Here, M2D brings you an excerpt from Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. If you’re interested in social readings of important texts, please subscribe and let me know which texts you find most timely for our moment in history.
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Toxic Memes
“Any creative encounter with evil requires that we not distance ourselves from it by simply demonizing those who commit evil acts. In order to write about evil, a writer has to try to comprehend it, from the inside out; to understand the perpetrators and not necessarily sympathize with them. But Americans seem to have a very difficult time recognizing that there is a distinction between understanding and sympathizing. Somehow we believe that an attempt to inform ourselves about what leads to evil is an attempt to explain it away. I believe that just the opposite is true, and that when it comes to coping with evil, ignorance is our worst enemy.”
— Kathleen Norris, “Native Evil”1
“Writing this book has helped me to understand that religion is a kind of technology. It is terribly seductive in its ability to soothe and explain, but it is also dangerous.”
— Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill
Have you heard about the Yahuuz, a people who think that what we call child pornography is just good clean fun? They smoke marijuana daily, make a public ceremony of defecation (with hilarious competition to see who gets to do the ritual wiping), and, whenever an elder reaches the age of eighty, have a special feast day on which the person ceremonially kills himself or herself—and is then eaten by all. Disgusted? Then you know how many Muslims feel about our contemporary culture, with its alcohol, provocative clothing, and casual attitudes toward familial authority. Part of my effort in this book is to get you to think and not just feel. In this instance, you need to see that your disgust, however strong, is only a datum, a fact about you and a very important fact about you, but not an inerrant sign of moral truth—it’s just like the Muslim’s disgust at some of our cultural practices. We should respect the Muslims, empathize with them, take their disgust seriously—but then propose that they join us in a discussion about the perspectives on which we differ. The price you should be willing to pay for this is your own willingness to consider the (imaginary!) Yahuuz’ way of life calmly, and ask if it is so clearly indefensible. If they enter into these traditions wholeheartedly, with no apparent coercion, perhaps we should say, “Live and let live.”
And perhaps not. The burden should be on us to demonstrate to the Yahuuz that their way of life includes traditions they should be ashamed of, and should banish. Perhaps, if we engaged in this exercise conscientiously, we would discover that some of our disgust with their ways was parochial and unjustifiable. They would teach us something. And we would teach them something. And perhaps the gulf of difference between us would never be crossed, but we shouldn’t assume this worst-case prospect.
In the meantime, the way to prepare for this utopian global conversation is to study, as compassionately and dispassionately as we can, both their ways and our own ways. Consider the brave self-observation of Raja Shehadeh, writing about the grip of modern Palestine: “Most of your energy is spent extending feelers to detect public perception of your actions, because your survival is contingent on remaining on good terms with your society.” When we can share similar observations about the problems in our own society, we will be on a good path to mutual understanding. Palestinian society, if Shehadeh is right, is beset with a virulent case of the “punish those who won't punish” meme, for which there are models (beginning with Boyd and Richerson, 1992) that predict other properties we should look for. It may be that this particular feature would foil well-intentioned projects that would work in societies that lack it. In particular, we mustn’t assume that policies that are benign in our own culture will not be malignant in others. As Jessica Stern puts it:
I have come to see terrorism as a kind of virus, which spreads as a result of risk factors at various levels: global, interstate, national, and personal. But identifying these factors precisely is difficult. The same variables (political, religious, social, or all of the above) that seem to have caused one person to become a terrorist might cause another to become a saint. [2003, p. 283]
As communications technology makes it harder and harder for leaders to shield their people from outside information, and as the economic realities of the twenty-first century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child, the floodgates will open all over the world, with tumultuous effects. All the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture, all the trash and scum that accumulates in the corners of a free society, will inundate these relatively pristine regions along with the treasures of modern education, equal rights for women, bettef health care, workers’ rights, democratic ideals, and openness to the cultures of others. As the experience in the former Soviet Union shows only too clearly, the worst features of capitalism and high tech are among the most robust replicators in this population explosion of memes, and there will be plenty of grounds for xenophobia, Luddism, and the tempting “hygiene” of backward-looking fundamentalism. At the same time, we shouldn't rush to be apologetic about American pop culture. It has its excesses, but in many instances it is not the excesses that offend so much as the egalitarianism and tolerance. The hatred of this potent American export is often driven by racism—because of the strong Afro-American presence in American pop culture—and sexism—because of the status of women we celebrate and our (relatively) benign treatment of homosexuality. (See, e.g., Stern, 2003, p. 99.)
As Jared Diamond shows in Guns, Germs, and Steel, it was European germs that brought Western Hemisphere populations to the brink of extinction in the sixteenth century, since those people had had no history in which to develop tolerance for them. In this century it will be our memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared world. Our capacity to tolerate the toxic excesses of freedom cannot be assumed in others, or simply exported as one more commodity. The practically unlimited educability of any human being gives us hope of success, but designing and implementing the cultural inoculations necessary to fend off disaster, while respecting the rights of those in need of inoculation, will be an urgent task of great complexity, requiring not just better social science but also sensitivity, imagination, and courage. The field of public health expanded to include cultural health will be the greatest challenge of the next century.
Related
Quoted in Stern, 2003, p. xiii.