Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  Here’s a proposal, then: as long as parents don’t teach their children anything that is likely to close their minds

  through fear or hatred or

  by disabling them from inquiry (by denying them an education, for instance, or keeping them entirely isolated from the world)

  then they may teach their children whatever religious doctrines they like. It’s just an idea, and perhaps there are better ones to consider, but it should appeal to freedom lovers everywhere: the idea of insisting that the devout of all faiths should face the challenge of making sure their creed is worthy enough, attractive and plausible and meaningful enough, to withstand the temptations of its competitors. If you have to hoodwink—or blindfold—your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.

  4 Toxic memes

  Any creative encounter with evil requires that we not distance ourselves from it by simply demonizing those who commit evil acts. In order to write about evil, a writer has to try to comprehend it, from the inside out; to understand the perpetrators and not necessarily sympathize with them. But Americans seem to have a very difficult time recognizing that there is a distinction between understanding and sympathizing. Somehow we believe that an attempt to inform ourselves about what leads to evil is an attempt to explain it away. I believe that just the opposite is true, and that when it comes to coping with evil, ignorance is our worst enemy.

  —Kathleen Norris, “Native Evil”10

  Writing this book has helped me to understand that religion is a kind of technology. It is terribly seductive in its ability to soothe and explain, but it is also dangerous.

  —Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill

  Have you heard about the Yahuuz, a people who think that what we call child pornography is just good clean fun? They smoke marijuana daily, make a public ceremony of defecation (with hilarious competition to see who gets to do the ritual wiping), and, whenever an elder reaches the age of eighty, have a special feast day on which the person ceremonially kills himself or herself—and is then eaten by all. Disgusted? Then you know how many Muslims feel about our contemporary culture, with its alcohol, provocative clothing, and casual attitudes toward familial authority. Part of my effort in this book is to get you to think and not just feel. In this instance, you need to see that your disgust, however strong, is only a datum, a fact about you and a very important fact about you, but not an inerrant sign of moral truth—it’s just like the Muslim’s disgust at some of our cultural practices. We should respect the Muslims, empathize with them, take their disgust seriously—but then propose that they join us in a discussion about the perspectives on which we differ. The price you should be willing to pay for this is your own willingness to consider the (imaginary!) Yahuuz’ way of life calmly, and ask if it is so clearly indefensible. If they enter into these traditions wholeheartedly, with no apparent coercion, perhaps we should say, “Live and let live.”

  And perhaps not. The burden should be on us to demonstrate to the Yahuuz that their way of life includes traditions they should be ashamed of, and should banish. Perhaps, if we engaged in this exercise conscientiously, we would discover that some of our disgust with their ways was parochial and unjustifiable. They would teach us something. And we would teach them something. And perhaps the gulf of difference between us would never be crossed, but we shouldn’t assume this worst-case prospect.

  In the meantime, the way to prepare for this utopian global conversation is to study, as compassionately and dispassionately as we can, both their ways and our own ways. Consider the brave self-observation of Raja Shehadeh, writing about the grip of modern Palestine: “Most of your energy is spent extending feelers to detect public perception of your actions, because your survival is contingent on remaining on good terms with your society.”11 When we can share similar observations about the problems in our own society, we will be on a good path to mutual understanding. Palestinian society, if Shehadeh is right, is beset with a virulent case of the “punish those who won’t punish” meme, for which there are models (beginning with Boyd and Richerson, 1992) that predict other properties we should look for. It may be that this particular feature would foil well-intentioned projects that would work in societies that lack it. In particular, we mustn’t assume that policies that are benign in our own culture will not be malignant in others. As Jessica Stern puts it:

  I have come to see terrorism as a kind of virus, which spreads as a result of risk factors at various levels: global, interstate, national, and personal. But identifying these factors precisely is difficult. The same variables (political, religious, social, or all of the above) that seem to have caused one person to become a terrorist might cause another to become a saint. [2003, p. 283]

  As communications technology makes it harder and harder for leaders to shield their people from outside information, and as the economic realities of the twenty-first century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child, the floodgates will open all over the world, with tumultuous effects. All the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture, all the trash and scum that accumulates in the corners of a free society, will inundate these relatively pristine regions along with the treasures of modern education, equal rights for women, better health care, workers’ rights, democratic ideals, and openness to the cultures of others. As the experience in the former Soviet Union shows only too clearly, the worst features of capitalism and high tech are among the most robust replicators in this population explosion of memes, and there will be plenty of grounds for xenophobia, Luddism, and the tempting “hygiene” of backward-looking fundamentalism. At the same time, we shouldn’t rush to be apologetic about American pop culture. It has its excesses, but in many instances it is not the excesses that offend so much as the egalitarianism and tolerance. The hatred of this potent American export is often driven by racism—because of the strong Afro-American presence in American pop culture—and sexism—because of the status of women we celebrate and our (relatively) benign treatment of homosexuality. (See, e.g., Stern, 2003, p. 99.)

  As Jared Diamond shows in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was European germs that brought Western Hemisphere populations to the brink of extinction in the s ixteenth century, since those people had had no history in which to develop tolerance for them. In this century it will be our memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared world. Our capacity to tolerate the toxic excesses of freedom cannot be assumed in others, or simply exported as one more commodity. The practically unlimited educability of any human being gives us hope of success, but designing and implementing the cultural inoculations necessary to fend off disaster, while respecting the rights of those in need of inoculation, will be an urgent task of great complexity, requiring not just better social science but also sensitivity, imagination, and courage. The field of public health expanded to include cultural health will be the greatest challenge of the next century.12

  Jessica Stern, an intrepid pioneer in this endeavor, notes that individual observations such as hers are just the beginning:

  A rigorous, statistically unbiased study of the root causes of terrorism at the level of individuals would require identifying controls, youth exposed to the same environment, who felt the same humiliation, human rights abuse, and relative deprivation, but who chose nonviolent means to express their grievances or chose not to express them at all. A team of researchers, including psychiatrists, medical doctors, and a variety of social scientists, would develop a questionnaire and a list of medical tests to be administered to a random sample of operatives and their families. [2003, p. xxx]

  In chapter 10, I argued that researchers don’t have to be believers to be understanders, and we had better hope I was right, since we want our researchers to understand Islamic terrorism from the inside without having to become
Muslims—and certainly not terrorists—in the process.13 But we also won’t understand Islamic terrorism unless we can see how it is like and unlike other brands of terrorism, including Hindu and Christian terrorism, ecoterrorism, and antiglobalist terrorism, to round up the usual suspects. And we won’t understand Islamic and Hindu and Christian terrorism without understanding the dynamics of the transitions that lead from benign sect to cult to the sort of disastrous phenomenon we witnessed in Jonestown, Guyana, in Waco, Texas, and in the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.

  One of the most tempting hypotheses is that these particularly toxic mutations tend to arise when charismatic leaders miscalculate in their attempts to be memetic engineers, unleashing memetic adaptations that they find, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, they can no longer control. They then become somewhat desperate, and keep reinventing the same bad wheels to carry them over their excesses. The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse (1995) offers an account of the debacle that overtook the leaders of Pomio Kivung, the new religion in Papua New Guinea mentioned at the outset of chapter 4, that suggests (to me) that something like runaway sexual selection took over. The leaders responded to the pressure from the people—Prove that you mean it!—with ever-inflated versions of the claims and promises that had brought them to power, leading inevitably to a crash. It’s reminiscent of the accelerated burst of creativity you see in pathological liars when they can sense that their exposure is imminent. Once you’ve talked the people into killing all the pigs in anticipation of the great Period of the Companies, you have nowhere to go but down. Or out: It’s them—the infidels—who are the cause of all our misery!

  There are so many complexities, so many variables—can we ever hope to make predictions that we can act on? Yes, in fact, we can. Here is just one: in every place where terrorism has blossomed, those it has attracted are almost all young men who have learned enough about the world to see that their futures look otherwise bleak and uninspiring (like the futures of those who were preyed upon by Marjoe Gortner).

  What seems to be most appealing about militant religious groups—whatever combination of reasons an individual may cite for joining—is the way life is simplified. Good and evil are brought out in stark relief. Life is transformed through action. Martyrdom—the supreme act of heroism and worship—provides the ultimate escape from life’s dilemmas, especially for individuals who feel deeply alienated and confused, humiliated or desperate. [Stern, 2003, pp. 5–6]

  Where are we going to find an overabundance of such young men in the very near future? In many countries, but especially in China, where the draconian one-child-per-family measures that have slowed the population explosion so dramatically (and turned China into a blooming economic force of unsettling magnitude) have had the side effect of creating a massive imbalance between male and female children. Everybody wanted to have a son (a superannuated meme that had evolved to thrive in an earlier economic environment), so daughters have been aborted (or killed at birth) in huge numbers, so now there are not going to be anywhere near enough wives to go around. What are all those young men going to do with themselves? We have a few years to figure out benign channels into which their hormone-soaked energies can be directed.

  5 Patience and politics

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

  —First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

  Traditions deserve to be respected only insofar as they are respectable—that is, exactly insofar as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of men and women.

  —Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

  Praise Allah for the Internet. With the Web making self-censorship irrelevant—someone else is bound to say what you won’t—it became a place where intellectual risk-takers finally exhaled.

  —Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam14

  Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

  —Either Thomas Jefferson (date unknown) or Wendell Phillips (1852)

  There’s such a thing as growing up too fast. We all have to make the awkward transition from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, and sometimes the major changes come way too early, with lamentable results. But we cannot maintain our childhood innocence forever. It is time for us all to grow up. We must help one another, and be patient. It is overreaction that again and again has lost us ground. Give growing up some time, encourage it, and it will come about. We must have faith in our open society, in knowledge, in continuing pressure to make the world a better place for people to live, and we must recognize that people need to see their lives as having meaning. The thirst for a quest, a goal, a meaning, is unquenchable, and if we don’t provide benign or at least nonmalignant avenues, we will always face toxic religions.

  Instead of trying to destroy the madrassahs that close the minds of thousands of young Muslim boys, we should create alternative schools—for Muslim boys and girls15—that will better serve their real and pressing needs, and let these schools compete openly with the madrassahs for clientele. And how can we hope to compete with the promise of salvation and the glories of martyrdom? We could lie, and make promises of our own that could never be fulfilled in this life or anywhere else, or we could try something more honest: we could suggest to them that the claims of any religion should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt. We could start to change the climate of opinion that holds religion to be above discussion, above criticism, above challenge. False advertising is false advertising, and if we start holding religious organizations accountable for their claims—not by taking them to court but just by pointing out, often and in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that of course these claims are ludicrous—perhaps we can slowly get the culture of credulity to evaporate. We have mastered the technology for creating doubt through the mass media (“Are you sure your breath is sweet?” “Are you getting enough iron?” “What has your insurance company done for you lately?”), and now we can think about applying it, gently but firmly, to topics that have heretofore been off limits. Let the honest religions thrive because their members are getting what they want, as informed choosers.

  But we can also start campaigns to adjust specific aspects of the landscape in which this competition takes place. A bottomless pit in that landscape that strikes me as particularly deserving of paving over is the tradition of “holy soil.” Here is Yoel Lerner, an Israeli and a former terrorist, quoted by Stern:

  “There are six hundred thirteen commandments in the Torah. The temple service accounts for about two hundred and forty of these. For nearly two millennia, since the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish people, contrary to their wishes, have been unable to maintain the temple service. They’ve been unable to comply with those commandments. The Temple constituted a kind of telephone line to God,” Lerner summarizes. “That link has been destroyed. We want to rebuild it.” [2003, p. 88]

  Nonsense, say I. Here is an imaginary case: Suppose it turned out that Liberty Island (formerly Bedloe’s Island, on which the Statue of Liberty stands) was once a burial ground of the Mohawks—say the Matinecock Tribe of nearby Long Island. And suppose the Mohawks came forward with the claim that it should be restored to pristine purity (no gambling casinos, but also no Statue of Liberty, just one big holy cemetery). Nonsense. And shame on any Mohawks who had the chutzpah(!) to rile up their fellow braves on the issue. This would be ancient history—a lot less ancient than the history of the Temple—and it should be allowed to recede gracefully into the past.

  We don’t let religions declare that their holy traditions require that left-handed people be enslaved, or that people who live in Norway should be killed. We s
imilarly cannot let religions declare that “infidels” who have been innocently living on their “holy” turf for generations have no right to live there. There is also, of course, culpable hypocrisy in the policy of deliberately building new settlements in order to create just such “innocent” dwellers and foreclose the claims of the previous dwellers on that land. This is a practice that goes back centuries; the Spaniards who conquered most of the Western Hemisphere often took care to build their Christian churches on the destroyed foundations of the temples of the indigenous people. Out of sight, out of mind. Neither side of these disputes is above criticism. If we could just devalue the whole tradition of holy soil, and its occupation, we could address the residual injustices with clearer heads.

  Perhaps you disagree with me about this. Fine. Let’s discuss it calmly and openly, with no untrumpable appeals to the sacred, which have no place in such a discussion. If we should continue to honor claims about holy soil, it will be because, all things considered, this is the course of action that is just, and life-enabling, and a better path to peace than any other we can find. Any policy that cannot pass that test doesn’t deserve respect.

  Such open discussions are underwritten by the security of a free society, and if they are to continue unmolested, we must be vigilant in protecting the institutions and principles of democracy from subversion. Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the “red-diaper babies,” children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.