I have heard a couple of accounts on radio shows lately by people who are either eclipse buffs or scientists who travel all around the world to see eclipses. They always emphasize the emotionally moving aspect of the experience, recounting their own emotional response (“I start jumping up and down!”) or that of others (“some people around me were moved to tears”).
I understand why it’s fascinating and novel, because it is so different from our everyday experience. But [Spock mode]why would the natural action of inanimate objects elicit an emotional response in humans?[/Spock mode] What is going on psychologically?
One reason might be related to how our ancient ancestors (“l’m talking about cavemen here”) must have felt since they had no warning and no understanding of what was really happening. Was it the end of the world? Were they all going to die? And then it starts to get better until the eclipse is over. Perhaps it’s in our DNA that an eclipse is a scary thing and we are emotionally relieved when it ends and jump and down for joy. Not all of us jump up and down by the way.
The more likely reason is all of the hype around it. Why do people go ape shit on New Year’s Eve? It’s just another night.
At least one aspect of it is that people get really, really worked up for it. It’s no longer an event that comes around unexpectedly; it’s a scheduled event and people go to a lot of trouble to watch. Something you make a big deal about will be a big deal.
Of course, it IS a remarkably cool thing and there’s not really anything else like it, but people do seem to get awfully crazy for silly reasons. In the NYT right now is a column by a person literally suggesting you might have trouble remaining sane. One wonders how she handles the daily planetary eclipse New York City sees every night.
It allows people who otherwise would never come together to share an experience, even if they aren’t at the same place at the same time. It’s a social convention to share experiences.
This might not seem like a GQ answer, but I’d suggest that the reason is that people are stupid.
Remember that there are people for whom the movie Avatar was life-changing. I think it’s fair to expect an eclipse to be at least equally profound for others.
A more technically accurate suggestion as to the mechanism would be that there are times when people are in a weak state and need something to correct it. As pattern-finding machines, we tend to link unrelated events in our mind. If what we needs happens to occur right at the same time as something else, we’re liable to connect the two. If I’m grieving the loss of a child and an eclipse happens right as I’m about ready to get over the hump, and it’s a great activity to get together with friends and family and see the whole world change, then that might be that moment where your mental shift and the solar event get bound up together and it becomes a “spiritual moment” for you.
I might also suggest that a non-zero percentage of the eclipse-fanatic population might be putting on some dark shades and hitting the bong or otherwise upping the ante on the psychedelic potential of the eclipse. So…
I think because it’s one of the most “spiritual” things humans can experience, whether you’re an atheist or not, which really gives some viewers a very visceral reaction in directly witnessing the very clockwork of our solar system play upon them.
It’s a natural phenomena we don’t often see, it involves massive forces and objects, and we know it won’t hurt us.
It’s like asking why people get emotional over a waterfall or seeing the Milky Way at night - the phenomena is perceived as beautiful, and the less often it’s seen, the less familiar, the greater the impact.
It’s rare. I heard that any given location will only experience one every 300 years or so, on average. So, if you’re primitive, you don’t travel much so you might get an oral history passed down over 9-12 generations, on average. How do you capture what I saw Monday (for the first time) into an oral history. Holy shit! Lookatthat! OMG! Probably loses something over the generations. I’d seen video and I had not understood it.
I expected something spectacular and did think this totality thing was overblown. Oh, the corona? Cool. Message me the picture. etc…
The moment it went into totality stunned me and I’m not easily stunned. The only way I could sum it up was that…
It was the most unnatural looking natural thing I’ve ever seen before.
One minute I’m seeing the sun obscured by the moon. A thing is passing in front of another thing. BFD.
But then, this hole opened in the sky and the corona emerges and it’s just the most unnatural natural thing ever.
It’s proof to the entire human race that science is not someones opinion. In ancient times the people who originally predicted when an eclipse would happen were revered as being the smartest of the smart people. That’s pretty cool.
I was at a small airport in TN, with perhaps 200 others. Based on the quantity and sophistication of the telescope and camera equipment on display, this crowd had far more than average technical and scientific savvy. To judge them as fundamentally stupid does not seem remotely supportable on the evidence.
Yet essentially all that I saw were emotionally affected. One guy with a huge reflector telescope who said he was an oncologist as well as a serious amateur astronomer almost had tears in his eyes when totality ended: “I’ve been wanting to see this for 25 years - and it was better than I could have imagined!” You might have been able to find some stupid people there - but I doubt you could have found one person that was blase about what we’d all seen.
It’s a dramatic, stunningly beautiful, exceedingly rare phenomenon presented on a cosmic stage. The idea that finding this moving connotes stupidity seems to me like arrant nonsense.
This is exactly what my question is about–why do people find this emotionally moving? I do find it fascinating but I don’t get all choked up. There are a lot of things in the world that I find beautiful, but I can’t get emotional about inanimate objects even if they do cool things. I get very emotional about various kinds of things that people and animals do or that happen to them (I’m not a sociopath); this is mostly out of empathy or a sense of joy or loss. But to me, being moved by an eclipse makes no more sense than yelling at the paint on my house if it peels.
I just wonder if psychologists understand the underlying mechanism of what makes (some us) react this way to such an event. Is it some sort of adaptive behavior?
This is not scientific, but my observation only. People spend most of their time indoors looking at a computer screen. The eclipse presented an opportunity to do something that can only be done outdoors, by observing a rare and safe natural phenomenon. Kind of like a waterfall, a sunrise/sunset, stargazing. (Unlike natural phenomena people usually experience, such as storms, earthquakes, and floods, which are scary, dangerous, and potentially life-threatening). It’s like people put down their smart phones, stepped away from their computers, and got out of their cars for a few minutes - experiencing something outdoors was not to be avoided this time - “OMG! There’s an outside outside!”
