't a lot of people going around brandishing supposed scientific credentials and trying to sell it as "creation science". Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies is interesting reading in this regard; the chapter on pseudoscientific creationism describes it as an extinct 19th- and early 20th-century curiosity.