Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  2. Dunbar (2004) calls these graves unequivocal evidence of religion, but they are in fact highly enigmatic. There is no doubt the bodies were deliberately placed in position with objects covered in red ocher, but the meaning of the tableau is highly contentious. See, e.g., http://home/earthlink.net/~ekerilaz/ dolni.html.

  3. A useful overview is Atran and Norenzayan, 2004, with its two dozen accompanying expert commentaries and a response from the authors. Other essential reading includes Sperber, 1975, 1996; Lawson and McCauley, 1990, 2002; Guthrie, 1993; Whitehouse, 1995; Barrett, 2000; Pyysièainen, 2001; Andresen, 2001; Shermer, 2003.

  4. This theme has been developed by many authors in recent years. My own contributions to this literature include Dennett, 1991a, 1995b, 1996, and many articles.

  5. The main reason I am opposed to speaking of animals—or even adult human beings—as “having a theory of mind” is that this typically conjures up entirely too intellectual an image of a theorem-deriving, proposition-consulting, hypothesis-testing little scientist, whereas I see adopters of the intentional stance—even virtuoso practitioners such as the most manipulative people you have ever encountered—as more like intuitive artists than sophisticated theorists. Craft is more in evidence than ideology, and the development of explicit, self-conscious models of the folk craft is a still more recent innovation—emerging first, really, in the wonderful novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and made more systematic (but arguably no more powerful) by psychologists and sociologists and the like in the twentieth century (Dennett, 1990, 1991c). The “theory theorists” will retort that this wonderful craft or know-how has to be implemented somehow in the brains of those who have the competence, and that we should be trying to develop a computational neuroscience model of this competence. I entirely agree, but calling this a theory still pinches the imagination of the theorist in ways I think we should avoid. What else could it be but some sort of theory? That’s a good question, I think, that we ought to try to answer, not a rhetorical question that forecloses the issue.

  6. See, for instance, Tomasello and Call, 1997; Hauser, 2000; and Povinelli, 2003.

  7. This is a delicate and controversial topic in theoretical cognitive science these days: just what is pleasure or pain, and what is addiction or habit or willpower? I have a little to say about the current state of the art in Dennett, 2003b, but more is in progress.

  5 Religion, the Early Days

  1.Do we know that other species don’t have language or art? If so, how do we know? Among the many good recent books on these subjects, I recommend Hauser, 1996, 2000. The bowerbirds’ bowers are perhaps the closest counterpart to human art, since they are nonfunctional or decorative artifacts whose manifest (if free-floating) purpose is to charm the opposite sex, which has often been hypothesized to be the original mainspring of our artistic impulses.

  2. Dunbar (2004) defends the thesis that whereas our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, can manage at most two orders of intentionality (beliefs about beliefs, say, or beliefs about desires) normal human beings can appreciate and respond to the complexities of fourth-or fifth-order intentionality, and argues that the virtuosi among us can go even higher, keeping track of sixth-order intentionality, as they maneuver their way among their conspecifics. “Religious leaders, like good novelists, are a rare breed” (p. 86). See also Tomasello, 1999.

  3. Faber (2004) observes that human life begins with an infant crying for food, for comforting, for protection (out of fear), for help, and getting answered by a big warm wonderful thing. Thousands of times, the infant cries out; thousands of times, the cries are answered. “One would be hard-pressed to discover within the realm of nature another example of physiological and emotional conditioning to compare with this one in both depth and duration”(p. 18). This prepares the child, Faber argues, for religious stories:

  He makes contact easily with the supernatural domain because in a manner of speaking he has been there all along. He has been living with or in the company of powerful, unseen, life-sustaining presences since he commenced the process of mind-body internalization, or interactional, physiological imprinting, as it naturally and persistently arose from his affective interaction with the all-powerful provider, the big one who appeared over and over again, ten thousand times, to rescue him from hunger and distress and to respond to his emotional and interpersonal needs, to his deep affective drive for attachment. [p. 20]…The child’s unconscious mind resonates to religious narratives before his rational faculties have ripened, before he can see and critically evaluate what it is that asks for his perceptual assent. [p. 25]

  4. A list of over eighty different methods can be found at http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Divination.

  5.Dumbo’s magic feather is discussed at some length in Dennett, 2003b.

  6. Burkert (1996) offers a different speculative evolutionary scenario of a cascade of bottlenecks that could select for genes for susceptibility to religion: “Although religious obsession could be called a form of paranoia, it does offer a chance of survival in extreme and hopeless situations, when others, possibly the nonreligious individuals, would break down and give up. Mankind, in its long past, will have gone through many a desperate situation, with an ensuing breakthrough of homines religiosi” (p. 16). I cannot yet see how to test this hypothesis, but it is certainly a possibility to consider seriously, if we can find some way to do so.

  7. My use of the term folk religion is at variance with the usage of some anthropologists and ethnomusicologists (e.g., Yoder, 1974; Titon, 1988), who use it to describe the contrast between “official” organized religion and what people of those denominations actually believe and practice in their daily lives (see Titon, 1988, pp. 144ff., for a discussion). See also the related concept of “theological incorrectness” (Slone, 2004). What I am calling folk religion is often called tribal or primitive religion.

  8. Few folk music fans today are such purists as to turn up their noses at all composed “folk” songs, but for my purposes purism rules: those relatively ancient melodies and lyrics without authors are the folk music I am talking about. In every age, these songs get artfully adjusted and rearranged, with new lyrics and new rhythms, and sometimes new melodies as well, and along the way folk artists add songs of their own composition. To take just the recent past, Huddie Ledbetter and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger composed hundreds of “folk songs” that have joined the canon, even though in these cases we know who the author was. We tend to exclude from the canon the equally singable ballads of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Gershwins, but time may well erase the distinction. My point is that, although it is possible in principle that if we had perfect historical knowledge we could always identify a composer and a lyricist, it is also possible—and more likely—that in many cases the authorship was so distributed over the centuries that nobody deserves credit for either the melody or the lyrics of the “classic” folk song that now appears in the canon. Did Ravenscroft just write down “The Three Ravens” in 1611, or did he compose it? Or did he adapt it as he wrote it down—or did it adapt itself?

  9. Some of this is too obvious to notice. Why should a written language be serial at all (just one word at a time)? Because we have just one mouth with which to speak, to put it crudely. The ideograms of Japanese and Chinese show that it is possible for written languages to untie their oral straitjackets if not shed them altogether. Would a system of symbols that could not be “pronounced,” that was three-dimensional (a word sculpture of sorts), or heavily dependent on the use of color, count as a language? The very idea of silent reading—let alone reading without moving your lips!—came along late in the development of writing (in medieval times, historians aver—see, e.g., Saenger, 2000). Archaic spelling is also, of course, a trace of earlier pronunciations.

  10. Blackmore (1999, p. 197) argues that “memetic drive” is possible and likely in accoun
ting for our love of rituals: that idiosyncrasies in culturally transmitted rituals would be variably responded to by people, and this would create a novel selective environment in which talent for and appreciation of these idiosyncrasies were genetically selected—just as talent for language was genetically selected once language got under way. What started as a more or less undifferentiated sweet tooth for ritual, in other words, could evolve genetically into a sweet tooth for supernormal versions of the local idiosyncrasies, a case of gene-culture coevolution that was led by cultural exploration of the space of possibilities, a possible extension of the Baldwin Effect, in which innovations of behavior achieved by individuals in their lifetimes (innovations discovered or learned by them) can create and focus selection pressures that eventually lead to innate proclivities to perform these innovations, a non-Lamarckian way that acquired characteristics can influence the evolution of genetically determined characteristics (see Dennett, 1995b, 2003a, 2003d).

  11. Some readers may be bothered by my persistent talk of memes in this chapter, since the anthropologists whose work I am discussing so favorably, Boyer and Atran and their mentor, Sperber, are united in their rejection of the memes perspective, as they make quite clear in their books and articles. I have been discussing this with them for some time, both in print (Dennett, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2002b [reprinted here as appendix A], and especially 2005b; and see Sperber, 2000) and at conferences. I think they are making a mistake, but it is a bit of a technical disagreement that would be a distraction to most readers. Still, a reply to their objections is in order, and is supplied in appendix C. See also the other essays in Aunger, ed., 2000, where Sperber, 2000, appears; and Laland and Brown, 2002, chapter 6.

  12. Thanks to Dan Sperber for popping this balloon by drawing my attention to Mahadevan and Staal, 2003, from which the passage is quoted.

  13. For a vivid but controversial introduction to the field, now somewhat out of date, see Ruhlen, 1994. For an overview of the current state of the science, see Christiansen and Kirby, eds., 2003. Other thought-provoking studies are Carstairs-McCarthy, 1999, and Cavalli-Sforza, 2001.

  14. Swimming is an interestingly intermediate case: Unlike running and walking, swimming strokes have quite a memetic history. In the late nineteenth century, an Englishman, Arthur Trudgen, carried the overarm Native American way of swimming (soon called the “trudgeon” or “trudgen crawl” after this meme-vector) to England, but he miscopied the kick, using a breaststroke “frog” kick instead of the flutter kick used by Native Americans. This transmission error was corrected by Richard Cavill in 1902, and today’s front crawl is the descendant of that quite recent improvement. But versions of the crawl have probably been invented and reinvented numerous times over the eons, since it is so clearly superior to all other known ways of propelling oneself through the water at high speed. Not for nothing is this Good Trick known as freestyle in competitive swimming. The only rule in freestyle is that you must break the surface every now and then (and this rule was introduced to prevent swimmers from experimenting with dangerous underwater strokes that might drown them if they passed out). In freestyle, you are welcome to improve on the front crawl if you can.

  15. Note that today, thanks to writing and other storage media, this is not a problem, so a religion no longer needs such regular rituals of unison to keep the text pure. But a religion that makes the rituals optional is in danger of succumbing for other reasons.

  16. Atran, 2002, and Lawson and McCauley, 2002, provide detailed critiques of the hypotheses of Whitehouse (1995, 2000) and others.

  17. Orgel’s Second Rule is “Evolution is cleverer than you are!” (Dennett, 1995b, p. 74). Stark and Finke (2000) argue that many religious “reforms” deliberately and consciously executed in recent times undo the wise design work implicit in traditional religious practices. It is a serious design error, they argue, to make religious ritual too easy, too inexpensive, too painless.

  6 The Evolution of Stewardship

  1. The ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon introduced me to the music of gospel preaching in his pioneering analysis of the art of John Sherfey (Titon, 1988); you can see and hear for yourself in his documentary video, Powerhouse for God (Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street, Watertown, MA 02472). Dozens of C. L. Franklin’s sermons in Detroit and Memphis were recorded and broadcast nationwide by Chess Records, and are available through various Web sites.

  2. It is also possible that some stable elements in leks are transmitted by imitation, not through the genes—yet another instance of animal tradition, not instinct (Avital and Jablonka, 2000). Cross-fostering studies, in which birds’ eggs from one lek tradition were hatched and raised by birds with a different lek, could shed light on this.

  3. Pinker, 1994; Deacon, 1997; and Jackendoff, 2002, are the most accessible recent works on this topic.

  4. And, yes, the pendulum is swinging back about tans. It now emerges that sunlight is so good for you (in moderation) that the coverup recommended by many dermatologists was going too far. It’s hard to keep up with all this information, and so mostly we just don’t question “what everyone knows.”

  5. I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe—the gods and other spirits—don’t exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don’t have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways.

  6. In an important but underappreciated discussion, Sperber (1985, pp. 49ff.) proposes that we call such indeterminate cognitive states semipropositional representations. These are the “half-understood ideas” that we all use every day, and that typically get turned into proper propositional representations only under the pressure of systematic inquiry. This hypothesized folieà -deux process of theology generation is similar to the generate-and-test model of dream production and hallucination generation described in Dennett, 1991a, chapter 1.

  7. I’m adopting here the active voice of “selfish meme” talk; it is the same shorthand we use when we say that HIV “attacks” and “hides” and “adjusts its strategy” in response to our efforts to eradicate it. Ideas don’t have minds any more than viruses or bacteria do, but they can be usefully and predictively described as if they were selfish and clever.

  8. Many years ago, I published a paper on pain (Dennett, 1975, reprinted in1978) that included some shocking facts about the use of amnestics by anesthesiologists to wipe out postsurgical memories of pain experienced by insufficiently anesthetized patients during surgery. Several anesthesiologists who read my piece in draft implored me not to publish these details in a nonmedical journal, since it would make their jobs more difficult. Anything that heightens the anxiety of patients presurgically makes the induction of safe anesthesia more difficult, and hence more dangerous to them, so it is best to keep this information where it belongs: restricted to the medical community. This is the strongest case I know of a fact that people might be better off not knowing—but it was not strong enough to dissuade me. You might want to ask yourself if you would approve of the policy of doctors’ having secret knowledge that was systematically kept from their patients, at all costs.

  9. The theory that all religion is just such Priestertrug, deception or manipulation by priests for their own benefit, has a history going back to Diderot and the Enlightenment. “Yet in spite of suspicions both ancient and modern, in spite of the unimpeachable existence of cunning and trickery among humans, the hypothesis of pure deception does not explain anything,” Burkert avers (1996, p. 118), but this is too strong; it may not explain everything, but it explains many features of religion around the world, from psychic-healing frauds to the worst abuses of televangelism.

  7 The Invention of Team Spirit<
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  1. One tradition would speak here of “selfless” caring, but since this inevitably invites objections about the purported incoherence of true selflessness, I prefer to think of this as the possibility of extending the domain of the self. Here is one good reason: Supposedly “selfless” agents are not at all immune to the problems that bedevil the selfish agents described by economists. Say I am an agent in a bargaining situation, or in a prisoner’s dilemma, or faced with a coercive offer, or an attempt at extortion. My problem is not resolved, or diminished, or even significantly adjusted, if the “self” I am protecting is other than my proper self—if I am not just trying to save my own skin, so to speak. An extortionist or a benefactor who knows what I care about is in a position to frame the situation to hit me where it matters to me, whatever matters to me. (Material in this note and the text paragraph to which it is keyed is drawn from Dennett, 2001b and 2003b.)

  2. Manji provides a telling example: the deliberate squelching of ijtihad, the Muslim tradition of inquiry that flourished until the tenth century (and accounted for the glorious intellectual and artistic achievements of early Islam).

  In the guise of protecting the world-wide Muslim nation from disunity (known as fitna and considered a crime), Baghdad-approved scholars formed a consensus to freeze debate within Islam. These scholars benefited from patronage and weren’t about to chirp an ode to openness when their masters wanted harsher lyrics…. The only thing this imperial strategy has achieved is to spawn the most dogged oppression of Muslims by Muslims: the incarceration of interpretation. [2003, p. 59]

  What has been spread, Manji notes, is the “imitation of imitation,” a copy-fidelity-enhancing mechanism like those discussed in chapter 5, but in this case deliberately designed by stewards, to edit out all exploratory mutations before they can spread.