Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  4 The domestication of religions

  When a race of plants is once pretty well established, the seed-raisers do not pick out the best plants, but merely go over their seed-beds, and pull up the “rogues,” as they call the plants that deviate from the proper standard.

  —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

  We now begin to see that what we call Christianity—and what we identify as Christian tradition—actually represents only a small selection of specific sources, chosen from among dozens of others. Who made that selection, and for what reasons? Why were these other writings excluded and banned as “heresy”? What made them so dangerous?

  —Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

  Folk religions emerge out of the daily lives of people living in small groups, and share common features the world over. How and when did these metamorphose into organized religions? There is a general consensus among researchers that the big shift responsible was the emergence of agriculture and the larger settlements that this made both possible and necessary. Researchers disagree, however, on what to emphasize in this major transition. The creation of nonportable food stockpiles, and the resultant shift to fixed residence, permitted the emergence of an unprecedented division of labor (Seabright, 2004, is especially clear about this), and this in turn gave rise to markets, and opportunities for ever more specialized occupations. These new ways for people to interact created novel opportunities and novel needs. When you find that you have to deal on a daily basis with people who are not your close kin, the prospect of a few like-minded people forming a coalition that is quite different from an extended family must almost always present itself, and often be an attractive option. Boyer (2001) is not alone in arguing that the transition from folk religion to organized religion was primarily one of these market phenomena.

  Throughout history, guilds and other groups of craftsmen and specialists have tried to establish common prices and common standards and to stop non-guild members from delivering comparable services. By establishing a quasi monopoly, they make sure that all the custom comes their way. By maintaining common prices and common standards, they make it difficult for a particularly skilled or efficient member to undersell the others. So most people pay a small price for being members of a group that guarantees a minimal share of the market to each of its members. [p. 275]

  The first step to such organization is the big one, but the next steps, from a guild of priests or shamans to what are, in effect, firms (and franchises and brand names), are an almost inevitable consequence of the growing self-consciousness and market savvy of those individuals who joined to form the guilds in the first place. Cui bono? When individuals start asking themselves how best to enhance and preserve the organizations they have created, they radically change the focus of the question, bringing new selective pressures into existence.

  Darwin appreciated this, and used the transition from what he called “unconscious” selection to “methodical” selection as a pedagogical bridge to explain his great idea of natural selection in the opening chapter of his masterpiece. (On the Origin of Species is a great read, by the way. Just as atheists often read “the Bible as literature” and come away deeply moved by the poetry and insight without being converted, creationists and others who cannot bring themselves to believe in evolution can still be thrilled by reading the founding document of modern evolutionary theory—whether or not it changes their minds about evolution.)

  At the present time, eminent breeders try by methodical selection, with a distinct object in view, to make a new strain or subbreed, superior to any existing in the country. But for our purpose, a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed. Nevertheless I cannot doubt that this process, continued during centuries, would improve and modify any breed…. There is reason to believe that King Charles’s spaniel has been unconsciously modified to a large extent since the time of that monarch.[pp. 34–35]

  Domestication of both plants and animals occurred without any farseeing intention or invention on the part of the stewards of the seeds and studs. But what a stroke of good fortune for those lineages that became domesticated! All that remains of the ancestors of today’s grains are small scattered patches of wild-grass cousins, and the nearest surviving relatives of all the domesticated animals could be carried off in a few arks. How clever of wild sheep to have acquired that most versatile adaptation, the shepherd! By forming a symbiotic alliance with Homo sapiens, sheep could outsource their chief survival tasks: food finding and predator avoidance. They even got shelter and emergency medical care thrown in as a bonus. The price they paid—losing the freedom of mate selection and being slaughtered instead of being killed by predators (if that is a cost)—was a pittance compared with the gain in offspring survival it purchased. But of course it wasn’t their cleverness that explains the good bargain. It was the blind, foresightless cleverness of Mother Nature, evolution, which ratified the free-floating rationale of this arrangement. Sheep and other domesticated animals are, in fact, significantly more stupid than their wild relatives—because they can be. Their brains are smaller (relative to body size and weight), and this is not just due to their having been bred for muscle mass (meat). Since both the domesticated animals and their domesticators have enjoyed huge population explosions (going from less than 1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass ten thousand years ago to over 98 percent today—see appendix B), there can be no doubt that this symbiosis was mutualistic—fitness-enhancing to both parties.

  What I now want to suggest is that, alongside the domestication of animals and plants, there was a gradual process in which the wild (self-sustaining) memes of folk religion became thoroughly domesticated. They acquired stewards. Memes that are fortunate enough to have stewards, people who will work hard and use their intelligence to foster their propagation and protect them from their enemies, are relieved of much of the burden of keeping their own lineages going. In extreme cases, they no longer need to be particularly catchy, or appeal to our sensual instincts at all. The multiplication-table memes, for instance, to say nothing of the calculus memes, are hardly crowd-pleasers, and yet they are duly propagated by hardworking teachers—meme shepherds—whose responsibility it is to keep these lineages strong. The wild memes of language and folk religion, in other words, are like rats and squirrels, pigeons and cold viruses—magnificently adapted to living with us and exploiting us whether we like them or not. The domesticated memes, in contrast, depend on help from human guardians to keep going.

  People have been poring over their religious practices and institutions for almost as long as they have been refining their agricultural practices and institutions, and these reflective examiners have all had agendas—individual or shared conceptions of what was valuable and why. Some have been wise and some foolish, some widely informed and some naïve, some pure and saintly, and some venal and vicious. Jared Diamond’s hypothesis about the practically exhaustive search by our ancestors for domesticatable species in their neighborhoods (discussed in chapter 5) can be extended. Curious practitioners will also have uncovered whatever Good Tricks are in the nearest neighborhoods in the Design Space of possible religions. Diamond sees the transition from bands of fewer than a hundred people to tribes of hundreds to chiefdoms of thousands to states of over fifty thousand people as an inexorable march “from egalitarianism to kleptocracy,” government by thieves. Speaking of chiefdoms, he remarks:

  At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes…. W
hy do the commoners tolerate the transfer of the fruits of their hard labor to kleptocrats? This question, raised by political theorists from Plato to Marx, is raised anew by voters in every modern election. [1997, p. 276]

  There are four ways, he suggests, that kleptocrats have tried to maintain their power: (1) disarm the populace and arm the elite, (2) make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, (3) use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence, or (4) construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy (p. 277).

  How might a religion support a kleptocracy? By an alliance between the political leader and the priests, of course, in which, first of all, the leader is declared to be divine, or descended from the gods, or, as Diamond puts it, at least having “a hotline to the gods.”

  Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other—by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others. At the cost of a few society members who die in battle as soldiers, the whole society becomes much more effective at conquering other societies or resisting attacks. [p. 278]

  So we find the same devices invented over and over again, in just about every religion, and many nonreligious organizations as well. None of this is new today—as Lord Acton said more than a century ago, “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”—but it was new once upon a time, when our ancestors were first exploring design revisions to our most potent institutions.

  For instance, accepting inferior status to an invisible god is a cunning stratagem, whether or not its cunning is consciously recognized by those who stumble upon it. Those who rely on it will thrive, wittingly or otherwise. As every subordinate knows, one’s commands are more effective than they might otherwise be if one can accompany them with a threat to tell the bigger boss if disobedience ensues. (Variations on this stratagem are well known to Mafia underlings and used-car salesmen, among others—“I myself am not authorized to make such an offer, so I’ll have to check with my boss. Excuse me for a minute.”)

  This helps to explain what is otherwise a bit of a puzzle. Any dictator depends on the fidelity of his immediate staff—in the simple sense that any two or three of them could easily overpower him (he can’t go around with dagger drawn all his life). How do you, as a dictator, ensure that your immediate staff puts its fidelity to you above any thoughts they may very well have about replacing you? Putting the fear of a higher power in their heads is a pretty good move. There is often, no doubt, an unspoken détente between chief priest and king—each needs the other for his power, and together they need the gods above. Walter Burkert is particularly Machiavellian in his account of how this stratagem brings the institution of ritual praise in its wake, and notes some of its useful complexity:

  By the force of his verbal competence [the priest] not only rises to a superior level in imagination but succeeds in reversing the attention structure: it is the superior who is made to pay heed to the inferior’s song or speech of praise. Praise is the recognized form of making noise in the presence of superiors; in a well-structured form, it tends to become music. Praise ascends to the heights like incense. Thus the tension between high and low is both stressed and relaxed, as the lower one establishes his place within a system he accepts emphatically. [1996, p. 91]

  The gods will get you if you try to cross either one of us. We have already noted the role of rituals, both individual rehearsals and unison error-absorption sessions, in enhancing the fidelity of memetic transmission, and noted that these are enforced by making nonparticipation costly in one way or another. Moreover, as Joseph Bulbulia suggests, “It may be that religious rituals put on display the natural power of a religious community, an awesome show to potential defectors of what they are up against” (2004, p. 40). But what drives the community spirit in the first place? Is the project of keeping groups united mainly just a matter of kleptocrats’ inventing ways of keeping their sheep? Or is there a more benign story to uncover?

  Chapter 6 The transmission of religion has been attended by voluminous revision, often deliberate and foresighted, as people became stewards of the ideas that had entered them, domesticating them. Secrecy, deception, and systematic invulnerability to disconfirmation are some of the features that have emerged, and these have been designed by processes that were sensitive to new answers to the cui bono? question, as the stewards’ motives entered the process.

  Chapter 7 Why do people join groups? Is this simply a rational decision on their part, or are there relatively mindless forces of group selection at work? Though there is much to be said in favor of both of these proposals, they do not exhaust the plausible models that attempt to explain our readiness to form lasting allegiances.

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Invention of Team Spirit

  1 A path paved with good intentions

  And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it.

  —C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

  Every control system, whether it is an animal nervous system, a plant’s system of growth and self-repair, or an engineered artifact such as an airplane-guidance system, is designed to protect something. And that something must include itself! (If it “dies” prematurely, it fails on its mission, whatever it is.) The “self-interest” that thus defines the evaluation machinery of all control systems can splinter, however, when a control system gets reflective. Our human reflectiveness opens up a rich field of opportunities for us to revise our aims, including our largest purposes. When you can start to think about the pros and cons of joining an existing coalition versus breaking away and trying to start a new one, or about how to deal with the problems of loyalty among your kin, or the need to change the power structure of your social environment, you create avenues by which to escape the default presumptions of your initial design.

  Whenever an agent—an intentional system, in my terminology—makes a decision about the best course of action, all things considered, we can ask from whose perspective this optimality is being judged. A more or less standard default assumption, at least in the Western world, and especially among economists, is to treat each human agent as a sort of isolated and individualistic locus of well-being. What’s in it for me? Rational self-interest. But although there has to be something in the role of the self—something that answers the cui bono? question for the decision-maker under examination—there is no necessity in this default treatment, common as it is. A self-as-ultimate-beneficiary can in principle be indefinitely distributed in space and time. I can care for others, or for a larger social structure, for instance. There is nothing that restricts me to a me as contrasted to an us.1 I can still take my task to be looking out for Number One while including, under Number One, not just myself, and not just my family, but also Islam, or Oxfam, or the Chicago Bulls! The possibility, opened up by cultural evolution, of installing such novel perspectives in our brains is what gives our species, and only our species, the capacity for moral—and immoral—thinking.

  Here is a well-known trajectory: You begin with a heartfelt desire to help other people and the conviction, however well or ill founded, that your guild or club or church is the coalition that can best serve to improve the welfare of others. If times are particularly tough, this conditional stewardship—I’m doing what’s good for the guild because that will be good for everybody—may be displaced by the narrower concern for the integrity of the guild itself, and for good reason
: if you believe that the institution in question is the best path to goodness, the goal of preserving it for future projects, still unimagined, can be the most rational higher goal you can define. It is a short step from this to losing track of or even forgetting the larger purpose and devoting yourself singlemindedly to furthering the interests of the institution, at whatever costs. A conditional or instrumental allegiance can thus become indistinguishable in practice from a commitment to something “good in itself.” A further short step perverts this parochial summum bonum to the more selfish goal of doing whatever it takes to keep yourself at the helm of the institution (“Who better than I to lead us to triumph over our adversaries?”).

  We have all seen this happen many times, and may even have caught ourselves in the act of forgetting just why we wanted to be leaders in the first place. Such transitions bring conscious decision-making to bear on issues that had previously been tracked by the foresightless process of differential replication by natural selection (of memes, or of genes), and this creates new rivals as answers to the cui bono? question. What is good all things considered may not coincide with what is good for the institution, which may not be what makes life easiest for the institution’s leader, but these different benchmarks have a way of being substituted for one another under the pressure of real-time reflective control. When this happens, the free-floating rationales that are blindly sculpted by earlier competitions can come to be augmented or even replaced by represented rationales, rationales that are not just anchored in individual minds, in diagrams and plans, and in conversations but used—argued over, reasoned about, agreed upon. People thus become conscious stewards of their memes, no longer taking their survival for granted the way we take our language for granted, but taking on the goal of fostering, protecting, enhancing, spreading the Word.2