Some More Spells to Break

By BJ Bjornson

I am currently in the process of reading Daniel Dennett�s Breaking the Spell, which is basically a tome on how we should treat religion as a natural phenomenon to be studied and analyzed. At the point I�ve gotten to, Dennett is providing a counter to the argument that only the faithful can understand religion well enough to study their own faiths with the following passage:

We would never let business tycoons get away with saying that since we weren�t plutocrats ourselves we couldn�t hope to understand the world of high finance and were hence disqualified from investigating their deals. Generals can�t escape civilian oversight by claiming that only those in uniform can appreciate what they are doing

It is passages like that that make me go back to the copyright page to see just when the book was published (2006 as it happens). On the first point, while I certainly agree that we shouldn�t let business tycoons get away with saying that only they are capable of understanding high finance, that is pretty clearly become the prevailing wisdom of far too many these days. After all, it is exactly that argument that was used to protect the jobs of those most responsible for the massive financial mess we find ourselves in, and to defend their continued outrageous bonuses on the backs of the taxpayers; that they and only they understood how just badly they had screwed the pooch to possibly be able to fix it, and to remove them and actually force them to pay for their horrid screw-ups would cause even more damage for us poor uninitiated rubes.

The ease of which this argument has been swallowed in too many quarters gives a whole new meaning to the term, �Worshipping the Almighty Dollar�.

As to the second, I would point you to this post by Tom Levenson over at Balloon Juice referring to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Milburn�s article where he argues that military officers are not only obligated but justified in refusing legal orders from their supposed civilian masters. (I�d also suggest reading Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling�s piece in the Small Wars Journal answering Milburn�s article. Yeah, it�s a lot of reading, but it�s good stuff, really.)

Levenson�s point, and one that has been made here on occasion as well, is that the kind of warrior worship that has become more and more commonplace is helping to set up a situation where the authority of the civilian government can become increasingly marginalized.

I don�t actually think that the US is in any proximate danger of a military coup.  But as Yingling recognizes, Milburn�s article � published, remember, by a journal from one of the military�s own graduate schools�is just one of many examples of the pressure that military and its fans put on any civilian leadership.  This is yet another warning shot aimed at driving upstarts like President Obama and his administration out of the rooms where real men make decisions.

Dennett says in his book that due to the outsized importance of the role played by religion in the world today, we�d be fools not to subject it to the kind of scrutiny and study other important topics are subjected to. That�s what spell he is looking to break. And the specific point that letting only the insiders of such a phenomenon be the only ones entitled to examine it is also clearly a mistake, since their own biases will ensure anything they find is rather suspect. From the above, it appears we need to remember and remind people of that in other areas as well.