Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  Wouldn’t such an exhaustive and invasive examination damage the phenomenon it self? Mightn’t it break the spell? That is a good question, and I don’t know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. That is why I raise the question, to explore it carefully now, so that we (1) don’t rush headlong into inquiries we would all be much better off not undertaking, and yet (2) don’t hide facts from ourselves that could guide us to better lives for all. The people on this planet confront a terrible array of problems—poverty, hunger, disease, oppression, the violence of war and crime, and many more—and in the twenty-first century we have unparalleled powers for doing something about all these problems. But what shall we do?

  Good intentions are not enough. If we learned anything in the twentieth century, we learned this, for we made some colossal mistakes with the best of intentions. In the early decades of the century, communism seemed to many millions of thoughtful, well-intentioned people to be a beautiful and even obvious solution to the terrible unfairness that all can see, but they were wrong. An obscenely costly mistake. Prohibition also seemed like a good idea at the time, not just to power-hungry prudes intent on imposing their taste on their fellow citizens, but to many decent people who could see the terrible toll of alcoholism and figured that nothing short of a total ban would suffice. They were proven wrong, and we still haven’t recovered from all the bad effects that well-intentioned policy set in motion. There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of keeping blacks and whites in separate communities, with separate facilities, seemed to many sincere people to be a reasonable solution to pressing problems of interracial strife. It took the civil-rights movement in the United States, and the painful and humiliating experience of Apartheid and its eventual dismantling in South Africa, to show how wrong those well-intentioned people were to have ever believed this. Shame on them, you may say. They should have known better. That is my point. We can come to know better if we try our best to find out, and we have no excuse for not trying. Or do we? Are some topics off limits, no matter what the consequences?

  Today, billions of people pray for peace, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them believe with all their hearts that the best path to follow to peace throughout the world is a path that runs through their particular religious institution, whether it is Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any of hundreds of other systems of religion. Indeed, many people think that the best hope for humankind is that we can bring together all of the religions of the world in a mutually respectful conversation and ultimate agreement on how to treat one another. They may be right, but they don’t know. The fervor of their belief is no substitute for good hard evidence, and the evidence in favor of this beautiful hope is hardly overwhelming. In fact, it is not persuasive at all, since just as many people, apparently, sincerely believe that world peace is less important, in both the short run and the long, than the global triumph of their particular religion over its competition. Some see religion as the best hope for peace, a lifeboat we dare not rock lest we overturn it and all of us perish, and others see religious self-identification as the main source of conflict and violence in the world, and believe just as fervently that religious conviction is a terrible substitute for calm, informed reasoning. Good intentions pave both roads.

  Who is right? I don’t know. Neither do the billions of people with their passionate religious convictions. Neither do those atheists who are sure the world would be a much better place if all religion went extinct. There is an asymmetry: atheists in general welcome the most intensive and objective examination of their views, practices, and reasons. (In fact, their incessant demand for self-examination can become quite tedious.) The religious, in contrast, often bristle at the impertinence, the lack of respect, the sacrilege, implied by anybody who wants to investigate their views. I respectfully demur: there is indeed an ancient tradition to which they are appealing here, but it is mistaken and should not be permitted to continue. This spell must be broken, and broken now. Those who are religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from expressing our doubts if they themselves are unwilling to put their convictions under the microscope. If they are right—especially if they are obviously right, on further reflection—we skeptics will not only concede this but enthusiastically join the cause. We want what they (mostly) say they want: a world at peace, with as little suffering as we can manage, with freedom and justice and well-being and meaning for all. If the case for their path cannot be made, this is something that they themselves should want to know. It is as simple as that. They claim the moral high ground; maybe they deserve it and maybe they don’t. Let’s find out.

  4 Peering into the abyss

  Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

  —Anonymous

  The spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many. But certainly one of the most pressing and plausible reasons for resisting this claim is the fear that if that spell is broken—if religion is put under the bright lights and the microscope—there is a serious risk of breaking a different and much more important spell: the life-enriching enchantment of religion itself. If interference caused by scientific investigation somehow disabled people, rendering them incapable of states of mind that are the springboards for religious experience or religious conviction, this could be a terrible calamity. You can only lose your virginity once, and some are afraid that imposing too much knowledge on some topics could rob people of their innocence, crippling their hearts in the guise of expanding their minds. To see the problem, one has only to reflect on the recent global onslaught of secular Western technology and culture, sweeping hundreds of languages and cultures to extinction in a few generations. Couldn’t the same thing happen to your religion? Shouldn’t we leave well enough alone, just in case? What arrogant nonsense, others will scoff. The Word of God is invulnerable to the puny forays of meddling scientists. The presumption that curious infidels need tiptoe around to avoid disturbing the faithful is laughable, they say. But in that case, there would be no harm in looking, would there? And we might learn something important.

  The first spell—the taboo—and the second spell—religion itself—are bound together in a curious embrace. Part of the strength of the second may be—may be—the protection it receives from the first. But who knows? If we are enjoined by the first spell not to investigate this possible causal link, then the second spell has a handy shield, whether it needs it or not. The relationship between these two spells is vividly illustrated in Hans Christian Andersen’s charming fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Sometimes falsehoods and myths that are “common wisdom” can survive indefinitely simply because the prospect of exposing them is itself rendered daunting or awkward by a taboo. An indefensible mutual presumption can be kept aloft for years or even centuries because each person assumes that somebody else has some very good reasons for maintaining it, and nobody dares to challenge it.

  Up to now, there has been a largely unexamined mutual agreement that scientists and other researchers will leave religion alone, or restrict themselves to a few sidelong glances, since people get so upset at the mere thought of a more intensive inquiry. I propose to disrupt this presumption, and examine it. If we shouldn’t study all the ins and outs of religion, I want to know why, and I want to see good, factually supported reasons, not just an appeal to the tradition I am rejecting. If the traditional cloak of privacy or “sanctuary” is to be left in place, we should know why we’re doing this, since a compelling case can be made that we’re paying a terrible price for our ignorance. This sets the order of business: First, we must look at the issue of whether the first spell—the taboo—should be broken. Of course, by writing and publishing this b
ook I am jumping the gun, leaping in and trying to break the first spell, but one has to start somewhere. Before continuing further, then, and possibly making matters worse, I am going to pause to defend my decision to try to break that spell. Then, having mounted my defense for starting the project, I am going to start the project! Not by answering the big questions that motivate the whole enterprise but by asking them, as carefully as I can, and pointing out what we already know about how to answer them, and showing why we need to answer them.

  I am a philosopher, not a biologist or an anthropologist or a sociologist or historian or theologian. We philosophers are better at asking questions than at answering them, and this may strike some people as a comical admission of futility—“He says his specialty is just asking questions, not answering them. What a puny job! And they pay him for this?” But anybody who has ever tackled a truly tough problem knows that one of the most difficult tasks is finding the right questions to ask and the right order to ask them in. You have to figure out not only what you don’t know, but what you need to know and don’t need to know, and what you need to know in order to figure out what you need to know, and so forth. The form our questions take opens up some avenues and closes off others, and we don’t want to waste time and energy barking up the wrong trees. Philosophers can sometimes help in this endeavor, but of course they have often gotten in the way, too. Then some other philosopher has to come in and try to clean up the mess. I have always liked the way John Locke put it, in the “Epistle to the Reader” at the beginning of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):

  …it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge;—which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation.

  Another of my philosophical heroes, William James, recognized as well as any philosopher ever has the importance of enriching your philosophical diet of abstractions and logical arguments with large helpings of hard-won fact, and just about a hundred years ago, he published his classic investigation, The Varieties of Religious Experience. It will be cited often in this book, for it is a treasure trove of insights and arguments, too often overlooked in recent times, and I will begin by putting an old tale he recounts to a new use:

  A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared. [James, 1902, p. 111]

  Like the revivalist preacher, I say unto you, O religious folks who fear to break the taboo: Let go! Let go! You’ll hardly notice the drop! The sooner we set about studying religion scientifically, the sooner your deepest fears will be allayed. But that is just a plea, not an argument, so I must persist with my case. I ask just that you try to keep an open mind and refrain from prejudging what I say because I am a godless philosopher, while I similarly do my best to understand you. (I am a bright. My essay “The Bright Stuff,” in the New York Times, July 12, 2003, drew attention to the efforts of some agnostics, atheists, and other adherents of naturalism to coin a new term for us nonbelievers, and the large positive response to that essay helped persuade me to write this book. There was also a negative response, largely objecting to the term that had been chosen [not by me]: bright, which seemed to imply that others were dim or stupid. But the term, modeled on the highly successful hijacking of the ordinary word “gay” by homosexuals, does not have to have that implication. Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum; they’re straight. Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim. They might like to choose a name for themselves. Since, unlike us brights, they believe in the supernatural, perhaps they would like to call themselves supers. It’s a nice word with positive connotations, like gay and bright and straight. Some people would not willingly associate with somebody who was openly gay, and others would not willingly read a book by somebody who was openly bright. But there is a first time for everything. Try it. You can always back out later if it becomes too offensive.)

  As you can already see, this is going to be something of a roller-coaster ride for both of us. I have interviewed many deeply religious people in the last few years, and most of these volunteers had never conversed with anybody like me about such topics (and I had certainly never before attempted to broach such delicate topics with people so unlike myself), so there were more than a few awkward surprises and embarrassing miscommunications. I learned a lot, but in spite of my best efforts I will no doubt outrage some readers, and display my ignorance of matters they consider of the greatest importance. This will give them a handy reason to discard my book without considering just which points in it they disagree with and why. I ask that they resist hiding behind this excuse and soldier on. They will learn something, and then they may be able to teach us all something.

  Some people think it is deeply immoral even to consider reading such a book as this! For them, wondering whether they should read it would be as shameful as wondering whether to watch a pornographic videotape. The psychologist Philip Tetlock (1999, 2003, 2004) identifies values as sacred when they are so important to those who hold them that the very act of considering them is offensive. The comedian Jack Benny was famously stingy—or so he presented himself on radio and television—and one of his best bits was the skit in which a mugger puts a gun in his back and barks, “Your money or your life!” Benny just stands there silently. “Your money or your life!” repeats the mugger, with mounting impatience. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Benny replies. This is funny because most of us—religious or not—think that nobody should even think about such a trade-off. Nobody should have to think about such a trade-off. It should be unthinkable, a “no-brainer.” Life is sacred, and no amount of money would be a fair exchange for a life, and if you don’t already know that, what’s wrong with you? “To transgress this boundary, to attach a monetary value to one’s friendships, children, or loyalty to one’s country, is to disqualify oneself from the accompanying social roles” (Tetlock et al., 2004, p. 5). That is what makes life a sacred value.

  Tetlock and his colleagues have conducted ingenious (and sometimes troubling) experiments in which subjects are obliged to consider “taboo trade-offs,” such as whether or not to purchase live human body parts for some worthy end, or whether or not to pay somebody to have a baby that you then raise, or pay somebody to perform your military service. As their model predicts, many subjects exhibit a strong “mere contemplation effect”: they feel guilty and sometimes get angry about being lured into even thinking about such dire choices, even when they make all the right choices. When given the opportunity by the experimenters to engage in “moral cleansing” (by volunteering for some relevant community service, for instance), subjects who have had to think about taboo trade-offs are significantly more likely than control subjects to volunteer—for real—for such good deeds. (Control subjects had been asked to think about purely secular trade-offs, such as whether to hire a housecleaner or buy food instead of something else.) So this book may do some good by just increasing the level of charity in those who feel guilty reading it! If you feel yourself contaminated by reading this book, you will perhaps feel resentful, but also more eager than you otherwise would be to work off that resentment by engaging in some moral cleansing. I
hope so, and you needn’t thank me for inspiring you.

  In spite of the religious connotations of the term, even atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred values—in the sense that I feel vaguely guilty even thinking about whether they are defensible and would never consider abandoning them (I like to think!) in the course of solving a moral dilemma. My sacred values are obvious and quite ecumenical: democracy, justice, life, love, and truth (in alphabetical order). But since I’m a philosopher, I’ve learned how to set aside the vertigo and embarrassment and ask myself what in the end supports even them, what should give when they conflict, as they often tragically do, and whether there are better alternatives. It is this traditional philosophers’ open-mindedness to every idea that some people find immoral in itself. They think that they should be closed-minded when it comes to certain topics. They know that they share the planet with others who disagree with them, but they don’t want to enter into dialogue with those others. They want to discredit, suppress, or even kill those others. While I recognize that many religious people could never bring themselves to read a book like this—that is part of the problem the book is meant to illuminate—I intend to reach as wide an audience of believers as possible. Other authors have recently written excellent books and articles on the scientific analysis of religion that are directed primarily to their fellow academics. My goal here is to play the role of ambassador, introducing (and distinguishing, criticizing, and defending) the main ideas of that literature. This puts my sacred values to work: I want the resolution to the world’s problems to be as democratic and just as possible, and both democracy and justice depend on getting on the table for all to see as much of the truth as possible, bearing in mind that sometimes the truth hurts, and hence should sometimes be left concealed, out of love for those who would suffer were it revealed. But I’m prepared to consider alternative values and reconsider the priorities I find among my own.