Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  Proposition 76. Even where competition is limited, religious firms can generate high levels of participation to the extent that the firms serve as the primary organizational vehicles for social conflict. (Conversely, if religious firms become significantly less important as vehicles for social conflict, they will be correspondingly less able to generate commitment.) [p. 202]

  In other words, expect religious “firms” to exploit and exacerbate social conflict whenever possible, since it is a way of generating business. This can be good (Polish Catholic resistance to communism) or bad (the interminable conflict in Ireland). Detractors will say we already knew this about religions, but the claim that this is a systematic feature, which follows from other features and interacts with still others in ways that are predictable, is, if true, just the sort of fact we are going to want to understand deeply as we deal with social conflicts in the future. When religious leaders and their critics both inside and outside their religions consider possible reforms and improvements, they are setting themselves up—whether they like it or not—to be memetic engineers, tinkering with the designs they have been bequeathed by tradition in order to adjust the observable effects, and some of the most telling observations in Stark and Finke’s book are their biting criticisms of well-intentioned reforms that have backfired. Are they right about the principal reason for the precipitous decline in Catholics seeking a vocation in the church after Vatican II?

  Previously, the Catholic Church had taught that priests and the religious [nuns and monks] were in a superior state of holiness. Now, despite their vows, they were just like everyone else [p. 177]…. The laity had gained some of the privileges of the priesthood without shouldering the burden of celibacy or a direct accountability to the church hierarchy. For many, the priesthood was no longer a good deal following the renewal efforts of Vatican II. [p. 185]

  Or are they wrong? The only way to find out is to do the research. Unpalatability is not a reliable sign of falsehood, and the pious homilies that often guided earlier reformers need to be confirmed, disconfirmed—or else ignored. The stakes are too high for well-meant amateur blundering. As earlier, in my discussions of the work of Boyer, Wilson, and others, I am not declaring a verdict on the soundness or conclusiveness of any of this work, but only introducing what I take to be examples of the work that needs to be taken seriously from now on, and either firmly and fairly refuted or—however begrudgingly—acknowledged for its genuine contributions to our understanding. In the case of Stark’s refreshingly candid vision, I myself have deep misgivings, some of which will emerge when we turn to some of the complications that he so resolutely sets aside. Stark and Finke express their fundamental attitude well when they disparage Don Cupitt’s After God: The Future of Religion (1997), which endorses a brand of religion from which all traces of the supernatural have been removed:

  But why would a religion without God have a future? Cupitt’s prescription strikes us as rather like expecting people to continue to buy soccer tickets and gather in the stands to watch players who, for lack of a ball, just stand around. If there are no supernatural beings, then there are no miracles, there is no salvation, prayer is pointless, the Commandments are but ancient wisdom, and death is the end. In which case the rational person would have nothing to do with church. Or, more accurately, a rational person would have nothing to do with a church like that. [p. 146]

  Strong language, but they must recognize that Cupitt and the others who have turned away from their vision of God the Dealmaker were well aware of its attractions and must have had their reasons (articulated or not) for resisting it so artfully for so long. What can be said in favor of the God-as-essence path—or, rather, paths, since there have been many different ways of trying to conceive of God in less anthropomorphic terms? I think the key can be found in some of Stark and Finke’s own observations:

  Given the fact that religion is risky goods and that people often can increase their flow of immediate benefits through religious inactivity, it seems unlikely that any amount of pluralism and vigorous marketing can ever achieve anything close to total market penetration. The proportion of Americans who actually belong to a specific church congregation (as opposed to naming a religious preference when asked) has hovered around 65 percent for many decades—showing no tendency to respond even to major economic cycles. [p. 257]

  It will be interesting to try to learn more about the 35 percent who are just not cut out for church, as well as the proportion of those churchgoers who are not cut out for high-tension, expensive religions of the sort Stark favors. They exist all over the world; according to Stark and Finke, “There are ‘godless’ religions, but their followings are restricted to small elites—as in the case of the elite forms of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism” (p. 290n). The attractions of Unitarianism, Episcopalianism, and Reform Judaism are not restricted to the Abrahamic traditions, and if the “elites” find that they just cannot bring themselves to “believe they have experienced long and satisfying exchange relations with” God, why do they persist with (something they call) religion at all?

  Chapter 7 The human proclivity for groupishness is less calculated and prudential than it appears in some economic models, but also more complicated than the evolved herding instinct of some animals. What complicates the picture is human language and culture, and the perspective of memes permits us to comprehend how the phenomena of human allegiance are influenced by a mixture of free-floating and well-tethered rationales. We can make progress by acknowledging that submission to a religion need not be cast as a deliberate economic decision, while also recognizing the analytic and predictive power of the perspective that views religions as designed systems competing in a dynamic marketplace for adherents with different needs and tastes.

  Chapter 8 The stewardship of religious ideas creates a powerful phenomenon: belief in belief, which radically transforms the content of the underlying beliefs, making rational investigation of them difficult if not impossible.

  CHAPTER EIGHT Belief in Belief

  1 You better believe it

  I think God honors the fact that I want to believe in Him, whether I feel sure or not.

  —Anonymous informant quoted by Alan Wolfe, in The Transformation of American Religion

  The proof that the Devil exists, acts and succeeds is precisely that we no longer believe in him.

  —Denis de Rougement, The Devil’s Share

  At the end of chapter 1, I promised to return to Hume’s question in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the question of whether we have good reasons for believing in God, and in this chapter, I will keep that promise. The preceding chapters have laid some new foundations for this inquiry, but also uncovered some problems besetting it that need to be addressed before any effective confrontation between theism and atheism can take place.

  Once our ancestors became reflective (and hyperreflective) about their own beliefs, and thus appointed themselves stewards of the beliefs they thought most important, the phenomenon of believing in belief became a salient social force in its own right, sometimes 200 eclipsing the lower-order phenomena that were its object. Consider a few cases that are potent today. Because many of us believe in democracy and recognize that the security of democracy in the future depends critically on maintaining the belief in democracy, we are eager to quote (and quote and quote) Winston Churchill’s famous line: “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the other forms that have been tried.” As stewards of democracy, we are often conflicted—eager to point to flaws that ought to be repaired, yet just as eager to reassure people that the flaws are not that bad, that democracy can police itself, so their faith in it is not misplaced.

  The same point can be made about science. Since the belief in the integrity of scientific procedures is almost as important as the actual integrity, there is always a tension between a whistle-blower and the authorities, even when they know
that they have mistakenly conferred scientific respectability on a fraudulently obtained result. Should they quietly reject the offending work and discreetly dismiss the perpetrator, or make a big stink?1

  And certainly some of the intense public fascination with celebrity trials is to be explained by the fact that belief in the rule of law is considered a vital ingredient in our society; so, if famous people are seen to be above the law, this jeopardizes the general trust in the rule of law. Hence we are interested not just in the trial, but in the public reactions to the trial, and the reactions to those reactions, creating a spiraling inflation of media coverage. We who live in democracies have become somewhat obsessed with gauging public opinion on all manner of topics, and for good reason: in a democracy it really matters what the people believe. If the public cannot be mobilized into extended periods of outrage by reports of corruption, or the torturing of prisoners by our agents, for instance, our democratic checks and balances are in jeopardy. In his hopeful book, Development as Freedom (1999), and elsewhere (see especially Sen, 2003), the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen makes the important point that you don’t have to win an election to achieve your political aims. Even in shaky democracies, what the leaders believe about the beliefs that prevail in their countries influences what they take their realistic options to be, so belief maintenance is an important political goal in its own right.

  Even more important than political beliefs, in the eyes of many, are what we might call metaphysical beliefs. Nihilism—the belief in nothing—has been seen by many to be a deeply dangerous virus, for obvious reasons. When Friedrich Nietzsche hit upon his idea of the Eternal Recurrence—he thought he had proved that we relive our lives infinitely many times—his first inclination (according to some stories) was to kill himself without revealing the proof, in order to spare others from this life-destroying belief.2 Belief in the belief that something matters is understandably strong and widespread. Belief in free will is another vigorously protected vision, for the same reasons, and those whose investigations seem to others to jeopardize it are sometimes deliberately misrepresented in order to discredit what is seen as a dangerous trend (Dennett, 2003c). The physicist Paul Davies (2004) has recently defended the view that belief in free will is so important that it may be “a fiction worth maintaining.” It is interesting that he doesn’t seem to think that his own discovery of the awful truth (what he takes to be the awful truth) incapacitates him morally, but believes that others, more fragile than he, will need to be protected from it.

  Being the unwitting or uncaring bearer of good news or bad news is one thing; being the self-appointed champion of a meme is something quite different. Once people start committing themselves (in public, or just in their “hearts”) to particular ideas, a strange dynamic process is brought into being, in which the original commitment gets buried in pearly layers of defensive reaction and meta-reaction. “Personal rules are a recursive mechanism; they continually take their own pulse, and if they feel it falter, that very fact will cause further faltering,” the psychiatrist George Ainslie observes in his remarkable book, Breakdown of Will (2001, p. 88). He describes the dynamic of these processes in terms of competing strategic commitments that can contest for control in an organization—or an individual. Once you start living by a set of explicit rules, the stakes are raised: When you lapse, what should you do? Punish yourself? Forgive yourself? Pretend you didn’t notice?

  After a lapse, the long-range interest is in the awkward position of a country that has threatened to go to war in a particular circumstance that has then occurred. The country wants to avoid war without destroying the credibility of its threat, and may therefore look for ways to be seen as not having detected the circumstance. Your long-range interest will suffer if you catch yourself ignoring a lapse, but perhaps not if you can arrange to ignore it without catching yourself. This arrangement, too, must go undetected, which means that a successful process of ignoring must be among the many mental expedients that arise by trial and error—the ones you keep simply because they make you feel better without your realizing why. [p. 150]

  This idea that there are myths we live by, myths that must not be disturbed at any cost, is always in conflict with our ideal of truth-seeking and truth-telling, sometimes with lamentable results. For example, racism is at long last widely recognized as a great social evil, so many reflective people have come to endorse the second-order belief that belief in the equality of all people regardless of their race is to be vigorously fostered. How vigorously? Here people of goodwill differ sharply. Some believe that belief in racial differences is so pernicious that even when it is true it is to be squelched. This has led to some truly unfortunate excesses. For instance, there are clear clinical data about how people of different ethnicity are differently susceptible to disease, or respond differently to various drugs, but such data are considered off limits by some researchers, and some funders of research. This has the perverse effect that strongly indicated avenues of research are deliberately avoided, much to the detriment of the health of the ethnic groups involved.3

  Ainslie uncovers strategic belief-maintenance in a wide variety of cherished human practices:

  Activities that are spoiled by counting them, or counting on them, have to be undertaken through indirection if they are to stay valuable. For instance, romance undertaken for sex or even “to be loved” is thought of as crass, as are some of the most lucrative professions if undertaken for money, or performance art if done for effect. Too great an awareness of the motivational contingencies for sex, affection, money, or applause spoils the effort, and not only because it undeceives the other people involved. Beliefs about the intrinsic worth of these activities are valued beyond whatever accuracy these beliefs might have, because they promote the needed indirection. [In press]

  Though not at all restricted to religion, belief in belief is nowhere else a more fecund engine of elaboration. Ainslie surmises that it explains some of the otherwise baffling epistemic taboos found in religions:

  From priesthood to fortune-telling, contact with the intuitive seems to need some kind of divination. This is all the more true for approaches that cultivate a sense of empathy with a god. Several religions forbid the attempt to make their deity more tangible by drawing pictures of him, and Orthodox Judaism forbids even naming him. The experience of God’s presence is supposed to come through some kind of invitation that he may or may not accept, not through invocation. [2001, p. 192]

  What do people do when they discover that they no longer believe in God? Some of them don’t do anything; they don’t stop going to church, and they don’t even tell their loved ones. They just quietly get on with their lives, living as morally (or immorally) as they did before. Others, such as Don Cupitt, author of After God: The Future of Religion, feel the need to cast about for a religious creed that they can endorse with a straight face. They have a firm belief that belief in God is something to preserve, so when they find the traditional concepts of God frankly incredible they don’t give up. They seek a substitute. And the search, once again, need not be all that conscious and deliberate. Without ever being frankly aware that a cherished ideal is endangered in some way, people may be strongly moved by a nameless dread, the sinking sense of a loss of conviction, a threat intuited but not articulated that needs to be countered vigorously. This puts them in a state of mind that makes them particularly receptive to novel emphases that somehow seem right or fitting. Like sausage-making and the crafting of legislation in a democracy, creed revision is a process that is upsetting to watch too closely, so it is no wonder that the fog of mystery descends so gracefully over it.

  Much has been written over the centuries about the historic processes by which polytheisms turned into monotheism—belief in gods being replaced by belief in God. What is less often stressed is how this belief in God joined forces with the belief in belief in God to motivate the migration of the concept of God in
the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts. What is remarkable about this can be illuminated by contrast with other conceptual shifts that have occurred during the same period. Fundamental concepts can certainly change over time. Our concept of matter has changed quite radically from the days of the ancient Greek atomists. Our scientific conceptions of time and space today, thanks to clocks and telescopes and Einstein and others, are different from theirs as well. Some historians and philosophers have argued that these shifts are not as gradual as they may at first appear but, rather, are abrupt saltations, so drastic that the before and after concepts are “incommensurable” in some way.4

  Are any of these conceptual revisions actually so revolutionary as to render communication across the ages impossible, as some have argued? The case is hard to make, since we can apparently chart the changes accurately and in detail, understanding them all as we go. In particular, there seems no reason to believe that our everyday conceptions of space and time would be even somewhat alien to Alexander the Great, say, or Aristophanes. We would have little difficulty conversing with either of them about today, tomorrow, and last year, or the thousands of yards or paces between Athens and Baghdad. But if we tried to converse with the ancients about God, we would find a much larger chasm separating us. I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation. It is as if their concept of milk had turned into our concept of health, or as if their concept of fire had turned into our concept of energy. You can’t literally drink health or literally extinguish energy, and (today, according to many but not all believers) you can’t literally listen to God or literally sit beside Him, but these would be strange claims indeed to the original monotheists. The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful. The original New Testament Lord is more forgiving and loving, but still a Father, not a Mother or a genderless Force, and active in the world, needless to say, through His miracle-performing Son. The genderless Person without a body who nevertheless answers prayers in real time (Stark’s conscious supernatural being) is still far too anthropomorphic for some, who prefer to speak of a Higher Power (Stark’s essence) whose characteristics are beyond comprehension—aside from the fact that they are, in some incomprehensible way, good, not evil.5 Does the Higher Power have (creative) intelligence? In what way? Does It (not He or She) care about us? About anything? The fog of mystery has descended conveniently over all the anthropomorphic features that have not been abandoned outright.