Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

This plea may fall on deaf ears, but if so, then there really are objective grounds for a verdict of irrationality: they are making a mistake that they themselves have no grounds to defend to themselves, and that we need not respect in deference.

Cultural evolution has given us the thinking tools to create our societies and all their edifices and perspectives, and Balkin sees that these thinking tools—which he calls cultural software—are inevitably both liberating and constraining, both empowering and limiting. When our brains come to be inhabited by memes that have evolved under earlier selection pressures, our ways of thinking are restricted just as surely as our ways of talking and hearing are restricted when we learn our mother tongue. But the reflexivity that has evolved in human culture, the trick of thinking about thinking and representing our representations, makes all the restrictions temporary and revisable. As soon as we recognize that, we are ready to adopt what Balkin calls the ambivalent conception of ideology which avoids Mannheim’s paradox: “A subject constituted by cultural software is thinking about the cultural software that constitutes her. It is important to recognize that this recursion in and of itself involves no contradiction, anomaly, or logical difficulty” (pp. 127–28). Balkin insists, “Ideological critique does not stand above other forms of knowledge creation or acquisition. It is not a master form of knowing” (p. 134). This book is intended to be an instance of just such an ecumenical effort, relying on the respect for truth and the tools of truth-finding to provide a shared pool of knowledge from which we can work together toward mutually comprehended and accepted visions of what is good and what is just. The idea is not to bulldoze people with science, but to get them to see that things they already know, or could know, have implications for how they should want to respond to the issues under discussion.

APPENDIX CThe Bellboy and the Lady Named Tuck

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For years, Dan Sperber and his colleagues Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have expressed their skepticism about the utility of the meme’s-eye perspective. First, let me try to give their main objections a clear expression, before saying why they have not persuaded me, in spite of what I have learned from them. This is my own summary of their position:

It is obvious that cultural items (ideas, designs, methods, behaviors…) have population explosions and extinctions, and that there are large noncoincidental family resemblances between such items and the models that inspire them or from which they are otherwise descended. But the phenomenon of transmission in most but not quite all these cases is not the sort of high-fidelity copying that the gene model requires. The cause of a new instance is not copying at all: “The cause may merely trigger the production of a similar effect” (Sperber, 2000, p. 169). Thus produced, the similarities between instances are not like the similarities between genes and hence require a different sort of Darwinian explanation. Culture evolves, but not strictly by descent with modification. And it is true that there are some few memes meeting Dawkins’s specifications, such as chain letters, but such true memes play a relatively negligible role in the dynamics of cultural evolution (Sperber, 2000, p. 163). It is better to concentrate instead on the constraints and biases discernible in the psychological mechanisms that people share (Atran, 2002, pp. 237–38; Boyer, 2001, pp. 35–40).