A review of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett.

Isaiah Berlin resurrected the line “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, and famously used it to divide thinkers into two camps:

The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.

Daniel C. Dennett is a fox. In fact, he is perhaps one of the greatest foxes alive. Dennett has had more great little ideas than anyone else I can think of. And his foxiness has a fractal quality: it exists at every scale. He has written about philosophy, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and much more. Within philosophy, he has written on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, the problem of free will, and much more. Within philosophy of mind, he has written on… well, you get the idea. He is astoundingly prolific in his output of ideas and arguments for dealing with a given issue, and an adept at inventing what he calls “intuition pumps” (thought experiments, illustrative examples, new vocabulary–like “intuition pump!”, you name it) to help us grasp difficult concepts. He has written books for specialists (The Intentional Stance) as well as for the well-educated lay reader (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) and everyone in between, but in his new book he targets and reaches out to his widest audience yet, “the curious and conscientious citizens of my native land–as many as possible, not just the academics. (I saw no point in preaching to the choir.)”

Dennett’s project in Breaking the Spell is to use the methods and tools of science to examine religion, just as science examines any other natural phenomenon, and to write about it in such a way that it is accessible to everyone. The book is divided into three parts. Dennett is particularly eager that religious people read his book, and for this reason spends the first third of the book motivating and justifying his project, and even just appealing to his audience to keep reading:

…in spite of my best efforts I will no doubt outrage some readers, and display my ignorance of matters they consider of the greatest importance. This will give them a handy reason to discard my book without considering just which points in it they disagree with and why. I ask that they resist hiding behind this excuse and soldier on. They will learn something, and then they may be able to teach us all something. (p. 21)

Here is Dennett’s own description of his goal:

While I recognize that many religious people could never bring themselves to read a book like this–that is part of the problem the book is meant to illuminate–I intend to reach as wide an audience of believers as possible. Other authors have recently written excellent books and articles on the scientific analysis of religion that are directed primarily to their fellow academics. My goal here is to play the role of ambassador, introducing (and distinguishing, criticizing, and defending) the main ideas of that literature. (p. 23)

Dennett says that scientists study fields like sports and cancer, where miracles are sometimes said to happen. Maybe they don’t and maybe they do, but:

…the only hope of ever demonstrating this to a doubting world would be by adopting the scientific method, with its assumption of no miracles, and showing that science was utterly unable to account for the phenomena. (p. 26)

He says the same goes for religion. And for this reason, even the Roman Catholic Church at least goes through the motions of objective scientific investigation of miracles when considering candidates for sainthood. If believers really want to show that something supernatural exists, they should welcome a scientific examination of the facts. Frankly, this portion of the book may be a bit tedious for those (the choir) who are already convinced that a scientific examination of the phenomenon of religion is a good idea.

The second part of the book is where the real fun starts. Dennett says that there is no reason that religious practices cannot be accounted for in terms of our understanding of evolutionary biology. He begins with theories of the origins of folk religion, and then shows that as human culture grew in scope and sophistication, these ideas developed into fully-fledged organized religions. This is covered in considerable detail, and he makes many interesting points along the way. One of his strategies here is to do with religious memes what Richard Dawkins did with genes thirty years ago: he adopts their point of view. In other words, what characteristics would a religious meme have to have to reproduce itself successfully and spread? Note that memes are:

…passed on to one’s offspring by non-genetic pathways. Speaking one’s “mother tongue,” singing, being polite, and many other “socializing” skills are transmitted culturally from parents to offspring, and infant human beings deprived of these sources of inheritance are often profoundly disabled. It is well-known that the parent-offspring link is the major pathway of transmission of religion. Children grow up speaking their parents’ language and, in almost all cases, identifying with their parents religion. Religion, not being genetic, can be spread “horizontally” to nondescendents, but such conversions play a negligible role under most circumstances. (p. 86)

This method of looking at things from a meme’s-eye point of view makes possible a number of interesting observations, and also explains why so many religious memes share striking similarities, for example, a systematic invulnerability to empirical refutation. It also helps to explain the similarities of various religious practices across different religions, for instance, the ritual of walking unharmed over a bed of hot coals has religious significance in India, China, Japan, Singapore, Polynesia, Sri Lanka, Greece, Bulgaria, and other places. (I know from my own childhood that Pakistan is no exception: walking on burning coals has at least been incorporated into the mourning rituals that are practiced by the Shia, along with self-flagellation.)

Just to give a flavor of the kinds of interesting insight that are made possible by the use of memetics in Dennett’s hands, I will quote him at some length here:

Domestication of both plants and animals occurred without any farseeing intention or invention on the part of the stewards of the seeds and studs. But what a stroke of good fortune for those lineages that became domesticated! All that remains of the ancestors of today’s grains are small scattered patches of wild-grass cousins, and the nearest surviving relatives of all the domesticated animals could be carried off in a few arks. How clever of wild sheep to have acquired that most versatile adaptation, the shepherd! By forming a symbiotic alliance with Homo sapiens, sheep could outsource their chief survival tasks: food finding and predator avoidance.They even got shelter and emergency medical care thrown in as a bonus. The price they paid–losing the freedom of mate selection and being slaughtered instead of being killed by predators (if that is a cost)–was a pittance compared with the gain in offspring survival it purchased. But of course it wasn’t their cleverness that explains the good bargain. It was the blind, foresightless cleverness of Mother Nature, evolution, which ratified the free-floating rationale of this arrangement. Sheep and other domesticated animals are, in fact, significantly more stupid than their wild relatives–because they can be. Their brains are smaller (relative to body size and weight), and this is not just due to their having been bred for muscle-mass (meat). Since both the domesticated animals and their domesticators have enjoyed huge population explosions (going from less than 1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass ten thousand years ago to over 98 percent today–see Appendix B) there can be no doubt that this symbiosis was mutualistic–fitness-enhancing to both parties.

What I now want to suggest is that, alongside the domestication of animals and plants, there was a gradual process in which the wild (self-sustaining) memes of folk religion became thoroughly domesticated. They acquired stewards. Memes that are fortunate enough to have stewards, people who will work hard and use their intelligence to foster their propagation and protect them from their enemies, are relieved of much of the burden of keeping their own lineages going. In extreme cases, they no longer need to be particularly catchy, or appeal to our sensual instincts at all [as was the case with folk-religious memes]. The multiplication-table memes, for instance, to say nothing of the calculus memes, are hardly crowd-pleasers, and yet they are duly propagated by hardworking teachers–meme shepherds–whose responsibility it is to keep these lineages strong. The wild memes of language and folk religion, in other words, are like rats and squirrels, pigeons and cold viruses–magnificently adapted to living with us and exploiting us whether we like them or not. The domesticated memes, in contrast, depend on human guardians to keep going. (p.169)

It is for such inventive ways of presenting ideas that Dennett is such a pleasure to read, and so easy to understand. Notice that in the above passage, wild animals and plants were domesticated by humans because they provided a mutual benefit. So what was in it for the domesticators of wild memes? Dennet examines this question in some detail next, but I must try to refrain from rewriting a short version of his book here.

The last part of the book is an examination of where religion stands today. This is the part of the book that is explicitly motivated by the current tensions that religion is producing in the world, and here is where Dennett urges his reader toward a serious reexamination of his or her own faith. A religious person might argue that for all of Dennett’s reasoning about religion, he is missing the point. Accepting religion and accepting God is not like accepting a conclusion, it is more like falling in love. To which Dennett says:

…it isn’t just like falling in love; it is a kind of falling in love. The discomfort or even outrage you feel when confronted by my calm invitation to consider the pros and cons of your religion is the same reaction one feels when asked for a candid evaluation of one’s true love: “I don’t just like my darling because, after due consideration, I believe all her wonderful qualities far outweigh her few faults. I know that she is the one for me…

But Dennett wants you to evaluate your love anyway, and he is right. He ends by first examining the question of whether morality is possible without religion (guess what his answer is!), and then by considering what our attitudes toward religion should be today. The whole book is marked by a careful attention to documenting sources and studies whenever an empirical assertion is made (this reminded me of Steven Pinker’s books, where hardly a paragraph goes by without his citing of several studies to back up what he is saying!) and, indeed, it also succeeds in being just about as accessible as is possible to a very wide audience while applying sophisticated analytic tools to its subject. Dennett has done what he wanted to do, and it is an extremely important and timely achievement. I strongly urge you, specially if you are religious, to click here to buy the book, and read it, will you?

Have a good week!

My other Monday Musings:
Mohammed Cartoon Madness and Understanding
A Moral Degeneracy
In the Peace Corps’ Shadow
Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President

The sudden ascension of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court within a few short months, time mostly taken up with opposition to their appointments, has precluded deeper reflections on the world we have lost. It is no longer possible to imagine the Supreme Court as a guardian of individual rights against state intrusion. Indeed, quite the opposite is occurring: the new Court is likely to sacrifice civil liberties given what they judge to be a “compelling state interest.” Already, the present Court has deprived aliens, permanent residents or sojourners, of civil liberties as a necessity of our undeclared wars, and citizens are next. Except for Justice Kennedy’s 2003 attempt to enlarge homosexual protections with an appeal to international law, a move Justice Scalia fiercely attacked as submission to the “homosexual agenda,“ the present Court has shown little interest in guaranteeing, let alone extending the rights and protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights. A solid statist majority, shorn of the libertarian streak of the old American right wing, will see to it that Bush and his successors, in the spirit of their great autocrat predecessor, can say: “L’etat, c’est moi.”

The golden age of what might be called “constitutional liberalism,” begun with the appointment of Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in 1937 and ending with the retirement of Justice William Brennan in 1990, is over. During this just a bit more than half a century, justices such as Black, Douglas, Warren, Brennan and Marshall wrote opinions that said in simple, eloquent English that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights applied to every citizen in almost every human circumstance. Under their tutelage, the Court became the ultimate protector of individual liberties, a role these justices cherished.

It was not always – in fact – never was thus. This remarkable band of brothers that ruled during the Court’s Golden Age was an historical anomaly. One suspects that students are still taught Chief Justice Roger Taney started the Civil War in 1857 by ruling in the Dred Scott case that slaves were property and their owners’ rights protected by the Constitution. What students are no doubt not taught is that the Supreme Court before the 20th Century was essentially a chancery court for rising corporate capitalism, magically transforming corporations into legal persons and availing them of most 14th Amendment protections, even while depriving African-Americans of same in Plessy versus Ferguson (1896). No greater thefts of civil rights save the Indian treaties have been sanctioned before or since.

Before the Golden Age, there were prophets with honor. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, not for nothing known as the Great Dissenter so little did he carry a Court majority from 1902 to 1932, and Justice Louis Brandeis, the Progressive era’s leading legal genius who sat on the Court from 1916 to 1939, anticipated constitutional liberalism but made little law. They along with Benjamin Cardozo, in his short six-year tenure ending in 1938, were the minority that protested the Supreme Court dismantling of the first New Deal.

Flush from his 1936 landslide victory, Franklin Roosevelt tried to add to their number by packing the Court with younger, more cooperative members, and for his hubris, suffered the loss of much of his second mandate’s power. Roosevelt, out of revenge and even out of spite, nominated in 1937 Hugo Black, the senior senator from Alabama and certified fire-eating New Dealer, to the Court. As Roosevelt knew, senatorial courtesy would protect Black, and the Senate confirmed him within days. As New Dealer Harold Ickes put it, the economic royalists, as corporations were known as in those days, would get a good licking now.

Son of a dissolute small town merchant in a hardscrabble, red clay county pushed up against the Appalachians, Black (1886-1971) got his start as a lawyer defending poor people against corporations, and was proud that unlike most of his peers in rural Alabama, he had never taken a dime in retainer or bribe from the railroads and other trusts then cracking open the South for new profits. Instead, he represented clients suing corporations for personal injuries, job-related disabilities, and wrongful separations, the latter often related to union activities. He hated big money and monopolies and became one of the crusading Democrats that brought the political impulses of populism into the party. He became a Klansman too, a fact that got him elected the first time to the Senate but that almost ruined him shortly after being named to the Court.

A radical New Dealer, Black was against Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act because it propped up big business through legalized price-fixing. He was likely the first national politician to call for national health insurance. He originated bills for the minimum wage and the 30-hour week, and was the author of the groundbreaking fair labor standards act. Though Black regretted it, he like Roosevelt gave in to southern Democratic demands that minimum wage protections be stripped from agricultural and service workers, thus re-consigning, in effect, African-Americans in the South to a Jim Crow economy.

Black was the leader, the inspirational force for the Golden Age, serving for 34 years between 1937 and 1971. At first something of an apprentice “Great Dissenter,” Black soon learned the craft of how to put together majorities. With William Douglas as his great ally, he began making law, affirming the right to counsel for poor defendants in federal trials (1938), demanding racial integration of juries (1939) and due process for black defendants in criminal trials (1941). He ordered the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi (1962). He defended freedom of speech, association, press and religion with an old-fashioned, Bible-thumping injunction that the Founders had said that Congress shall make no law respecting these freedoms, and they meant it. He brooked no compromises with the Bill of Rights, seeing in it a citizen’s sole defense against government tyranny. He defended it against all comers, even those liberals like Felix Frankfurter, and by implication so many others since, who believed that the protections of the Bill of Rights must be balanced against other rights and privileges granted in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights contains “absolutes,” that were not mere “admonitions,” in his words, but prohibited prejudicial action of any sort. Unable to get his colleagues to apply the entire Bill of Rights in defense of citizens in altercations with local and state authorities as well as to federal jurisdictions, he painstaking and relentlessly sought over the course of 34 years to achieve the same result piece-meal.

Black defended Communists, pacifists, and said with generosity, pornographers. They were all protected, as were their rights to a living. Tyranny, he said in Chambers versus Florida (1940), was the great truth of human history, and those who suffered the most at tyranny’s hand were almost always “the poor, the ignorant, the numerically weak, the friendless, and the powerless.” The Court’s job was to affirm their rights – to stand up to governments and stop them from taking rights away. This was the kernel of constitutional liberalism, whether the Court found itself deciding for equal protection under the law and equal opportunity, or against extracted confessions, lawyerless suspects, and unreasonable search and seizure by the agencies of the state.

Sadly, the Golden Age began to decay by the late sixties, as a quick look at Justice Black’s last decade suggests. It had gone about as far as these brothers could take it. Black worked hard to put the Court behind equal protection under the law for African-Americans and for desegregation of schools and other public facilities, and for his pains, became anathema in his native South. Integration, on the other hand, was social policy to him, a matter of community preference, not jurisprudence. He stepped down just as the Court began hearing the cases that moved the federal government beyond simply assuring equality of opportunity to toward equality of outcomes. The Court’s many attempts to protect the rights of crime suspects led him to despair that that the Court may be aiding in letting guilty criminals go free.

From early on, he carried forward perhaps the two most crucial flaws of constitutional liberalism, and perhaps of the political liberalism of his time. First, Black treated property rights as sovereign. Picketers on company land were trespassers; even bus counter boycotters raised his ire. Second, the President’s powers in war were virtually supreme. He voted to affirm putting Japanese Americans and Japanese resident aliens in camps during World War II, because President Roosevelt and his generals had declared it a military necessity. His brothers Earl Warren (also the governor of California who had urged internment) and Tom Clark (U.S. attorney general at the time) later regretted their votes for it; Hugo Black never did. Consider the consequences. Of the first flaw, property, not opportunity or dignity is what our law protects, and we live the consequences daily. Of the second flaw, perhaps the word Guantanamo suffices.

The Golden Age is over, over by a good 15 years, though Clinton’s giddy Gilded Age spread money enough around to help us forget. The Supreme Court now decisively returns to is historic role as the protector of privilege, but this time it adds the defense of autocracy to its brief.

(You will find an extensive archive of Justin E. H. Smith’s writing at www.jehsmith.com.)

Justin E. H. Smith

Contemporary evolutionary biology tells us that there are five distinct evolutionary lines in which bipedalism has emerged independently, including, among other species, lizards (see R. C. Snyder, “Adaptations for Bipedal Locomotion in Lizards,” American Zoologist 2 (1962): 191-203); kangaroos (see M. B. Bennett, “Unifying Principles in Terrestrial Locomotion: Where do Hopping Australian Marsupials Fit In?” Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 73, 6 (2000): 726-735); and, obviously, birds.  Yet the perception persists that these other species are not really bipedal, but only balance on their hind legs for long periods, and that moreover they cannot be bipedal, since as we all know the ability to walk on two legs is peculiar to humans. 

As Craig Stanford writes in his popular book, Upright: The Evolutionary Key to Becoming Human: “Kangaroos and birds such as ostriches and penguins are bipedal — sort of. But they are built on an entirely different body plan and are not, strictly speaking, reliant only on their legs for transport. Even if we throw in all the extinct forms of terrestrial animal life, such as Tyrannosaurus rex and its kin, the percentage of bipeds is still remarkably small. And birds and dinosaurs differ markedly in their brand of upright posture,” etc. (Houghton Mifflin, 2003, Preface).

Such popular resistance suggests that bipedalism functions something like language, even if it is not quite as contested, in the way human beings conceive themselves: an adaptive trait among others that is inflated to tremendous significance as a way of marking out human uniqueness.

But surely language truly is a unique feature of humans.  Or is it?  To cite just one recent treatment of the subject, Lesley Rogers and Gisela Kaplan give substantial evidence that numerous species of mammal do in fact make referential sounds deserving of the name ‘language’.  Studies of ground-dwelling mammals, they affirm, “including squirrels, suricats…, marmots, and Diana monkeys, have confirmed that the ability to discriminate between different alarm calls that signal the presence of different predators exists in a variety of species and that such signals lead to predictable responses by the receivers” (“All Animals are Not Equal: The Interface between Scientific Knowledge and Legislation for Animal Rights,” in Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (Eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)).  The authors infer from these studies that “many other mammals, not in the primate order, possess referent signals in their vocal repertoires and may thus show at least rudiments of higher cognitive abilities.”

Language and bipedalism have long served as the most promising criteria for marking out human distinctness among natural beings.  It is noteworthy that in antiquity ‘featherless biped’, while tongue-in-cheek, was as a definition of ‘man’ the only available alternative to ‘rational animal’.  In the 17th century some, such as the philosopher Margaret Cavendish, explicitly identified language as dependent upon upright posture, while the anatomist Edward Tyson had to devote almost as much energy to arguing that chimpanzees can walk on their hind legs as to arguing that they cannot speak.  Both doctrines reveal an incipient atheism and materialism, and Tyson was not radical enough to accept them both. 

Tyson had a long career in comparative anatomy, and it is clear that he approached his subject with passion and wonder.  He makes a telling debut with his study of the “Scent-Bags in Poll-Cats” in 1676.  In 1682-83, Tyson performs a great number of dissections, most of which take place in front of members of the Royal Society and the results of which are subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions.  Noteworthy among these is  the “Tajacu, seu Aper Mexicanus Moschiferus, or the Anatomy of the Mexico Musk-Hog,”  as well as the study of a porpoise, an American rattlesnake, and numerous species of worms and insects.  This is followed by a roughly 15-year hiatus in which he appears to have been engaged primarily in medicine, only to return to comparative anatomy in 1698 with the “Carigueya, seu Marsupiale Americanum, or The Anatomy of an Opossum,”  followed by the Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris, Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man a year later. 

In his early anatomical frenzy, Tyson’s approach seems prima facie to be to dissect any animal he can get his hands on.  But further consideration seems to reveal more specific concerns.  On the one hand, he is concerned to study species that produce unusual secretions, particularly odoriferous ones, but also venom.  In the human being, Tyson discovers in 1693 the scent-producing gland in the penis responsible for the secretion of smegma, a part now honored by the name ‘Tyson’s gland’.  On the other hand, he is interested in what Mary Douglas, in her study of the dietary prohibitions of Leviticus,  would identify as borderline cases: taxonomically puzzling species such as marsupials and marine mammals, the species that cannot be easily accommodated in folk-taxonomical systems.  In the Orang-Outang, Tyson tellingly expresses regret that he has never been able to procure a zoophyte—a borderline creature par excellence. 

Quadrupeds, generally speaking, have served in Western thought as the paradigm brute, and ape perambulation, as much as any other purported ability, has persistently threatened the neat categorization of them with the cows and horses.  One way around this problem has been to identify all of their four limbs as ‘hands’: thus the taxonomic designation suggested by Tyson, ‘quadrumanes’.  Animals, then, are the things that go on all fours, whether on four feet as the cows, or four hands as the ape, but humans are the creatures that, uniquely, have two of each. 

Another approach is to deny that being able to balance on one’s hind limbs for extended periods is a true marker of bipedalism.  Thus Pliny in his Natural History is able to describe the satyrus indicus as “an animal, a quadruped, in the tropical mountains of India, a most pernicious one; with a human figure, but with the feet of a goat; and with a body hairy all over.”   And Aristotle maintains in the Historia animalium that bipedalism in apes is just a flourish, that the creature’s underlying nature is to go on all fours.

Tyson believes that the ape is capable of both sorts of motion, and tellingly notes that bipedalism reveals the ape’s humanlikeness in more ways than one: “When it goes on all four, as a Quadruped,” he writes, “it seems all hairy: When it goes erect, as a Biped, it appears before less hairy, and more like a Man.”  He presumes that the knuckle-walking he had observed in the infant chimpanzee had been a consequence of the weakness resulting from its debilitating illness, and that a healthy ape would naturally prefer to walk on its hind limbs. 

Tyson (correctly) adduces evidence for ape bipedalism from the direction of the hair follicles on his specimen’s limbs: “The tendency of the Hair of all the Body was downwards; but only from the Wrists to the Elbow ‘twas upwards; so that at the Elbow the Hair of the Shoulder and the Arm ran contrary to one another.  Now in Quadrupeds the Hair in the fore-limbs have usually the same Inclination downwards, and it being here different, it suggested an Argument to me, as if Nature did design it as a Biped.”

But can they speak?  This would be something more than a proprium quarto modo– a property universally shared by the members of a species that nonetheless does not serve to constitute their essence.  Tyson explicitly sees the view that apes are capable of language as atheistic, and as a ‘romance of antiquity’.   As Richard Serjeantson notes of the early modern period, “An unsuitable anatomy… was one of the principal reasons for denying animals the capacity for articulate speech.  They were widely taken to lack the right equipment of palate, larynx, tongue, lips…  For this reason… the miraculous constitution of the human speech organs served as a powerful proof in natural theology” (“The Passions and Animal Language, 1540-1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2001)).

Tyson shares in the majority view of animal language in the early modern period, yet, as we shall see, his own account of ape anatomy in the region of the mouth and throat poses a serious explanatory problem for him.  No one in the 17th century is on record as defending the view that animals were capable of the sort of rich and flexible, referential vocal utterances that we today attribute to a grasp of syntax in human beings.  Much more common was the view that animals were equipped to communicate to one another whatever they might have the need to communicate within the context of their animal lives, whether by calls or by visual signals, and that there was no reason in principle to consider this sort of communication inferior to human speech.  This latter view is associated with certain radical deniers of human uniqueness among creatures, such as Girolamo Rorario with his 16th-century treatise That Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Humans, as also with those figures who hoped to set the art of physiognomic divination on a proper scientific footing, such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Bulwer. 

Tyson for his part is very clearly worried about the particular physiological likeness of apes and humans in the region responsible, at least in humans, for the production of speech: “As to the Larynx in our Pygmie,” he writes, “I found the whole Structure of this Part exactly as ‘tis in Man…And if there was any further advantage for the forming of Speech, I can’t but think our Pygmie had it.  But upon the best Enquiry, I was never informed, that it attempted any thing that way.  Tho’ Birds have been taught to imitate Humane Voice, and to pronounce Words and Sentences, yet Quadrupeds never; neither has this Quadru-manous Species of Animals, that so nearly approaches the Structure of Mankind, abating the Romances of Antiquity concerning them.” 

Here, then, Tyson explicitly accounts for all reported instances of teaching animals to speak as mere imitation, and not as indicative of any conscious activity.  He goes on to write of the larynx that “Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Galen have thought [it] to be the Organ which Nature has given to Man, as to the wisest of all Animals; for want perhaps of this Reflection: For the Ape is found provided by Nature of all those marvellous Organs of Speech with so much exactness… that there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto; for, according to these Philosophers, Apes should speak, seeing that they have the Instruments necessary for Speech.”

Well then, why aren’t they speaking?  Tyson repeats  his conviction that the only explanation lies in the fact that anatomy is not, to borrow a phrase, destiny, that one cannot infer from the organs a creature has what it will be able to do: “From what is generally received, viz. That the Brain is reputed the more immediate Seat of the Soul it self; one would be apt to think, that since there is so great a disparity between the Soul of a Man, and a Brute, the Organ likewise in which ‘tis placed should be very different too.  Yet by comparing the Brain of our Pygmie with that of a Man; and with the greatest exactness, observing each Part in both; it was very surprising to me to find so great a resemblance of the one to the other, that nothing could be more… Since therefore in all respects the Brain of our Pygmie does so exactly resemble a Man’s, I might here make the same Reflection the Parisians did upon the Organs of Speech, That there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such Actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto: for then our Pygmie might be really a Man.”

But this is an odd sort of reasoning, particularly in view of the fact that, as concerns bipedalism, Tyson is perfectly willing to reason that the ape is capable of this simply in view of the fact that “‘tis sufficiently provided in all respects to walk erect.”   Why does sufficient provision translate into a capability in the one case but not in the other?    

By the late 18th century, we find Lord Monboddo offering a different account of Tyson’s findings regarding the presence of speech organs in apes, but the absence of speech.  For him, the great apes are “a barbarous nation, which has not yet learned the use of speech.”  He argues that since, as Tyson has shown, they possess the organs necessary to speak, what prevents them is only that they have never been educated, just as “men, living as the Orang Outangs do, upon the natural fruits of the earth, with few or no arts, are not in a situation that is proper for the invention of language.”   Among 17th-century writers, only Louis Le Comte employs a similar racist comparison between non-European people and apes, but even he continues to see speech as a marker of absolute distinctness separating all humans equally from all apes: he writes of apes that their “Shape, Stature, Countenance, Arms, Legs, and other Members of the Body, are so like ours, that excepting the Voice only, one should have much ado not to reckon them equally men with certain Barbarians in Africa, who do not much differ from Beasts.” 

One of the great ironies of early modern anthropology is that it is the religious and creationist world-view of the sort defended by Tyson, with its commitment to supernatural and permanent species reification, that spoke in favor of common origins for all of humanity with clear genealogical and essential criteria for discriminating the ‘lowest’ humans from apes.  The opposition to such a reified view of species, already celebrated by Locke, is a part of the story of the emergence of modern scientific racism—once humanity is no longer conceived as uniquely a reflection of God, then greater and lesser proximity to the ape becomes thinkable.  For Lord Monboddo, the lower boundary of humanity may be crossed by a well-trained orangutan, and there is nothing about the people dwelling near the lower boundary that ensures their superiority to it.  For Tyson, in contrast, the Cartesian criterion remains in place: there must be an absolute division between humans and animals; animal speech would threaten to collapse this divide; therefore, it is unthinkable. 

We may speculate, though, that by opening the door to ape bipedalism, Tyson himself has set Western thought on that path that will lead to the dissolution of the neat ontological divide between humans and animals, and that will bring in its wake so much social havoc, and so much scientific progress, over the following 300 years. 

If we wish to continue jealously guarding language as something uniquely our own, and to inflate it into some quasi-divine human virtue, we should ask ourselves whether this is any less small-minded than the ongoing effort, Craig Stanford its latest spokesman, to do something similar with bipedalism– an impressive skill, to be sure, but far from godly.  It is amazing to me that old pieties about the special place of humans in the cosmos can still sell books, even when the case can no longer be made on the basis of profound, theologically based convictions, and must instead rest on trivial features of our species such as gait and call.  I suspect that there’s some kind of dim self-congratulatory buzz coursing through electric eels too, some faint self-love rooted in the singularity of this species’ special adaptive trait, which, unlike language and bipedalism, really is a rarity in nature.   

For nearly a year after S. and I moved to Scholes Street, the laundry around the corner was operated by a broad-faced, solid, and grinning man we called Mr. Danny. He was a source of much discussion between us; in the early morning S. once saw Mr. Danny leaving the home of another neighborhood icon, a woman who stood in her pinwheel-decorated front yard yelling at her dog Sean; one afternoon I thought I heard him arguing with a woman in his supply room, peered in, and saw only Mr. Danny. His face was freckled and wrinkled about the eyes and neck, and he wore polo shirts in bright, aggressively unfaded shades of green and yellow. The short sleeves revealed arms roped with muscle, and his legs were strong too. I imagined he might have been a swimmer or a weightlifter ten or twenty years ago, but in his eyes I could rarely read a subject other than laundry.

What interested us in Mr. Danny in the very first place was the manner in which he ran the shop. It was impossible to wash anything out from under his glare. He stood behind a dingy white countertop, folding a baby’s underpants, and stared at S. and I as we shoveled our wet clothes out of the machines and into one of the many wheeled wire baskets that cluttered the narrow room. If on the way to the dryers I nudged another cart with my own, he’d drop the baby’s panties, shoulder me out of the way, and steer my basket swiftly to an empty dryer, all with a static grin. If I dropped a sock on the floor he’d pick it up, smooth it and hand it back. Once I put liquid detergent in the softener chute and Mr. Danny’s grin persisted though his eyes were panicked; when he finally consented to let me right the problem myself, his hand hovered above mine as I tipped water into the machine.

Unfortunately unable to manage everything alone, Mr. Danny employed several women to handle the heavy volume of ‘drop-off’ laundry, and when they spread the work across the counter and there was no place for him to stand, he sat in a folding chair by the door and watched them fold. His gaze would sometimes drift to the Telemundo gameshow playing on a TV set in the corner, but just as quickly would snap back to the dryers to catch a red display read “1 minutes left.” Then he’d watch the machine spin, and would rise as it shuddered to a stop. His eyes were just full of laundry: even when S. saw him leave our neighbor’s home he was carrying hundreds of wire hangers.

Towards the beginning of our relationship my feelings toward Mr. Danny ranged from fascination (remember when he balanced a bulging 30 pound trash bag of laundry perfectly on that tiny scale?) to irritation (but what about when he sold me that dirty, dented Coke?). Eventually they settled firmly in the resentment corner, and I let my laundry accumulate for weeks to avoid Mr. Danny’s pained smile as I folded a shirt with a wrinkle down the front. I had once found doing laundry relaxing. Now I was consumed with dread.

So when Mr. Danny disappeared from Danny’s Laundromat a few months ago, I was shocked not to feel an ounce of relief. His departure was so sudden and unexplained. I did my wash under Mr. Danny’s nose one week, and returned a few Saturdays later to find a slight, smooth skinned woman with wire rimmed glasses and a pink shirt giving Mr. Danny’s stained and sticky linoleum floor a thorough scrub. The television was gone and the machines were priced higher. I left my sack of wash in her care, something I’d never done with Mr. Danny, and the pink ticket she gave me read “Amy’s Laundromat.” I went home with a hollow feeling.

S. was equally put out. “Maybe she’s his wife,” she offered feebly. Privately we referred to Amy as Mrs. Danny for a few weeks, but in the end it just felt desperate. Mr. Danny really was gone, and we were free to fold in peace.

But I couldn’t fold. Every time I set foot in there, I threw my bag on the scale and fled.

I did trust Amy to handle my wash, and it was convenient, and her style did impress (I asked her when tomorrow my clothes would be ready, and she offered “We open at seven”), but the truth seemed to be that I missed Mr. Danny. I didn’t want to do my laundry my way while Amy power-vacuumed the floor. I wanted to seethe under Mr. Danny’s direction, and I wanted to imagine that my devil-may-care detergent measuring bothered him as much as his crazy grin killed me. It was a reliable tension, probably in the end as soothing as laundry alone had once been.

I thought I saw Mr. Danny the other day on the 6 train. I was standing at the back of the car; his broad shoulders were squeezed into a middle seat and he was snoozing, his chin settled firmly on his chest. I wanted to get closer to verify the I.D. but some shopping bags and school kids blocked my path. Suddenly I noticed his pants: from the knee down they were wrinkled and there was a greasy smudge at the hem. It’s not Mr. Danny, I knew, when the train stopped and the stranger looked in my direction, I felt what Mr. Danny would have wanted me to feel. I wanted to take that man’s pants and clean them myself.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

On Christmas day 2005 the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson died in her homeland. News of her death was kept private, apparently at her own request, until the requisite obsequies were observed, so obituaries did not appear in the press until mid-January 2006.

The passing of such an artist gives every reason to ask myself again where such vocal excellence comes from. It is no good telling me about the mechanics of voice production. There is a mystery to beauty, and anyone who was ever at a performance of Nilsson’s will tell you that such resplendent power, glistening acrobatic vocal technique, warmth and stamina could bring down the house, not just with applause and cheering, but with the certainty that one had been in the presence of greatness. This is one of the imponderables of theatre life—you never know when you are about to run into unexpected revelations. Only recently I experienced one of the great nights in the theatre when the Chekhov International Theatre Company presented Declan Donnellan’s production of Twelfth Night in Sydney. So much panache, but with subtlety; how effective the choreographed movement; what intimacy and musical delivery of the text (in Russian with surtitles). And what actors. Surprised by joy indeed! Well, this sometimes happens in the opera theatre which is one of the reasons people look forward to going.

Then there is Australia’s own great soprano, Joan Sutherland. Australia has produced many fine singers, Nellie Melba, Florence Austral, Marjorie Lawrence and Lisa Gasteen among them, but Sutherland truly was La Stupenda, as the Italians dubbed her. We have all had the experience of being told about the supposed greatness of this or that performer or work of art, only to find ourselves disappointed and perplexed by the actual embodiment of the said diva, actor, book or film. Well, I had the pleasure of seeing Sutherland on many occasions towards the end of her career when she returned to Australia to perform at the Sydney Opera House, and I always marvelled at how easily her voice would fill the largest hall. One of the most astonishing sounds for people visiting Australia for the first time is the noise of kookaburras with their uproarious, cackling birdcalls. Hearing their laughter is sheer delight. But perhaps never did a more beautiful human sound come out of Australia than that of Joan Sutherland’s voice. Joan Sutherland, OM AC DBE, one of the few non-Americans to receive a Kennedy Center Honors award.

My admiration for these two singers has nothing to do with canary fancying, for which I have little time. Neither do I exclude other singers from the pleasure dome. I think you should take your vocal pleasures where you find them. I enjoy Trent Reznor and Jeff Buckley too, Jussi Björling and Waltraud Meier, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Charles Trenet, Nina Simone. Where do you stop? I do not like the development of cults around singers. For example, the cult of Callas leaves me cold, even if Callas was a great singer too. Also, I dislike ranking people, insisting on one’s favourites at the expense of other vocal grandeur. One should be properly grateful for any kind of performing excellence, wherever it might derive. There is this thing called the glory of the human voice. Its equivalent in poetry is the enormous range of poets whose largeness of spirit and expressive power revives and delights. Well, Nilsson and Sutherland have different kinds of voices, of course. They are both sopranos, but what a difference in sound. Nilsson’s voice was often compared to that of a laser beam, cutting through vast Strauss and Wagner orchestras with consummate ease. Sutherland’s voice was also big, with an agility that took you on the wings of song to dazzling heights that astonished with their incandescent nobility.

One of the interesting similarities about Nilsson and Sutherland was that neither of them played the diva. They were both immensely practical, down to earth kinds of people with a sense of humour needed to cope with the ups and downs of the theatrical life and the egos one sometimes encounters in performers of a certain kind and ability. These singers were humble before the greatness of the works they performed but did not allow themselves to be sold short either. I can never forget Nilsson walking onto the platform of the Concert Hall in the Sydney Opera House at the all-Wagner concert she gave in 1973. She was clearly nervous, and this after her long-lived career and success in all the world’s major opera houses. What a lesson to other performing artists about priorities, about duty towards greatness, about accepting a gift with due respect. But you would also have to have a sense of the ridiculous to survive epic Wagner and Donizetti runs, the nightmare roles of Salome and Elektra, the stratospheric coloratura of Bellini’s I Puritani or Massenet’s Esclarmonde. I’ll bet there was plenty of laughter backstage after, or during, performances. You would go insane if you took all that high seriousness around with you after curtain call. There are two well-known anecdotes regarding Nilsson’s humour: managing to put Herbert von Karajan in his place—quite an achievement—wearing a miner’s helmet to make fun of Karajan’s dim lighting in his Ring; and once quipping, when asked if she had any dependents, ‘Rudolf Bing’, then general manager of the Met.

Nevertheless, there still remains the question of beauty, where it comes from. It will always remain a rhetorical question, since there can be no answers to it. Keats was wise: ‘ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ However, ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn’ is not nearly good enough for our latter-day rationalists who think everything can be explained. Beauty is going to turn out an adaptive Darwinian mechanism for them. The human is a mutation of the gene pool in a dress, or suit. These people will tell me about vocal training, using the diaphragm correctly, scale practise, hard yakka as we Australians might call it. Necessary, but not an explanation. There are no explanations for Tristan, the statue of David or the taste of Australian shiraz. Don’t tell me about harmonic progression, quarrying marble in Carrara or the terroir of Western Australian soil. These are banal explanations for wonders, just as when we fall in love we realign the universe on inexplicable principles. And who would ever try to explain love? Only a very foolish person. When I hear Nilsson singing the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung or Sutherland performing ‘At The Balalaika’ I know that explanations must stop and that I must submit myself to a different form of knowledge, the knowledge that comes from feeling, into words, into the world. We know all too well that terrible things happen on this earth, but that is no reason to disavow greatness. That is a striking hypocrisy exhibited by nihilists who take delight in nothing so much as their own certainty that everything is awful, except, perhaps, their own pontifications about why things are awful.

What a privilege it is to have heard these artists. One gives profound thanks for their splendour, the gift of their singing, the pleasures of their amazing artistry.

                                                                     *
                              Music

When thinking of the world, or tired, or excited,
And taken with the moment,
Music brings detachment
To our bizarre involvements.
The subtlety of this dwarf planet’s errors
Contracts to ample harmony, to water, wind and fire,
When life seems stale desire
And chaos the only factor to remember.
To hear the warp, the earth’s emphatic surface,
Pressing from thick scores of black and white
Is passionate, past circumstance or time,
And breaks the barrier of the flesh’s senses.
Music is geometry of space
Bending to our doubting minds the final, purest shapes.

Written 1975 Published A Temporary Grace 1991 43

Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti sing the Brindisi from La Traviata here. 4′ 51”

Imagine this: a small group of white supremacists collects in Strauss Park near where I live in New York City, and then marches up Broadway, past 125th Street, into the heart of Harlem, all the while chanting anti-African-American slogans of the vilest kind. They have a permit from the city for their march. They use the n-word, they call black people monkeys, they taunt them with reminders that their ancestors were slaves owned by the white people’s own ancestors. They call black people lazy, stupid, and repeat every stereotypical epithet from the centuries of historical insult and injury to which African-Americans have been subjected in this country. An angry crowd gathers around the marchers. African-Americans yell some threats at the marchers, vowing to hurt them. Words are exchanged, and a shouting match erupts between one of the march leaders and a black man. The black man’s mother is subjected to a particularly repulsive and obscene insult by the white man. Suddenly, the black man cannot take it anymore, and lashes out at the marcher, striking him down to the ground and kicking him until he is seriously injured. A few other young and hot-blooded black men jump into the fray and attack some of the marchers. The black men are arrested for assault and battery and taken to jail.

In an editorial, the New York Times very rightly blames the black men for responding to a legal expression of free speech with unnecessary violence, and calls for them to be punished severely. Articles in papers all over the country express the ultimate importance of free speech for all citizens, and correctly remind us that no matter how offensive we may find what people say, we must never respond with violence. They correctly tell us that we must not be cowed by the threats and irrational behavior of the African-Americans, who seemed unable to respond to words with words of their own, and instead resorted to threats of violence and even real violence. All over the world, decent people who wish to live in peace with all races wonder what it is about African-Americans that makes them prone to violence, and unable to engage in rational debate. Those who are particularly fair-minded, realize that it must have been the leaders of the African-Americans who manipulated them for their own ends. Others make the helpful suggestion that it is wrong to condemn all African-Americans and that it is only a few extremist elements among them that resort to violence whenever they see something that they find insulting. President Bush tells us that most African-Americans are peace-loving people, after all. Still others explain that it is poverty which has driven African-Americans to such violent behavior. A white professor at Harvard warns of an imminent and inevitable clash of black and white civilizations. Many black intellectuals also have the courage to condemn the violence of their people. Everyone reasonable agrees that the most important thing to come out of this is that free speech is something that must be protected at all cost. It is what makes us a civilized people.

What’s wrong with this picture? This is not just a rhetorical question. It is something to think about very carefully and deeply. One of the reasons that I am writing this (other than Robin’s urging me to do it) is that in the last few days, I have received quite a few emails from 3 Quarks readers asking me to explain what it is about Islam that makes it so intolerant and irrational. These are well-meaning individuals, hoping to figure out a way to avoid what many have come to see as the inevitable “clash of civilizations”. How should they be engaging the Islamic world when it appears to them so incapable of reasoned debate and discussion? They mean no insult, but I still wonder if they wrote to their black friends during the Rodney King riots, asking them to explain why black people behave so irrationally? No, they didn’t. Why didn’t they? Because while they do not give sanction to criminal and violent acts of looting and vandalism, they can understand how a collection of historically oppressed people can be driven to irrational rage by repeated acts of injustice and caricature. Look, one can say, “It was wrong of Adam to slap Bob,” but no one says, “I don’t understand why Adam had to stand up for his mother, and slap Bob.” As Edward Said said in a different context, to understand something is not to condone it.

But Muslims have resorted to death-threats against the publishers of the cartoons. Yes, unfortunately they have. Did you know that Michael Moore regularly receives death threats from right-wing nuts? Do you know that the Dixie Chicks have received countless death-threats from American patriots? Do you know how many death-threats Martin Scorsese received from Christians for making The Last Temptation of Christ? Did you know there were Christian bomb-threats to movie theaters right here in New York City that played the film? Well, there were. Is this, then, a defense of the Muslims who have made such threats? No, it emphatically is not. It is also not an attempt to say that there was anything like the globe-spanning demonstrations and death-threats that Muslims are engaging in now, in any of the cases that I mention. What I wish to say is that while there is a difference between those cases and what is happening in the Muslim world right now, it is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. Despite their crusades and holy wars of the past, most Westerners do not any longer have an attachment to religion strong enough to easily give up their lives for it, and this is a good thing in my view. But it is not a good thing to forget what such an emotion can be like. Others still have it and one must deal with that reality.

What is of importance to understand here is that (however unfortunate this may be) one of the few remaining sources of dignity for many in the largely impotent world of Islam, unable to compete militarily or economically with the West and unable to remain free of interference from the West because of the curse of holding much of the world’s oil-supplies, is their religion. This is the last redoubt of their pride. And this is why they lash out so angrily against what is correctly perceived by them as a deliberate provocation and insult to their religion by their erstwhile colonizers and oppressors via crude and offensive caricature. Those of you who cannot stop yourself from loudly and continually proclaiming the right of newspapers to publish whatever they want (no one serious is really arguing with you there), please take a few minutes to condemn the cheap provocation of the Danish newspaper which published the revolting cartoon of Mohammad as a terrorist. If the New York Times publishes a vulgar and racist cartoon about African-Americans, for example, my first reaction will not be to proclaim that they have a right to do so, which of course they do. My reaction might be to boycott the paper and otherwise bring attention to what they are doing. Do this, condemn the racism of the Danish newspaper, then lecture me about free speech. If the Muslim world saw large-scale Western condemnations of the cartoons and demonstrations in which white Christian Danes stood shoulder to shoulder with their Muslim fellow-citizens in protesting these racist insults, it would have a much needed calming effect and demonstrate that the Danes truly are a well-meaning people. Instead, the endless prattling-on about principles of free speech and how Islam doesn’t care about it, only serves to confirm to many in that part of the world that the West sees all of the vast and diverse landscape of Islam only in terms of crude generalities of contemptuous enmity.

What I have written so far leaves unanswered the following question: what about the silencing of dissent within the world of Islam (as well as dissenting views on Islam, within and without) that giving in to threats from religious zealots may result in? This is a serious and genuine concern. Well, let me tell you something personal. One of the formative events of my mental life occurred on Valentine’s day, 1989: the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa asking for Salman Rushdie to be murdered. Having grown up a Shia Muslim, this shocked and saddened me beyond what I can describe. As a South Asian, Rushdie’s writings were a great source of pleasure and pride to me, and perhaps even life-changing for me, in the sense that I developed an addiction to literature at least partly through my enjoyment of Rushdie. I supported Rushdie wherever and whenever I could, as vociferously as I could, and still do. (In a private act of protest against those who failed to stand up for him, I even stopped reading books by John Le Carre and Roald Dahl, both of whom suggested that Rushdie got what was coming to him.) But that situation was different: a religious leader and a head of state had incited people to murder, and a whole country had gone along. No leader or country, to my knowledge, has done that in the present case. Of course, one must condemn anyone who calls for death or violence because of some stupid cartoons. One could also try to understand the historical and current sources of Muslim rage. That is the only way that we can encourage them to move toward more confident and more open and more tolerant societies. One could say much more about every part of this, but I must stop somewhere. More discussion is needed and one must deal with a real and dangerous situation and try to defuse it. But the media have more serious and pressing issues to discuss, like this from Slate: Where Do Muslim Protesters Get Their Danish Flags?

My other columns at 3 Quarks Daily:
A Moral Degeneracy
In the Peace Corps’ Shadow
Richard Dawkins, Relativism and Truth
Reexamining Religion
Posthumously Arrested for Assaulting Myself
Be the New Kinsey
General Relativity, Very Plainly
Regarding Regret
Three Dreams, Three Athletes
Rocket Man
Francis Crick’s Beautiful Mistake
The Man With Qualities
Special Relativity Turns 100
Vladimir Nabokov, Lepidopterist
Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments
Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President