Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  If this is the precious meaning our lives are vouchsafed thanks to our allegiance to one religion or another, it is not such a bargain, in my opinion. Is this the best we can do? Is it not tragic that so many people around the world find themselves enlisted against their will in a conspiracy of silence, either because they secretly believe that most of the world’s population is wasting their lives in delusion (but they are too tenderhearted—or devious—to say so), or because they secretly believe that their own tradition is just such a delusion (but they fear for their own safety if they admit it)?

  What alternatives are there? There are the moderates who revere the tradition they were raised in, simply because it is their tradition, and who are prepared to campaign, tentatively, for the details of their tradition simply because, in the marketplace of ideas, somebody should stick up for each tradition until we can sort out the good from the better and settle for the best we can find, all things considered. This is like allegiance to a sports team, and it, too, can give meaning to a life—if not taken too seriously. I am a Red Sox fan simply because I grew up in the Boston area and have happy memories of Ted Williams and Jimmy Piersall and Jackie Jensen and Carl Yastrzemski and Wade Boggs and Luis Tiant and Pudge Fisk, among others. My allegiance to the Red Sox is enthusiastic, but cheerfully arbitrary and undeluded. The Red Sox aren’t my team because they are, in fact, the Best; they are “the Best” (in my eyes) because they are my team. I bask in the glory of their victory in 2004 (which was, of course, the Most Amazing and Inspiring Come-from-Behind Saga Ever), and if the team were ever to disgrace itself, I would be not just deeply chagrined but personally ashamed—as if I had something to do with it. And of course I do have something to do with it; my tiny personal contribution to the ocean of local enthusiasm and pride actually does buoy the players’ spirits (as they always insist).

  This is a kind of love, but not the rabid love that leads people to lie, and torture, and kill. Those who feel guilty contemplating “betraying” the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the “eternal” tradition introduced to them in their youth—is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.

  3 What can we say about sacred values?

  We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.

  —W. H. Auden

  For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems that are beyond our comprehension. Well, the truth is there are simple answers. They are just not easy ones.

  —Ronald Reagan, inaugural address as governor of California, January 1977

  If our tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine criticism. It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation.

  —Sam Harris, The End of Faith

  In order to adopt such a moderate position, however, you have to loosen your grip on the absolutes that are apparently one of the main attractions of many religious creeds. It isn’t easy being moral, and it seems to be getting harder and harder these days. It used to be that most of the world’s ills—disease, famine, war—were quite beyond the capacities of everyday people to ameliorate. There was nothing they could do about it, and since “‘ought’ implies ‘can, ’” people could ignore the catastrophes on the other side of the globe—if they even knew about them—with a clear conscience, since they were powerless to avert them in any way. Living by a few simple, locally applicable maxims could more or less guarantee that one lived about as good a life as was possible at the time. No longer.

  Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn’t kept pace (Dennett, 1986, 1988). You can have a test-tube baby or take a morning-after pill to keep from having a baby; you can satisfy your sexual urges in the privacy of your room by downloading Internet pornography, and you can copy your favorite music for free instead of buying it; you can keep your money in secret offshore bank accounts and purchase stock in cigarette companies that are exploiting impoverished Third World countries; and you can lay minefields, smuggle nuclear weapons in suitcases, make nerve gas, and drop “smart bombs” with pinpoint accuracy. Also, you can arrange to have a hundred dollars a month automatically sent from your bank account to provide education for ten girls in an Islamic country who otherwise would not learn to read and write, or to benefit a hundred malnourished people, or provide medical care for AIDS sufferers in Africa. You can use the Internet to organize citizen monitoring of environmental hazards, or to check the honesty and performance of government officials—or to spy on your neighbors. Now, what ought we to do?

  In the face of these truly imponderable questions, it is entirely reasonable to look for a short set of simple answers. H. L. Mencken cynically said, “For every complex problem, there is a simple answer…and it is wrong.” But maybe he was wrong! Maybe one Golden Rule or Ten Commandments or some other short list of absolutely nonnegotiable Dos and Don’ts resolves all the predicaments just fine, once you figure out how to apply them. Nobody would deny, however, that it is far from obvious how any of the favored rules or principles can be interpreted to fit all our quandaries. As Scott Atran points out, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is cited by religious opponents of the death penalty, and by religious proponents as well (2002, p. 253). The principle of the Sanctity of Human Life sounds bracingly clear and absolute: every human life is equally sacred, equally inviolable; as with the king in chess, no price can be placed on it—aside from “infinity,” since to lose it is to lose everything. But in fact we all know that life isn’t, and can’t be, like chess. There are multitudes of interfering “games” going on at once. What are we to do when more than one human life is at stake? If each life is infinitely valuable and none more valuable than another, how are we to dole out the few transplantable kidneys that are available, for instance? Modern technology only exacerbates the issues, which are ancient. Solomon faced tough choices with notable wisdom, and every mother who has ever had less than enough food for her own children (let alone her neighbor’s children) has had to confront the impracticality of applying the principle of the Sanctity of Human Life.

  Surely just about everybody has faced a moral dilemma and secretly wished, “If only somebody—somebody I trusted—could just tell me what to do!” Wouldn’t this be morally inauthentic? Aren’t we responsible for making our own moral decisions? Yes, but the virtues of “do it yourself” moral reasoning have their limits, and if you decide, after conscientious consideration, that your moral decision is to delegate further moral decisions in your life to a trusted expert, then you have made your own moral decision. You have decided to take advantage of the division of labor that civilization makes possible and get the help of expert specialists.

  We applaud the wisdom of this course in all other important areas of decision-making (don’t try to be your own doctor; the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and so forth). Even in the case of political decisions, like which way to vote, the policy of delegation can be defended. When my wife and I go to Town Meeting, I know that she has studied the issues that confront our town so much more assiduously than I have that I routinely follow her lead, voting the way she tells me to vote, even if I’m not sure just why, because I have plenty of evidence for my conviction that if we did take the time and energy to thrash it all out she’d persuade me that, all things considered, he
r opinion was correct. Is this a dereliction of my duties as a citizen? I don’t think so, but it does depend on my having good grounds for trusting her judgment. Love is not enough. That’s why those who have an unquestioning faith in the correctness of the moral teachings of their religion are a problem: if they themselves haven’t conscientiously considered, on their own, whether their pastors or priests or rabbis or imams are worthy of this delegated authority over their own lives, then they are in fact taking a personally immoral stand.

  This is perhaps the most shocking implication of my inquiry, and I do not shrink from it, even though it may offend many who think of themselves as deeply moral. It is commonly supposed that it is entirely exemplary to adopt the moral teachings of one’s own religion without question, because—to put it simply—it is the word of God (as interpreted, always, by the specialists to whom one has delegated authority). I am urging, on the contrary, that anybody who professes that a particular point of moral conviction is not discussable, not debatable, not negotiable, simply because it is the word of God, or because the Bible says so, or because “that is what all Muslims [Hindus, Sikhs…] believe, and I am a Muslim [Hindu, Sikh…],” should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously, excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing.

  The argument for this is straightforward. Suppose I have a friend, Fred, who is (in my carefully considered opinion) always right. If I tell you I’m against stem-cell research because “my friend Fred says it’s wrong and that’s all there is to it,” you will just look at me as if I was missing the point of the discussion. This is supposed to be a consideration of reasons, and I have not given you a reason that I in good faith could expect you to appreciate. Suppose you believe that stem-cell research is wrong because that is what God has told you. Even if you are right—that is, even if God does indeed exist and has, personally, told you that stem-cell research is wrong—you cannot reasonably expect others who do not share your faith or experience to accept this as a reason. You are being unreasonable in taking your stand. The fact that your faith is so strong that you cannot do otherwise just shows (if you really can’t) that you are disabled for moral persuasion, a sort of robotic slave to a meme that you are unable to evaluate. And if you reply that you can but you won’t consider reasons for and against your conviction (because it is God’s word, and it would be sacrilegious even to consider whether it might be in error), you avow your willful refusal to abide by the minimal conditions of rational discussion. Either way, your declarations of your deeply held views are posturings that are out of place, part of the problem, not part of the solution, and we others will just have to work around you as best we can.

  Notice that this stand involves no disrespect and no prejudging of the possibility that God has told you. If God has told you, then part of your problem is convincing others, to whom God has not (yet) spoken, that this is what we ought to believe. If you refuse or are unable to attempt this, you are actually letting your God down, in the guise of demonstrating your helpless love. You can withdraw from the discussion if you must—that is your right—but then don’t expect us to give your view any particular weight that we cannot discover by other means—and don’t blame us if we don’t “get it.”

  Many deeply religious people have all along been eager to defend their convictions in the court of reasonable inquiry and persuasion. They will have no difficulty at all with these observations—aside from confronting the diplomatic decision of whether they will join me in trying to convince their less reasonable coreligionists that they are making matters worse for their religion by their intransigence. And here is one of the most intractable moral problems confronting the world today. Every religion—aside from a negligible scattering of truly toxic cults—has a healthy population of ecumenical-minded people who are eager to reach out to people of other faiths, or no faith at all, and consider the moral quandaries of the world on a rational basis. In July 2004, the fourth Parliament of World Religions was held in Barcelona, 3 and it brought thousands of people of different religions together for a week of workshops, symposia, plenary sessions, performances, and worship services, all enjoined to observe the same principles:

  listen and be listened to so that all speakers can be heard

  speak and be spoken to in a respectful manner

  develop or deepen mutual understanding

  learn about the perspective of others and reflect on one’s own views,

  and

  discover new insights. [Pathways to Peace, the Parliament program]

  Colorful flocks of differently robed priests and gurus, nuns and monks, choirs and dancers, all holding hands and listening respectfully to one another—it was all very heartwarming, but these well-intentioned and energetic people are singularly ineffective in dealing with the more radical members of their own faiths. In many instances they are, rightly, terrified of them. Moderate Muslims have so far been utterly unable to turn the tide of Islamic opinion against Wahhabists and other extremists, but moderate Christians and Jews and Hindus have been equally feckless in countering the outrageous demands and acts of their own radical elements.

  It is time for the reasonable adherents of all faiths to find the courage and stamina to reverse the tradition that honors helpless love of God—in any tradition. Far from being honorable, it is not even excusable. It is shameful. And most shameful are the priests, rabbis, imams, and other experts whose response to the sincere requests from their flock for moral guidance is to conceal their own inability to give reasons for their views about the tough issues by hiding behind some “inerrant” (read “above criticism”) interpretation of the sacred texts. It is one thing for a well-meaning layperson with a deep allegiance to a religious tradition to delegate authority to his or her religious leaders, but it is quite another for those leaders to pretend to discover (thanks to their expertise) the right answers in their tradition by a process that has to be taken on faith and is inaccessible to even the most well-meant criticism.

  As so often before, we should grant that it is entirely possible that this evasive question-ducking rationale is entirely free-floating. In other words, it is surely possible for people to believe in all innocence that their love of God absolves them from the responsibility to figure out reasons for these hard-to-fathom commands from their beloved God. We need make no accusations of insincerity or guile, but respecting someone’s innocence does not oblige us to respect his belief. Here is what we should say to such a person: There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was pleased by displays of unreasoning love would be worthy of worship.

  Here is a riddle: how is your religion like a swimming pool? And here is the answer: it is what is known in the law as an attractive nuisance. The doctrine of attractive nuisance is the principle that people who maintain on their property a dangerous condition that is likely to attract children are under a duty to post a warning or to take stronger affirmative action to protect children from the dangers of that attraction. It is an exception to the general rule that no particular care is required of property owners to safeguard trespassers from harm. Unenclosed swimming pools are the best-known example, but old refrigerators with their doors not removed, machinery or stacks of building materials, or other eminently climbable objects that could be an irresistible lure to young children have also been deemed attractive nuisances. Property owners are held responsible for harms that result when they maintain something that can lure innocent people into harm.

  Those who maintain religions, and take steps to make them more attractive, must be held similarly responsible for the harms produced by some of those whom they attract and provide wi
th a cloak of respectability. Defenders of religion are quick to point out that terrorists typically have political, not religious agendas, which may well be true in many or most cases, or even in all cases, but that is not the end of it. The political agendas of violent fanatics often lead them to adopt a religious guise, and to exploit the organizational infrastructure and tradition of unquestioning loyalty of whichever religion is handy. And it is true that these fanatics are rarely if ever inspired by, or guided by, the deepest and best tenets in those religious traditions. So what? Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorism is still Islam’s responsibility, and abortion-clinic bombing is still Christianity’s responsibility, and the murderous activities of Hindu extremists are still Hinduism’s responsibility.

  As Sam Harris argues in his brave book The End of Faith (2004), there is a cruel Catch-22 in the worthy efforts of the moderates and ecumenicists in all religions: by their good works they provide protective coloration for their fanatical coreligionists, who quietly condemn their open-mindedness and willingness to change while reaping the benefits of the good public relations they thereby obtain. In short, the moderates in all religions are being used by the fanatics, and should not only resent this; they should take whatever steps they can find to curtail it in their own tradition. Probably nobody else can do it, a sobering thought:

  If a stable peace is ever to be achieved between Islam and the West, Islam must undergo a radical transformation. This transformation, to be palatable to Muslims, must also appear to come from Muslims themselves. It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of “moderate” Muslims. [Harris, 2004, p. 154]