Philosopher Daniel Dennett On Religion, Gould and UFOs at Monsters & Critics
Ronald Bailey | July 11, 2007, 12:09pm
Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves, and most recently, Breaking the Spell, is interviewed by Dan Schneider over at Monsters & Critics. Wading through the overwrought, pretentious and often confused questions, there are some Dennettian gems to be mined from it. (In journalism, few things are more annoying than interviewers who think that they are more interesting than the people whose views they are allegedly soliciting.) I boil down a couple of the questions to their essentials and leave Dennett's answers in full.
On religion:
Q. I have to admit that the really religious-despite whatever blinders they wear, were FAR happier and focus on their lives than the anomic suburbanites or career-oriented MBAs:
DD: There is no doubt that many religions make many people happier than they otherwise would be. The same is true, as you say, of opium. Probably—I wonder if this research has been done—being an impassioned major league baseball team fan has similarly bracing effects. I find that scientists and philosophers seem to be happier than bankers and stockbrokers, by and large, but that's just anecdotal. I haven't done any careful studies. Several studies show that paraplegics are, in general, more satisfied and happy with their lives than people not confined to wheel chairs! This fascinating—and heartening—fact shows that some of our 'obvious' convictions about quality of life are just wrong. But I'm not going to start toasting to the future of my friends' children by wishing that they become paraplegics.
Q. I claim that, by that definition, all organized religion is fundamentally psychotic. Do you agree?
DD: There is definitely a similarity, but more interesting are the differences: most deeply religious people can be entirely effective and clearheaded agents on behalf of their curious beliefs. Nothing disorganized about their behavior.
On Dennett's falling out with Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
A. Your views on the late Stephen Jay Gould.
DD: I see Gould quite differently. He was an academic bully, who exploited his scientific credentials to push his political views—or maybe they were closer to religious views. (Remember: I started out as a friend of his; I often attended his seminars at Harvard but eventually I got so annoyed with the way he would misrepresent his critics and bully the students that I had to leave.) When I wrote DDI, I knew I was going to have to expose Gould's history of misrepresentation—since he was going to hate my book, and would pillory it with his usual tricks if I didn't attempt to preempt that vilification effort with an analysis of his own work. Gould had been selling America a watered-down and distorted version of basic evolutionary theory for decades, and when I pointed this out, he reacted--not unreasonably!-- with a venomous attack on what he called my "Darwinian fundamentalism," but, you know, the evolutionary biology community knew I was right, and said so. (I am not alone in incurring Gould's wrath: I'm proud to stand with Richard Dawkins, the late, great John Maynard Smith and Steve Pinker, as sane and forthright a team of "fundamentalists" as one could ask for.) Gould could never accept that natural selection is fundamentally a sorting algorithm, and kept hunting for some softening of that fact—limiting the role of natural selection itself, or elevating 'constraints' that would subdue it. He never found any worth keeping, but he tried hard. Punctuated equilibrium, the Cambrian explosion, and exaptation all turn out to be interesting wrinkles in orthodox ("ultra") neo-Darwinian theory, not challenges to it. And today we still have to face creationists (such as Senator Brownback) who think that Gould's punctuated equilibrium shows that the theory of evolution is not established. That's part of Gould's legacy, sad to say. He didn't actively discourage the idea that he'd found a major flaw in the theory of evolution by natural selection. I don't know whether a protracted debate between me and Gould on television would have worked in any case. He was not above pulling rank, and was a master of insinuation. Certainly in our infrequent public confrontations after my book came out, he did not behave in a principled manner.
On UFOs:
Q. Why are people who claim to be alien abductees looked upon askance while those who see the Virgin Mary [are] not?
DD: There are good reasons to believe that many who claim to be alien abductees have actually had a traumatic sexual experience at the hands of some abusing member of the family, or other sexual abuser. For them this is just the socially easiest way of "explaining" their traumatic memories, and their PTSD symptoms, and they may be entirely sincere in their hallucinated memories. (So John Mack was probably half right: these people had indeed had a terrible experience; it just wasn't with aliens.) The phenomenon should be studied with a suitably rigorous methodology (not the way Whitley Strieber "investigated" it). But that's tough, since ethical and legal problems arise immediately. That's no accident. It's an instance of Nicholas Humphrey's Argument from Unwarranted Design (in his excellent book LEAPS OF FAITH). Now why should it be that the juiciest and most contagious tales of horror and wonder always seem to involve circumstances that are systematically difficult to investigate? These myths spread because they can spread, just like the virus for the common cold.
reason's interview of Dennett in which he discussed the idea of humans as "choice machines" in his book Freedom Evolves here. Also see my review of that book here.
Finally, the whole M&C interview here.
eye-of-horus | July 11, 2007, 1:28pm | #
Too bad Steve Gould can no longer fight back.
DD should discuss the difference between genuine, but falsified, scientific theories and those ad-hoc monsters manufactured out of ideological prejudice. Having read most of Gould, I can not recall his opining or even suggesting that he and Eldridge had created an alternative to the standard theory that would supplant natural selection, for example.
In the face of philosophy (of the empirico-logicico-linguistic sort) what can one say, except echo with Descartes that "philosophers raise a dust and then complain that they can not see."
Ah well, we can rest content that there are no living philosophers; in anglophone lands there are only ELLosophists. It's a good background for Law.
Where else will a Ph.D. in philosophy have taken one in the last 40 years? DD and his ilk live off of the false hope of grad students and junior faculty -- most departments of philosophy should be closed, and all remaining should be cut back.
On the question of values. Sure, don't look for them in scientific theories. Look for them in scientific practice, methodology. Every putative contribution to knowledge asserts that what it contains is true. You'll find that 'is true' is a predicate belonging to a metalanguage which operates on scientific statements as well as statements in areas like Law and, surprise!, ordinary discourse. And, why truth rather than falsehood? Especially, when falsehood is often more comforting . . . perhaps even more adaptive for advanced Apes.
You could read Nietzsche, DD. Or, if you desire more sober prose, try Science and Human Values by J. Bronowski.
www.amazon.com/Science-Human-Values-Jacob-Bronowski/dp/0060972815
eye-of-horus
copyright asserted 2007
Dan Schneider | July 11, 2007, 5:22pm | #
Re: the Gould digression.
That is exactly what an interview, if it strives to be good, is about.
Imagine the venom still held about a man 5 years dead. That says something about DD and the egos of scientists in general, re: pissing matches.
No other interview, in print or video, with DD gets that, and there's many more moments like that.
Also, for a man devoted to ideas, to answer so many with flippant non sequiturs, says more than any lengthy BS answer could. That's why they were left in.
Compare the DD interview to the prior interview with novelist Charles Johnson. The q's side in each interview ran about 9k words. CJ's replies ran about 13.5k. DD's a little over 6k, even though his q's covered a greater range than CJ's q's.
The point is it cores into the two men to contrast their answers. CJ comes off as engaged and appreciative of thoughtful in depth questions that force him to think, and even states such in the interview. DD comes off as a grumpy old man who wants to give canned answers, as in your infomercial-cum-interview. The fact that he had no book to push also played a part in his answers.
Commerce may prefer Reason's interview, but real reason prefers mine. It's the better interview, by a long shot.
Dan Schneider | July 11, 2007, 7:36pm | #
No shoulder straining, but in researching Dennett, and looking at printed (paper and online) interviews, this Reason interview (and others of the 10 questions we can ask as we pimp your current book sort) was exactly what I wanted to avoid. Again, DD's answers to your Q's are lifted straight from his book (sans page #s).
Any DD 'gems' come only from the proper mining techniques. That would be from the q's asked.
Also, the Khan trope is a good one. I link to an online DD roundtable discussing people of the millennium, where many intellectual types discuss their choices. I posited mine. Now, I could have asked about causality, but given the framing of that interview, decided to show, not tell. M&C is a site more interested in Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. The unfortunate fact is that not only the readers, but many of the folk involved, would be lost without such vivid examples.
To try to expand readers one has to lay things out more vividly.
As for less people reading 'my stuff.' M&C gets 4.5 mill hits a month. My personal site averages about 2 million. How many folk read Reason online a month? The commerce I was referring to was the infomercial as interview. My interview was for the long term, and for folk not acquainted with DD- those who might want to find out who he is, rather than Paris's stint in jail.
Bridging the gap between high and low culture, and diff readerships, is difficult, but one must know one's medium. Online is the perfect vehicle for long interviews and articles. There are no paper costs.
As for Chomsky, I dismissed his Left Wing lunacy but acknowledged his scientific creds. You don't seriously want to defend his recrudescent Communist nonsense, do you? Thanks, Josh.
In short, I am going more for a Charlie Rose interview in print. There are many people who loathe Rose's interview style because he talks almost as much as the guests. But, he gets far more nuggets PRECISELY because his style is eye to eye, not supplicant to Master. And, because of the online medium, I can go longer than Rose can.
I did think about trimming the answers to those q's that got a 'Huh?' response, but realized that a lack of intellectual curiosity on subject A or B was just as revealing as a lengthy answer.
Do I think it was a great interview? No. Was it a good one. Yes. And certainly the best of the many I read online, and by a long shot.
Interviews are not to serve my (the interviewer's) desires, nor even the interviewee's, but the reader's. They are not to merely pimp a product, but to core to the essence of that individual.
Warts and all, that's exactly what my interview does. Some folk have loved it, others hated it. Some think Dennet comes off pompous, some think I do, Some think both of us do. Others think it's amongst the best they've ever read.
The length of this thread proves it's had an impact.
How many interviews on Reason can claim the same?
