Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  Innate curiosity, stimulated by music and rhythmic dancing and other forms of “sensory pageantry” (Lawson and McCauley, 2002), could probably account for the initial motivation to join the chorus—especially if we have an evolved innate desire to belong, to join with the others, especially the elders, as many have recently argued. (This will be a topic in the next chapter.) Then there are the phenomena of “mass hypnosis” and “mob hysteria,” still poorly understood but undeniably potent effects observable when people are brought together in crowds and given something exciting to react to. Once people find themselves in the chorus, other motivations can take over. Anything that makes the cost of nonparticipation steep will do the trick, and if community members get the idea of encouraging other members not only to participate but to inflict costs on those who shirk their responsibility to participate, the phenomenon can become self-sustaining (Boyd and Richerson, 1992).

  Doesn’t there have to be someone to prime the pump? How would this initially get started unless there were some people, some agents, who wanted to start a ritual tradition? As usual, this hunch betrays a failure of evolutionary imagination. It is of course possible—and in some instances surely likely or even proven—that some community leader or other agent set out to design a ritual to serve a particular purpose, but we have seen that such an author is not strictly necessary. Even elaborate and expensive rituals of public rehearsal could emerge out of earlier practices and habits without conscious design.17

  Public rehearsal is a key process of memory enhancement, but it is not enough. We also have to look at the features of what is rehearsed, for these can themselves be designed to be more and more memory-friendly. A key innovation is breaking down the material to be transmitted into something like an alphabet, a smallish repertoire of norms of production. In appendix A, I describe how the reliability of DNA replication itself depends on there being a finite code or ensemble of elements, an alphabet of sorts, such as A, C, G, T. This is a form of digitization that allows tiny fluctuations or variations in execution to be absorbed or wiped out in the next round. The design idea of digitization has been made famous in the computer age, but earlier applications of it can be seen in the ways in which religious rituals—like dances and poems and words themselves—can be broken down into easily recognizable elements fit for what Dan Sperber (2000) calls “triggered production” (see appendixes A and C). No two people may do their curtsy or salute or kowtow in exactly the same way, but each will be clearly recognizable as a curtsy or salute or kowtow by the rest of the group, which thereby absorbs the noise of the moment and transmits to the future only the essential skeleton, the spelling out of the moves. When the children watch their elders doing the moves, whether in a secular folk dance or a folk-religious ceremony (and that distinction will be quite arbitrary or nonexistent in some cultures), they learn an alphabet of behaviors, and they may vie with one another to see who can do the most dashing A-move or the curliest B-move or the loudest C-chant, but they all agree on what the moves are, and therein lies a huge compression of the information that must be transmitted. This kind of compression can be accurately measured on your home computer by comparing a bitmap of a page of text (which makes no distinction between alphabet characters and smudges or inkblots, laboriously representing every dot) and a text file of the same page, which will be orders of magnitude smaller.

  To speak of an “alphabet” as composed of a “canonical” set of things to remember is to be doubly anachronistic, using later technology (written language and the conscious and deliberate elevation of a restricted canon of prescribed beliefs and texts) to analyze the design strengths of earlier innovations in transmission methods that had no authors. These were further enhanced by the use of rhythm and rhyme—to commit a further anachronism, since these “technical” terms were surely invented long after the effectiveness of the properties was “recognized” by the blind watchmaker of cultural selection. Rhythm and rhyme and musical pitch all provided additional bolstering (Rubin, 1995), turning unmemorable strings of words into sound bites (let’s wallow in anachronism, while we’re at it).

  A somewhat less obvious design feature was the inclusion of incomprehensible elements! Why would this help transmission? By obliging the transmitters to fall back on “direct quotation” in circumstances where they might otherwise be tempted to use “indirect quotation” and just transmit the gist of the occasion “in their own words”—a dangerous source of mutation. The underlying idea is familiar enough to us all in the (usually despised, but effective) pedagogical method: rote learning. “Don’t try to understand these formulas! Just memorize them!” If you are simply unable to understand the formulas, or some aspect of them, you don’t need the admonition; you have no recourse but memorization, and that reinforces the reliance on strict rehearsal and the error-correcting genius of alphabets. The admonition, however, may well be there as well, as yet another memory-enhancing feature: Say the formula exactly! Your life depends on it! (If you don’t say the magic word just right, the door won’t open. The devil will get you if you misspeak.) To repeat the refrain that should be familiar by now: nobody had to understand these rationales, or even want to improve the copying fidelity of the rituals in which they participated; it is rather that any rituals that just happened to be favored by these features would have a powerful replicative advantage over competing rituals that lacked them.

  Note that, so far, the adaptations that we have uncovered as likely contributors to the survival of religions have been neutral on the subject of whether or not we are beneficiaries. They are features of the medium, not the message, designed to ensure the transmission fidelity—a requirement of evolution—while almost entirely neutral with regard to whether what is transmitted is good (a mutualist), bad (a parasite), or neutral (a commensal). To be sure, we hypothesized that the evolution of shamanic healing rituals was probably a benign or mutualist development, not just a bad habit for which our ancestors suckered, and there is a good chance that divination actually helped (and didn’t just seem to help) our ancestors make up their minds when they needed to, but these are still open empirical questions on which we could revise our opinion without collapse of the theory if the evidence warranted. And no one should object, at this point, that we haven’t begun talking about all the good that religion does. We haven’t had to address that issue yet, which is as it should be. We should exhaust our minimalist options in order to lay the foundations for a proper consideration of that question.

  Chapter 5 The obvious expensiveness of folk religion, a challenge to biology, can be accounted for by hypotheses that are not yet confirmed but testable. Probably the excess population of imaginary agents generated by the HADD yielded candidates to press into service as decision aids, in divination, or as shaman’s accomplices, in health maintenance, for instance. These co-opted or exapted mental constructs were then subjected to extensive design revision under the selective pressure for reproductive prowess.

  Chapter 6 As human culture grew and people became more reflective, folk religion became transformed into organized religion; the free-floating rationales of the earlier designs were supplemented and sometimes replaced by carefully crafted reasons as religions became domesticated.

  CHAPTER SIX The Evolution of Stewardship

  1 The music of religion

  It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

  —Duke Ellington

  The central claim of this chapter is that folk religion turned into organized religion in much the same way folk music spawned what we might call organized music: professional musicians and composers, written representations and rules, concert halls, critics, agents, and the rest. In both cases the shift happened for many reasons but largely because, as people became more and more reflective about both their practices and their reactions, they could then become more and more inventive in thei
r explorations of the space of possibilities. Both music and religion gradually became more “artful” or sophisticated, more elaborate, more of a production. Not necessarily better in any absolute sense, but better able to respond to increasingly complicated demands from populations that were biologically pretty much the same as their distant ancestors but culturally enlarged, both equipped and encumbered.

  There is artifice in the design and execution of religious practices, as anyone knows who has ever suffered through an ineptly conducted religious ceremony. A stammering and prosaic minister and boring liturgy, shaky singing from the choir, people forgetting when to stand and what to say and do—such a flawed performance can drive away even the best-intentioned congregants. More artfully celebrated occasions can raise the congregation to sublime ecstasy. We can analyze the artifice in religious texts and ceremonies just as we can analyze the artifice in literature, music, dance, architecture, and other arts. A good professor of music theory can take apart a Mozart symphony or a Bach cantata and show you how the various design features work to achieve their “magic,” but some people prefer not to delve into these matters, for the same reason that they don’t want stage magic tricks explained: for them, explanation diminishes the “wonder.” Maybe so, but compare the uncomprehending awe with which the musically uneducated confront a symphony to the equally superficial appreciation of someone at a soccer match who doesn’t know the rules or the fine points of the game, and just sees lots of kicking the ball back and forth and vigorous running around. “Great action!” they may sincerely exclaim, but they’re missing most of the excellence on offer. Mozart and Bach—and Manchester United—deserve better. The designs and techniques of religion can also be studied with the same detached curiosity, with valuable results.

  Consider adopting the same inquisitive attitude to religion, especially to your own religion. It is a finely tuned amalgam of brilliant plays and stratagems, capable of holding people enthralled and loyal for their entire lives, lifting them out of their selfishness and mundane ways in much the way music often does, but even more so. Understanding how it works is as much a preamble to better appreciating it or making it work better as it is to trying to dismantle it. And the analysis I am urging is, after all, just the continuation of the reflective process that has brought religion to the state it is now in. Every minister in every faith is like a jazz musician, keeping traditions alive by playing the beloved standards the way they are supposed to be played, but also incessantly gauging and deciding, slowing the pace or speeding up, deleting or adding another phrase to a prayer, mixing familiarity and novelty in just the right proportions to grab the minds and hearts of the listeners in attendance. The best performances are not just like good music; they are a kind of music. Listen to the recorded sermons of the Reverend C. L. Franklin (Aretha Franklin’s father, and famous among gospel preachers before she recorded any hits), or the white Baptist preacher Brother John Sherfey, for example.1

  Such performer-composers are not just vocalists; their instrument is the congregation, and they play it with the passionate but knowledgeable artistry of a violinist entrusted with a Stradivarius. In addition to the immediate effects today—a smile or “Amen!” or “Hallelujah!”—and short-term effects—returning to church next Sunday, putting another dollar in the collection plate—there are long-term effects. By choosing which passages of Scripture will be replicated this week, the minister shapes not just the order of worship but the minds of the worshipers. Unless you are a remarkable and rare scholar, you carry around in your personal memory only a fraction of the holy texts of your faith—those that you have heard over and over again since your childhood, sometimes intoning them in unison with the congregation, whether or not you have deliberately committed any of them to memory. Just as the Latin minds of ancient Rome gave way to French and Italian and Spanish minds, Christian minds today are quite unlike the minds of the earliest Christians. The major religions of today are as different from their ancestral versions as today’s music is different from the music of ancient Greece and Rome. The changes that have been established are far from random. They have tracked the restless curiosity and changing needs of our encultured species.

  The human capacity for reflection yields an ability to notice and evaluate patterns in our own behavior (“Why do I keep falling for that?” “It seemed like a good idea at the time, but why?”…). This enhances our ability to represent future prospects and opportunities, which in turn threatens the stability of any ill-grounded social practices that cannot survive such skeptical attention. Once people start “catching on,” a system that has “worked” for generations can implode overnight. Traditions can erode more swiftly than stone walls and slate roofs, and preventive maintenance of an institution’s creeds and practices can become a full-time occupation for professionals. But not all institutions get, or require, such maintenance.

  2 Folk religion as practical know-how

  Among the Nuer it is particularly auspicious to sacrifice a bull, but since bulls are particularly valuable, a cucumber will do just fine most of the time.

  —E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Bringing Ritual to Mind

  In the face of inevitable wear and tear, no designed thing persists for long without renewal and replication. The institutions and habits of human culture are just as bound by this principle, the second law of thermodynamics, as are the organisms, organs, and instincts of biology. But not all culturally transmitted practices need stewardship. Languages, for instance, don’t require the services of usage police and grammarians—though in European languages they have long had a surfeit of these self-appointed protectors of integrity. One of the main claims of the previous chapter is that folk religions are like languages in this regard: they can pretty much take care of themselves. The rituals that persist are those that are self-perpetuating, whether or not anybody devotes serious effort to the goal of maintaining them. Memes could acquire new tricks—adaptations—that could help them secure this longevity of their lineages whether or not anybody appreciated them. Thus the question of whether folk religions have ever provided a clear benefit to people—whether the memes that compose them are mutualist memes, not commensals or parasites—could be left unanswered for the time being. The benefits of folk religion may seem obvious—as obvious as the benefits of language—but we need to remind ourselves that a benefit to human genetic fitness is not the same thing as a benefit to human happiness or human welfare. What makes us happy may not make us more prolific, which is all that matters to genes.

  Even language should be viewed with as much neutrality as we can muster. Perhaps language is just a bad habit that happened to spread! How on earth could that be? Like this: Once language began to be the fad among our ancestors, those who didn’t swiftly catch on to language were pretty much left out of the mating game. Chat or go childless. (This would be the sexual-selection theory of language: glibness as the peacock’s tail for Homo sapiens. According to this theory, it might be true that if none of us had ever had language we’d all have done better in the offspring department, but once the costly handicap of language caught on among the females, males without it tended to die without offspring, so they couldn’t afford not to make the investment, however difficult it made their lives.) Unlike tail feathers, which you have to grow with whatever equipment your parents endowed you with, languages spread horizontally or culturally, so we need to consider them as interactors in the drama as well, with their own prospects for reproduction. On this theory, the reason we love speaking is like the reason that mice infected with Toxoplasma gondii love to taunt cats—languages have enslaved our poor brains and made us eager accomplices in their own propagation!

  That’s a far-fetched hypothesis, since language’s contributions to genetic fitness are all too obvious. There are now over six billion of us crowding up the planet and mon
opolizing its resources, while our nearest kin, the languageless bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas, are all threatened with extinction. Setting aside the hypotheses that our running ability or hairlessness is the secret of our success, we can be quite confident that the memes of language have been fitness-enhancing mutualists, not parasites. Nevertheless, framing the hypothesis reminds us that genetic evolution doesn’t foster happiness or well-being directly; it cares only about the number of our offspring that survive to make grand-offspring and so on. Folk religion may well have played an important role in the propagation of Homo sapiens, but we don’t know that yet. The fact that, so far as we know, all human populations have had some version of it doesn’t establish that. All known human populations have also had the common cold, which—so far as we know—is no mutualist.

  How long could folk religion be carried along by our ancestors before reflection began to transform it? We may get some perspective on this by looking at other species. It is obvious that birds don’t need to understand the principles of aerodynamics that dictate the shapes of their wings. It is less obvious—but still true—that birds can be uncomprehending participants in such elaborate rituals as leks—the mating meeting places sometimes called “nature’s nightclubs”—where females of a local population of a species gather to observe the competitive performances by the males, who strut their stuff. The rationale for leks, which are also found in some mammals, fish, and even insects, is clear: leks pay for themselves as efficient methods of mate selection under specifiable conditions. But the animals that participate in leks don’t need to have any understanding of why they do what they do. The males show up and show off, and the females pay attention and let their choices be guided by the “dictates of their hearts,” which, unbeknownst to them, have been shaped by natural selection over many generations.2