Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

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.

But isn’t the hypothesis that the costs of religion outweigh the benefits even more ludicrous than the fantastic claim about music? I don’t think so. Music may be what Marx said religion is: the opiate of the masses, keeping working people in tranquilized subjugation, but it may also be the rallying song of revolution, closing up the ranks and giving heart to all. On this point, music and religion have quite similar profiles. In other regards, music looks far less problematic than religion. Over the millennia, music has started a few riots, and charismatic musicians may have sexually abused a shocking number of susceptible young fans, and seduced many others to leave their families (and their wits) behind, but no crusades or jihads have been waged over differences in musical tradition, no pogroms have been instituted against the lovers of waltzes or ragas or tangos. Whole populations haven’t been subjected to obligatory scale-playing or kept in penury in order to furnish concert halls with the finest acoustics and instruments. No musicians have had fatwas pronounced against them by musical organizations, not even accordionists.

The comparison of religion to music is particularly useful here, since music is another natural phenomenon that has been ably studied by scholars for hundreds of years but is only just beginning to be an object of the sort of scientific study I am recommending. There has been no dearth of professional research on music theory—harmony, counterpoint, rhythm—or the techniques of musicianship, or the history of every genre and instrument. Ethnomusicologists have studied the evolution of musical styles and practices in relation to social, economic, and other cultural factors, and neuroscientists and psychologists have rather recently begun studying the perception and creation of music, using all the latest technology to uncover the patterns of brain activity associated with musical experience, musical memory, and related topics. But most of this research still takes music for granted. It seldom asks: Why does music exist? There is a short answer, and it is true, so far as it goes: it exists because we love it, and hence we keep bringing more of it into existence. But why do we love it? Because we find that it is beautiful. But why is it beautiful to us? This is a perfectly good biological question, but it does not yet have a good answer. Compare it, for instance, with the question: Why do we love sweets? Here we know the evolutionary answer, in some detail, and it has some curious twists. It is no accident that we find sweet things to our liking, and if we want to adjust our policies regarding sweet things in the future, we had better understand the evolutionary basis of their appeal. We mustn’t make the mistake of the man in the old joke who complained that, just when he’d finally succeeded in training his donkey not to eat, the stupid animal up and died on him.

Some things are necessary to life, and some things are at least so life-enhancing or life-enabling that we tamper with them at our peril, and we need to figure out these roles and needs. Ever since the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, many quite well-informed and brilliant people have confidently thought that religion would soon vanish, the object of a human taste that could be satisfied by other means. Many are still waiting, somewhat less confidently. Whatever religion provides for us, it is something that many think they cannot live without. Let’s take them seriously this time, for they might be right. But there is only one way to take them seriously: we need to study them scientifically.

4 Would neglect be more benign?

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

—William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”

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Why then must science and scientists continue to be governed by fear—fear of public opinion, fear of social consequence, fear of religious intolerance, fear of political pressure, and, above all, fear of bigotry and prejudice—as much within as without the professional world?

—William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Human Sexual Response

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And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

—Jesus of Nazareth, in John 8:32

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It is time to confront the worry that such an investigation might actually kill all the specimens, destroying something precious in the name of discovering its inner nature. Wouldn’t it be more prudent to leave well enough alone? As I have already noted, the case for curbing our curiosity here has two parts: it must show both (1) that religion provides net benefits to humankind, and (2) that these benefits would be unlikely to survive such an investigation. The tactical problem that confronts us is that there is really no way of showing the first point without actually engaging in the investigation. Religion seems to many people to be the source of many wonderful things, but others doubt this, for compelling reasons, and we shouldn’t just concede the point out of a misplaced respect for tradition. Perhaps this very respect is like the protective outer shell that often conceals deadly viruses from our immune system, a sort of camouflage that disengages much-needed criticism. So the most we can say is that point 1 is not yet proven. We can, however, proceed tentatively, and consider how likely point 2 would be if we were to assume for the sake of argument that religion is indeed a thing of great value. We can assume it innocent until proven guilty—in other words, just the way our legal system operates.

Now, what about point 2? How much damage do we suppose an investigation might do, in the worst case? Might it not break the spell and disenchant us forever? This concern has been a favorite ground for resisting scientific curiosity for centuries, but although it is undeniable that taking apart particular instances of wonderful things—plants, animals, musical instruments—may sometimes destroy them beyond reconstruction, other wonderful things—poems, symphonies, theories, legal systems—thrive on analysis, however painstaking, and one can hardly deny the benefit to other plants, animals, and musical instruments derived from dissecting a few specimens. In spite of all the warnings over the centuries, I have been unable to come up with a case of some valuable phenomenon that has actually been destroyed, or even seriously damaged, by scientific scrutiny.

Field biologists often confront a terrible quandary when studying an endangered species: does their well-meant attempt at a census, involving live capture and release, actually hasten the extinction of the species? When anthropologists descend on a heretofore isolated and pristine people, their inquiries, however discreet and diplomatic, swiftly change the culture they are so eager to know. With regard to the former cases, thou shalt not study is a policy that may indeed be wisely invoked on occasion, but with regard to the latter, prolonging the isolation of people by putting them, in effect, in a cultural zoo, though it is sometimes advocated, does not bear scrutiny. These are people, and we have no right to keep them ignorant of the larger world they share with us. (Whether they have the right to keep themselves ignorant is one of the vexing questions to be considered later in this book.)