This was another great ABC "All in the Mind" podcast, with world famous philosopher of the mind, delving into the tricky but fascinating topic of trying to understand religion from a psychological perspective. (I suspects this guy gets a lot of hate mail?)
Breaking the Spell: Daniel Dennett on religion
My guest is perhaps the world's most popular philosopher of mind and a great provocateur, as you'll hear. Daniel Dennett's best sellers include Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Consciousness Explained and, just out, is Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has generated some whopping feuds this year. He thinks some religions are evolving in toxic ways and that science shouldn't be shy about investigating why. So let's join him then in his cosy office at Tufts University in Boston. where this self-described godless philosopher co-heads the Centre for Cognitive Studies.
The following extract gives you a good flavour of the sort of tough and pertinent questions Daniel is asking regarding religion:
Natasha Mitchell: You know, nevertheless though, when science has attempted to scrutinise religious belief it can be really dodgy science sometimes. I mean there have been some really poorly controlled studies on, say, the impact of prayer on health. It's not always the best tango that science and religion plays...
Daniel Dennett: No, in fact if I were a devious sort of person and had been hired to design the most impenetrable shield I could dream up to put between science and religion so that scientists would just keep their hands off religion, I think I couldn't improve on what was in fact erected. Which was a gauzy curtain of sanctity which repels the best scientists but encourages some second-raters to go in there and do third-rate science and that just drives the other scientists away. You don't want to spend your time dealing with second-rate, third-rate stuff and so you turn to other fields. We shouldn't fly blind into the 21st century, we should get a good grip on this, and that means asking the tough questions and making sure that the answers we get aren't just plausible and reassuring but are true.
Natasha Mitchell: What sorts of tough questions?
Daniel Dennett: Does religion make people better morally? Does it, in fact, encourage more honesty, less violence, more sympathy, more charity? All the things they say. They have an inspiring litany of dos and don'ts, the presumption is that the people that are god-fearing and that are church-going are morally better as a result. Is there any evidence that that's true? I don't know of any yet. It's interesting that the divorce rate for instance is actually higher among born-again Christians than it is among, say, atheists.
Of course divorce isn't a sin but when one sees family values being a code word for religious fealty it does strike an interesting note.
One idea, which had already occurred to me, is that religion creates solidarity at the expense of hostility of the outside group (i.e. the notions of a "private club" and a "zero sum gain")
Natasha Mitchell: And yet it's also been responsible partly for destroying civilisations. I mean religion brings people together; it also brings people to battle.
Daniel Dennett: With no known exceptions the cost of internal trust, efficiency and loyalty is external distrust. That the us against them is not an optional feature, if there is some way to preserve the loyalties and the tremendous benefits of internal trust without paying the cost of the ferocious xenophobia, then that would be just what we want to do. But we don't know how to do that.
Natasha Mitchell: You think that it's not just the believers who are responsible for propagating religions, we're all involved in propagating the memes. That the belief in belief is key here too.
Daniel Dennett: Yes. This is a feature of organised religion. It doesn't exist in folk religions at all and this is the belief that belief in God is a good thing. It may be, it may not, but the belief that belief in God is a good thing is very widespread. In the United States you cannot be elected to national office or even to state office, you can't be a senator, you can't be a congressman and not profess a belief in God. We know that a lot of those senators and congressmen, they are not religious really. They don't really believe in God, they're atheists, they're agnostics.
I hadn't come across the concepts of memes before, but I could be see it a powerful and useful concept:
Natasha Mitchell: Dan, I want to come to the question of the infamous meme - let's bring the meme into the argument here, the meme is not a gene, let's remind people what a meme is and give it your best shot; the argument for memes and religion.
Daniel Dennett: Well we've already been talking about them without using the word. Those ideas that make copies of themselves in your mind and then get copied to other brains where they make more copies. Those are memes. Richard Dawkins the British biologist coined the term about 30 years ago.
Natasha Mitchell: And it's hard to imagine, isn't it, that The Selfish Gene, the book that he wrote in the 70s, is 30 years old; we just celebrated it on the Science Show recently.
Daniel Dennett: And in that book, to illustrate the power of Darwinian processes, the power of evolutionary processes, he drew attention to the fact that nowhere does it say that evolution has to be restricted to protein and to DNA; that anywhere you have a few features present you should get an evolutionary process. You should have a large population with variation, there should be dissent with modification, that is, there should be copying, replication, and there should be competition. And he pointed out that this was true in human culture too. That once we had language in human culture we had, in effect, a new kind of thing which he called a meme and words are in fact in one way, the best and most obvious example of memes.
What are words? What are they made of? What are they? They replicate, go extinct, they have histories. If we look at languages, if we look at the Romance languages; how they have evolved from Latin, picking up words from other languages along the way. There are a few that have been coined by individuals but most of the words have no author. Well the same thing has happened in the world of culture, we've had unconscious selection of ideas, we've had conscious, deliberate selection of ideas as in science or in the design of a political system. And then we even have, really, memetic engineering, we have people who take themselves to be professional...
He goes on to give a good example of the power of memes:
Daniel Dennett: Oh yes. There's an instinct that we share with just about all mammals and that is when something puzzling or startling happens, if it makes a loud noise, or suddenly something jumps out of the picture, we do a startle and we respond and it's not just a looking around, it's a 'who's there - did I hear a voice, oh my god was that tree talking to me? Could it be a talking tree?' Each time we obsess it's another repetition in the mind.
Natasha Mitchell: But some of them, the talking tree becomes a cult.
Daniel Dennett: Pretty soon the whole town and even the ones that are sceptical say ah, there's no such thing as a talking tree, but every time they say it they make another copy of that idea, and pretty soon the idea of the talking tree is everywhere. Whether it's fiction or fact, it gains a foothold in that culture and every culture that we look at has a whole menagerie of invisible agents - gods, and imps, and leprechauns, and goblins, and fairies, and sprites of every kind.
Checking for other articles, radio programs and video's featuring Dan, I found a couple of interesting TED videos;
In his funny video-cast "Sweet, sexy and cute", Dan raises some of everyone's favourite questions:
- Why do we love chocoalte cake ad honey?
- Why do guys go fox sexy girls in skimpy bikinis?
- Why do babes look cute?
He is clearly a very experienced and polished presenter, with funny graphics, barbie girls versus mating chimps - 6 million years ago we split off from the chimps and slowly became "bold bodied".
I liked the notion of "supernormal stimuli" for sweet, sexy and cute babies?
Witty, excellent comic voice and timing.
The presentation, like much of the American intellectuals movement, is a rebuttal of the creationism (a sad reflection on American culture and the danger of religion).
He focus on "strange inversions", the creationists can't believe that we are here by evolution alone, there must a controlling force.
He sites an interesting/curious study, apparently "Mother's prefer the diapers of their own babies.". That it is interesting study - why? He suggests a few ideas here:
- "Nature works on many levels"
- "A strange inversion here."
- "A neural system wired up to reward the brian for doing a grubby clerical job."
I'm not quite sure where all this was going and he meant by the "The joy of debugging?" but it sounds intriguing.
pertinent |ˈpərtn-ənt|
adjective
relevant or applicable to a particular matter; apposite : she asked me a lot of very pertinent questions | the unreleased section of tape was not pertinent to the investigation.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, or from Latin pertinent- ‘having reference to,’ from the verb pertinere (see pertain ).
meme |mēm|
noun Biology
an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, esp. imitation.
DERIVATIVES
memetic |mēˈmetik; mə-| adjective
ORIGIN 1970s: from Greek mimēma ‘that which is imitated,’ on the pattern of gene.
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