So, although I understand and sympathize with those who take offense at my invitation to consider the pros and cons of religion, I insist that they have no right to indulge themselves by declaring their love and then hiding behind the veil of righteous indignation or hurt feelings. Love is not enough. Have you ever had to face the heart-wrenching problem of a dear friend who has fallen head over heels in love with somebody who is just not worthy of her love? If you suggest this to her, you risk losing a friend and getting slapped in the face for your trouble, for people in love often make it a point of honor to respond irrationally and violently to any perceived slight of their beloved. Itâs part of the whole point of being in love, after all. When they say that love is blind, they say it without regret. It is commonly understood that love should be blind; the whole idea of assessment should be off limits when it comes to true love. But why? Common wisdom doesnât answer, and hardheaded economists have long dismissed the idea as romantic nonsense, but the evolutionary economist Robert Frank has pointed out that there is in fact an excellent (free-floating) rationale for the phenomenon of romantic love in the unruly marketplace of human mate-finding:
Because search is costly, it is rational to settle on a partner before having examined all potential candidates. Once a partner is chosen, however, the relevant circumstances will often changeâ¦. The resulting uncertainty makes it imprudent to undertake joint investments that would otherwise be strongly in each partyâs interest. In order to facilitate these investments, each party wants to make a binding commitment to remain in the relationshipâ¦. Objective personal characteristics may continue to play a role in determining which people are initially most attracted to one another, as much evidence suggests. But the poets are surely correct that the bond we call love does not consist of rational deliberations about these characteristics. It is instead an intrinsic bond, one in which the person is valued for his or her own sake. And precisely therein lies its value as a solution to the commitment problem. [1988, pp. 195â96]
As Steven Pinker says, âMurmuring that your loverâs looks, earning power, and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the romantic mood, even though the statement is statistically true. The way to a personâs heart is to declare the oppositeâthat youâre in love because you canât help itâ (1997, p. 418). This demonstrated (or at least passionately professed) helplessness is as close as you can muster to a guarantee that you are not still shopping around. Like all communicative signals, however, if it can be cheaply faked, your commitment signal will not be effective, and the result, as so often in the world of animal signaling, is the inflationary spiral of costly signaling (Zahavi, 1987). It is not just love-struck young men who shower their beloveds with presents they can barely afford; the bowerbirdsâ bowers are costly investments, and so are the ânuptial giftsâ of food and other goods provided by male moths, beetles, crickets, and many other creatures.
Has our evolved capacity for romantic love been exploited by religious memes? It would surely be a Good Trick. It would get people to think that it was actually honorable to take offense, to attack all skeptics with fury, to lash out wildly and without concern for their own safetyâlet alone the safety of the person they are attacking. Their beloved deserves nothing less than this, they think: a total commitment to eradicating the blasphemer. Of such stuff are fatwas made, but this meme is not at all restricted to Islam. There are plenty of misguided Christians, for instance, who will contemplate with relish the prospect of demonstrating the depths of their commitment by raining abuse on me for daring to question the love they have for their Jesus. Before they act on their self-indulgent fantasies, I hope they will pause to consider that any such action would actually bring dishonor to their faith.
Some of the saddest spectacles of the last century have been the way zealots of all faiths and ethnicities have defiled their own shrines and holy places, and brought shame and dishonor to their causes, by their acts of fanatical loyalty. Kosovo may have been a holy place to Serbs since the battle of 1389, but it is hard to see how Serbs can continue to cherish its memory after recent history. By destroying the âidolatrousâ Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan, the Taliban dishonored themselves and their tradition in ways that will take centuries of good works to expiate. The killing of hundreds of Muslims in reprisal for the killing of dozens of Hindus in the Akshardham temple in Gujarat besmirches the reputations of both religions, whose fanatical devotees should be reminded that the rest of the world is not just unmoved by, but sick and tired of, their respective demonstrations of their devotion. What would really impress us infidels would be an announcement, unilateral or joint, that the contested site was henceforth to be considered the Hall of Shame, no longer holy but, rather, a reminder to all of the evils of zealotry.
Since September 11, 2001, I have often thought that perhaps it was fortunate for the world that the attackers targeted the World Trade Center instead of the Statue of Liberty, for if they had destroyed our sacred symbol of democracy I fear that we Americans would have been unable to keep ourselves from indulging in paroxysms of revenge of a sort the world has never seen before. If that had happened, it would have befouled the meaning of the Statue of Liberty beyond any hope of subsequent redemptionâif there were any people left to care. I have learned from my students that this upsetting thought of mine is subject to several unfortunate misconstruals, so let me expand on it to ward them off. The killing of thousands of innocents in the World Trade Center was a heinous crime, much more evil than the destruction of the Statue of Liberty would have been. And, yes, the World Trade Center was a much more appropriate symbol of Al Qaedaâs wrath than the Statue of Liberty would have been, but for that very reason it didnât mean as much, as a symbol, to us. It was Mammon and Plutocrats and Globalization, not Lady Liberty. I do suspect that the fury with which many Americans would have responded to the unspeakable defilement of our cherished national symbol, the purest image of our aspirations as a democracy, would have made a sane and measured response extraordinarily difficult. This is the great danger of symbolsâthey can become too âsacred.â An important task for religious people of all faiths in the twenty-first century will be spreading the conviction that there are no acts more dishonorable than harming âinfidelsâ of one stripe or another for âdisrespectingâ a flag, a cross, a holy text.
By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse, and yet I persist. Why? Because I believe that it is very important to break this spell and get us all to look carefully at the question with which I began this section: are people right that the best way to live a good life is through religion? William James confronted the same problem squarely when he gave the Gifford Lectures that became his great book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and I will echo his plea for forbearance:
I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by moving always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope to bring you all to my way of thinking before the termination of these lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably against the empiricism which I profess. [1902, p. 334]
2 The academic smoke screen
The word God refers to a âdepthâ and âwholenessâ unlike anything that we humans know or can know. Certainly it is beyond our ability to discriminate and label.
âJames B. Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright, The Humanizing Brain
A mystery is a mystery. If, on the other hand, we consider that it is important to study how people communicate about the idea of something being a mystery, there is no a priori reason why this should be beyond the reach of scientific method.
âIlkka Pyysièainen, How Religion Works
To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that i
t is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bullrush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. And the same fires, which were kindled for heretics, will serve also for the destruction of philosophers.
âDavid Hume, The Natural History of Religion
James was trying to forestall dismissal by the devout, but they are not the only ones who resort to protectionism. A subtler, less forthright, but equally frustrating barrier to straightforward inquiry into the nature of religion has been erected and maintained by the scholarly friends of religion, many of whom are atheistic or agnostic connoisseurs, not champions of any creed. They do want to study religion, but only their way, not the way I am proposing, which by their lights is âscientistic,â âreductionistic,â and, of course, philistine. I alluded to this opposition in chapter 2, when I discussed the legendary gap that many want to see between the natural sciences and the interpretive sciences, Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. Anyone who tries to bring an evolutionary perspective to bear on any item of human culture, not just religion, can expect rebuffs ranging from howls of outrage to haughty dismissal from the literary, historical, and cultural experts in the humanities and social sciences.
When the cultural phenomenon is religion, the most popular move is pre-emptive disqualification, and it has been well known since the eighteenth century, when it was used to discredit the earliest atheists and deists (such as David Hume and Baron dâHolbach, and some great American heroes, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine). Here is an early-twentieth-century version from Emil Durkheim: âHe who does not bring to the study of religion a sort of religious sentiment cannot speak about it! He is like a blind man trying to talk about colorâ (1915, p. xvii). And here, half a century later, is an oft-quoted version from the great religious scholar Mircea Eliade:
A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in itâthe element of the sacred. [1963, p. iii]
You can find similar claims of pre-emptive disqualification protecting other topics. Only women are qualified to do research on women (according to some radical feminists), because only they can overcome the phallocentrism that renders males obtuse and biased in ways they can never acknowledge and counteract. Some multiculturalists insist that Europeans (including Americans) can never really cancel out their disabling Eurocentrism and understand the subjectivity of Third World people. It takes one to know one, according to this theme in all its variations. Well, then, should we all just hunker down in our isolationist enclaves and wait for death to overtake us, since we can never understand one another? And then there is the brand of defeatism in my own home discipline, philosophy of mind, the mysterian doctrine that insists that the human brain is simply not up to the task of understanding the human brain, that consciousness is not a puzzle but an insoluble mystery (so stop trying to explain it). What is transparent in all these claims is that they are not so much defeatist as protectionist: donât even try, because weâre afraid you might succeed! âYouâll never understand Indian street magic if youâre not an Indian born into the caste of magicians. It is impossible.â But of course it is possible (Siegel, 1991). âYouâll never understand music unless you are born with a great ear for musicâand perfect pitch.â Nonsense. In fact, people who have difficulty training themselves as musicians sometimes grind out insights into the nature of the music and how to perform it that were unavailable to those who glide effortlessly to musical mastery. Similarly, Temple Grandin (1996), who is autistic and hence has a tin ear for the intentional stance and folk psychology, has come up with striking observations about how people present themselves and interact, insights that had escaped the rest of us normal folk.
We would never let business tycoons get away with saying that since we werenât plutocrats ourselves we couldnât hope to understand the world of high finance and were hence disqualified from investigating their deals. Generals canât escape civilian oversight by claiming that only those in uniform can appreciate what they are doing, and doctors have had to open up their methods and practices to the scrutiny of experts who are not themselves M.D.âs. It would be dereliction of duty for us to let pedophiles insist that only those who appreciate a commitment to pedophilia can really understand them at all. So what we may say to those who insist that only those who believe, only those with a deep appreciation of the sacred, are to be entrusted with the investigation of religious phenomena, is that they are simply wrong, about both facts and principles. They are mistaken about the imaginative and investigative powers of those they would exclude, and they are wrong to suppose that it might be justifiable on any grounds to limit the investigation of religion to those who are religious. If we say this politely, firmly, and often, they may eventually stop playing this card and let us get on with our investigations, hampered though we may be by our lack of faith. Weâll just have to work harder.
A related smoke screen is the more general declaration that the methods of the natural sciences cannot possibly make progress on human culture, which requires âsemioticsâ or âhermeneutics,â not experiments. A favorite exponent of this position is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who has put it this way:
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be, therefore [emphasis added], not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. [1973, p. 5]
âThereforeâ? Back in 1973, it might have passed muster, but this argument is way out of date. That we human beings spin webs of significance is not in doubt, but those webs can be analyzed by methods that critically involve experiments and the disciplined methods of the natural sciences. Interpretation in the natural sciences is not opposed to experiment, and science isnât all subsumption under some covering law. All of cognitive science and all of evolutionary biology, for instance, is interpretive in ways that closely parallel some of the interpretive strategies of the humanities and anthropology (Dennett, 1983, 1995b).
In fact, one of the few serious differences between the natural sciences and the humanities is that all too many thinkers in the humanities have decided that the postmodernists are right: itâs all just stories, and all truth is relative. A cultural anthropologist who will go unnamed recently announced to his students that one of the great things about his field is that, given the same set of data, no two anthropologists would arrive at the same interpretation. End of story. Scientists often have just such disagreements about how to interpret a shared pool of unchallenged data, but for them it is the beginning of a task of resolution: which of them is wrong? Experiments and further statistical analyses and the like are then designed to answer the questionâby discovering the truth (not the capital âTâ Truth about everything, but just the ho-hum truth about this particular little factual disagreement). It is this subsequent process (which may take years) that has been declared impossible or unnecessary by these ideologues, who scoff at the very idea that there are objective truths about such matters to be discovered. They couldnât claim to prove that there is no such thing as objective truth, of course, for that would be to contradict themselves blatantly, and they have at least that much respect for logic. So they content themselves with clucking at the presumption and naïveté of anyone who still believes in truth. It is hard to convey how boring this relentless barrage of defensive sneering is, so it is not surprising that some investigators have stopped trying to rebut it, and settle for poking fun at it instea
d:
For example, right now I am typing on my keyboard with the intention of creating a coherent story about the logic of postmodernism. Were someone to study me, they might look beyond that surface level intention I just offered and infer instead that what I really am doing is inventing a story from my personal experiences for the purposes of advancing my academic career. To accomplish this, they might argue, I am constructing a discourse that sets me apart from other people and thus increases my value as a writer. (The more I confuse you, the smarter I appear!) Why do I do this? Because I am a self-interested white heterosexual privileged Protestant male who uses knowledge for power (a strategy not of savvy but of manipulation and exploitation). For postmodernists, that which gets presented as truth (e.g., this book) is an invention, just a take on reality, that masks what I am really doingâtricking everyone in order to acquire and maintain power.[Slone, 2004, pp. 39â40]
The pioneers whose scientific work on religion I have been introducingâAtran, Boyer, Diamond, Dunbar, Lawson, McCauley, McClenon, Sperber, Wilson, and the restâall have to deal with this. It can be amusing, in the end, to see how they all brace themselves against this onslaught and, following in William Jamesâs footsteps, beg for an open-minded audience. So much pleading! The irony is that these intrepid interlopers have been far more conscientious in their attempts to get a sympathetic, informed view of religion than the self-appointed defenders of religion have been in trying to understand the point of view and methods of those they are resisting. When the humanist defenders have studied evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience (and statistics and the rest) with the same energy and imagination that the scientists have devoted to studying the histories, rites, and creeds of the various religions, they will become worthy critics of the work they fear.
Breaking the Spell Page 28