Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Or imagine if we identified children from birth as young smokers or drinking children because their parents smoked or drank. In this regard (and no other) Dawkins reminds me of my grandfather, a physician who was way ahead of his time back in the 1950s, writing impassioned letters to the editors of the Boston newspapers, railing against the secondhand smoke that was endangering the health of children whose parents smoked at home—and we all laughed at him, and went on smoking. How much harm could that little bit of smoke do anyone? We’ve found out.

Everybody quotes (or misquotes) the Jesuits, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man,” but nobody—not the Jesuits or anybody else—really knows how resilient children are. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of young people turning their backs on their religious traditions after years of immersion and walking away with a shrug and a smile and no visible ill effects. On the other hand, some children are raised in such an ideological prison that they willingly become their own jailers, as Nicholas Humphrey (1999) has put it, forbidding themselves any contact with the liberating ideas that might well change their minds. In his deeply thoughtful essay, “What Shall We Tell the Children?,” Humphrey pioneers the consideration of the ethical issues involved in deciding how to decide “when and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensible” (p. 68). He proposes a general test based on the principle of informed consent, but applied—as it must be—hypothetically: what would these children choose if they were, later in life, somehow given the information they would need in order to make an informed choice? Against the objection that we cannot answer such hypothetical questions, he argues that there is in fact plenty of empirical evidence, and general principles, from which clear conclusions can be conscientiously derived. We take ourselves to be sometimes permitted, and even obligated, to make such conscientious decisions on behalf of people who cannot, for one reason or another, make an informed decision for themselves, and this set of problems can be addressed using the understanding that we have already hammered out in the workshop of political consensus on these other topics.

The resolution of these dilemmas is not (yet) obvious, to say the least. Compare it with the closely related issue of what we, on the outside, should do about the Sentinelese and the Jarawas and the other peoples who still live a stone-age existence in remarkable isolation on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, far out in the Indian Ocean. These people have managed to keep even the most intrepid explorers and traders at bay for centuries by their ferocious bow-and-arrow defense of their island territories, so little is known about them, and for some time now the government of India, of which the islands form a distant part, has prohibited all contact with them. Now that they have been drawn to the world’s attention in the wake of the great tsunami of December 2004, it is hard to imagine that this isolation can be maintained, but even if it could be, should it be? Who has the right to decide the matter? Certainly not the anthropologists, although they have worked hard to protect these people from contact—even with themselves—for decades. Who are they to “protect” these human beings? The anthropologists do not own them as if they were laboratory specimens carefully gathered and shielded from contamination, and the idea that these islands should be treated as a human zoo or preserve is offensive—even when we contemplate the even more offensive alternative of opening the doors to missionaries of all faiths, who would no doubt eagerly rush in to save their souls.

It is tempting, but illusory, to think that they have solved the ethical problem for us, by their adult decision to drive away all outsiders without asking if they are protectors, exploiters, investigators, or soul-savers. They clearly want to be left alone, so we should leave them alone! There are two problems with this convenient proposal: Their decision is so manifestly ill informed that if we let it trump all other considerations are we not as culpable as somebody who lets a person drink a poisoned cocktail “of his own free will” without deigning to warn him? And in any case, although the adults may have reached the age of consent, are their children not being victimized by the ignorance of their parents? We would never permit a neighbor’s child to be kept so deluded, so shouldn’t we cross the ocean and step in to rescue these children, however painful the shock?