Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

5. I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe—the gods and other spirits—don’t exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don’t have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways.

6. In an important but underappreciated discussion, Sperber (1985, pp. 49ff.) proposes that we call such indeterminate cognitive states semipropositional representations. These are the “half-understood ideas” that we all use every day, and that typically get turned into proper propositional representations only under the pressure of systematic inquiry. This hypothesized folieà-deux process of theology generation is similar to the generate-and-test model of dream production and hallucination generation described in Dennett, 1991a, chapter 1.

7. I’m adopting here the active voice of “selfish meme” talk; it is the same shorthand we use when we say that HIV “attacks” and “hides” and “adjusts its strategy” in response to our efforts to eradicate it. Ideas don’t have minds any more than viruses or bacteria do, but they can be usefully and predictively described as if they were selfish and clever.

8. Many years ago, I published a paper on pain (Dennett, 1975, reprinted in1978) that included some shocking facts about the use of amnestics by anesthesiologists to wipe out postsurgical memories of pain experienced by insufficiently anesthetized patients during surgery. Several anesthesiologists who read my piece in draft implored me not to publish these details in a nonmedical journal, since it would make their jobs more difficult. Anything that heightens the anxiety of patients presurgically makes the induction of safe anesthesia more difficult, and hence more dangerous to them, so it is best to keep this information where it belongs: restricted to the medical community. This is the strongest case I know of a fact that people might be better off not knowing—but it was not strong enough to dissuade me. You might want to ask yourself if you would approve of the policy of doctors’ having secret knowledge that was systematically kept from their patients, at all costs.

9. The theory that all religion is just such Priestertrug, deception or manipulation by priests for their own benefit, has a history going back to Diderot and the Enlightenment. “Yet in spite of suspicions both ancient and modern, in spite of the unimpeachable existence of cunning and trickery among humans, the hypothesis of pure deception does not explain anything,” Burkert avers (1996, p. 118), but this is too strong; it may not explain everything, but it explains many features of religion around the world, from psychic-healing frauds to the worst abuses of televangelism.

7 The Invention of Team Spirit

1. One tradition would speak here of “selfless” caring, but since this inevitably invites objections about the purported incoherence of true selflessness, I prefer to think of this as the possibility of extending the domain of the self. Here is one good reason: Supposedly “selfless” agents are not at all immune to the problems that bedevil the selfish agents described by economists. Say I am an agent in a bargaining situation, or in a prisoner’s dilemma, or faced with a coercive offer, or an attempt at extortion. My problem is not resolved, or diminished, or even significantly adjusted, if the “self” I am protecting is other than my proper self—if I am not just trying to save my own skin, so to speak. An extortionist or a benefactor who knows what I care about is in a position to frame the situation to hit me where it matters to me, whatever matters to me. (Material in this note and the text paragraph to which it is keyed is drawn from Dennett, 2001b and 2003b.)

2. Manji provides a telling example: the deliberate squelching of ijtihad, the Muslim tradition of inquiry that flourished until the tenth century (and accounted for the glorious intellectual and artistic achievements of early Islam).

In the guise of protecting the world-wide Muslim nation from disunity (known as fitna and considered a crime), Baghdad-approved scholars formed a consensus to freeze debate within Islam. These scholars benefited from patronage and weren’t about to chirp an ode to openness when their masters wanted harsher lyrics…. The only thing this imperial strategy has achieved is to spawn the most dogged oppression of Muslims by Muslims: the incarceration of interpretation. [2003, p. 59]