Coincidentally, he was laid low by malaria, legacy of a visit to Bamako, and it was through the fever that he revisited the experiences he and his friends had shared a quarter-century earlier, as well as exploring the present predicament of sans-papiers African immigrants. He experienced a couple of disturbing encounters with the authorities that made him instead plan an expos?f French racism. What a joy to read a book by an academic free of self-regarding jargon! Manthia Diawara, a Mali-born professor at New York University, embarked on a sabbatical year in Paris to write a book on decolonisation. Scientists trying to comprehend religion don’t just need to learn from historians and anthropologists; they need to learn how to make their fellow scholars into allies.Marek Kohn’s A Reason for Everything is published by Faber.
The style is familiar but the effect very different from a book such as Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, where Dennett’s voice is filled by something he really believes in.To make real progress his project must engage with religion both as a natural phenomenon and a social one. It is in the latter terms that we can best make sense of why a populist Christian movement arose in America, insisting that the earth is just a few thousand years old, a good century after educated Britons had come to accept that the planet is far older than the Bible suggests. It takes a hundred pages to justify itself, drops interesting ideas no sooner than it has picked them up, and we’re still waiting for it to hit its stride when we run into the appendices. Breaking the Spell reads like an exercise in fulfilling a disagreeable obligation. But the project does require passion, which is why Dawkins’s essayistic voice is convincing even if not found persuasive. People nowadays can live moral lives and sustain decent communities without religious faith, although it seems only fair to acknowledge that these moral frameworks are secularised versions of earlier religious ones.Dennett insists that a sense of reverence for the sacred is not a necessary qualification for the analysis of religion. Even if religion was the foundation of human society, you could say the same about hunting and gathering, and we’re not going back to that.
The minutiae of anthropologists’ field observations or the archaeological record do not detain him on his way to his discussion of religion today, where past form can be dismissed. Towards the end, he does declare that “scientists have much to learn from the historians and cultural anthropologists”, but by that stage it evokes the distinction he draws earlier between what people profess and what they actually believe.This absence may also reflect Dennett’s intellectual preference, as a philosopher, for abstraction rather than detail. Only a few evolutionary thinkers have taken up the study of religion, and evolutionary psychology has failed to incorporate religion with the same enthusiasm it has applied to other universal forms of human behaviour, despite its keen interest in the evolution of morality.Dennett’s reference to anthropologists’ and historians’ “blinkered perspectives” smacks of pots and kettles. The possibility that rituals benefit the individuals performing them disappears behind the focus on what may be in it for the ideas themselves.Dennett is not alone among Darwinians in his reluctance to explore the possibility that religion is adaptive. Dennett suggests that rituals may be a means of ensuring that the ideas behind them are reproduced faithfully. It might also suggest that, as costly signals are hard to fake and tend to be reliable, these advantages may relate to the establishment of trust, turning groups into communities.But here, as throughout Breaking the Spell, the revving of a powerful analytical engine is followed by the sound of it slipping out of gear.
To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrill’s bottom that religion may be adaptive. To an evolutionist, the extravagance of a peacock’s fan insists it must confer benefits that outweigh its costs. As Dennett points out, “To an evolutionist, rituals stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade”. These capacities proved so valuable that people came to assume that intentions lay behind all events, and conjured up supernatural beings to account for intentions which could not be ascribed to humans or animals. These entities, or rather ideas of them, have evolved and multiplied in human minds.In the course of their evolution they have imposed immense costs on their hosts. “Breaking the spell” suggests the removal of an external influence, probably a malign one. Dennett argues convincingly that the human readiness to believe in supernatural entities may have arisen from the evolved capacity to understand that other individuals have intentions.This understanding provides a basis for empathy and a defence against deception as well as a means to anticipate others’ behaviour.
