Book Review: Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennett
Book Review: Breaking the Spell, by Daniel Dennett
reviewed by Madeleine Bunting
Daniel Dennett, one of America’s most brilliant philosophers, wants to provoke. That’s obvious not just from the title of his new book, Breaking the Spell but the image he uses to begin his 400 page analysis of why people have religious faith. An ant climbs laboriously up a blade of grass. Up it climbs, falls and climbs again… and again. Why? A parasite, a tiny brain worm, has commandeered the ant’s brain because it needs to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or cow to complete its reproductive cycle. The ant’s wellbeing is redundant. Could religion have commandeered human brains to ensure the survival of its own precepts without any regard to its hosts’ wellbeing?
Dennett has spent much of his distinguished career as a philosopher explaining how some of our most cherished ideals such as freedom and justice can be explained by evolution because they gave human genes an advantage in their struggle to replicate. In this, his new book, he’s turned his formidable intellectual firepower on religion itself: his book is the boldest and most ambitious attempt of a Darwinian to account for the phenomenon of religion. Can religion—its practices, beliefs and experiences—be explained simply in terms of genetic advantage? And has that genetic advantage passed its sell-by date—in other words, if religion was useful in the past, is it now?
These are big questions so it seems fitting that a tall man with a big beard—with an uncanny resemblance to Charles Darwin or a child’s idea of God—has launched himself into the centre of one of America’s most fraught public debates, the nature of religion. In the UK on a tour of public debates across the country to promote the book, it’s immediately clear that here is a man who has thought deeply about what he is contributing to that debate and why. He is a captivating thinker because he’s a master of accessible, vivid analogies—such as that brain worm. Or to take a couple more: referring to the tendency amongst humans for a sweet tooth (he explains why that evolved in the book) he goes on to ask me,
Is religion sugar or saccharine. If it’s the latter, we eliminate it at our peril because sugar is worse. But if its sugar, can we develop saccharine?
As the interview drew to a conclusion, he came up with another: I have a farm in Maine and I was reseeding a hay field when an old hand suggested I needed oats as a ‘nurse crop’. I’d never heard of the concept before. He explained that it would protect the hay becomes it comes up first. Perhaps religion is a nurse crop; we needed it for civilisation to get going. We couldn’t have had science without religion first. But now we have science and religion is no longer necessary. That’s a possibility I’m prepared to accept.
Dennett raises hugely important questions and what distinguishes him from Richard Dawkins, (the fellow Darwinian with whom he is often bracketed) is that he readily admits he doesn’t have the answers. Indeed, the book offers only questions, and the conclusion of his book—namely, we need plenty of research in which the scientific method is applied to religion—sounds somewhat lame given the book’s intellectual scope. But the book’s purpose is not an elongated bid for research funding; its avowed purpose is to get the believer to admit, firstly, that the questions are important and secondly, that they don’t really know the answers either.
That is a pressing imperative in twenty-first century America, believes Dennett. He says that he felt he had to write this book and really, he would have preferred to have continued working on consciousness. But he took four years out to write a book which he hopes will challenge the alarming ‘drift to theocracy’ in America.
This book is written for Americans and that affects both the tone and the argument. For the British reader, the core questions Dennett poses have to be dug out of some material which is unnecessarily defensive and combative. As Dennett talks in the London hotel where we meet, the image comes to mind of a warrior taking a pause from the battle.
More than half of all Americans think the End Times are coming. There are many who are quite sure that Judgement Day is just around the corner, and a disturbing number of them are in positions of influence in Washington, maybe influencing our foreign policy and our environmental policy. On the latter, they say, ‘why worry about global warming when the world is going to end anyway?’
They went into Iraq with an unbelievable arrogance that can only be explained by religion: the attitude which says, ‘God tells me what to do. I just listen to God and I don’t have to worry about the consequences. Religion can turn off moral judgement.’
We’re living in a hypocrisy trap: everyone in Congress claims to be Christians—you can’t get elected without professing to believe. That’s appalling. Coming out as an atheist in America is now what coming out as gay used to be.
What infuriates Dennett is the
sublime indifference of some religious people to facts. Whereas he is meticulous with his facts and happy to be corrected, he finds many religious people are
blithely unconcerned about colossal mistakes.To illustrate his point, he gives a recent anecdote from a prestigious conference where he spoke alongside Pastor Rick Warren, the author of the hugely successful bestseller, The Purpose-Driven Life:
I was very respectful. Warren is a clever social psychologist and has plenty of wise advice and knows how people tick. But he’s a creationist and the book is full of falsehoods; he claims that before the flood, there had never been any rain. He has a literalist reading of the Bible. I reverse engineered his book. He walked out.
Dennett believes too much power is accruing to men such as Warren (who has sold 30 million copies of his book) and they need to be challenged head-on. Hence Dennett’s abrasive challenge early in the book: I for one, am not in awe of your faith. I am appalled by your ignorance, by your unreasoning certainty that you have all the answers.
He goes on to ask, I wonder if any believers in the End Times will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.
This sounds like a foreign battle—and it is; only a particular type of paranoia could fear that evangelicalism is gaining the same kind of dominance in the UK. The danger is that in the UK, the probing nature of Dennett’s challenge gets lost in the heat generated by a misplaced combativeness. That would be a shame because there is territory here for some thought provoking exchanges.
To his credit, Dennett wants a response—particularly from those who describe themselves as religious, and says as much in the book. I test him out on a few small points; I accuse him of using his considerable intellectual gifts to belittle the religious people he interviewed. He concedes the point and seems genuinely troubled by what he admits is intellectual bullying
. I argue that his definition of spirituality has an unacceptable omission—the development of compassion. He says, he agrees and that’s a good point. Finally, I tackle him on his slighting analogy of contemplatives with someone who perfects their golfing drive. He listens carefully and finally concedes some ground.
But these points indicate that Dennett has failed to grasp some fundamental insights into the nature of religious practice. He privileges cognitive thought; he even suggests at one point in the book an examination to determine who understands a religion as if the acquisition of a body of knowledge was the key factor in faith. (Was he suggesting the return of the Catholic penny catechism?)Yet in the course of the interview, he also readily admits his love of religious ritual and how deeply it moves him and describes with great affection his family annual Christmas carol party. He begins an anecdote then stops himself It’s about my child, I don’t think it fair to say more… But a child lighting a candle, that is deeply moving.
He willingly concedes that he sees many lives shaped in excellent ways by religion and I’ve no interest in interfering with that
but little of these aspects of the man emerges in the book and the way he presents his arguments is not designed to conciliate.
Hence, it’s a book which will infuriate some readers and delight others. It will fail in its central purpose to get believers to question their beliefs because it is too antagonistic—but will serve another purpose, as a crowd pleaser and fabulous morale raiser for beleaguered atheist America. He says that’s fine by him. Some call him mischievous, others including prominent atheist Darwinians in the US, call him irresponsible because he is only contributing to the increasing polarisation of this debate on science and religion in the US—whittling away that possibility for common ground just as successfully as his evangelical opponents.
Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C Dennett is published by Penguin.