Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

It is not that I don’t sympathize with the distaste of those who resist my proposal. Trying to imagine what their emotional response to my proposal would be, I have come up with an unsettling thought experiment that seems to me to do the trick. (I am speaking now to those who, like me, are not appalled by the idea of this examination.) Imagine how you would feel if you were to read in the science section of the New York Times that new research conducted at Cambridge University and Caltech showed that music, long viewed as one of the unalloyed treasures of human culture, is actually bad for your health, a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s and heart disease, a mood-distorter that impairs judgment in subtle but clearly deleterious ways, a significant contributor to aggressive tendencies, xenophobia, and weakness of will. Early and habitual exposure to music, both performing and listening, makes you 40 percent more likely to suffer serious depression, knocks an average of ten points off your IQ, and nearly doubles the probability that you will commit an act of violence at some time in your life. A panel of researchers recommends that people restrict their music intake to no more than an hour a day (including everything from elevator music and background music on television to symphony concerts) and that the widespread practice of music lessons for children be curtailed immediately.

Aside from the utter disbelief with which I would greet a report of such “findings,” I can detect in my imagined reactions a visceral defensive surge, along the lines of “So much the worse for Cambridge and Caltech! What do they know about music?” and “I don’t care if it is true! Anybody who tries to take away my music had better be prepared for a fight, because a life without music isn’t worth living. I don’t care if it ‘hurts’ me, and I don’t even care if it ‘hurts’ others—we’re going to have music, and that’s all there is to it.” That is how I would be tempted to respond. I would rather not live in a world without music. “But why?” someone might ask. “It’s just some silly sawing away and making noise together. It doesn’t feed the hungry or cure cancer or…” I answer: “But it brings great comfort and joy to hundreds of millions of people. Sure, there are excesses and controversies, but, still, can anybody doubt that music is by and large a good thing?” “Well, yes,” comes the reply. There are religious sects—the Taliban, for instance, but also Puritan sects of yore in Christianity and no doubt others—that have held that music is an evil pastime, a sort of drug to be forbidden. The idea is not clearly insane, so we should accept the intellectual burden of showing that it is an error.

I recognize that many people feel about religion the way I feel about music. They may be right. Let’s find out. That is, let’s subject religion to the same sort of scientific inquiry that we have done with tobacco and alcohol and, for that matter, music. Let’s find out why people love their religion, and what it’s good for. And we should no more take the existing research to settle the issue than we took the tobacco companies’ campaigns about the safety of cigarette smoking at face value. Sure, religion saves lives. So does tobacco—ask those GIs for whom tobacco was an even greater comfort than religion during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.

I’m prepared to look hard at the pros and cons of music, and if it turns out that music causes cancer, ethnic hatred, and war, then I’ll have to think seriously about how to live without music. It is only because I am so supremely confident that music doesn’t do much harm that I can enjoy it with such a clear conscience. If I were told by credible people that music might be harmful to the world, all things considered, I would feel morally bound to examine the evidence as dispassionately as I could. In fact, I would feel guilty about my allegiance to music if I didn’t check it out.