Skepticism and Wonder

1979, and a six-year-old

I grew up with The Muppet Show. The Muppet Movie came out in 1979, when I was six, and I was captivated by its opening song.

“Rainbow Connection” was written by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher and sung by Jim Henson as Kermit, sitting on a log in a swamp with a banjo. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the American Film Institute later placed it 74th among movie songs, and in 2021 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

None of which is why it mattered to me. It mattered because of what its first verse does in the space of six lines.

The verse opens by asking why there are so many songs about rainbows and what is on the other side. Then it grants that rainbows are visions — and immediately downgrades them, calling them only illusions. And then it lands the line that did the work: rainbows have nothing to hide.

On the lyrics, which are not printed here This page discusses “Rainbow Connection” closely and quotes almost none of it, because reproducing a copyrighted lyric is not ours to do. The verses are characterised rather than transcribed, individual words appear where the argument turns on that exact word, and the full lyric is one link away at Genius. If a sentence here seems to be circling a line rather than quoting it, that is why.

Nothing to hide

To a science-loving kid, nothing to hide was the whole song.

It recognises that a rainbow is an artifact of observation. There is no pot of gold in its reaches. There is no other side, because there is no side. Rainbows are not withholding anything from you, and they are not keeping a secret at the end that you might reach if you walked far enough. Rainbows just are.

As a closeted queer kid and a closeted atheist, I found the observational reality of rainbows better than any story of what they might hold if they were fixed and finite. The science of them filled my head with more wonder and awe than the stories told about them ever did. That is an unusual thing for a song aimed at children to allow, and it is why this one stuck.

A thing with nothing to hide is not a thing with nothing in it.

The one word the song gets wrong

And here the rack has to be honest about its own opening track, because the verse contains a word that our own Zine No. 69 spends twelve spreads refusing.

“Illusions.” A rainbow is not one. An illusion is a mistake your perception makes — something you seem to see that is not occurring. A rainbow is occurring. It is light, refracted and reflected in falling water, arriving at your eye along a path that is calculable to a fraction of a degree from a refractive index of 1.3315. Roger Bacon measured its maximum elevation at 42 degrees around 1267, with an astrolabe and no theory of refraction at all, and the number has not moved.

What is true is stranger and better than illusion: a rainbow has no location. It possesses, in Les Cowley's words, “neither distance nor linear dimension.” It is a direction rather than a place, centred on the shadow of your own head, and no two people have ever seen the same one. That is not a thing failing to be real. That is a real thing that is not an object.

So I read the chorus — so we've been told, and some choose to believe it — not as negating the verse but as refusing the reduction in it. The true nature of rainbows is more wonderful than any of the flattenings, and it opens far more metaphorical room, not less. They are perfect circles, centred on the observer, made of solar light and falling water and a working eye, all three in real-time collaboration. How connected and wonderful is that?

Two uneasily cohabiting modes

The next verse asks who decided that a wish on a star would be heard, notes that somebody thought of it and somebody believed it, and then says, flatly: look what it's done so far.

I was a skeptical kid and a closet atheist. Fascinated by stars; unconvinced by wishing on them. What I liked was the ambiguity — that line can be read as praise or as indictment and the song does not tell you which. It holds the good and the bad of belief in the same hand. I chose to hold both the skepticism of science and the wonder of dreaming, and the song let me.

Sixteen years later, Carl Sagan gave me the words for what I had been doing. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), writing about his parents:

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995

Uneasily cohabiting. Not balanced, not reconciled — sharing a house and not always comfortably. That is the correct description, and it is what “Rainbow Connection” had already modelled for me before I had a name for it. The song is skeptical in the verse and hopeful in the chorus and does not resolve the tension, because the tension is the point.

Princes of the air

Autistic, skeptical minds have been looking at the stars and inventing the future out of their dreams for a long time.

NeuroTribes has a chapter about it — “Princes of the Air” — documenting the stargazing visionaries who turned science fiction into working technology and connected the world through the air. Steve Silberman notes that Hans Asperger may have been the first clinician to see that his patients' imaginations sometimes anticipated developments in science by decades, which forced him to walk back his own claim that their interests were remote from real-world concerns:

But his joking suggestion that the designers of spaceships themselves must be autistic also turned out to be prescient.Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes — ch. “Princes of the Air”

The joke was that we were unworldly. The record is that we were early.

The alembic

There is a third voice worth adding, and the lineage is not a coincidence.

Dorion Sagan — son of Carl Sagan and of Lynn Margulis, whose endosymbiosis this whole collection already runs on — puts the same two modes together as a piece of laboratory glassware:

Science's eye for detail, buttressed by philosophy's broad view, makes for a kind of alembic, an antidote to both.Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

An alembic is a still: two vessels joined, one heating and one condensing, and neither of them useful alone. An antidote to both is the sharp part — detail without breadth curdles into scientism, breadth without detail into vapour, and each is the cure for the other's excess. Which is the same claim Sagan the elder made about skepticism and wonder, and the same one a frog made on a log in 1979.

What the song was later found to cost

In March 2023, first-graders at Heyer Elementary in Waukesha, Wisconsin, were preparing a spring concert on a theme of world unity and peace. Their teachers picked “Rainbowland,” the Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton duet on this rack.

The district vetoed it, reviewing the song against a board policy on controversial issues in the classroom. The music teacher was asked to find something else, and what she landed on was “Rainbow Connection.”

That was initially banned too. It was reinstated only after parents pushed back. The teacher who spoke publicly about the first ban, Melissa Tempel, was later terminated.

Sit with the shape of it. A song whose entire argument is that rainbows are ordinary optical phenomena with nothing hidden in them — written for a puppet, nominated for an Oscar, entered in the National Recording Registry — was, for a moment, too controversial for six-year-olds. Not because of anything in the song. Because of what the word in its title had come to be suspected of.

Which is the skepticism half of this rack arriving from a direction I did not expect when I was six. The wonder half is easier and it is still true: the light is real, the water is real, your eye is real, and the three of them are collaborating right now. Nothing is being hidden from you. That was always the good news.