Science in the Soul
Page 26
I think this beaver felt an overwhelming urge to build a dam, because that is what it would do in nature. And it went ahead and ‘built’ a phantom dam in a vacuum. I think what the beaver felt must have been a bit like what a man feels when he lusts over a picture of a naked woman – it perhaps gives him an erection – yet he knows perfectly well that it is only printing ink on paper. It is vacuum lust. What I am now suggesting is that we also feel vacuum gratitude. It is the gratitude we feel when we are overwhelmed with the urge to ‘thank’ something or someone, even though there is nobody to thank. It is gratitude in a vacuum, just like the beaver’s dam-building in a vacuum. And the same goes for the way we feel when we say ‘unfair’ even though we know that there is nobody there to blame for the unfairness: we just feel hard done by, by the weather, or by an earthquake, or by ‘fate’.
So, that is a possible evolutionary reason why we feel an urge to give thanks, even when we know there is nobody to thank. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
‘Thank’ shouldn’t have to be a transitive verb. We don’t have to thank God, or Allah, or the saints, or the stars. We can simply be thankful, and that’s just fine.
* * *
*1 I let the habit slip, rather to my regret, but for a few years I was a regular columnist in Free Inquiry, one of two excellent journals published by the Center for Inquiry (the CFI has this year merged with my own Foundation, I am happy to say). This is one of my columns, published in 2005 soon after the terrible tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, which wrought widespread devastation on coastal areas around the Indian Ocean.
*2 See Dan Barker’s God: the most unpleasant character in all fiction for ample justification of this judgement.
*3 For more on how this sense of ‘natural justice’ might have arisen, see the first essay in this collection, ‘The values of science and the science of values’, especially this page to this page.
Merry Christmas, Prime Minister!*1
DEAR PRIME MINISTER,
Merry Christmas! I mean it. All that ‘Happy Holiday Season’ stuff, with ‘holiday’ cards and ‘holiday’ presents, is a tiresome import from the US, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than by atheists. A cultural Anglican (whose family has been part of the Chipping Norton Set since 1727, as you’ll see if you look around you in the parish church*2), I recoil from secular carols such as ‘White Christmas’, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and the loathsome ‘Jingle Bells’, but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige – only from the King James version, of course.
Token objections to cribs and carols are not just silly, they distract vital attention from the real domination of our culture and politics that religion still gets away with, in (tax-free) spades. There’s an important difference between traditions freely embraced by individuals, and traditions enforced by government edict. Imagine the outcry if your government were to require every family to celebrate Christmas in a religious way. You wouldn’t dream of abusing your power like that. And yet your government, like its predecessors, does force religion on our society, in ways whose very familiarity disarms us. Setting aside the twenty-six bishops in the House of Lords, passing lightly over the smooth inside track on which the Charity Commission accelerates faith-based charities to tax-free status while others (quite rightly) have to jump through hoops, the most obvious and most dangerous way in which governments impose religion on our society is through faith schools.
We should teach about religion, if only because religion is such a salient force in world politics and such a potent driver of lethal conflict. We need more and better instruction in comparative religion (and I’m sure you’ll agree with me that any education in English literature is sadly impoverished if the child can’t take allusions from the King James Bible). But faith schools don’t so much teach about religion as indoctrinate in the particular religion that runs the school. Unconscionably, they give children the message that they belong specifically to one particular faith, usually that of their parents, paving the way, at least in places such as Belfast and Glasgow, for a lifetime of discrimination and prejudice.
Psychologists tell us that, if you experimentally separate children in any arbitrary way – say, dress half of them in green T-shirts and half in orange – they will develop ingroup loyalty and outgroup prejudice. To continue the experiment, suppose that, when they grow up, greens only marry greens and oranges only marry oranges. Moreover, ‘green children’ only go to green schools and ‘orange children’ to orange schools. Carry on for three hundred years and what have you got? Northern Ireland, or worse. Religion may not be the only divisive power that can propel dangerous prejudices down through many generations (language and race are other candidates) but religion is the only one that receives active government support in Britain today in the form of schools.
So deeply ingrained is this divisive ethos in our social consciousness that journalists, and indeed most of us, breezily refer to ‘Catholic children’, ‘Protestant children’, ‘Muslim children’, ‘Christian children’, even where the children are too young to decide what they think about questions that divide the various faiths. We assume that children of Catholic parents (for instance) just are ‘Catholic children’, and so on. A phrase such as ‘Muslim child’ should grate like fingernails on a blackboard. The appropriate substitution is ‘child of Muslim parents’.
I satirized the faith-labelling of children in the Guardian last month,*3 using an analogy that almost everybody gets as soon as he hears it – we wouldn’t dream of labelling a child a ‘Keynesian child’ simply because her parents were Keynesian economists. Mr Cameron, you replied to that serious and sincere point with what could distinctly be heard on the audio version as a contemptuous snigger: ‘Comparing John Maynard Keynes to Jesus Christ shows, in my view, why Richard Dawkins just doesn’t really get it.’ Do you get it now, Prime Minister? Obviously I was not comparing Keynes with Jesus. I could just as well have used ‘monetarist child’ or ‘fascist child’ or ‘postmodernist child’ or ‘Europhile child’. Moreover, I wasn’t talking specifically about Jesus, any more than Muhammad or the Buddha.
In fact, I think you got it all along. If you are like several government ministers (of all three parties) to whom I have spoken, you are not really a religious believer yourself. Several ministers and ex-ministers of education whom I have met, both Conservative and Labour, don’t believe in God but, to quote the philosopher Daniel Dennett, they do ‘believe in belief’. A depressingly large number of intelligent and educated people, despite having outgrown religious faith, still vaguely presume without thinking about it that religious faith is somehow ‘good’ for other people, good for society, good for public order, good for instilling morals, good for the common people even if we chaps don’t need it. Condescending? Patronizing? Yes, but isn’t that largely what lies behind successive governments’ enthusiasm for faith schools?
Baroness Warsi, your Minister without Portfolio (and without election) has been at pains to inform us that this coalition government does indeed ‘do God’.*4 But we who elected you mostly do not. It is possible that the recent census may register a slight majority of people ticking the ‘Christian’ box. However, the UK branch of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science commissioned an Ipsos MORI poll in the week following the census. When published, this will enable us to see how many people who self-identified as Christian are believers.*5
Meanwhile, the latest British Social Attitudes survey, just published, clearly demonstrates that religious affiliation, religious observance and religious attitudes to social issues have all continued their long-term decline and are now irrelevant to all but a minority of the population. When it comes to life choices, social attitudes, moral dilemmas and sense of identity, religion is on its deathbed, even for many of those who still nominally identify with a religion.
This is good news. It is good news because if we depended on religion for o
ur values and our sense of cohesion we would be well and truly stuck. The very idea that we might get our morals from the Bible or the Quran will horrify any decent person today who takes the trouble to read those books – rather than cherry-pick the verses that happen to conform to our modern secular consensus. As for the patronizing assumption that people need the promise of heaven (or the obscene threat of torture in hell) in order to be moral, what a contemptibly immoral motive for being moral! What binds us together, what gives us our sense of empathy and compassion – our goodness – is something far more important, more fundamental and more powerful than religion: it is our common humanity, deriving from our pre-religious evolutionary heritage, then refined and improved, as Professor Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angels of our Nature, by centuries of secular enlightenment.*6
A diverse and largely secular country such as Britain should not privilege the religious over the non-religious, or impose or underwrite religion in any aspect of public life. A government that does so is out of step with modern demographics and values. You seemed to understand that in your excellent, and unfairly criticized, speech on the dangers of ‘multiculturalism’ in February this year.*7 Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I mean not state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state. Individuals must always be free to ‘do God’ if they wish; but a government for the people certainly should not.
With my best wishes to you and your family for a happy Christmas,
Richard Dawkins
* * *
*1 In November 2011 the Guardian invited a number of people to pose questions to the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, and Mr Cameron replied in a subsequent issue of the newspaper. I was one of those invited and my question was a serious and polite question about faith schools. Mr Cameron’s rudely dismissive reply, in which he accused me of ‘not getting it’, stung me into writing an open reply in the Christmas 2011 issue of New Statesman, of which I was guest editor. My original title was ‘Do you get it now, Prime Minister?’ but I here retitle it in friendlier vein.
*2 Note for non-British readers: David Cameron was the Member of Parliament for West Oxfordshire, which includes my home town of Chipping Norton. He, and a number of other prominent members of the London political and journalistic class, have country homes in the area, and had become known in the gossip columns as the ‘Chipping Norton Set’. The church, as I unkindly implied he might have noticed if he were as pious as he pretends, is loaded to the architraves with Dawkins family memorials.
*3 26 November 2011.
*4 Sayeeda Warsi, whose only known distinction was failing to win election to Parliament, was elevated to the peerage as the youngest member of the House of Lords by David Cameron, and made co-chair of the Conservative Party and a government minister. Rightly or wrongly, this was widely interpreted as three-way tokenism – she was the first female non-white Muslim member of the British Cabinet. My dig may have been unfair (though I doubt it), but in any case I feel the need of a footnote to explain it to non-British readers who might not otherwise have got it. Mr Cameron would certainly have got it, in the event (which again I doubt) that he had time to read my open letter. The phrase ‘do God’ is an allusion to the previous government of Tony Blair, whose chief spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, embarrassed by his boss’s leanings towards the pious, interrupted a religious question during an interview by saying ‘We don’t do God.’
*5 It is now published, and I summarized the results in the tenth anniversary edition of The God Delusion. Briefly, the percentage of people who self-identified as Christian dropped dramatically between 2001 and 2011, and our survey showed that even those who still did so in 2011 were Christian only very nominally. For example, the dominant answer to the question what being a Christian meant to them was: ‘I try to be a good person.’ Yet, when asked whether they took religion into account when facing a moral choice, only 10 per cent said yes. Only 39 per cent of the self-identifying Christians were able to name which of the following four is the first book of the New Testament: Matthew, Genesis, Psalms, Acts.
*6 I have tried to go a little further into this in the Afterword to the first piece in this collection (see this page).
*7 I’ve since learned that Mr Cameron’s speech was written with the advice of the admirable Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation. Not surprising it was so good, therefore.
The science of religion*1
IT IS WITH trepidation and humility that I come from the oldest university in the English-speaking world to what must surely be the greatest. My trepidation is not lessened by the title that, perhaps unwisely, I gave the organizers all those months ago. Anybody who publicly belittles religion, however gently, can expect hate mail of a uniquely unforgiving species. But the very fact that religion arouses such passions catches a scientist’s attention.
As a Darwinian, the aspect of religion that catches my attention is its profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness. If a wild animal habitually spends time performing some useless activity, natural selection will favour rival individuals who devote the time, instead, to promoting their own survival or reproduction. Nature cannot afford time-wasting frivolity. Ruthless utilitarianism trumps, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.
I am a Darwinian student of animal behaviour – an ethologist and follower of Niko Tinbergen. You won’t be surprised, therefore, if I talk about animals (nonhuman animals, I should add, for there is no sensible definition of an animal that excludes ourselves). The tail of a male bird of paradise, extravagant though it seems, would be penalized by females if it were less so. The same for the time and labour that a male bower bird puts into making his bower. Anting is the odd habit of birds, such as jays, of ‘bathing’ in an ant’s nest and apparently inciting the ants to invade the feathers. Nobody knows for sure what the benefit of anting is: perhaps some kind of hygiene measure, cleansing the feathers of parasites. My point is that uncertainty as to detail doesn’t – nor should it – stop Darwinians believing, with great confidence, that anting must be for something.
Such a confident stance is controversial – at Harvard, if nowhere else – and you may be aware of the wholly unwarranted slur that functional hypotheses are untestable ‘Just So Stories’. This is such a ridiculous claim that the only reason it has come to be widely accepted is a certain style of bullying advocacy originating, I reluctantly have to say, at Harvard. All you have to do to test a functional hypothesis of a piece of behaviour is to engineer an experimental situation in which the behaviour doesn’t happen, or in which its consequences are negated. Let me give a simple example of how to test a functional hypothesis.
Next time a housefly lands on your hand, don’t immediately brush it off; watch what it does. You won’t wait long before it brings its hands together as if in prayer, then wrings them in what seems like ritual fastidiousness. This is one of the ways in which a fly grooms itself. Another is to wipe a hind leg over the same side wing. They also rub middle and hind feet together, or middle and front. Flies spend so much time self-grooming, any Darwinian would immediately guess that it is vital for survival. The more so because – this is less paradoxical than it sounds – grooming is quite likely to lead directly to the fly’s death. When a chameleon, for example, is around, grooming is very likely to be the last thing the fly does. Predatory eyes often lock onto movement. A motionless target goes unnoticed, even totally unseen. A flying target is difficult to hit. A grooming fly’s shuttling limbs stimulate the predator’s movement-detectors, but the fly as a whole is a sitting target. The fact that flies spend so much time grooming, in spite of its being so dangerous, argues for a very strong survival value. And this is a testable hypothesis.
An appropriate experimental design is the ‘Yoked Control’. Put a matched pair of flies in a small arena and watch them. Every time Fly A starts to groom itself, scare both flies into flight. A
t the end of two hours of this regime, Fly A will have done no grooming at all. Fly B will have groomed itself a great deal. It will have been scared off the ground as many times as A, but at random with respect to its grooming. Now put A and B through a battery of comparison tests. Is A’s flying performance impaired by dirty wings? Measure it and compare it with B’s. Flies taste with their feet, and it is a reasonable hypothesis that ‘foot washing’ unclogs their sense organs. Compare the threshold sugar concentration that A and B can taste. Compare their tendency to disease. As a final test, compare the two flies’ vulnerability to a chameleon.
Repeat the trial with lots of pairs of flies and do a statistical analysis comparing each A with its corresponding B. I would bet my shirt on the A flies being significantly impaired in at least one faculty vitally affecting survival. The reason for my confidence is purely the Darwinian conviction that natural selection would not have allowed them to spend so much time on an activity if it were not useful. This is not a ‘Just So Story’; the reasoning is thoroughly scientific, and it is fully testable.*2
Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral would consume hundreds of man-centuries in the building. Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolized medieval and Renaissance talent. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture first, for loyalty to one religion rather than a scarcely distinguishable alternative.