It’s Only Natural
According to Daniel C. Dennett, author of the recently published Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, it is.
Here’s what I would consider a captivating and interesting interview on the Charlie Rose show, with Bill Moyers sitting in.
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Linda:
I think that's a reasonable point. However, can you make distinctions between the spell generally cast by Bach and Brahms, and that cast by religion, particularly the religions that assert an anthropomorphic or personal God?
I don’t have time to watch the whole interview with Dennett just now, but I’ve got a comment on what he says right off the starting block:
“One reason that some people are very anxious about my book is they see me as showing how the magicians do their tricks… But you see, if we’re talking about music, you can go in you can show how Bach does his tricks and how Brahms does his tricks. You can show how poets do their tricks, you can show how doctors do their tricks… How important their bedside manner is…
“We can show how religions do their tricks, too. And every religion does it… Every religion has its own technology for belief maintenance, and we can look under the hood and see how it works.”
It’s quite pertinent here that he represents, offhandedly, music and poetry and the healing arts as the products of “tricks” that can be revealed, and that, with his analogy to religion, he goes on to imply that exposing the tricks would subvert the sublimity and efficacy of that for which he imagines the tricks to account.
Never mind whether he can undo religion in this manner; I frankly doubt he can break the spell of Bach and Brahms.
I find that understanding what is happening in music, or any kind of art, makes it more moving, more "magical", to use the term very loosely.
That's the reason that breaking the "spell" of Bach and Brahms won't happen: more knowledge leads to better understanding, better integration. More knowledge of what religion is about is disintegrative to the subject.
Not to sound any alarms or anything, but doesn’t all this sound more like a collectivist nightmare of coercive indoctrination …
Yes.
Linda / Kyle:
I don't know what to tell ya. While I certainly would not advocate teaching by force, I generally think that more education is better than less, so when various people fight over who and what goes into Billy's cannibal pot, I tend to "root for" the guy with the better ideas when the whole cannibal pot thingy is not considered.
What can I say? It's not like it's a question of whether there's a cannibal pot, or not, but who and what's going in it. Of course, I remain but a bystander, when I'm not myself being thrown into the thing, but since I'm spending a lot of time in there, I suppose I have preferences as to the character and the nature of the company I'm forced to endure.
All in all, I thought it was a good hour of interesting dialog, with patches of minutes that weren't so good — but not a whole lot different from what I see and hear every day.
Obviously, your mileage differs.
The problem is, he's poisoned the well beyond the point where I can point to him as an example of rational thinking. No matter how good some of his observations are – and some are very good – I'll never be able to allow any implication that he speaks for me or my positions by favorably linking to him, recommending him, etc, the way I could with some others.
Richard asks, "can you make distinctions between the spell generally cast by Bach and Brahms, and that cast by religion…?"
Distinctions that might be made between the power of art and the power of religion don’t serve, so far as I can see, to make more plausible – or useful – Dennett’s plan for explicating such powers in terms of the “tricks” that somehow constitute them. Imagine Dennett setting out to show how Bach composed his masterworks by manipulating a few clever tricks of the music trade? Wouldn’t that raise a bit of skepticism? Yet he, in the quoted passage, speaks as though such understanding (or dismissal) of the signal achievements of art has long since been realized. Now it remains only to do the same number on religion.
Even before I watched the interview, I suspected that all he’d really *meant* to say was that science has leave – permission – to poke art and prod poetry however it likes to tease out such understanding as it can. Those subjects are not taboo, to use a word Dennett likes, and neither should religion be. I don’t see anything even remotely scandalous or revolutionary or novel about that proposal and I suspect a rather ponderous literature attests that rational, scientific inquiry has indeed had quite a go at religion for some time already. And has surely yielded up something more insightful that this notion of “tricks” that leapt into Dennett’s animated discourse so unexpectedly, given all the respect and rapturous appreciation he professes for art, religion and religious art throughout the interview.
In all honesty, Dennett doesn’t impress me as being all that interested in sorting out what science has and has not, can and cannot tell us about art, religion or other human endeavors. What he wants primarily is to push a very noxious agenda, which includes shutting religious people out of public office so that those professing the sort of secular allegiances he approves can take over. And I do mean take over. I have to admit that, even after his harping on what kind of people “we” want in office raised a bunch of red flags, I still wasn’t prepared for the proposal he lays out some 36 minutes into the interview. He says:
“I’m trying to make sure that religion is not toxic… Since we haven’t done the research that I’m calling for, I can’t give a lot of policy recommendations… We’ve got to study religion more, but in the meantime I have one proposal which I think is really important and that is we should have a national curriculum on world religions that is compulsory for all school children from grade school through high school, for the public schools, for the private schools, for the homeschooling.”
Holy mother of God! And, uh, saints preserve us. What the hell has got into that guy that he thinks he can dictate what is taught to whom, when and where he says, everywhere that people propose to instruct the young? Who died and made him God, we might ask.
Seriously, later in the interview (around the 49 minute mark) he rhapsodizes about the transformation that would dawn in the Muslim world if they would teach the religion curriculum he proposes to enforce, perhaps with some sort of UN resolution once he’s got the national plan nailed down by the Supremes, most likely.
Not to sound any alarms or anything, but doesn’t all this sound more like a collectivist nightmare of coercive indoctrination than a rational way of exploring the wonders of art and religion? That’s certainly the sense I had after hearing all his wild fantasizing about how “we” are going to tell them that they’ve “got to” do this and that “this is a democracy and that’s how we settle these things.”
Of course he wants to do it all for the children, and rails a couple of times against “the enforced ignorance of the young,” which “we” can no longer tolerate.
You know, it occurs to me. If Hillary ever scrapes up the gumption to unhitch from Bill, she could do a lot worse than snagging this Dennett character for a soul mate, religious differences notwithstanding. And hardly discernable.