And You Thought Book Reviews Were the Final Refuge
I would like to call attention to this bullshit review of Daniel Dennett’s new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
Regardless of what you think of assigning reviewers who are critical of �nay, hostile to�the basic premise of a book (a popular NYTBR strategy), Leon Wieseltier was the wrong person to review Dennett’s book. Wieseltier is interested in destroying the possibility of evolutionary psychology, not critiquing a product of it.
I particularly object to the following graph:
It will be plain that Dennett’s approach to religion is contrived to evade religion’s substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett’s natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.
I’m not sure whether or not Dennett’s intent is to disprove religion by hypothesizing about its origins in genetic adaptations. I very much doubt it, but for that I’d have to read the book. What I despise, however, is Wieseltier’s notion that the usefulness of rationality to the human animal as the human animal was evolving somehow obviates the usefulness of rationality to our species now. Clearly, the reason reason works is because it worked. If rationality still generates useful results, we should be thrilled that we evolved to make use of it. Later in the review, Wieseltier mocks Dennett’s look at the possible adaptive qualities of romantic love:
His book is riddled with translations of emotions and ideas into evo-psychobabble … “Marriage rituals and taboos against adultery, clothing and hairstyles, breath fresheners and pornography and condoms and H.I.V. and all the rest” have their “ancient but ongoing source” in the organism’s need to thwart parasites. “The phenomenon of romantic love” may be adequately understood by reference to “the unruly marketplace of human mate-finding.”
Does Wieseltier think Dennett doesn’t subjectively experience love for his wife, just because he thinks love is useful to the human species?
Frankly, this kind of mushy thinking is analogous to distorting the theory of evolution and then scoffing at the idea that people “came from monkeys.” The notion sounds unpleasant, so some people don’t like it. Wieseltier thinks Dennett’s way of thinking about religion isn’t nice, so he doesn’t like it. (For the record, Wieseltier is not in favor of intelligent design.) Review a book on the basis of what it’s trying to do, not what you think it should.
Oh, and I work in book publishing, so I definitely wasn't under the illusion that book reviewing is the last refuge.