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  Breaking the Spell

  Daniel C. Dennett

  Daniel C. Dennett

  BREAKING THE SPELL

  ALSO BY DANIEL C. DENNETT

  Content and Consciousness

  Brainstorms

  The Mind’s I

  (with Douglas Hofstadter)

  Elbow Room

  The Intentional Stance

  Consciousness Explained

  Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

  Kinds of Minds

  Brainchildren

  Freedom Evolves

  Sweet Dreams

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Books (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Daniel C. Dennett, 2006

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dennett, Daniel Clement.

  Breaking the spell: religion as a natural phenomenon / Daniel C. Dennett.

  p.cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1886-0

  Religion—Controversial literature. I. Title.

  BL2775.3.D46 2006

  200—dc22 2005042415

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  FOR SUSAN

  Contents

  Preface

  PART I OPENING PANDORA’S BOX

  1 Breaking Which Spell?

  1 What’s going on?

  2 A working definition of religion

  3 To break or not to break

  4 Peering into the abyss

  5 Religion as a natural phenomenon

  2 Some Questions About Science

  1 Can science study religion?

  2 Should science study religion?

  3 Might music be bad for you?

  4 Would neglect be more benign?

  3 Why Good Things Happen

  1 Bringing out the best

  2 Cui bono?

  3 Asking what pays for religion

  4 A Martian’s list of theories

  PART II THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

  4 The Roots of Religion

  1 The births of religions

  2 The raw materials of religion

  3 How Nature deals with the problem of other minds

  5 Religion, the Early Days

  1 Too many agents: competition for rehearsal space

  2 Gods as interested parties

  3 Getting the gods to speak to us

  4 Shamans as hypnotists

  5 Memory-engineering devices in oral cultures

  6 The Evolution of Stewardship

  1 The music of religion

  2 Folk religion as practical know-how

  3 Creeping reflection and the birth of secrecy in religion

  4 The domestication of religions

  7 The Invention of Team Spirit

  1 A path paved with good intentions

  2 The ant colony and the corporation

  3 The growth market in religion

  4 A God you can talk to

  8 Belief in Belief

  1 You better believe it

  2 God as intentional object

  3 The division of doxastic labor

  4 The lowest common denominator?

  5 Beliefs designed to be professed

  6 Lessons from Lebanon: the strange cases of the Druze and Kim Philby

  7 Does God exist?

  PART III RELIGION TODAY

  9 Toward a Buyer’s Guide to Religions

  1 For the love of God

  2 The academic smoke screen

  3 Why does it matter what you believe?

  4 What can your religion do for you?

  10 Morality and Religion

  1 Does religion make us moral?

  2 Is religion what gives meaning to your life?

  3 What can we say about sacred values?

  4 Bless my soul: spirituality and selfishness

  11 Now What Do We Do?

  1 Just a theory

  2 Some avenues to explore: how can we home in on religious conviction?

  3 What shall we tell the children?

  4 Toxic memes

  5 Patience and politics

  Appendixes

  A The New Replicators

  B Some More Questions About Science

  C The Bellboy and the Lady Named Tuck

  D Kim Philby as a Real Case of Indeterminacy of Radical Interpretation

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Preface

  Let me begin with an obvious fact: I am an American author, and this book is addressed in the first place to American readers. I shared drafts of this book with many readers, and most of my non-American readers found this fact not just obvious but distracting—even objectionable in some cases. Couldn’t I make the book less provincial in outlook? Shouldn’t I strive, as a philosopher, for the most universal target audience I could muster? No. Not in this case, and my non-American readers should consider what they can learn about the situation in America from what they find in this book. More compelling to me than the reaction of my non-American readers was the fact that so few of my American readers had any inkling of this bias—or, if they did, they didn’t object. That is a pattern to ponder. It is commonly observed—both in America and abroad—that America is strikingly different from other First World nations in its attitudes to religion, and this book is, among other things, a sounding device intended to measure the depths of those differences. I decided I had to express the emphases found here if I was to have any hope of reaching my intended audience: the curious and conscientious citizens of my native land—as many as possible, not just the academics. (I saw no point in preaching to the choir.) This is an experiment, a departure from my aims in earlier books, and those who are disoriented or disappointed by the departure now know that I had my reasons, good or bad. Of course I may have missed my target. We shall see.

  My focus on America is deliberate; when it comes to contemporary religion, on the other hand, my focus on Christianity first, and Islam and Judaism next, is unintended but unavoidable: I simply do not know enough about other religions to write with any confidence
xiii about them. Perhaps I should have devoted several more years to study before writing this book, but since the urgency of the message was borne in on me again and again by current events, I had to settle for the perspectives I had managed to achieve so far.

  One of the departures from my previous stylistic practices is that for once I am using endnotes, not footnotes. Usually I deplore this practice, since it obliges the scholarly reader to keep an extra bookmark running while flipping back and forth, but in this instance I decided that a reader-friendly flow for a wider audience was more important than the convenience of scholars. This then let me pack rather more material than usual into rather lengthy endnotes, so the inconvenience has some recompense for those who are up for the extra arguments. In the same spirit, I have pulled four chunks of material meant mainly for academic readers out of the main text and deposited them at the end as appendixes. They are referred to at the point in the text where otherwise they would be chapters or chapter sections.

  Once again, thanks to Tufts University, I have been able to play Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence with a remarkably brave and conscientious group of students, mostly undergraduates, who put their own often deeply held religious convictions on the line, reading an early draft in a seminar in the fall of 2004, correcting many errors, and guiding me into their religious worlds with good humor and tolerance for my gaffes and other offenses. If I do manage to find my target audience, their feedback deserves much of the credit. Thank you, Priscilla Alvarez, Jacquelyn Ardam, Mauricio Artinano, Gajanthan Balakaneshan, Alexandra Barker, Lawrence Bluestone, Sara Brauner, Benjamin Brooks, Sean Chisholm, Erika Clampitt, Sarah Dalglish, Kathleen Daniel, Noah Dock, Hannah Ehrlich, Jed Forman, Aaron Goldberg, Gena Gorlin, Joseph Gulezian, Christopher Healey, Eitan Hersh, Joe Keating, Matthew Kibbee, Tucker Lentz, Chris Lintz, Stephen Martin, Juliana McCanney, Akiko Noro, David Polk, Sameer Puri, Marc Raifman, Lucas Recchione, Edward Rossel, Zack Rubin, Ariel Rudolph, Mami Sakamaki, Bryan Salvatore, Kyle Thompson-Westra, and Graedon Zorzi.

  Thanks also to my happy team in the Center for Cognitive Studies, the teaching assistants, research assistants, research associate, and program assistant. They commented on student essays, advised students who were upset by the project, advised me; helped me devise, refine, copy, and translate questionnaires; entered and analyzed data; retrieved hundreds of books and articles from libraries and Web sites; helped one another, and helped keep me on track: Avery Archer, Felipe de Brigard, Adam Degen Brown, Richard Griffin, and Teresa Salvato. Thanks as well to Chris Westbury, Diana Raffman, John Roberts, John Symons, and Bill Ramsey for their participation at their universities in our questionnaire project, which is still under way, and to John Kihlstrom, Karel de Pauw, and Marcel Kinsbourne for steering me to valuable reading.

  Special thanks to Meera Nanda, whose own brave campaign to bring scientific understanding of religion to her native India was one of the inspirations for this book, and also for its title. See her book Breaking the Spell of Dharma (2002) as well as the more recent Prophets Facing Backwards (2003).

  The readers mentioned in the first paragraph include a few who have chosen to remain anonymous. I thank them, and also Ron Barnette, Akeel Bilgrami, Pascal Boyer, Joanna Bryson, Tom Clark, Bo Dahlbom, Richard Denton, Robert Goldstein, Nick Humphrey, Justin Junge, Matt Konig, Will Lowe, Ian Lustick, Suzanne Massey, Rob McCall, Paul Oppenheim, Seymour Papert, Amber Ross, Don Ross, Paul Seabright, Paul Slovak, Dan Sperber, and Sue Stafford. Once again, Terry Zaroff did an outstanding copyediting stint for me, picking up not just stylistic slips but substantive weaknesses as well. Richard Dawkins and Peter Suber are two who provided particularly valuable suggestions in the course of conversations, as did my agent, John Brockman, and his wife, Katinka Matson, but let me also thank, without naming them, the many other people who have taken an interest in this project over the last two years and provided much-appreciated suggestions, advice, and moral support.

  Finally, I must once again thank my wife, Susan, who makes every book of mine a duet, not a solo, in ways I could never calculate.

  Daniel Dennett

  PART I OPENING PANDORA’S BOX

  CHAPTER ONE Breaking Which Spell?

  1 What’s going on?

  And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up.

  —Matthew 13:3–4

  If “survival of the fittest” has any validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts.

  —Hugh Pyper, “The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics”

  You watch an ant in a meadow, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top. Why is the ant doing this? What benefit is it seeking for itself in this strenuous and unlikely activity? Wrong question, as it turns out. No biological benefit accrues to the ant. It is not trying to get a better view of the territory or seeking food or showing off to a potential mate, for instance. Its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke (Dicrocelium dendriticum), that needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to complete its reproductive cycle. This little brain worm is driving the ant into position to benefit its progeny, not the ant’s. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Similarly manipulative parasites infect fish, and mice, among other species. These hitchhikers cause their hosts to behave in unlikely—even suicidal—ways, all for the benefit of the guest, not the host.1

  Does anything like this ever happen with human beings? Yes indeed. We often find human beings setting aside their personal interests, their health, their chances to have children, and devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an idea that has lodged in their brains. The Arabic word islam means “submission,” and every good Muslim bears witness, prays five times a day, gives alms, fasts during Ramadan, and tries to make the pilgrimage, or hajj, to Mecca, all on behalf of the idea of Allah, and Muhammad, the messenger of Allah. Christians and Jews do likewise, of course, devoting their lives to spreading the Word, making huge sacrifices, suffering bravely, risking their lives for an idea. So do Sikhs and Hindus and Buddhists. And don’t forget the many thousands of secular humanists who have given their lives for Democracy, or Justice, or just plain Truth. There are many ideas to die for.

  Our ability to devote our lives to something we deem more important than our own personal welfare—or our own biological imperative to have offspring—is one of the things that set us aside from the rest of the animal world. A mother bear will bravely defend a food patch, and ferociously protect her cub, or even her empty den, but probably more people have died in the valiant attempt to protect sacred places and texts than in the attempt to protect food stores or their own children and homes. Like other animals, we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal, but we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives. This fact does make us different, but it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science. How did just one species, Homo sapiens, come to have these extraordinary perspectives on their own lives?

  Hardly anybody would say that the most important thing in life is having more grandchildren than one’s rivals do, but this is the default summum bonum of every wild animal. They don’t know any better. They can’t. They’re just animals. There is one interesting exception, it seems: the dog. Can’t “man’s best friend” exhibit devotion that rivals that of a human friend? Won’t a dog even die if need be to protect its master? Yes, and it is no coincidence that this admirable trait is found in a domesticated species. The dogs of today are the offspring of the dogs our ancestors most loved and admired in the past; without even trying to breed for loyalty, t
hey managed to do so, bringing out the best (by their lights, by our lights) in our companion animals.2 Did we unconsciously model this devotion to a master on our own devotion to God? Were we shaping dogs in our own image? Perhaps, but then where did we get our devotion to God?

  The comparison with which I began, between a parasitic worm invading an ant’s brain and an idea invading a human brain, probably seems both far-fetched and outrageous. Unlike worms, ideas aren’t alive, and don’t invade brains; they are created by minds. True on both counts, but these are not as telling objections as they first appear. Ideas aren’t alive; they can’t see where they’re going and have no limbs with which to steer a host brain even if they could see. True, but a lancet fluke isn’t exactly a rocket scientist either; it’s no more intelligent than a carrot, really; it doesn’t even have a brain. What it has is just the good fortune of being endowed with features that affect ant brains in this useful way whenever it comes in contact with them. (These features are like the eye spots on butterfly wings that sometimes fool predatory birds into thinking some big animal is looking at them. The birds are scared away and the butterflies are the beneficiaries, but are none the wiser for it.) An inert idea, if it were designed just right, might have a beneficial effect on a brain without having to know it was doing so! And if it did, it might prosper because it had that design.

  The comparison of the Word of God to a lancet fluke is unsettling, but the idea of comparing an idea to a living thing is not new. I have a page of music, written on parchment in the mid-sixteenth century, which I found half a century ago in a Paris bookstall. The text (in Latin) recounts the moral of the parable of the Sower (Matthew 13): Semen est verbum Dei; sator autem Christus. The Word of God is a seed, and the sower of the seed is Christ. These seeds take root in individual human beings, it seems, and get those human beings to spread them, far and wide (and in return, the human hosts get eternal life—eum qui audit manebit in eternum).