Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  The interplay of cultural and genetic transmission should also be explored. Consider the well-studied case of lactose tolerance in adults, for instance. Many of us adults can drink and digest raw milk without difficulty, but many others, who of course had no difficulty consuming milk when they were babies, can no longer digest milk after infancy, since their bodies switch off the gene for making lactase, the necessary enzyme, after they are weaned, which is the normal pattern in mammals. Who is lactose-tolerant and who isn’t? There is a clear pattern discernible to geneticists: lactose tolerance is concentrated in human populations that have descended from dairying cultures, whereas lactose intolerance is common in those whose ancestors were never herders of dairy animals, such as the Chinese and Japanese.15 Lactose tolerance is genetically transmitted, but pastoralism, the disposition to tend herds of animals, on which the genetic trait depends, is culturally transmitted. Presumably it could have been genetically transmitted, but, so far as we know, it hasn’t been. (Border collies, unlike the children of Basque shepherds, have had herding instincts bred into them, after all [Dennett, 2003c, d].)

  Then there are money theories, according to which religions are cultural artifacts rather like monetary systems: communally developed systems that have evolved, culturally, several times. Their presence in every culture is readily explained and even justified: it’s a Good Trick that one would expect to be rediscovered again and again, a case of convergent social evolution. Cui bono? Who benefits? Here we can consider several answers:

  A. Everybody in the society benefits, because religion makes life in society more secure, harmonious, efficient. Some benefit more than others, but nobody would be wise to wish the whole away.

  B. The elite who control the system benefit, at the expense of the others. Religion is more like a pyramid scheme than a monetary system; it thrives by preying on the ill-informed and powerless, while its beneficiaries pass it along gladly to their heirs, genetic or cultural.

  C. Societies as wholes benefit. Whether or not the individuals benefit, the perpetuation of their social or political groups is enhanced, at the expense of rival groups.

  This last hypothesis, group selection, is tricky, since the conditions under which genuine group selection can exist are hard to specify.16 The schooling of fish and flocking of birds, for instance, are certainly phenomena involving grouping, but they are not explained as group-selection phenomena. In order to see how individuals (or their individual genes) are benefited by the dispositions to school or flock, you have to understand the ecology of groups, but the groups aren’t the primary beneficiaries; the individuals that compose them are. Some biological phenomena masquerade as group selection but are better dealt with as instances of individual-level selection that depend on certain environmental phenomena (such as grouping) or even as instances of symbiont-selection phenomena. As we have already noted, a symbiont meme needs to be spread to new hosts, and if it can drive people into groups (the way Toxoplasma gondii drives rats into the jaws of cats) where it can readily find alternate hosts, the explanation is not group selection after all.

  If the Martians can’t make any of these theories fit the facts, they should consider a default theory of sorts that we may call the pearl theory: religion is simply a beautiful by-product. It is created by a genetically controlled mechanism or family of mechanisms that are meant (by Mother Nature, by evolution) to respond to irritations or intrusions of one sort or another. These mechanisms were designed by evolution for certain purposes, but then, one day, along comes something novel, or a novel convergence of different factors, something never before encountered and of course never foreseen by evolution, that happens to trigger the activities that generate this amazing artifact. According to pearl theories, religion isn’t for anything, from the point of view of biology; it doesn’t benefit any gene, or individual, or group, or cultural symbiont. But once it exists, it can be an objet trouvé, something that just happens to captivate us human agents, who have an indefinitely expandable capacity for delighting in novelties and curiosities. A pearl begins with a meaningless speck of foreign matter (or, more likely, a parasite), and once the oyster has added layer after beautiful layer, it can become something of coincidental value to members of a species who just happen to prize such things, whether or not this coveting is wise from the point of view of biological fitness. There are other standards of value that may emerge, for reasons good or bad, free-floating or highly articulated. In much the way the oyster responds to the initial irritant and then incessantly responds to the results of its first response and then to the results of that response and so on, human beings may be unable to leave off reacting to their own reactions, incorporating ever more elaborate layers into a production that then takes on shapes and features unimaginable from its modest beginnings.

  What explains religion? Sweet tooth, symbiont, bower, money, pearl, or none of the above? Religion may include phenomena of human culture that have no remote analogue in genetic evolution, but if so, we will still have to answer the cui bono? question, because it is undeniable that the phenomena of religion are designed to a very significant degree. There are few signs of randomness or arbitrariness, so some differential replication has to pay for the R & D responsible for the design. These hypotheses do not all pull in the same direction, but the truth about religion might well be an amalgam of several of them (plus others). If this is so, we will not get a clear vision of why religion exists until we have clearly distinguished these possibilities and put each of them to the test.

  If you think you already know which theory is right, you are either a major scientist who has been concealing a vast mountain of unpublished research from the rest of the world, or else you are confusing wishful thinking with knowledge. Perhaps it seems to you that I am somewhat willfully ignoring the obvious explanation of why your religion exists and has the features it does: it exists because it is the inevitable response of enlightened human beings to the obvious fact that God exists! Some would add: we engage in these religious practices because God commands us to do so, or because it pleases us to please God. End of story. But that could not be the end of the story. Whichever religion is yours, there are more people in the world who don’t share it than who do, and it falls to you—to all of us, really—to explain why so many have gotten it wrong, and to explain how those who know (if there are any) have managed to get it right. Even if it is obvious to you, it isn’t obvious to everyone, or even to most people.

  If you have come this far in the book, you are willing to inquire into the sources and causes of other religions. Wouldn’t it be hypocritical to claim that your own religion was somehow out of bounds? Just to satisfy your own intellectual curiosity, you might wish to see how your own religion measures up to the sort of scrutiny we will be directing at others. But, you may well wonder, can science be truly nonpartisan? Isn’t science, in fact, “just another religion”? Or, to put it the other way around, aren’t religious perspectives just as valid as the scientific perspective? How can we find any common, objective ground from which to conduct our inquiries? These questions concern many readers, especially academics who have invested heavily in the answers to them, but others, I find, are impatient with them, and not all that concerned. The questions are important—indeed, crucial to my whole project—since they put into doubt the very possibility of conducting the inquiry I am embarking on, but they can be postponed until after the theory sketch is completed. If you disagree, then before continuing with chapter 4 you should turn directly to appendix B, “Some More Questions About Science,” which deals with these questions, spelling out in more detail, and defending, the path by which we can work together to find mutual agreement about how to proceed and what matters.

  Chapter 3 Everything we value—from sugar and sex and money to music and love and religion—we value for reasons. Lying behind, and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that ha
ve been endorsed by natural selection.

  Chapter 4 Like all animal brains, human brains have evolved to deal with the specific problems of the environments in which they must operate. The social and linguistic environment that coevolved with human brains gives human beings powers that no other species enjoys, but also created problems that folk religions apparently evolved to handle. The apparent extravagance of religious practices can be accounted for in the austere terms of evolutionary biology.

  PART II THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

  CHAPTER FOUR The Roots of Religion

  1 The births of religions

  Everything is what it is because it got that way.

  —D’Arcy Thompson

  Among Hindus, there is disagreement over whether Shiva or Vishnu is the higher Lord, and many have been killed for their belief in this matter. “The Lińgapurāna promises Śiva’s heaven to one who kills or tears out the tongue of someone who reviles ´ Siva” (Klostermaier, 1994).

  Among the Zulus, when a pregnant woman is about to give birth, sometimes the “spirit-snake of an old woman” makes an angry appearance (according to the shamans), indicating that a goat or some other animal should be sacrificed to the tribe’s ancestors so that the child may be born healthy (Lawson and McCauley, 1990, p. 116).

  The Jivaro of Ecuador believe that you have three souls, the true soul you have from birth (it returns to your birthplace when you die, then turns into a demon, which dies in turn, becoming a giant moth, which becomes mist when it dies); the arutam, a soul you obtain by fasting, bathing in a waterfall, and partaking of hallucinogenic juice (it makes you invincible but has the unfortunate habit 97 of leaving you when you’re in a jam); and the musiak, the avenging soul which tries to escape a victim’s head and kill the victim’s murderer. This is why you must shrink the head of your victim (Harris, 1993).

  These curious beliefs and practices have not existed “forever”—no matter what their devotees may say. Marcel Gauchet begins his book on the political history of religion by noting, “As far as we know, religion has without exception existed at all times and in all places” (1997, p. 22), but this is a historian’s pinched perspective, and simply isn’t true. There was a time before religious beliefs and practices had occurred to anyone. There was a time, after all, before there were any believers on the planet, before there were any beliefs about anything. Some religious beliefs are truly ancient (by historical standards), and the advent of others can be read about in newspaper archives. How did they all arise?

  Sometimes the answer seems obvious enough, especially when we have reliable historical records from the recent past. When Europeans in their magnificent sailing ships first visited the islands of the South Pacific in the eighteenth century, the Melanesians living on these islands were awestruck by these vessels, and by the remarkable gifts they were given by the white men who lived in them: steel tools and bolts of cloth and glass you could see through, and other cargo beyond their ken. They reacted much as we would probably react today if visitors from outer space showed up capable of overwhelming us at will, and bearing technologies we hadn’t even dreamt of: “We must get ourselves some of this cargo, and learn how to harness the magical powers of these visitors.” And our puny efforts to use what we did know to take control of the situation and restore our security and sense of power would probably amuse these technologically superior aliens as much as we are amused by the Melanesians’ conclusion that the Europeans must be their ancestors in disguise, coming back from the realm of the dead with untold wealth, demigods to be worshiped. When Lutheran missionaries arrived in Papua New Guinea in the late nineteenth century to try to convert the Melanesians to Christianity, they met stubborn suspicion: why were these stingy ancestors in disguise withholding the cargo and trying to make them sing hymns?

  Cargo cults have sprung up again and again in the Pacific. During World War II, American forces arrived at the island of Tana to recruit a thousand men to help build an airfield and army base on neighboring Efate Island. When the workers returned with tales of white and black men who had possessions beyond the dreams of the people of Tana, the whole society was thrown into turmoil. The islanders, many of whom had earlier been converted to Christianity by British missionaries,

  stopped going to church and began to build landing strips, warehouses and radio masts out of bamboo, in the belief that if it worked on Efate for the Americans, it would work for them on Tana. Carved figurines of American warplanes, helmets and rifles were made from bamboo and used as religious icons. Islanders began to march in parades with USA painted, carved or tattooed on their chests and backs. John Frum emerged as the name of their Messiah, although there are no records of an American soldier with that name.

  When the last American GI left at the end of the war, the islanders predicted John Frum’s return. The movement continued to flourish and on 15 February, 1957, an American flag was raised in Sulphur Bay to declare the religion of John Frum. It is on this date every year that John Frum Day is celebrated. They believe that John Frum is waiting in the volcano Yasur with his warriors to deliver his cargo to the people of Tana. During the festivities the elders march in an imitation army, a kind of military drill mixed with traditional dancing. Some carry imitation rifles made of bamboo and wear American army memorabilia such as caps, T-shirts and coats. They believe that their annual rituals will draw the god John Frum down from the volcano and deliver the cargo of prosperity to all of the islanders. [MotDoc, 2004]

  Still more recently, around 1960, on New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea, the Pomio Kivung cult was founded. It still flourishes.

  Pomio Kivung doctrine holds that adherence to the Ten Laws (a modified version of the Decalogue [Ten Commandments]) and the faithful performance of an extensive set of rituals, including the payment of fines for the purpose of gaining absolution, are essential to the moral and spiritual improvement that is necessary to hasten the return of the ancestors. The most important of these rituals aims at placating the ancestors, who make up the so-called “Village Government.” Headed by God, the Village Government includes those ancestors whom God has forgiven and perfected.

  The spiritual leaders of the Pomio Kivung have been its founder, Koriam, his principal assistant, Bernard, and Koriam’s successor, Kolman. Followers have regarded all three as already members of the Village Government and, hence, as divinities. All three have resided on earth physically (specifically in the Pomio region of the province), but their souls have dwelt with the ancestors all along.

  Achieving sufficient collective purification is the decisive condition for inducing the return of the ancestors and inaugurating the “Period of the Companies.” The Period of the Companies will be an era of unprecedented prosperity, which will result from the transfer of knowledge and an industrial infrastructure for the production of technological wonders and material wealth like that of the Western world. [Lawson and McCauley, 2002, p. 90]

  These cases may be exceptional. Your religion, you may believe, came into existence when its fundamental truth was revealed by God to somebody, who then passed it along to others. It flourishes today because you and the others of your faith know that it is the truth, and God has blessed you and encouraged you to keep the faith. It is as simple as that, for you. And why do all the other religions exist? If those people are just wrong, why don’t their creeds crumble as readily as false ideas about farming or obsolete building practices? They will crumble in due course, you may think, leaving only true religion, your religion, standing. Certainly there is some reason to believe this. In addition to the few dozen major religions in the world today—those whose adherents number in the hundreds of thousands or millions—there are thousands of less populous religions recognized. Two or three religions come into existence every day, and their typical lifespan is less than a decade.1 There is no way of knowing how many distinct religions have flourished for a while during the las
t ten or fifty or a hundred thousand years, but it might even be millions, of which all traces are now lost forever.

  Some religions have confirmed histories dating back for several millennia—but only if we are generous with our boundaries. The Mormon Church is less than two hundred years old, as its official name reminds us: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Protestantism is less than five hundred years old, Islam is less than fifteen hundred years old, Christianity is less than two thousand years old. Judaism is not even twice as old as that, and the Judaisms of today have evolved significantly from the earliest identifiable Judaism, though the varieties of Judaism are as nothing compared with the riotous blossoming of variations that Christianity has spawned in the last two millennia.