Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett
I enjoyed this book. I've tried Dennett before, and not succeeded: Kinds of Minds was a book I found difficult to read, section not satisfactorily flowing from section, sentence not flowing from sentence so that its argument was hard to follow. Breaking the Spell certainly doesn't have that problem. It's true that occasionally you need to re-read a pair of sentences to make sure you've understood the way they hang together, but that's really just a question of prose style - I'm not sure Dennett always reads what he's written back to himself when editing (something I'm guilty of myself sometimes, and which does affect readability). But overall this book is very reader-friendly, and approach Dennett is committed to, as shown by the passage I quote later in this post, about Foucault. I found Dennett's writing absorbing, and read very quickly indeed.
Dennett's strategy has two planks to it. At the book's heart is an attempt to construct a tentative hypothesis of how religion came about and why it survives today. It's a natural history of religion, a study of it as a natural phenomenon. As well as that, it's a sustained argument in favour of such a project, and argument that further investigation of the questions Dennett identifies is an urgent and vital project if we're to understand religion and avert the dangers it may present.
It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political and economic conflict, but the very meanings we find in our lives.
Dennett usefully insists that religion has not always existed: like language, it must have arisen at some point in the history or prehistory of mankind. He imagines it as arising out of a hard-wired instinct to attribute intentions and agency to all kinds of things - to see everything that happens as the result of some conscious being. The cosmological argument, that says God exists because the universe must have a cause, a first mover, is an intellectualisation of this instinctive belief. Dennett argues, using a meme-based analysis, that certain religious ideas survived better than others because they met deep psychological needs better, or because they had features making them more memorable or impressive - one of which he suggests might, paradoxically, be obscurity.
John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: "Michel, you're so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?" To which Foucault replied, "That's because, in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense." I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault's candor: eumerdification.
In time, people "domesticated" religion, deliberately shaping it and defending it from attack by shielding it with protective ideas - for instance, that doubt is caused by the devil.
It's all interesting, and I was happy to read Dennett for hours on the ways religion might be good for health or contribute to success in important challenges, how it might help small communities evolve an ethic of cooperation that could assist their survival. I think he succeeds in sharpening or thinking, as he puts it, and setting out the broad programme that a naturalistic religious studies movement should follow. Good stuff. He goes on to examine moral and political issues relevant to religion: the importance of understanding the roots of terrorism, for instance, and for religion to take responsibility for the evils it gives rise to.
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.
I think there's a slight problem with the book, though. At the beginning Dennett mentions its American bias, not apologising, but giving a warning about it. Actually I saw little evidence of American bias (he even mentions Manchester United at one point); anyway, what bias there was was mild. There is, though, a tactical assumption that the reader is an American fundamentalist, which makes Dennett painfully exhaustive in his pleas for the reader to critically examine questions like why people believe in God (rather than simply answering them biblically), even though any reader with a mind just slightly open will not need such exhaustiveness, and true fundamentalists will not benefit from it. Perhaps my approach is pessimistic, but I think the study of religion as a natural phenomenon is something that will only interest brights like me and Dennett and truly thoughtful believers, and I think the book would have been even better had he accepted that and just got on with talking to the converted. Unlike Dennett I see nothing wrong with that. He might have made more progress in his inquiry that way, and his argument might have embodied more completely the change of perspective he wants to argue for. I can imagine his counter-argument: that the thinking he's asking for should be an inclusive project carried out by those who are committed to religion as well those who are not. I can see the sense in that. Even so, I think the extent to which Dennett looks over his shoulder at possible objections from evangelicals diverts him from the more important discussions I'd like him to have taken further.
It's a good book, this, though. Anyone who's interested in this area will probably also like Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a racier, more daring and in the sense that troubled me about Dennett, less circumspect attempt to hypothesise about the origins of religion. Both books are cracking contributions to this post-religious field.
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