[Kabar-indonesia] 2 of 2: NYRB: The Threat to the Planet [+Religion from the Outside]

[Joyo at aol.com]

-2 of 2-

includes: Religion from the Outside

The Threat to the Planet continues...

Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers puts needed emphasis
on the effects of human-made climate change on other
life on the planet. Flannery is a remarkable
scientist, having discovered and described dozens of
mammals in New Guinea, yet he writes for a general
audience with passion and clarity. He considers
changes in climate that correspond to what I have
defined as the business-as-usual and alternative
scenarios. Flannery estimates that when we take
account of other stresses on species imposed by human
beings, the alternative scenario will lead to the
eventual extinction of 20 percent of today's species,
while continuing with business-as-usual will cause 60
percent to become extinct. Some colleagues will object
that he extrapolates from meager data, but estimates
are needed and Flannery is as qualified as anyone to
make them. Fossil records of mass extinctions support
Flannery's shocking estimate of the potential for
climate change to extinguish life.

Flannery concludes, as I have, that we have only a
short time to address global warming before it runs
out of control. However, his call for people to reduce
their CO2 emissions, while appropriate, oversimplifies
and diverts attention from the essential requirement:
government leadership. Without such leadership and
comprehensive economic policies, conservation of
energy by individuals merely reduces demands for fuel,
thus lowering prices and ultimately promoting the
wasteful use of energy. I was glad to see that in a
recent article in these pages, he wrote that an
effective fossil energy policy should include a tax on
carbon emissions.

A good energy policy, economists agree, is not
difficult to define. Fuel taxes should encourage
conservation, but with rebates to taxpayers so that
the government revenue from the tax does not increase.
The taxpayer can use his rebate to fill his
gas-guzzler if he likes, but most people will
eventually reduce their use of fuel in order to save
money, and will spend the rebate on something else.
With slow and continual increases of fuel cost, energy
consumption will decline. The economy will not be
harmed. Indeed, it will be improved since the trade
deficit will be reduced; so will the need to protect
US access to energy abroad by means of diplomatic and
military action. US manufacturers would be forced to
emphasize energy efficiency in order to make their
products competitive internationally. Our automakers
need not go bankrupt.

Would this approach result in fewer ultraheavy SUVs on
the road? Probably. Would it slow the trend toward
bigger houses with higher ceilings? Possibly. But
experts say that because technology has sufficient
potential to become more efficient, our quality of
life need not decline. In order for this to happen,
the price of energy should reflect its true cost to
society.

Do we have politicians with the courage to explain to
the public what is needed? Or may it be that such
people are not electable, in view of the obstacles
presented by television, campaign financing, and the
opposition of energy companies and other special
interests? That brings me to Al Gore's book and movie
of the same name: An Inconvenient Truth. Both are
unconventional, based on a "slide show" that Gore has
given more than one thousand times. They are filled
with pictures—stunning illustrations, maps, graphs,
brief explanations, and stories about people who have
important parts in the global warming story or in Al
Gore's life. The movie seems to me powerful and the
book complements it, adding useful explanations. It is
hard to predict how this unusual presentation will be
received by the public; but Gore has put together a
coherent account of a complex topic that Americans
desperately need to understand. The story is
scientifically accurate and yet should be
understandable to the public, a public that is less
and less drawn to science.

The reader might assume that I have long been close to
Gore, since I testified before his Senate committee in
1989 and participated in scientific "roundtable"
discussions in his Senate office. In fact, Gore was
displeased when I declined to provide him with images
of increasing drought generated by a computer model of
climate change. (I didn't trust the model's estimates
of precipitation.) After Clinton and Gore were
elected, I declined a suggestion from the White House
to write a rebuttal to a New York Times Op-Ed article
that played down global warming and criticized the
Vice President. I did not hear from Gore for more than
a decade, until January of this year, when he asked me
to critically assess his slide show. When we met, he
said that he "wanted to apologize," but, without
letting him explain what he was apologizing for, I
said, "Your insight was better than mine."

Indeed, Gore was prescient. For decades he has
maintained that the Earth was teetering in the
balance, even when doing so subjected him to ridicule
from other politicians and cost him votes. By telling
the story of climate change with striking clarity in
both his book and movie, Al Gore may have done for
global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides.
He will be attacked, but the public will have the
information needed to distinguish our long-term
well-being from short-term special interests.

An Inconvenient Truth is about Gore himself as well as
global warming. It shows the man that I met in the
1980s at scientific roundtable discussions, passionate
and knowledgeable, true to the message he has
delivered for years. It makes one wonder whether the
American public has not been deceived by the distorted
images of him that have been presented by the press
and television. Perhaps the country came close to
having the leadership it needed to deal with a grave
threat to the planet, but did not realize it.

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The New York Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 11 • June 22, 2006

Review

Religion from the Outside

By Freeman J. Dyson [Professor Emeritus of Physics at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton]

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
Viking Penguin, 448 pp., $25.95

1.

Breaking the spell of religion is a game that many
people can play. The best player of this game that I
ever knew was Professor G.H. Hardy, a world-famous
mathematician who happened to be a passionate atheist.
There are two kinds of atheists, ordinary atheists who
do not believe in God and passionate atheists who
consider God to be their personal enemy. When I was a
junior fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, Hardy was
my mentor. As a junior fellow I enjoyed the privilege
of dining at the high table with the old and famous.
During my tenure, Professor Simpson, one of the old
and famous fellows, died. Simpson had a strong
sentimental attachment to the college and was a
religious believer. He left instructions that he
should be cremated and his ashes should be scattered
on the bowling green in the fellows' garden where he
loved to walk and meditate. A few days after he died,
a solemn funeral service was held for him in the
college chapel. His many years of faithful service to
the college and his exemplary role as a Christian
scholar and teacher were duly celebrated.

In the evening of the same day I took my place at the
high table. One of the neighboring places at the table
was empty. Professor Hardy, contrary to his usual
habit, was late for dinner. After we had all sat down
and the Latin grace had been said, Hardy strolled into
the dining hall, ostentatiously scraping his shoes on
the wooden floor and complaining in a loud voice for
everyone to hear, "What is this awful stuff they have
put on the grass in the fellows' garden? I can't get
it off my shoes." Hardy, of course, knew very well
what the stuff was. He had always disliked religion in
general and Simpson's piety in particular, and he was
taking his opportunity for a little revenge.

Paul Erdös was another world-famous mathematician who
was a passionate atheist. Erdös always referred to God
as SF, short for Supreme Fascist. Erdös had for many
years successfully outwitted the dictators of Italy,
Germany, and Hungary, moving from country to country
to escape from their clutches. He called his God SF
because he imagined God to be a fascist dictator like
Mussolini, powerful and brutal but rather slow-witted.
Erdös was able to outwit SF by moving frequently from
one place to another and never allowing his activities
to fall into a predictable pattern. SF, like the other
dictators, was too stupid to understand Erdös's
mathematics. Hardy and Erdös were both lovable
characters, contributing more than their fair share to
the human comedy. Both of them were gifted clowns as
well as great mathematicians.

And now comes Daniel Dennett to take his turn at
breaking the spell. Dennett is a philosopher. In this
book he is confronting the philosophical questions
arising from religion in the modern world. Why does
religion exist? Why does it have such a powerful grip
on people in many different cultures? Are the
practical effects of religion preponderantly good or
preponderantly evil? Is religion useful as a basis for
public morality? What can we do to counter the spread
of religious movements that we consider dangerous? Can
the tools and methods of science help us to understand
religion as a natural phenomenon? Dennett remarks at
the beginning that he will proceed

    not by answering the big questions that motivate
the whole enterprise but by asking them, as carefully
as I can, and pointing out what we already know about
how to answer them, and showing why we need to answer
them.

    I am a philosopher, not a biologist or an
anthropologist or a sociologist or historian or
theologian. We philosophers are better at asking
questions than at answering them....

Dennett practices what he preaches. He does not answer
the questions, but takes four hundred pages to ask
them. The book proceeds at a leisurely pace, with an
easy conversational style and many digressions. It is
divided into three sections, the first concerned with
the nature of scientific inquiry, the second concerned
with the history and evolution of religion, the third
concerned with religion as it exists today. In the
first section, Dennett defines scientific inquiry in a
narrow way, restricting it to the collection of
evidence that is reproducible and testable. He makes a
sharp distinction between science on the one hand and
the humanistic disciplines of history and theology on
the other. He does not accept as scientific the great
mass of evidence contained in historical narratives
and personal experiences. Since it cannot be
reproduced under controlled conditions, it does not
belong to science. He quotes with approval and high
praise several passages from The Varieties of
Religious Experience, the classic description of
religion from the point of view of a psychologist,
published by William James in 1902. He describes
James's book as "a treasure trove of insights and
arguments, too often overlooked in recent times." But
he does not accept James's insights and arguments as
scientific.

James is examining religion from the inside, like a
doctor trying to see the world through the eyes of his
patients. James was trained as a medical doctor before
he became a professor of psychology. He studied the
personal experiences of saints and mystics as evidence
of something real existing in a spiritual world beyond
the boundaries of space and time. Dennett honors James
as an explorer of the human condition, but not as an
explorer of a spiritual world. For Dennett, the
visions of saints and mystics are worthless as
evidence, since they are neither repeatable nor
testable. Dennett is examining religion from the
outside, following the rules of science. For him, the
visions of saints and mystics are only a phenomenon to
be explained, like falling in love or hating people of
a different skin color, mental conditions that may or
may not be considered pathological.

The second section of the book is the longest and
contains the core of Dennett's argument. He describes
the various stages of the long historical evolution of
religion, beginning with primitive tribal myths and
rituals, and ending with the market-driven evangelical
megachurches of modern America. Looking at these
evolutionary processes from the outside, he speculates
about ways in which they might be understood
scientifically. He explains them tentatively as
products of a Darwinian competition between belief
systems, in which only the fittest belief systems
survive. The fitness of a belief system is defined by
its ability to make new converts and retain their
loyalty. It has little to do with the biological
fitness of its human carriers, and it has nothing to
do with the truth or falsehood of the beliefs. Dennett
emphasizes the fact that his explanation of the
evolution of religion is testable with the methods of
science. It could be tested by quantitative
measurements of the transmissibility and durability of
various belief systems. These measurements would
provide an objective scientific test, to find out
whether the surviving religions are really fitter than
those that became extinct.

Dennett puts forward other hypotheses concerning the
evolution of religion. He observes that belief, which
means accepting certain doctrines as true, is
different from belief in belief, which means believing
belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds
evidence that large numbers of people who identify
themselves as religious believers do not in fact
believe the doctrines of their religions but only
believe in belief as a desirable goal. The phenomenon
of "belief in belief" makes religion attractive to
many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To
belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You
only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have
to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief
in belief is easy. Belief in belief is one of the
important phenomena that give a religion increased
transmissibility and consequently increased fitness.
Dennett puts forward this connection between belief in
belief and fitness as a hypothesis to be tested, not
as a scientifically established fact. He regrets that
little of the relevant research has yet been done. The
title Breaking the Spell expresses his hope that when
the scientific analysis of religion has been
completed, the power of religion to overawe human
reason will be broken. 

Dennett has an easy time poking fun at the modern
evangelical mega-churches which pay more attention to
the size of their congregations than to the quality of
their religious life. The leaders of these churches
are selling their versions of religion in a
competitive market, and those that have the best
marketing skills prevail. The market favors practical
convenience rather than serious commitment to a pure
and holy life. Looking at religion from the outside,
Dennett sees clearly how the leaders of religious
organizations are corrupted by power and money. He
quotes Alan Wolfe, one of the sociologists who study
American religious organizations and practices:

    Evangelicalism's popularity is due as much to its
populistic and democratic urges—its determination to
find out exactly what believers want and to offer it
to them—as it is to certainties of the faith.... The
term "sanctuary" is shunned by one church because of
its "strong religious connotations," and more
attention is paid to providing plenty of free parking
and babysitting than to the proper interpretation of
passages of Scripture.

Like Hardy and Erdös, Dennett plays the game of
breaking the spell by making religion look silly. Many
of my scientist friends and colleagues have similar
prejudices. One famous scientist for whom I have a
deep respect said to me, "Religion is a childhood
disease from which we have recovered." There is
nothing wrong with such prejudices, provided that they
are openly admitted. Dennett's account of the
evolution of religion is on the whole fair and well
balanced.

The third and last section of Dennett's book describes
his view of religion in the modern world. In a long
chapter entitled "Morality and Religion," he blames
religion for many of the worst evils of our century.
He blames not only the minority of murderous fanatics
whose religion impels them to acts of terrorism, but
also the majority of peaceful and moderate believers
who do not publicly condemn the actions of the
fanatics. This is a serious problem, whether one is
dealing with Irish Catholic fanatics in Belfast or
with Muslim fanatics in Britain and Spain. He quotes
with approval the famous remark of the physicist
Stephen Weinberg: "Good people will do good things,
and bad people will do bad things. But for good people
to do bad things—that takes religion." Weinberg's
statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the
whole truth. To make it the whole truth, we must add
an additional clause: "And for bad people to do good
things—that takes religion." The main point of
Christianity is that it is a religion for sinners.
Jesus made that very clear. When the Pharisees asked
his disciples, "Why eateth your Master with publicans
and sinners?" he said, "I come to call not the
righteous but sinners to repentance." Only a small
fraction of sinners repent and do good things, but
only a small fraction of good people are led by their
religion to do bad things.

I see no way to draw up a balance sheet, to weigh the
good done by religion against the evil and decide
which is greater by some impartial process. My own
prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads
me to conclude that the good vastly outweighs the
evil. In many places in the United States, with
widening gaps between rich and poor, churches and
synagogues are almost the only institutions that bind
people together into communities. In church or in
synagogue, people from different walks of life work
together in youth groups or adult education groups,
making music or teaching children, collecting money
for charitable causes, and taking care of each other
when sickness or disaster strikes. Without religion,
the life of the country would be greatly impoverished.
I know nothing at first hand about Islam, but by all
accounts the mosques in Islamic countries, and to some
extent in America too, play a similar role in holding
communities together and taking care of widows and
orphans.

Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes
to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme
religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of
young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of
ordinary believers giving them moral support by
failing to turn them in to the police. He sees
religion as an attractive nuisance in the legal sense,
meaning a structure that attracts children and young
people and exposes them to dangerous ideas and
criminal temptations, like an unfenced swimming pool
or an unlocked gun room. My view of religion and
Dennett's are equally true and equally prejudiced. I
see religion as a precious and ancient part of our
human heritage. Dennett sees it as a load of
superfluous mental baggage which we should be glad to
discard.

After Dennett's harsh depiction of the moral evils
associated with religion, his last chapter, "Now What
Do We Do?," is bland and conciliatory. "So, in the
end," he says, "my central policy recommendation is
that we gently, firmly educate the people of the
world, so that they can make truly informed choices
about their lives." This recommendation sounds
harmless enough. Why can we not all agree with it?
Unfortunately, it conceals fundamental disagreements.
To give the recommendation a concrete meaning, the
meaning of the little word "we" must be specified. Who
are the "we" who are to educate the people of the
world? At stake is the political control of religious
education, the most contentious of all the issues that
religion poses to modern societies. "We" might be the
parents of the children to be educated, or a local
school board, or a national ministry of education, or
a legally established ecclesiastical authority, or an
international group of philosophers sharing Dennett's
views. Of all these possibilities, the last is the
least likely to be implemented. Dennett's
recommendation leaves the practical problems of
regulating religious education unsolved. Until we can
agree about the meaning of "we," the recommendation to
"gently, firmly educate the people of the world" will
only cause further dissension between religious
believers and well-meaning philosophers.

2.

The control of education is the arena in which
political fights between religious believers and civil
authorities become most bitter. In the United States
these fights are made peculiarly intractable by the
legal doctrine of separation of church and state,
which forbids public schools to provide religious
instruction. Parents with fundamentalist beliefs have
a legitimate grievance, being compelled to pay for
public schools which they see as destroying the
religious faith of their children. This feeling of
grievance was avoided in England through the wisdom of
Thomas Huxley, a close friend of Charles Darwin and a
leading proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution.
When public education was instituted in England in
1870, eleven years after Darwin's theory was
published, Thomas Huxley was appointed to the royal
commission which decided what to teach in the public
schools.

Huxley was himself an agnostic, but as a member of the
commission he firmly insisted that religion should be
taught in schools together with science. Every child
should be taught the Christian Bible as an integral
part of English culture. In recent times the scope of
religious instruction in England has been extended to
include Judaism and Islam. As a result of this policy,
no strong antagonism between religious parents and
public schools has arisen, from 1870 until the present
day. The teaching of religion in public schools
coincided with a decline of religious belief and a
growth of religious tolerance. Children exposed to
religion in public schools do not as a rule take it
seriously. We do not know whether Thomas Huxley
foresaw the decline of religion in England, but there
is no doubt that he would have welcomed this
unintended consequence of his educational policy.

It is unfortunate that Huxley's solution of the
problem of religious education is not available to the
United States. Every country is different, especially
in matters concerning religion, and no single solution
to the problem of religious education fits all. In
each country, a workable solution has to be found by
political compromise between conflicting views, within
the rules imposed by the local culture. To be
workable, a solution does not need to be
scientifically or philosophically consistent. When I
was a boy in England long ago, people who traveled on
trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The
question arose whether I needed to buy a dog ticket
when I was traveling with a tortoise. The conductor on
the train gave me the answer: "Cats is dogs and
rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel
free according." The rules governing religious
education should be administered with a similar
freedom of interpretation.

Dennett also advocates more intensive research on
religion considered from a scientific point of view.
Here again, we can all agree with the recommendation,
but we may disagree about the meaning of "research."
Dennett limits research to scientific investigations
studying religious activities and organizations as
social phenomena. In my opinion, such research,
looking at religion from the outside, can be helpful
but will never throw much light on the central
mystery. The central mystery is the perennial
sprouting of religious practices and beliefs in all
human societies from ancient times until today. My
mother, who was a skeptical Christian like me, used to
say, "You can throw religion out of the door, but it
will always come back through the window." I recently
experienced a vivid demonstration of the truth of my
mother's words. I went with my wife to visit the
monastery of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow, the
ancient headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The young guide who showed us around said almost
nothing about the ancient buildings and works of art
that we were supposed to be admiring. Instead she
talked for an hour about her own faith and the
mystical influences that she felt emanating from the
old saints of the church in their tombs. After three
generations of atheistic government and official
suppression of religion, here it was sprouting again
from its roots.

Let me state frankly my own philosophical prejudices
in opposition to Dennett. As human beings, we are
groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange
universe into which we are born. We have many ways of
understanding, of which science is only one. Our
thought processes are only partially based on logic,
and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires
and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated
intelligences, but only as members of a working
community. Our ways of understanding have been
collective, beginning with the stories that we told
each other around the fire when we lived in caves. Our
ways today are still collective, including literature,
history, art, music, religion, and science. Science is
a particular bunch of tools that have been
conspicuously successful for understanding and
manipulating the material universe. Religion is
another bunch of tools, giving us hints of a mental or
spiritual universe that transcends the material
universe. To understand religion, it is necessary to
explore it from the inside, as William James explored
it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The
testimony of saints and mystics, including the young
lady at Sergiev Posad, is the raw material out of
which a deeper understanding of religion may grow.

The sacred writings, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran
and the Bible, tell us more about the essence of
religion than any scientific study of religious
organizations. The research that Dennett advocates,
using only the scientific tool kit that was designed
for a different purpose, will always miss the goal. We
can all agree that religion is a natural phenomenon,
but nature may include many more things than we can
grasp with the methods of science.

The best source of information about modern Islamic
terrorists that I know of is a book, Understanding
Terror Networks, by Marc Sageman.[1] Sageman is a
former United States foreign service officer who
worked with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. In chapter 5 of his book, he describes in
detail the network that planned and carried out the
September 2001 attacks on the United States. He finds
that the bonds holding the group together, during its
formative years in Hamburg, were more personal than
political. He concludes: "Despite the popular accounts
of the 9/11 perpetrators in the press, in-group love
rather than out-group hate seems a better explanation
for their behavior."

To end this review, I would like to introduce another
recently published book, Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections
of Japanese Student Soldiers, by Emiko
Ohnuki-Tierney.[2] This contains extensive extracts
from diaries written by seven of the young men who
died in suicidal missions or as kamikaze pilots in the
closing months of World War II. The diaries give us
firsthand testimony of the thoughts and feelings of
these young soldiers who knew that they were fated to
die. Their thoughts and feelings are astonishingly
lucid and free from illusions. Some of them expressed
their feelings in poetry. All of them were highly
educated and familiar with Western literature in
several languages, having spent most of their brief
lives in reading and writing. Only one of them,
Hayashi Ichizo, was religious, having grown up in a
Japanese Christian family. His Christian faith did not
make self-sacrifice easier for him than for the
others. He had read Kierkegaard's Sickness unto
Deathand carried it with him on his final mission
together with his Bible.

All of the young men, including Hayashi, had a
profoundly tragic view of life, mitigated only by
happy memories of childhood with family and friends.
They were as far as it was possible to be from the
brainwashed zombies that contemporary Americans
imagined to be piloting the kamikaze planes. They were
thoughtful and sensitive young men, neither religious
nor nationalistic fanatics.

Here I have space to mention only one of them, Nakao
Takanori, who must speak for the rest. Nakao left a
poem beginning, "How lonely is the sound of the clock
in the darkness of the night." In his last letter to
his parents, a week before his death, he wrote,

    At the farewell party, people gave me
encouragement. I did my best to encourage myself. My
co-pilot is Uno Shigeru, a handsome boy, aged
nineteen, a naval petty officer second class. His home
is in Hyogo Prefecture. He thinks of me as his elder
brother, and I think of him as my younger brother.
Working as one heart, we will plunge into an enemy
vessel. Although I did not do much in my life, I am
content that I fulfilled my wish to live a pure life,
leaving nothing ugly behind me.

We have no firsthand testimony from the young men who
carried out the September 11 attacks. They were not as
highly educated and as thoughtful as the kamikaze
pilots, and they were more influenced by religion. But
there is strong evidence that they were not
brainwashed zombies. They were soldiers enlisted in a
secret brotherhood that gave meaning and purpose to
their lives, working together in a brilliantly
executed operation against the strongest power in the
world. According to Sageman, they were motivated like
the kamikaze pilots, more by loyalty to their comrades
than by hatred of the enemy. Once the operation had
been conceived and ordered, it would have been
unthinkable and shameful not to carry it out.

Even after recognizing the great differences between
the circumstances of 1945 and 2001, I believe that the
kamikaze diaries give us our best insight into the
state of mind of the young men who caused us such
grievous harm in 2001. If we wish to understand the
phenomenon of terrorism in the modern world, and if we
wish to take effective measures to lessen its
attraction to idealistic young people, the first and
most necessary step is to understand our enemies. We
must give respect to our enemies, as courageous and
capable soldiers enlisted in an evil cause, before we
can understand them. The kamikaze diaries give us a
basis on which to build both respect and
understanding.

Notes

[1] University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004

[2] University of Chicago Press, 2006.

-END 2 of 2-

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