Breaking the Spell

Breaking the Spell Page 45

by Daniel C. Dennett

  3. Earlier Parliaments were held in Chicago in 1893, at the Columbian Exposition; in 1993, in Chicago; and in 1999, in Cape Town.

  4. This was the headline, in Italian, of an interview with me by Giulio Giorelli published in Corriere della Serra in Milan in 1997. Ever since then, I have adopted it as my slogan, opening my book Freedom Evolves (2003c) with it.

  5. For a recent attempt to exploit it, see Johnson, 1996.

  11 Now What Do We Do?

  1. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, I joined Ronald de Sousa in disparaging philosophical theology as “intellectual tennis without a net” (1995b, p. 154), and showed why an appeal to faith is out of bounds, quite literally, in the serious game of empirical research. That passage has drawn fire from Plantinga(1996) and others, but I stand by it. Let’s play real intellectual tennis: this book is my serve, and I welcome serious returns—with the net of reason always up.

  2. I am proposing this in advance, with scant hope of forestalling the usual reaction: defensive sneering. Consider some of the response to Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse (2005), as described in the Boston Globe by Christopher Shea (2005):

  “He is one of those people who—I don’t want to sound catty, because he is an elegant writer—is not taken seriously by most historians,” says Anthony Grafton, a professor of early European history at Princeton, who deems Diamond’s work “superficial.” Books like “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” he says, are less important for their arguments than for “showing what historians have given up”—grand, sweeping history that connects the dots created by thousands of monographs.

  To me, Professor Grafton doesn’t sound catty; he sounds complacent. Perhaps he and his fellow historians are underestimating the force of Diamond’s “superficial” arguments. We won’t know until they take them seriously enough to dispose of them properly. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. We evolutionists don’t all have to take the creationists seriously, because some of our folks have done that job well, and we’ve checked it out and approved it (see note 3 to chapter 3). Once the historians have duly rebutted Diamond’s theses with the same care, they can go back to ignoring his arguments, if they haven’t been persuaded. For another response to a response to Diamond, see Gregg Easterbrook’s review (2005) and my reply (Dennett, 2005b).

  3. The researchers who have made the headlines are Michael Persinger(1987), Vilayanur Ramachandran et al. (1997; for Ramachandran’s popular account see Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998), and Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili (Newberg et al., 2001). The prospects and shortcomings connected with this work are discussed fairly by Atran (2002, chapter 7, “Waves of Passion: The Neuropsychology of Religion”). See also Churchland, 2002, and Shermer, 2003, for good reviews of religion and the brain. The more recent book by Dean Hamer (2004) was discussed in chapter 5. There are others working on such topics, and the best of the recent work is discussed by Atran.

  4. The new field of neuro-economics (e.g., Montague and Berns, 2002; Glimcher, 2003) is making progress as much because of advances in economic thinking as because of the new neuro-imaging technology. For a discussion, see chapter 8 of Ross, 2005.

  5. An initial opening into this politically delicate but biologically secure research can be found in Ewing et al., 1974; Shriver, 1997; Gill et al., 1999; Wall et al., 2003. See Duster, 2005, for a thoughtful evaluation of the pitfalls to be avoided in studying the genetic factors in human diseases.

  6. See, for instance, the encyclopedic Hill and Hood, 1999, Measures of Religiosity, which reviews hundreds of different surveys and instruments.

  7. These questions may seem too fanciful to take seriously, but they are not. Research has shown striking effects of apparently trivial differences. The news of the day does matter in some conditions (Iyengar, 1987). In a survey about personal happiness (or subjective well-being), if the telephone caller asks subjects, “How’s the weather where you are?,” then how the weather is doesn’t matter; if the telephone caller doesn’t ask this innocuous question and the weather is sunny, people say they are significantly happier! Drawing attention to the local weather makes answerers less likely to be covertly influenced by it in their responses to questions on other topics (Schwarz and Clore, 1983). For other examples, see Kahnemann et al., eds., 2000.8. Shermer designed the study in collaboration with Frank Sulloway, a former MIT statistician and Darwin scholar and author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (1996). After extensive pretesting and refining of their questionnaire, they first sent it out to the five thousand Skeptic Society members and got over seventeen hundred replies, and then they sent the same survey to a random sample of ten thousand people across the country and got over a thousand respondents. The statistics above are for the random sample, not the skeptics. See Shermer, 2003, for some of the details. Shermer and Sulloway, in press, is the formal presentation of the results.

  9. My own foray into questionnaire design has been exploring other possible sources of distortion, such as looking at how the same questions in two different contexts (challenging and supportive) get answered differently. There are definitely significant differences, but they are not what we initially expected, and are ambiguous between several different interpretations, so we are designing follow-up studies and have not yet submitted any of our results to a peer-reviewed journal. By the way, we have attempted to answer the question raised in chapter 8 and reviewed above, regarding whether it makes a difference whether a question reads “God exists” or “I believe that God exists” (strongly agree, agree somewhat…). Our preliminary results suggest that this minor difference in wording does not make a difference when, for instance, the test items are “Jesus walked on water” versus “I believe Jesus walked on water.” But further studies may discover a context yielding a different result.

  10. Quoted in Stern, 2003, p. xiii.

  11. Quoted in Manji, 2003, p. 90.

  12. This paragraph and its predecessor are drawn, with revisions, from Dennett, 1999b.

  13. Scott Atran has begun studying future Hamas leaders in Palestine and Gaza. See his important editorial, “Hamas May Give Peace a Chance,” New York Times, December 18, 2004.

  14. No Arabic-language publisher would dare publish a translation of Manji’s book, but an Arabic translation of it is available, free, on the Web. Young Muslims all over the Arab world can download it in discreet PDF files, to be read and shared and discussed, the beginnings of what Manji calls Operation Ijtihad. Ijtihad means “independent thinking,” and it flourished as a tradition during the greatest period of Islam, the five hundred years beginning about A.D. 750 (Manji, 2003, p. 51).

  15. Irshad Manji reports seeing a sign in a new school for girls in Afghanistan: “Educate a boy and you educate only that boy, educate a girl and you educate her entire family” (speech at Tufts University, March 30, 2005).

  16.A recent poll in Newsweek (May 24, 2004) claimed that 55 percent of Americans think that the faithful will be taken up to heaven in the Rapture and 17 percent believe the world will end in their lifetimes. If this is even close to being accurate, it suggests that End Timers in the first decade of the twenty-first century outnumber the Marxists of the 1930s through the 1950s by a wide margin. But what percentage of these adherents are prepared to take any steps, overt or covert, to hasten the imagined Armageddon is anybody’s guess, I fear to say.

  17.Sharlet, 2003, provides a fascinating and unsettling introduction to this little-known organization, which includes this list of congressmen (including a few who are no longer in Congress), and also describes highlights of the history of its activities around the world, which include the National Prayer Breakfasts but also the covert support of political leaders and movements. Its current leader, Douglas Coe, is described by Time magazine (February 7, 2005, p. 41) as “the Stealth Persuad
er.” Sharlet comments:

  At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy,” as an “ambassador of faith.” Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family’s unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with 1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. [p. 55]

  I think we need to know more about the activities of this quiet, nongovernmental diplomacy, since it may be pursuing policies that are antithetical to those of the democracy of which these congressmen are elected representatives.

  18.We also need to keep ourselves informed, and this is becoming more difficult, oddly enough. We used to think that secrecy was perhaps the greatest enemy of democracy, and as long as there was no suppression or censorship, people could be trusted to make the informed decisions that would preserve our free society, but we have learned in recent years that the techniques of misinformation and misdirection have become so refined that, even in an open society, a cleverly directed flood of misinformation can overwhelm the truth, even though the truth is out there, uncensored, quietly available to anyone who can find it. For instance, I do not fear that this book will be censored or suppressed, but I do anticipate that it (and I) will be subjected to ruthless misrepresentation when those who cannot honestly face its contents seek to poison the minds of readers to it or direct attention away from it. In my recent experience, even some respectable academics have been unable to resist the temptation to do this (Dennett, 2003e). Relying on that experience, I have made a list of the passages in this book most likely to be ripped out of context and used deliberately to misrepresent my position. This is not the first time I have done this. In Consciousness Explained, I provided a premonitory footnote to a passage on zombies (don’t ask; you don’t want to know), asserting, “It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!” (1991a, p. 407n), and, sure enough, several authors could not resist quoting it out of context—but at least they had to quote the footnote, too, not being quite that desperate or dishonest. In this case, stronger measures are called for, since the stakes are higher, so I am keeping my list of predicted deliberate misrepresentations sealed and ready to release. For instance, which of my little jokes, quite innocuous in context, will be brandished to demonstrate my “intolerance,” my “disrespect,” my anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim “bias”? (As all you careful readers know full well, I am an equal-opportunity teaser, who refuses to tiptoe around for fear of offending people—because I want to take the “I’m mortally offended” card out of the game.) It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, falls into my trap. They won’t be assiduous note readers, will they?

  Appendix B Some More Questions About Science

  1. William Dembski, the author of numerous books and articles attacking evolutionary theory, often complains loudly that his “scientific” work is not treated with respect by working biologists. As the coeditor of Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies (2001), he can find the reason for this in his own practices. For a detailed critique of Dembski’s methods, see the Web site of Thomas Schneider, http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/ ~toms/paper/ev/.

  2.This paragraph is drawn from Dennett, 2003c, p. 303.3. Most of this huge increase in mass relative to “wild” nature is due to our livestock and pets, which now outweigh us in total by more than three to one. It is hard to estimate the ratio of domesticated plants to wild plants, but of course that ratio has changed dramatically as well.

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