Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  We must hold these moderate Muslims responsible for reshaping their own religion—but that means we must equally hold moderate Christians and Jews and others responsible for all the excesses in their own traditions. And, as George Lakoff has noted, we need to prove to those Islamic leaders that we hear their moral voices, and not just our own:

  We depend on the goodwill and courage of moderate Islamic leaders. To gain it, we must show our goodwill by beginning in a serious way to address the social and political conditions that lead to despair. [2004, p. 61]

  How can we all keep the cloak of religious respectability from being used to shelter the lunatic excesses? Part of the solution would be to make religion in general less of a “sacred cow” and more of a “worthy alternative.” This is the course somewhat haplessly followed by some of us brights—atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secular humanists, and others who have liberated themselves from specifically religious allegiances. We brights are quite aware of all the good that religions accomplish, but we prefer to channel our charity and good deeds through secular organizations, precisely because we don’t want to be complicit in giving a good name to religion! This keeps our hands clean, but that is not enough—any more than it is enough for moderate Christians to avoid giving funds to anti-Semitic organizations within Christianity, or for moderate Jews to restrict their charity to organizations that are working to secure peaceful coexistence for Palestinians and Israelis. That is a start, but there is more work to be done, and it is the unpleasant and even dangerous work of desanctifying the excesses in each tradition from the inside. Any religious person who is not actively and publicly involved in that effort is shirking a duty—and the fact that you don’t belong to a congregation or denomination that is offending doesn’t excuse you: it is Christianity and Islam and Judaism and Hinduism (for example) that are attractive nuisances, not just their offshoot sects.

  Any vicious cult that uses Christian imagery or texts as its protective coloration should lie heavily on the conscience of all who call themselves Christians, for instance. Until the priests and rabbis and imams and their flocks explicitly condemn by name the dangerous individuals and congregations within their ranks, they are all complicit. I know many Christians who are privately sickened by many of the words and deeds done “in the name of Jesus,” but expressions of dismay to close friends are not enough. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, I wrote about the brave Muslims who dared to speak out publicly against the obscene travesty of the fatwa pronounced on Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, condemned to death for his heresies, and urged, “Let us all distribute the danger by joining hands with them” (p. 517n). But here is the truly distressing Catch-22: if we non-Muslims join hands with them, we thereby mark them as “puppets of the enemies of Islam” in the eyes of many Muslims. Only those within the religious community can effectively start to dismantle this deeply immoral attitude, and multiculturalists who urge us to go easy on them are exacerbating the problem.

  4 Bless my soul: spirituality and selfishness

  He who has the most toys when he dies wins.

  —Well-known materialist slogan

  Yes, we have a soul; but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.

  —My materialist slogan4

  Consider the two utterly different meanings of the word “materialistic.” In its most common everyday sense, it refers to somebody who cares only about “material” possessions, wealth, and all its trappings. In its scientific or philosophical sense, it refers to a theory that aspires to explain all the phenomena without recourse to anything immaterial—like a Cartesian soul, or “ectoplasm”—or God. The standard negation of materialistic in the scientific sense is dualistic, which maintains that there are two entirely different kinds of substance, matter and…whatever minds are supposedly made of. The apparent bridge tying the two meanings together is obvious enough: if you don’t think you have an immortal soul, then you don’t believe you’ll get your reward in heaven, so…you might as well go for whatever you can get in this material world. If we asked people what term was the negation of materialistic in the everyday sense, they might very well settle on spiritual.

  In the course of my research on this book, I found one opinion expressed in slightly different ways by people across the spectrum of religious views: “man” has a “deep need” for “spirituality,” a need that is fulfilled for some by traditional organized religion, for others by New Age cults or movements or hobbies, and for still others by the intense pursuit of art or music, pottery or environmental activism—or football! What fascinates me about this delightfully versatile craving for “spirituality” is that people think they know what they are talking about, even though—or perhaps because—nobody bothers to explain just what they mean. It is supposed to be obvious, I guess. But it really isn’t. When I’ve asked people to explain themselves, they typically beg off, along the lines of Louis Armstrong’s oft-quoted reply when asked what jazz was: “If you gotta ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.” This will not do. To see for yourself just how hard it is to say what spirituality is, take a stab at improving on this parody, boiled down from many frustrating encounters: “Spirituality is, you know, like, it’s like paying attention to your soul or having deep thoughts that really move you, and not just thinking about who’s got nicer clothes and whether to buy a new car and what’s for dinner and stuff like that. Spirituality is really caring and not being just, you know, materialistic.” Along with this common and unreflective view of spirituality goes a stereotype of the atheist: atheists lack “values” they are careless, self-centered, shallow, overconfident. They think they know it all, and yet they completely miss out on the spirit. (You really can’t be a good person unless you have a spiritual life.)

  Now let me try to put better words in their mouths. What these people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: let your self go. If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.

  The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has explored in some depth the relationship between belief in “psychic forces” and the everyday sense of morality. He notes that almost all stories of the paranormal, of extrasensory perception and clairvoyance and talking to deceased friends and relatives at séances, have a “somewhat self-righteous aura to them—a tag of holiness, a certain touch-menot feel” (1995, p. 186). And although this may be due in part to the fact that so often the stories deal with the most emotionally sensitive areas of people’s lives, he has another explanation:

  …it originates with what is, arguably, one of the most remarkable confidence tricks our culture has played on us. This has been to persuade people that there is a deep connection between believing in the possibility of psychic forces and being a gracious, honest, upright, trustworthy member of society….

  He deftly enunciates the free-floating rationale:

  Whether or not people have had any explicit religious education, they have all been exposed to the idea that some kind of supernatural parent figure watches over them and cares for them. It may easily follow therefore that people’s sense of jus
tice and propriety persuades them that, if such a figure does exist, then not to believe in him would be ungrateful in the extreme—and only wicked children could possibly be so ungrateful. But, if unbelievers are generally wicked, it is natural (though hardly logical) to assume that believers are generally good. So whether or not a person believes in this supernatural parent becomes in itself a measure of his moral virtue…. The absurd, but quite widely accepted result has been that every paranormal story we hear is supposed to be automatically worthy of attention and respect. [pp. 186–87]

  I have come to accept that this alignment of moral goodness with “spirituality” and moral evil with “materialism” is just a frustrating fact of life, so deeply rooted in our contemporary conceptual scheme that it amounts to a prevailing wind against which materialistic science has to strain. We materialists are the bad guys, and those who believe in anything supernatural, however goofy and gullible the particular belief, have at least this much going for them: they’re “on the side of the angels.”

  This familiar phrase was born, by the way, in the Oxford Union, a debating society at Oxford University, in a speech by Benjamin Disraeli in 1864, in response to the challenge of Darwinism: “What is the question now placed before society with a glib assurance the most astounding? The question is this—Is man an ape or an angel. My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.” The misalignment of goodness with the denial of scientific materialism has a long history, but it is a misalignment.5 There is no reason at all why a disbelief in the immateriality or immortality of the soul should make a person less caring, less moral, less committed to the well-being of everybody on Earth than somebody who believes in “the spirit.” But won’t such a materialist care only about the material well-being of the people? If that means only their housing, their car, their food, their “physical” as opposed to “mental” health, no. After all, a good scientific materialist believes that mental health—spiritual health, if you like—is just as physical, just as material, as “physical” health. A good scientific materialist can be just as concerned about whether there is plenty of justice, love, joy, beauty, political freedom, and, yes, even religious freedom as about whether there is plenty of food and clothing, for instance, since all of these are material benefits, and some are more important than others. (But for goodness’ sake, let’s try to get food and clothing to everybody who needs them as soon as possible, since without them justice and art and music and civil rights and the rest are something of a mockery.)

  That should correct the understandable logical confusion. There is also the factual misconception to correct: plenty of “deeply spiritual” people—and everybody knows this—are cruel, arrogant, self-centered, and utterly unconcerned about the moral problems of the world. Indeed, one of the truly nauseating side effects of the common confusion of moral goodness with “spirituality” is that it permits untold numbers of people to slack off on the sacrifice and good works and hide behind their unutterably sacred (and impenetrable) mask of piety and moral depth. It’s not just the hypocrites, though there are always plenty of them around. There are many people who quite innocently and sincerely believe that if they are earnest in attending to their own personal “spiritual” needs, this amounts to living a morally good life. I know many activists, both religious and secular, who agree with me: these people are deluding themselves. Auden’s sardonic quip may shake our faith in the obviousness of the imperative to help others, but it certainly does nothing to suggest that just taking care of one’s own “soul” is anything but selfish. Consider, for instance, those contemplative monks, primarily in Christian and Buddhist traditions, who, unlike hardworking nuns in schools and hospitals, devote most of their waking hours to the purification of their souls, and the rest to the maintenance of the contemplative lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. In what way, exactly, are they morally superior to people who devote their lives to improving their stamp collections or their golf swing? It seems to me that the best that can be said of them is that they manage to stay out of trouble, which is not nothing.

  I am under no illusions about how hard it will be to undo the centuries of presumption that tend to merge “spirit” and “goodness.” Since “team spirit” is obviously good, how can the denial of “spirit” be anything but bad? Even deep in the trenches of cognitive neuroscience, I find annoying echoes and shadows of this prejudice, with us “hardheaded” materialists forever on the defensive against the now practically extinct species of “tenderhearted” dualists, who seem (to the laypeople at least) to occupy the moral high ground simply because they still believe in the immateriality of souls. It’s an uphill battle, but perhaps it will go better for us when it is fought in broad daylight.

  But what about that hunger for spirituality that so many of my informants think is the mainspring of religious allegiance? The good news is that people really do want to be good. Believers and brights alike deplore the crass materialism (everyday sense) of popular culture and yearn not just to enjoy the beauty of genuine love but to bring that joy to others. It may often have been true in the past that for most people the only available road to that fulfillment involved a commitment to the supernatural, and more particularly to a specific institutional version of the supernatural, but today we can see that there is a bounty of alternative highways and footpaths to consider.

  Chapter 10 The widely prevailing opinion that religion is the bulwark of morality is problematic at best. The idea that heavenly reward is what motivates good people is demeaning and unnecessary; the idea that religion at its best gives meaning to a life is jeopardized by the hypocrisy trap into which we have fallen; the idea that religious authority grounds our moral judgments is useless in genuine ecumenical exploration; and the presumed relation between spirituality and moral goodness is an illusion.

  Chapter 11 The research described in this book is just the beginning. Further research is needed, on both the evolutionary history of religion and on its contemporary phenomena, as they appear to different disciplines. The most pressing questions concern how we should deal with the excesses of religious upbringing and the recruitment of terrorists, but these can only be understood against a background of wider theories of religious conviction and practice. We need to secure our democratic society, the home base for this research, against the subversions of those who would use democracy as a ladder to theocracy and then throw it away, and we need to spread the knowledge that is the fruit of free inquiry.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Now What Do We Do?

  1 Just a theory

  You philosophers are fortunate people. You write on paper—I, poor empress, am forced to write on the ticklish skins of human beings.

  —Catherine the Great, to Diderot (who had advised her about land reforms)

  Since 2002, schools in Cobb County, Georgia, have put stickers in some of their biology textbooks saying “Evolution is a theory, not a fact,” but a judge recently ruled that these must be removed, since they may convey the message of endorsement of religion “in violation of First Amendment separation of church and state and the Georgia Constitution’s prohibition against using public money to aid religion” (New York Times, January 14, 2005). This makes sense, since the only motivations for singling out evolution for this treatment are religious. Nobody is putting stickers in chemistry or geology books saying that the theories explained therein are theories, not facts. There are still plenty of controversies in chemistry and geology, but these rival theories are contested within the securely established background theories of each field, which are not just theory but fact. There are lots of controversial theories within biology, too, but the background theory that is not contested is evolution. There are rival theories of vertebrate flight, and the role of migration in speciation, and, closer to human home, theories about the evolution of language, bipedality, concealed ovulati
on, and schizophrenia, to name just a few particularly vigorous controversies. Eventually, these will all get sorted out, and some of the theories will prove to be not just theories but facts.

  My description of the evolution of various features of religion in chapters 4–8 is definitely “just a theory”—or, rather, a family of proto-theories, in need of further development. In a nutshell, this is what it says: Religion evolved, but it doesn’t have to be good for us in order to evolve. (Tobacco isn’t good for us, but it survives just fine.) We don’t all learn language because we think it’s good for us; we all learn language because we cannot do otherwise (if we have normal nervous systems). In the case of religion, there is a lot more teaching and drill, a lot more deliberate social pressure, than there is in language learning. In this regard, religion is more like reading than talking. There are tremendous benefits to being able to read, and perhaps there are similar or greater benefits to being religious. But people may well love religion independently of any benefits it provides them. (I am delighted to learn that red wine in moderation is good for my health, since, whether or not it is good for me, I like it, and I want to go on drinking it. Religion could be like that.) It is not surprising that religion survives. It has been pruned and revised and edited for thousands of years, with millions of variants extinguished in the process, so it has plenty of features that appeal to people, and plenty of features that preserve the identity of its recipes for these very features, features that ward off or confound enemies and competitors, and secure allegiance. Only gradually have people come to have any appreciation of the reasons—the heretofore free-floating rationales—for these features. Religion is many things to many people. For some, the memes of religion are mutualists, providing undeniable benefits of sorts that cannot be found elsewhere. These people may well depend for their very lives on religion, the way we all depend on the bacteria in our guts that help us digest our food. Religion provides some people with a motivated organization for doing great things—working for social justice, education, political action, economic reform, and so forth. For others, the memes of religion are more toxic, exploiting less savory aspects of their psychology, playing on guilt, loneliness, the longing for self-esteem and importance. Only when we can frame a comprehensive view of the many aspects of religion can we formulate defensible policies for how to respond to religions in the future.