Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

6. Burkert (1996) offers a different speculative evolutionary scenario of a cascade of bottlenecks that could select for genes for susceptibility to religion: “Although religious obsession could be called a form of paranoia, it does offer a chance of survival in extreme and hopeless situations, when others, possibly the nonreligious individuals, would break down and give up. Mankind, in its long past, will have gone through many a desperate situation, with an ensuing breakthrough of homines religiosi” (p. 16). I cannot yet see how to test this hypothesis, but it is certainly a possibility to consider seriously, if we can find some way to do so.

7. My use of the term folk religion is at variance with the usage of some anthropologists and ethnomusicologists (e.g., Yoder, 1974; Titon, 1988), who use it to describe the contrast between “official” organized religion and what people of those denominations actually believe and practice in their daily lives (see Titon, 1988, pp. 144ff., for a discussion). See also the related concept of “theological incorrectness” (Slone, 2004). What I am calling folk religion is often called tribal or primitive religion.

8. Few folk music fans today are such purists as to turn up their noses at all composed “folk” songs, but for my purposes purism rules: those relatively ancient melodies and lyrics without authors are the folk music I am talking about. In every age, these songs get artfully adjusted and rearranged, with new lyrics and new rhythms, and sometimes new melodies as well, and along the way folk artists add songs of their own composition. To take just the recent past, Huddie Ledbetter and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger composed hundreds of “folk songs” that have joined the canon, even though in these cases we know who the author was. We tend to exclude from the canon the equally singable ballads of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Gershwins, but time may well erase the distinction. My point is that, although it is possible in principle that if we had perfect historical knowledge we could always identify a composer and a lyricist, it is also possible—and more likely—that in many cases the authorship was so distributed over the centuries that nobody deserves credit for either the melody or the lyrics of the “classic” folk song that now appears in the canon. Did Ravenscroft just write down “The Three Ravens” in 1611, or did he compose it? Or did he adapt it as he wrote it down—or did it adapt itself?

9. Some of this is too obvious to notice. Why should a written language be serial at all (just one word at a time)? Because we have just one mouth with which to speak, to put it crudely. The ideograms of Japanese and Chinese show that it is possible for written languages to untie their oral straitjackets if not shed them altogether. Would a system of symbols that could not be “pronounced,” that was three-dimensional (a word sculpture of sorts), or heavily dependent on the use of color, count as a language? The very idea of silent reading—let alone reading without moving your lips!—came along late in the development of writing (in medieval times, historians aver—see, e.g., Saenger, 2000). Archaic spelling is also, of course, a trace of earlier pronunciations.

10. Blackmore (1999, p. 197) argues that “memetic drive” is possible and likely in accounting for our love of rituals: that idiosyncrasies in culturally transmitted rituals would be variably responded to by people, and this would create a novel selective environment in which talent for and appreciation of these idiosyncrasies were genetically selected—just as talent for language was genetically selected once language got under way. What started as a more or less undifferentiated sweet tooth for ritual, in other words, could evolve genetically into a sweet tooth for supernormal versions of the local idiosyncrasies, a case of gene-culture coevolution that was led by cultural exploration of the space of possibilities, a possible extension of the Baldwin Effect, in which innovations of behavior achieved by individuals in their lifetimes (innovations discovered or learned by them) can create and focus selection pressures that eventually lead to innate proclivities to perform these innovations, a non-Lamarckian way that acquired characteristics can influence the evolution of genetically determined characteristics (see Dennett, 1995b, 2003a, 2003d).