The Bellman's maxim  - "What I say three times is true."

David Bentley Hart reviews Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell":

I confess that I have never been an admirer of Dennett's work. I have thought all his large books—especially one entitled Consciousness Explained—poorly reasoned and infuriatingly inadequate in their approaches to the questions they address. Too often he shows a preference for the cumulative argument over the cogent and for repetition over demonstration. The Bellman's maxim, “What I tell you three times is true,” is not alien to Dennett's method. He seems to work on the supposition that an assertion made with sufficient force and frequency is soon transformed, by some subtle alchemy, into a settled principle. And there are rather too many instances when Dennett seems either clumsily to miss or willfully to ignore pertinent objections to his views and so races past them with a perfunctory wave in what he takes to be their general direction—though usually in another direction altogether. Consider, for example, this dialectical gem, plucked from his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea: “Perhaps the most misguided criticism of gene centrism is the frequently heard claim that genes simply cannot have interests. This . . . is flatly mistaken. . . . If a body politic, or General Motors, can have interests, so can genes.” At moments like this, one feels that something has been overlooked.


Generally speaking, Dennett's method in all his books is too often reminiscent of the forensic technique employed by the Snark, in the Barrister's dream, to defend a pig charged with abandoning its sty: The Snark admits the desertion but then immediately claims this as proof of the pig's alibi (for the creature was obviously absent from the scene of the crime at the time of its commission). And past experience perhaps caused me to approach his most recent book with rather low expectations. Even so, I was entirely unprepared for how bad an argument his latest book advances—so bad, in fact, that the truly fascinating question it raises is how so many otherwise intelligent persons could have mistaken it for a coherent or serious philosophical proposition.

Having listened to debates involving the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, I concur with Hart's assessment - Dennet is by far the least intellectually rigorous among that number, and that is quite an achievement among a group for whom intellectual rigor is not particularly noticeable.

Hart continues:

There are also the embarrassing moments of self-delusion, as when Dennett, the merry “Darwinian fundamentalist,” claims that atheists—unlike persons of faith—welcome the ceaseless objective examination of their convictions, or that philosophers are as a rule open to all ideas (which accords with no sane person's experience of either class of individuals). And then there is his silly tendency to feign mental decrepitude when it serves his purposes, as when he pretends that the concept of God possesses too many variations for him to keep track of, or as when he acts scandalized by the revelation that academic theology sometimes lapses into a technical jargon full of obscure Greek terms like apophatic and ontic. And there are the historical errors, such as his ludicrous assertion that the early Christians regarded apostasy as a capital offense.


The prose is rebarbative, moreover, and the book is unpleasantly shapeless: It labors to begin and then tediously meanders to an inconclusive conclusion. There is, as well, the utter tone-deafness evident in Dennett's attempts to describe how persons of faith speak or think, or what they have been taught, or how they react to challenges to their convictions. He even invents an antagonist for himself whom he christens Professor Faith, a sort of ventriloquist's doll that he compels to utter the sort of insipid bromides he imagines typical of the believer's native idiom.

In fact, Dennett expends a surprising amount of energy debating, cajoling, insulting, quoting, and taking umbrage at nonexistent persons. In the book's insufferably prolonged overture, he repeatedly tells his imaginary religious readers—in a tenderly hectoring tone, as if talking to small children or idiots—that they will probably not read his book to the end, that they may well think it immoral even to consider doing so, and that they are not courageous enough to entertain the doubts it will induce in them. Actually, there is nothing in the book that could possibly shake anyone's faith, and the only thing likely to dissuade religious readers from finishing it is its author's interminable proleptic effort to overcome their reluctance. But Dennett is convinced he is dealing with intransigent oafs, and his frustration at their inexplicably unbroken silence occasionally erupts into fury. “I for one am not in awe of your faith,” he fulminates at one juncture. “I am appalled by your arrogance, by your unreasonable certainty that you have all the answers.” And this demented apostrophe occurs on the fifty-first page of the book, at which point Dennett still has not commenced his argument in earnest.

It's all so time-wasting and uninformative.  Hart observes:

Dennett, needless to say, has no curiosity regarding any actual faith or its intellectual tradition. His few references to Christian history make it clear that his historical consciousness is little more than a compilation of threadbare eighteenth-and nineteenth-century caricatures. In the six spacious pages he devotes to the question of whether there is any reason to believe in God (or, really, devotes mostly to quoting himself at length on why the question is not worth considering), he does not address any of the reasons for which persons actually do believe but merely recites a few of the arguments that freshmen are given in introductory courses on the philosophy of religion. Even then, his mental sloth is so enormous that he raises only those counterarguments that all competent scholars of philosophical history know to be the ones that do not work.

On the other hand, reading the book is useful if only for the reason that early Twentieth Century Germans should have been reading fringe Volkisch literature - as a foreshadowing of what would happen if such people obtained real power:

In the end, though, I am uncertain that Dennett actually believes much of what he is saying. In all likelihood, he harbors no more than a sort of wistful “belief in belief” with regard to it. I doubt it matters much to him whether future research on religious memes is a concrete possibility or not. I doubt even that he is really interested in the questions he raises, except insofar as they might induce salubrious doubts in his readers by appearing more probative than they are. Breaking the Spell is a thoroughly tendentious book and in a rather vicious way, for Dennett's ultimate aim is to propose certain social policies of a distinctly dictatorial sort. For instance, he sympathetically cites the view of Richard Dawkins and others that religious indoctrination of children should be considered a form of child abuse, and he suggests that we might need to consider what measures our society should take to protect children from their parents' superstitions. He also pompously proclaims that we cannot as a society tolerate certain Catholic or Mormon teachings.

This, no doubt, partially explains his devotion to the concept of memes, for it gives him license to indulge a small taste for the totalitarian without any undue stress on his conscience. If, after all, the only beneficiaries of memes are memes themselves, and if religious memes are an especially toxic strain, then surely it is nothing but prudence and benevolence to seek the extermination of these parasites, ideally by preventive measures. And it hardly matters that the argument by which Dennett reaches his conclusions is patently absurd. He can assume the credulity of a compliant journalistic class and the tacit collaboration of his ideological allies, and he is convinced of the stupidity of his religious readers. His book's digressions and longueurs, its coarse jargon and fraudulent tone of authority, and its parodies of logic and science are all part of an immense and ponderous obfuscation, behind which is concealed a thoroughly authoritarian agenda. And behind that is concealed only ignorance and apprehension.

Well, why not?  The trope of being ruled by "philosopher kings" is a standard of fascist dreams.



This trope - or "meme" - of atheist fascism is a constant of the Four Horsemen.  In some of his more recent debates - those against Schmuel Boteach, for example - Hitchens is quite explicit in arguing that religious views should be forcibly ousted out of the public view so that he - and his fellow fascist atheists - won't be forced to overhear anything hinting of religion.


These people are quite simply nuts, and in no practical sense are they "about" freedom of thought or conscience, except in the Rousseian totalitarian sense of forcing people to be "free."