Introduction: The Book and its Critics
In 2006, American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett published Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, a seminal work of the cultural trend donned “New Atheism.” For those who may have forgotten, New Atheism was embodied by the strident and confrontational ideas of intellectuals like neuroscientist Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and the late journalist Christopher Hitchens. Together with Dennett, they were called the “Four Horsemen of Atheism,” as their anti-religious books all came out within a few years of each other. Dennett routinely receives the reputation for being the nicest and most accommodating of the group, never resorting to the kinds of vitriol that the other three gained notoriety from, and his book is supposedly indicative of that view. Breaking the Spell is well-written, cogently researched, and attempts (key word here) to be as charitable to religions and their followers as a rationalist can be.
Despite his alleged gentler approach, Dennett received intense criticism for Breaking the Spell, especially in Leon Wiseltier’s blistering review in the pages of the New York Times. Wiseltier, himself not immune from controversy, believed that Dennett couldn’t get beyond some of the most superficial readings of both religion and rationalism. “Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky,” he wrote. Dennett’s insistence that studying religion scientifically is the only way that matters is what Wiseltier calls, “scientism,” or the belief that only the physical sciences provide us with knowledge about the world and can solve any of our problems. Yet, Dennett’s own conclusions about religion are mere hypotheses, which in Wiseltier’s opinion are “an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.”
Andrew Brown, writing more sympathetically in the Guardian, nevertheless finds Dennett’s book wanting. In particular, he’s critical of Dennett’s assertion that he is singularly breaking the “taboo” against studying religion as a “human phenomenon,” which “comes as a tremendous shock to those Americans who have never heard of [David] Hume, William James, or even Terry Pratchett.” While acknowledging that Dennett understands and even writes openly about the complications associated with studying the evolution of religion, Brown finds Dennett’s “meme” hypothesis a poor substitute for real, scientific investigation. As he writes, Dennett “doesn't skirt the complications of theorising about religion: he sees the difficulties, marches bravely into the swamp and then - about half way through the book, at exactly the point where we're wondering how to reach firm ground - he stops, inflates a hot air balloon that's labelled "memes", climbs into it and floats away.” Memes, in Dennett’s framing as the cultural equivalent of genes, serve their own ends, mostly as a benefit to society. This view won't work, in Brown’s estimation, as it “distract[s] from the worrying and frightening questions.” “If we are going to be atheists and to regard religions as human constructions serving human ends,” he writes, “we should not shrink from the idea that these ends are likely to be sometimes inimical to other humans outside the group. For all the rhetoric about the wickedness of religious belief, I don't think Dennett takes this idea very seriously.” In the end, the problem to Brown is not religion, per se, but fanaticism, which can even manifest itself in atheism.
Finally, we’ll turn to philosopher John Gray’s review, also in the Guardian. A longtime critic of “New Atheism,” Gray pulls no punches when criticizing Breaking the Spell. He considers another of Dennett’s central conceits, that religions are “rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense.” He criticizes this point on two fronts. First, he notes that religions themselves are often concerned with the incomprehensibility of life and the cosmos, not with developing proto-scientific theories. “It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory,” Gray notes. Second, the idea of religions as a “primitive version of science” that Dennett conjures in Breaking the Spell is nothing more than a “revamped version” of the 19th century anthropologist J. G. Frazer’s ideas in his work, The Golden Bough. Gray is also heavily critical of “memes” as a scientific theory, which he sees as “a classic example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere.” Like Brown, Gray notes that memes are without empirical evidence and should be dismissed as such. In all, Gray believed that “the theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory. Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors.”
Fifteen years later, do these criticisms hold up? Are Dennett’s concepts of religion off base, or has new scholarship vindicated him? In this re-review of sorts, I will address the main critiques discussed above and evaluate whether they, or the book itself, stand the test of time. We’ll review whether Dennett’s call to “break the spell” is so revolutionary, if religions are “memes,” if people believe in religion because they believe that belief is itself a virtue, what Dennett calls “belief in belief,” and what we should do with religion in the modern age. In the final estimation, we’ll find that each of these conclusions is deeply flawed and the reviewers were right to call out Dennett for his mistakes. In closing, I’ll also challenge the oft-heard notion that Dennett is the “nice” one of the group. While he’s certainly the more level-headed of the bunch when comparing his book to say, The God Delusion or The End of Faith, Dennett still displays all the usual hallmarks of mainstream atheism in our culture: smugness, arrogance, condescension, and intolerance. In short, Breaking the Spell isn’t a bad book, but it isn’t much of a good book, either.
Studying Religion Scientifically
To start, let’s review how Dennett defines religion. In his view, religions are “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” In other words, religions are belief systems with gods whose followers need to worship or praise. Contra the great psychologist William James, who believed religions were “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine,” Dennett’s view is more interested in understanding specific beliefs within an institutional structure, rather than a personal feeling or experience.
I think this approach is deliberate. This book’s genesis stems, in my estimation, from two trends that existed at the time Dennett wrote it. First is the September 11, 2001 attacks, carried out by Saudi Islamists who used their institutionalized form of Islam as a justifying ideology for their horrific deeds. Second was the ascendency of Christian conservatism to the highest places of American power, most exemplified by the presidency of George W. Bush. Each of these trends are tied to institutionalized forms of religious belief, ones in which Gods and their desire for worship are essential. Personal beliefs, what Dennett calls “private religions,” are not relevant to his analysis, as he thinks the “core phenomenon of religion. . . invokes gods who are effective agents in real time, and who play a central role in the way the participants think about what they ought to do.” The agenicity of Gods, and their influence on believers, jells closely with the problems of Islamism and Christian conservatism, whose respective ideologies routinely invoke God as a justification for their actions. If we were discussing New Age beliefs, Buddhism, or other passive, personal forms of belief, they wouldn’t track Dennett's issues with religion. Narrowing the definition allows him to get at his real project, which is a critique of religious fundamentalism.
With these ideas in mind, let’s get to the heart of the matter: what does Dennett mean by “Breaking the Spell?” In essence, he’s advocating that we break the taboo of studying religion scientifically. He clearly lays out his approach in this passage:
It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very meanings we find in our lives. For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion. For this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.
When he says “multidisciplinary,” he doesn’t necessarily mean history, economics, or sociology. Dennett does provide paeans to them throughout the book, but his real interest is in science, specifically psychology, evolutionary biology, and genetics. Dennett actually gives up the game a couple of pages later, when he says “the spell that I say must be broken is the taboo against a forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.”
But is this such a taboo? Going back at least to the days of the Enlightenment, philosophers, historians, scientists, and psychologists have attempted to do exactly what Dennett is calling for here: a scientific, or at least rational, investigation of the natural origins of religion. In fact, Dennett himself cites two of these trailblazing thinkers throughout the book: the Scottish philosopher David Hume and the American psychologist William James, who both developed long works on the subject (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Varieties of Religious Experience, respectively). There have been many more throughout the centuries, including Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason), Immanuel Kant (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone), Ludwig Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity), Robert Ingersoll (numerous works, including Some Mistakes of Moses), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (The German Ideology), V. I. Lenin (“Socialism and Religion”), and Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo; “taboo” is literally in the name!). Additionally, scientific researchers such as Pascal Boyer, Andrew Newberg, and Scott Atran have all done research into religion, which Dennett references in Breaking the Spell. The only people who consider it a taboo are the fundamentalists, religious and atheistic alike, which is why Dennett frames it the way he does. In my opinion, there is no spell to break; ever since there has been religion, there have been those interested in studying it rationally or scientifically. The only taboo Dennett is really breaking is the narrow, scientistic way he wants religion studied, as a vehicle to undermine fundamentalism. This isn’t a bad project to take on, but it's more limited than what he claims to be doing.
Religions as “Memes”
The most important concept of Breaking the Spell, and indeed much of Dennett’s work, is the influence of memes. Now, most of you reading this have a very different concept of memes. The word conjures funny graphics with grammatically tortured phrases and non sequitur images. While these do objectively exist, the memes than Dennett explores are far more complicated.
For Dennett, memes are “culturally based replicators” that, like genes, replicate with a life of their own, almost with a self-directed agency. Languages, fads, songs, and even religions are memes, according to Dennett’s conceptualization. This framework is contrary to the work of biologist David Sloan Wilson, who argued that religions are the product of “group selection,” or natural selection guided by advantageous changes for groups rather than individual organisms or genes. Dennett explains his position and its relationship to religion, in this passage:
Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival (and hence host fitness) most directly depends on hosts' joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, enhancing outgroup curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated.
As a result, “the ultimate beneficiaries of religious adaptations are the memes themselves, but their proliferation (in competition with rival memes) depends on their ability to attract hosts one way or another.” Thus, memes are Dennett’s guiding heuristic for understanding the development and propagation of religion in human societies.
I think that this view is extremely simplistic, and grants memes powers that I don’t think they have. For example, what does it mean for a meme to "benefit"? If it's a meme’s propagation, then yes, it's beneficial, but that is circular reasoning; it propagates because it's beneficial, and it's beneficial because it propagates. Also, I'm very bothered by the anthropomorphizing of memes. They don’t have minds of their own, they don’t benefit in any meaningful sense of the word, and thinking they do essentially idealizes reality, stripping any idea from its historical, economic, and political contexts. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum, and they shouldn't be treated as such, but that’s exactly what Dennett’s conceptualization of memes does.
I’m not the only one who thinks that memes are junk science. The legendary biologist Ernst Mayr, who Dennett quotes in the book, rejects the meme hypothesis. As he wrote in a 1997 article for the National Academy of Sciences, “it seems to me that this word [meme] is nothing but an unnecessary synonym of the term ‘concept.’. . . In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does [Richard] Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.” In fact, per Mayr’s thinking, concepts “are not restricted to an individual or to a generation, and they may persist for long periods of time. They are able to evolve.” So, if concepts can evolve or time, based upon biological and cultural influences, why do we need a science of memes at all? It just seems like an unnecessary complication of cultural evolution via a term whose usage got way out of control.
Additionally, Radim Chvaja of the LEVYNA Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, critiques memes in a 2020 comparative study published in MIT’s Perspectives on Science. His work looked into comparing memetics to a rival theory, that of gene-culture coevolution (GCCE), which “did not work with discrete units but rather with cultural traits in general” and “understood the human ability for cultural transmission to be an adaptation and focused on the potential adaptive values that cultural traits might have for their bearers.” GCCE, rejecting memetic’s insistence on the centrality of memes within the cultural transmission process, envisions a symbiotic relationship between genes and culture as the main driver of change, especially for religions. Today, most scholars in the field accept GCCE and reject memetics, largely due to “little consensus among the memeticists” on what exactly memes are. To put it bluntly, memetics couldn’t be empirically tested and GCCE could.
(One side note here that I find both interesting and funny. In 2004, two years before Breaking the Spell was published, the Journal of Memetics, the premier journal in the field, folded. In its final issue, editor Bruce Edmonds “admitted that the science of memes lost the competition with other evolutionary accounts,” as noted by Chvaja.)
Lacking empirical evidence, the success of memetics largely happened as a result of deliberate misrepresentation, according to historian Jeremy Trevelyan Burman in a 2012 article, also in Perspectives on Science. When biologist Richard Dawkins originally proposed the concept in his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, it was intended as a narrative device. “Dawkins’ intent,” writes Burman, “was not to put the meme forward as the true cultural counterpart to the gene. Rather, he used it as part of a larger goal: redefining the fundamental unit of selection in evolutionary biology.” That “fundamental unit” was the gene, and Dawkins’ way to get that across to a lay audience was through a cultural metaphor of memes. Dawkins, according to Burman, never intended to “inaugurate a new science of memetics. That was accidental.”
So, who warped Dawkins’ original, modest claim about memes into a field of science that could explain nearly everything about culture? It was none other than Daniel Dennett, and his co-author, mathematician Douglas Hofstadter. In 1981, the two authors published a collection of essays called The Mind’s I, wherein they actually reconfigured Dawkins’ writing on memes from The Selfish Gene and other sources into a narrative that fit their conclusions. “Although a footnote at the start of the piece indicates that the text had been excerpted from the original,” Burnam writes, “it doesn’t indicate that the essay had been wholly fabricated from those excerpts; reinvented by pulling text haphazardly, hither and thither, so as to assemble a new narrative from multiple sources.” Burnam provides a detailed table of excised and decontextualized passages that demonstrates how Dawkins’ chapter in The Mind’s I is truly a Frankenstein’s monster of science writing. Ever since, the popular and influential understanding of memes has been the one Dennett and Hofstadter created. Learning about this completely soured me on Dennett as a writer and thinker. That he would deliberately misrepresent someone’s writing in the service of his own agenda is one of the most reprehensible things an intellectual can do. Furthermore, the fact that he got away with it is even more damning, underscoring that a significant amount of popular science writing is likely bunk.
If memes as a scientific concept are nonsense, why did it catch on? Here Burnam makes an important point: science can be influenced by cultural and political contexts as much as any other intellectual discipline. In the case of memes, the idea of individual, selfish cultural replicators that bored into the minds of people scratched the itch of the go-go 1980s and 1990s, an era in which “Greed was Good” and neoliberalism, the ideology of free markets, limited government, and individualism, was ascendant. It confirmed for so many what had been their bias for so long: individual competition, rather than social cooperation, actually led to biological and cultural change. As Burnam writes, “Greed and selfishness thereby came to be linked, first in language and then in the public understanding of what Dawkins seemed to imply: genes are selfish, and so are we, because that’s nature. Society must be red in tooth and claw because that’s how evolution works.” Thanks to Dennett and Hofstadter, this also applied to memes, due to their deliberate “reinterpretation” of Dawkins’ more humble idea.
“Belief in Belief”
Now that we’ve worked through much of what I think Dennett gets wrong, let’s spend some time with something I think he gets right: the idea of “belief in belief.” In my opinion, this is the most interesting concept of the book, and way more insightful than memes or his supposed breaking of taboos. As he writes, “people who. . . believe in belief in God are sure that belief in God exists (and who could doubt that?), and they think that this is a good state of affairs, something to be strongly encouraged and fostered wherever possible.” In other words, the success of religion has a lot to do with the fact that people think believing in it is itself good. In fact, Dennett claims that this phenomenon had a lot to do with the development of monotheistic religion, as the “belief in [a monotheistic] God joined forces with the belief in belief in God to motivate the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts.”
Belief in belief, according to Dennett, is a big part of why people are reluctant or even resistant to studying religion more objectively. This makes a lot of sense, as many believers tie their moral judgements and personal identity to their belief system. If you openly challenge that, it is tantamount to challenging their morality or personality. A further difficulty Dennett acknowledges is that “given the way religious concepts and practices have been designed, the very behaviors that would be clear evidence of belief in God are also behaviors that would be clear evidence of (only) belief in belief in God. . . This fact makes it hard to tell who—if anybody!—actually believes in God in addition to believing in belief in God.” As such, “the robustness of the institution of religion doesn't depend on uniformity of belief at all; it depends on the uniformity of professing.” Now, it’s important to acknowledge how hard it is to tell whether someone genuinely believes or merely professes, and unless we can read minds in the future, that won’t get any easier. Regardless, I think we can get a good indication from some, namely cheap televangelists and sleazy politicians, that they only profess belief.
One underlying theme of “belief in belief” is that believing— in itself—is a virtue, something Dennett and I reject whole-heartedly. There’s nothing about dedicating yourself to a belief system that makes you a better person, especially if that belief system has little evidence to back it up. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a Christian, Muslim, or Atheist, if you do terrible things in this life, they are still terrible things, and believing in some worldview that justifies your actions doesn’t nullify their terrible consequences. Echoing the economist Thomas Sowell, I think this world would be a lot better off if we judged people more on their actions than their intentions or justifications. If society easily accepts belief as a cheap excuse for every inhumanity to humanity, we will never morally progress.
What is to be Done with Religion?
Most of what we’ve dealt with so far has been descriptive, but the last chapter of Breaking the Spell offers some prescriptions for dealing with religious fundamentalism. Dennett’s initial humility in this chapter is overshadowed by some ill-founded and occasionally offensive suggestions. His humility is summed up here, where he says, “since my proto-theory is not yet established and may prove to be wrong, it shouldn't be used yet to guide our policies.” He also foregrounds the importance of the social sciences. “Applied to the study of religion,” Dennett writes, “the prescription is clear: scientists intent on explaining religious phenomena are going to have to delve deeply and conscientiously into the lore and practices, the texts and contexts, the daily lives and problems of the people they are studying.” Buried within the muck of memes are insights that, while largely banal, are encouraging to read.
The positive passages are fewer and fewer as we wade through the rest of this chapter, and we are left with some controversial solutions to our problems. The first one I found absolutely appalling was his concept of “cultural health.” According to Dennett, while public health is used to stave off physical diseases, “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.” There’s a lot of problematic assumptions in this model. First, who gets to decide what we need inoculation from? Government bureaucrats or democratic systems of knowledge creation? Second, how would inoculation happen? Via classrooms or concentration camps? Treating ideas as “scourges” that need to be eradicated recalls all the horrifying excesses of the 20th century, from Nazism to Stalinism. The concept of "cultural health" is undemocratic, anti-human, and shouldn't be taken seriously.
His second suggestion, though less offensive, is both self-serving and naïve:
We could start to change the climate of opinion that holds religion to be above discussion, above criticism, above challenge. False advertising is false advertising, and if we start holding religious organizations accountable for their claims—not by taking them to court but just by pointing out, often and in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, that of course these claims are ludicrous—perhaps we can slowly get the culture of credulity to evaporate.
Let’s unpack both claims here. First, his claim that “we could start to change the climate of opinion that holds religion to be above discussion, above criticism, above challenge” is just not true. Religion and its ideas are challenged in the public square all the time! Again, there is no “spell” to break; critiquing religion is not only accepted in public life, but actively encouraged. His very book is evidence of this, as it’s a critique of religion published by a major, popular press (Viking). His second claim is naïve; with religion, people are often not always motivated by reason, they are motivated by circumstance. Thinking that you can merely talk someone out of their religious beliefs is a very narrow view of humanity, one propagated by those dedicated to what I’ve called the “cult of reason,” those who think that by merely being reasonable all human problems can be solved. Again, this just isn’t true. The rationality of people like Dennett, divorced from humanistic considerations, led us to concentration camps, the atomic bomb, and the imperialist slaughter in Vietnam and Iraq, to name a few.
As a Marxist, I couldn’t end my discussion of this chapter without discussing the end. He spends nearly a page trashing Marxism and glibly commenting that “it used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas.” In misrepresenting its core concepts, Dennett claims that Marxism is deterministic, dogmatic, and even dangerous. As he writes, “some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.” Those on the actual left, who are Marxists, know that it is a rich political tradition that shouldn't be embodied as something dead and irrelevant to the current left. (Interestingly, Marxist Anton Pannekoek wrote an enlightening article in 1912 on the relationship between Marxism and Darwinism. While it’s out of the scope of this essay, go give it a read.) Dennett’s liberal chauvinism only emphasizes his own limited thinking on science, religion, and politics, and the extent to which advocating a non-ideology is the most ideological project of them all.
Conclusion: Dennett the “Nice One”
Despite being better than most entries in the “New Atheist” canon of the mid-2000s, Breaking the Spell is nevertheless a very flawed work that collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. After 15 years, most of its central claims have been found wanting. He didn’t break any taboo against studying religion, but rather provided another entry into the long canon of religious criticism. Religions are not memes, selfishly infesting the minds of their hosts, but rather deeply complex cultural phenomena that should be studied not only by the natural sciences but by the social sciences. And finally, his solutions to religious fundamentalism are at best naïve, and at worst, deeply authoritarian.
Finally, I want to put one more notion about Daniel Dennett to bed, that he is the “nice one” of the New Atheists, kinder to his enemies than say, Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. While his general tone is perhaps softer than that of his peers, he nonetheless echoes their arrogance. Throughout Breaking the Spell, there are times where Dennett can’t help but be a smug prick. He’ll say some nice things about religion, largely to appear open-minded, while pairing it with something off-putting and intolerant. The most glaring example of this happens within only a few pages. While asking for religious readers to “give him an open mind” on page 53, he says this on page 51:
History gives us many examples of large crowds of deluded people egging one another on down the primrose path to perdition. How can you be so sure you're not part of such a group? I for one am not in awe of your faith. I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasonable certainty that you have all the answers. I wonder if any believers in the End Times will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.
It's really hard to ask readers to have an "open mind" when mere paragraphs ago he insults them for being "arrogant" and "certain" about their beliefs.
If anyone should be more humble about the certainty of their beliefs, it’s Dennett. Memes, the core theory he has defended for more than 40 years, is essentially a dead science— a long dead one. Only he and Susan Blackmore are the only major scholars still advocating memetics. It makes him look like a bit of a scientific fundamentalist, clinging to a pet theory well after it was debunked. I think the only spell worth breaking is the one that memetics has over Dennett and anyone else who thinks you can explain deeply complex ideas like religion with a pithy, one-size-fits-all, pseudo-Darwinian concept. In closing, Breaking the Spell, if it's remembered at all, will be remembered as one book among many others that tried to explain religion away and ultimately failed.