Daniel Dennett has something of the look of those seventeenth-century puritan preachers who would talk for hours about the sins of the flesh. The gospel he has spent most of his life spreading, however, has nothing to do with supernatural vengeance; quite the opposite. His full white beard is worn more in homage to Charles Darwin than the Almighty.
When I went to see him at the little office in the corner of a quadrangle at Tufts University he has occupied for 30 years, he was examining on his computer screen the cover of his new book, Breaking the Spell. His book seeks to demonstrate that religion, chiefly Christianity, is itself a biologically evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness. In America, these days, that is the most virulent form of fighting talk.
Dennett, you might say, has been working up to this. His previous bestselling books, Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained, established him as America's most important and entertaining philosopher; such is the provocative content of Breaking the Spell that it earned him a reported publishing advance of a million dollars.
I had been reading Dennett's book on the plane to Boston and 36,000 feet seemed about right for its heady intelligence. He has made his polymathic career mixing rigorous science and philosophy with anecdote and storytelling; Richard Dawkins, his friend and British equivalent, routinely calls Dennett 'surpassingly brilliant'. Like Dawkins he is, too, not without a sense of mischief. He begins his latest 400-page argument against the divine, for example, by comparing the idea of religion to a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke, 'a little brain worm', that changes the behaviour of an ant, its host, in order to get itself swallowed by a sheep or a cow so it can reproduce in a bovine gut. It is not, it would be fair to say, a version of the greatest story ever told that is designed to appeal to the crusading legions of the religious right.
In the past, by detractors, he has been called a 'Darwinian fundamentalist' in that there is no area of life or experience that he believes cannot be understood in terms of natural selection. He is happy to accept the label. He has devoted his working life to showing how all of the ideals we hold most sacred - free will, individuality, justice, the soul, anything resembling an 'I' - can (and must) be explained in terms of blind genetic-preservation.
'What I have done is to show people that they have to let go of a lot of instincts they have about their minds,' he says, 'but also that when they have done that, everything is hunky dory; they have got free will, they have got consciousness and they don't need God to explain any of it.' He seems entirely comfortable with this literally soulless proposition, though he allows himself a smile when I suggest that one of his epigrams has lodged itself in my mind, or at least in a neural pathway that kids itself it is 'me' and refuses to go away: 'Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares,' it says.
Dennett has worked closely with Richard Dawkins in extending the mechanics of selfish genes into the realm of thought. He talks a lot about 'memes', which are ideas seen in the context of replication. 'If you have an original idea and keep it to yourself, even if it's true, that's not a meme,' he says. 'Memes are contagious ideas. They spread from person to person. There are millions of people in this world who make their living trying to propagate memes. Everyone in advertising, everyone in public relations, everyone in religion.'
Dennett has long since fancied himself as a first-rate global meme-spreader, not least because early in his academic career he introduced the first frisbee into Britain and watched it colonise the country from the gardens of Worcester College Oxford where he first spun it into the air as a postgraduate. These days he restricts himself to sending Darwinist idea-germs into battle against the politicised viruses of creationism and 'intelligent design', both of which are still taught in some American schools. (At his own high school 50 years ago Dennett starred in a production of Inherit the Wind - as the preacher Rev Jeremiah Brown, no less - and he can't quite believe that versions of the Scopes trial are still being played out to this day in American court rooms. He thought that argument would have been won by now. 'But still, we are where we are.')
Breaking the Spell opens up a new front in this engagement. 'It just became clearer and clearer to me that there were too many presumptions in the air about the elevated status of religious presuppositions,' he says. 'I thought that wasn't right. I wanted to find out why religion still has such a hold on people.'
To fortify his beleaguered army of American rationalists, Dennett has found a new banner under which to march. Along with Dawkins, he has taken to calling himself a 'bright', which is a catch-all moniker for atheists and agnostics and materialists of all kinds. 'We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny - or God,' he suggests. 'We disagree about many things and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic - and life after death.'
Dennett has written editorial pieces in the New York Times about the brights being America's most persecuted minority these days; the godless worse than jihadists in some eyes. Is the term gaining currency?
'Well,' he says 'there was a flurry at first and then it sort of died down and people said, "Ha! It's not going to catch on." But it took the term "gay" quite a few years to catch on. So let's come back in five years and see what is happening to "bright". I think it would be good if there was a familiar novel term for people who don't believe in the supernatural. There are such negative connotations to the word atheist in that it defines an opposition. I'd like a word that stands on its own.'
Dennett does not make the comparison with gay liberation tritely. For a while now, he has cheerfully been announcing to anyone who will listen that he is bright and he is proud.
'When I came out as a bright at this wonderful conference of high-school kids up in Seattle, the effect was electrifying,' he recalls. 'Many of them came up to me afterwards and said, "Thank you! Thank you! I have never heard an adult say that before."'
The children had apparently held these private doubts about God for years, but they'd had to keep them to themselves, worried about being different, or strange. 'Let's shout it out,' Dennett exclaims. 'We're brights! We don't believe in God!'
I suggest to him that this feels, at least where Christianity is concerned, like a pointedly American battle cry, but he is not convinced.
He smooths his beard. 'That reminds me of what I used to hear when I was a graduate student in England many years ago. The civil rights movement was in full swing and people would tell me how backward America was. I didn't quite have the guts to say then: just you wait, but that's what I felt. And that is what I feel now. Maybe we are not behind this curve - maybe we are ahead of it.'
In writing his book, he says, it was very important to him to get as many believers as possible to read it. He did a seminar at Tufts where at least half of his audience was deeply religious. He sought them out, discussed the exact nature of his blasphemies. 'Of course I'm going to hurt people's feelings,' he says, 'but I don't want to offend people casually. I really want to do it on purpose.'
Dennett imagined that the book would stir up some trouble for him, and so far, oddly, the New York Times has led the charge; its reviewer, Leon Wieseltier, calling Dennett 'the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name' and aggressively dismissing his claims about religion as being a form of 'scientism' which is 'one of the dominant superstitions of our day'. Dennett responded by letter with typical wit and quiet anger: 'What next?' he wondered of Wieseltier's criticism 'A review that warns about the pernicious "meteorologism" that keeps scolding us about global warming, or the "economism" that has the effrontery to inform us that the gap between rich and poor is growing?"' The row has consumed blogs across America; it gives some insight into what Dennett is up against.
For the most part he has been content to get his retaliation in first. His book states, for example, that gods are the product of a nascent 'fantasy-generation impulse' and that theism is made possible by a 'gene for heightened hypnotisability' beloved of shamans. Anyone who argues otherwise is 'a protectionist'. Dennett is clearly a profoundly generous-spirited man in person, but he gives no quarter intellectually to anyone. 'The only meaning of life worth caring about,' he says, 'is one that can withstand our best efforts to understand it.'
As a younger man, Dennett took on some of the biggest beasts in the academic jungle - Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky - and has never once taken a step back. 'The thing is,' he says, 'I really don't like academic bullies, these silverbacks in whatever field who resort to bullying. Overpowering people with their prestige and rhetoric. It's an abuse of power. What I discovered early on was that you can call them out. They can't hurt you. Very good, wise people told me not to put a chapter criticising Stephen Jay Gould in a book, because he would eat me alive. I left it in and he tried to eat me alive, but he did not manage it because he was wrong.'
Dennett sees the world of the future polarising between rationalists and believers and, from the corner of his quad, watches that fracture deepening daily. When he wrote his seminal book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, people used to ask him: why is it so dangerous? They don't ask him that any more. Dawkins wrote that people had 'evolved to be Darwinists', but some people are clearly taking a lot longer than others. Dennett puts this blip down to a 'genetic variation in lovers of mystery'. Perhaps even a majority of people, he believes, really don't like to have things explained. 'Many very intelligent people really don't want to hear how a magic trick is done; they prefer their ignorant mystification.'
It is hard to imagine anyone, I suggest, with a more robust anti-mystery gene than him, but he insists there are lots of things he does not want to know - when he is going to die, say, or which of the people he thinks of as his friends are really not his friends - as well as a handful of things he has proved himself incapable of knowing - quantum physics, how to play the violin.
Other than that, he is up to speed on almost everything, and if he is not sure, he has a formidable list of 'phone-a-friends'. He is a world-class philosopher and neuroscientist, he is a pioneer of artificial intelligence, as well as being a gifted sculptor, a virtuoso jazz pianist and an intrepid Atlantic sailor. It is, he says, the last of these though that always makes him feel most alive. I wonder if he has any intimations of immortality at all when he is out at sea, with the heavens set out above him and the wind in his sails.
'No,' he says, 'but what I do love is when it's stormy and everyone else is below decks, snug in their cabin. I'm doing my trick at the helm. I love that. The great thing about being a philosopher is that if you make a mistake, no one gets hurt. We don't need malpractice insurance. One of the things I love about sailing is that I can be in a situation that if I did not know what I know, I could be in mortal danger. I'm applying knowledge in the real world and people are safe because I know what I'm doing.'
This dominant urge to test himself, to be as expert as he can be in as many areas as he can manage, is something he believes he has inherited from his father, Daniel Dennett senior, a precociously eminent historian who specialised in the social and political history of Islam.
His father was a great academic star at Harvard before transferring to the University of Beirut to finish his PhD in the Forties. When America joined the Second World War, he was recruited to the forerunner of the CIA in the Middle East. He was killed in a plane crash while on a mission to Ethiopia in 1948 when his son was five. His influence still casts its light on Dennett, however, though he finds it hard to separate out the facts from the fiction.
'I don't really know which memories I have of him that are real any more,' he says. 'But I do know that when old friends of his have met me in adulthood, they have been in tears: they say it is uncanny; I am him. I have the same tone of voice, the same way of telling stories, the same laugh. Except that he was a historian and I am not that. I tried but I had a habit of remembering the wrong things and forgetting the right ones.'
Dennett rues the fact that his father never got to serve his country as he might have done. 'Here was a man who intimately understood the Middle East, and who was deeply interested in politics, who loved the Arab world. It would have been great to have him in the State Department for a few decades.'
It might have gone some small way to help avoiding what he sees as the current 'dark age' of foreign policy that he believes his country finds itself in. There have been bad times before - Vietnam, Watergate - but, he suggests, it is worse now because the debate is not as impassioned. 'I was in the thick of the anti-war movement in the Sixties. I'd lie awake at night thinking: how can we change things? I think the situation is terrible now, but I don't think many young people are lying awake. It seems to be harder and harder to kindle outrage.'
It is tempting, I suggest, to see his current book as a continuation of his father's legacy, a nice bit of genetic inheritance in that along the way it seeks to shed light on the histories of fundamentalism that have come to dominate the world's politics. He's not sure he would go that far, though he will concede that Breaking the Spell is his contribution to the anti-war movement.
'At the very least,' he says, 'I would certainly like people to reflect very hard on their delegation of moral authority to a few religious leaders, and to question it.'
He means, by this, religious leaders on both sides?
'President Bush certainly tries to make himself appear a religious leader and it worries me that so many people he surrounds himself with are unabashed devout people. I fear that their allegiance to their religion is much more powerful than their allegiance to their country. That scares me.'
We talk a little more about the extent to which his beliefs have been shaped by his childhood, about nature and nurture. I suggest that for someone who believes that what we think of as a self is no more than a 'trillion mindless robots dancing', he seems a very settled, inviolate kind of character, married for 40 years (with two children), and still obsessed with and excited by the areas of knowledge that interested him as a young man.
He agrees. 'Well, it's the dance that is unchanging,' he says. 'And in a certain sense, I think I haven't altered at all. I have the same set of aspirations in life, the same loves, the same weakness. As far as my work in philosophy goes, it's almost embarrassing. I look at my first book and I can see most of the ideas I've ever had are in there. I think it was partly luck. A lot of philosophers turn the crank and it all falls apart; for me I kept turning and it kept going ...'
Looking at the trajectory of his work, I suggest, from Consciousness Explained to Freedom Evolves to Breaking the Spell, he seems to have managed to do all of his thinking without being ever thrown off course by doubt or darkness. Where, I wonder, does he think that all of his profound, often thrilling, intellectual confidence comes from?
He thinks for a moment, smiles a little. 'Well, being right helps, I guess,' he says.
A life in short
Born 28 March 1942 in Boston
Education Harvard and Oxford
Career Lectured at the University of California at Irvine, then moved, in 1971, to Tufts University in Boston.
BooksBrainstorms (1978) made Dennett's reputation. Other notable works include
The Mind's I (1981),
Consciousness Explained (1991).
He says The first stable conclusion I reached ... was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse.'
They say 'He was very good at so many things: he was a sculptor, an expert downhill skier ... a tennis champion and had toyed with becoming a jazz musician,' Bo Dahlbohm, Swedish Institute for Information Technology.
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