Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

In the meantime, the way to prepare for this utopian global conversation is to study, as compassionately and dispassionately as we can, both their ways and our own ways. Consider the brave self-observation of Raja Shehadeh, writing about the grip of modern Palestine: “Most of your energy is spent extending feelers to detect public perception of your actions, because your survival is contingent on remaining on good terms with your society.”¹¹ When we can share similar observations about the problems in our own society, we will be on a good path to mutual understanding. Palestinian society, if Shehadeh is right, is beset with a virulent case of the “punish those who won’t punish” meme, for which there are models (beginning with Boyd and Richerson, 1992) that predict other properties we should look for. It may be that this particular feature would foil well-intentioned projects that would work in societies that lack it. In particular, we mustn’t assume that policies that are benign in our own culture will not be malignant in others. As Jessica Stern puts it:

I have come to see terrorism as a kind of virus, which spreads as a result of risk factors at various levels: global, interstate, national, and personal. But identifying these factors precisely is difficult. The same variables (political, religious, social, or all of the above) that seem to have caused one person to become a terrorist might cause another to become a saint. [2003, p. 283]

As communications technology makes it harder and harder for leaders to shield their people from outside information, and as the economic realities of the twenty-first century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child, the floodgates will open all over the world, with tumultuous effects. All the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture, all the trash and scum that accumulates in the corners of a free society, will inundate these relatively pristine regions along with the treasures of modern education, equal rights for women, better health care, workers’ rights, democratic ideals, and openness to the cultures of others. As the experience in the former Soviet Union shows only too clearly, the worst features of capitalism and high tech are among the most robust replicators in this population explosion of memes, and there will be plenty of grounds for xenophobia, Luddism, and the tempting “hygiene” of backward-looking fundamentalism. At the same time, we shouldn’t rush to be apologetic about American pop culture. It has its excesses, but in many instances it is not the excesses that offend so much as the egalitarianism and tolerance. The hatred of this potent American export is often driven by racism—because of the strong Afro-American presence in American pop culture—and sexism—because of the status of women we celebrate and our (relatively) benign treatment of homosexuality. (See, e.g., Stern, 2003, p. 99.)

As Jared Diamond shows in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was European germs that brought Western Hemisphere populations to the brink of extinction in the s ixteenth century, since those people had had no history in which to develop tolerance for them. In this century it will be our memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared world. Our capacity to tolerate the toxic excesses of freedom cannot be assumed in others, or simply exported as one more commodity. The practically unlimited educability of any human being gives us hope of success, but designing and implementing the cultural inoculations necessary to fend off disaster, while respecting the rights of those in need of inoculation, will be an urgent task of great complexity, requiring not just better social science but also sensitivity, imagination, and courage. The field of public health expanded to include cultural health will be the greatest challenge of the next century.¹²

Jessica Stern, an intrepid pioneer in this endeavor, notes that individual observations such as hers are just the beginning:

A rigorous, statistically unbiased study of the root causes of terrorism at the level of individuals would require identifying controls, youth exposed to the same environment, who felt the same humiliation, human rights abuse, and relative deprivation, but who chose nonviolent means to express their grievances or chose not to express them at all. A team of researchers, including psychiatrists, medical doctors, and a variety of social scientists, would develop a questionnaire and a list of medical tests to be administered to a random sample of operatives and their families. [2003, p. xxx]