Well known for Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett has now extended that interest to religion. The ‘natural’ in the subtitle should not be read as a synonym for ‘human’, nor yet for ‘social’. Religion has necessarily evolved and is therefore part of nature – one subtext is the ascendancy of biology.
Dennett’s aim, a political one, is directed explicitly to the religious in the USA:
It is high time to subject religion… to the most intensive multidisciplinary research… because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about…it affects not just our social, political and economic conflicts, but the very meaning we find in our lives… for many people nothing matters more than religion and for this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.
We need not be reminded of the power wielded by the religious right during the current Administration. (See Sofia 77, May 2006). Dennett opens with a parable: ‘…an ant in a meadow, laboriously climbing up a blade of grass, higher and higher until it falls, then climbs again, and again, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, always striving to reach the top’. What benefit will the ant achieve for itself? ‘Wrong question, as it turns out’, says Dennett. A lancet fluke which needs to find its way into the stomach of a sheep or cow, has commandeered the ant’s brain. The ant is being caused to climb not for its benefit but rather for the benefit of the fluke and its progeny. An analogy is immediately deployed to describe religions.
Dennett’s style is an earnest avuncularity, he proceeds with an elaborate sweet reasonableness, his route is via Richard Dawkins’ notion of a meme which, consciously modelled on gene, indicates anything that is capable of replication: words, games, songs, dances, gestures, the skills of hunting, farming etc. These replicants, as Dennett prefers to call them, enable us to consider who benefits from the replication. Dennett is even-handed: religions themselves might turn out to be mutualists enhancing human fitness, or commensuals, neutral, neither good nor bad, or they might be parasites, deleterious replicators. If the latter, the cui bono? question changes dramatically: it is no longer our fitness which is in question, but rather that of the religion as a replicator.
Dennett sees some religion as better understood by practices rather than by creeds, but when considering belief, also considers belief in belief, where the second of these can be left conveniently hazy.
The book has an accomplished style, conversational in tone, sparkling and engaging yet at a leisurely pace, the examples being homely and everyday. It would be a useful text for reading groups of a wide range of interests and abilities. It is rich in some of its reflexivity, just as this reader came up with an objection, that same objection was shortly recognized. Anthropology and economics are adopted as useful allies.
It is also exceptionable on several grounds. Topics introduced are often quickly dropped. ‘Science’ is not rendered problematic. Logicians will mutter ‘assumes the consequent’ on many occasions, Occam’s razor will reveal a harvest. Religion is narrowly defined as a social system whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
Dennett has at least two uses of Spell in mind.
There is the possibility of breaking that spell which religions evince; and there is his main target, that spell of ‘the taboo on a no-holds-barred investigation of religion as a natural phenomenon among many’.
I am left with an intriguing puzzle. I am delighted that Dennett is content to be vague, delighted by his copious use of metaphor and the possible programme of research he has derived from it – though not, as yet, carried out. If, as his publisher claims, Dennett has already broken the spell, he has done so simply by encouraging his reader to drop some ways of talking in favour of others – in a thoroughly Rortyean fashion. So, is Breaking the Spell simply another example of the literary genre Predatory Darwinism or has the spell been broken by a thoroughly benign Trojan Horse?
Penguin are advertising a paperback edition for March 2007. .
David Lambourn Ph.D.is an Open University Lecturer and a former C of E clergyman in the diocese of Southwark.He is the host of the Birmingham SoF group.
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett. Allen Lane, 2006. £18.75. 448 pages. ISBN: 0713997893.