Dust 2 dust

There is still more that is systematically curious about the phenomenon that people call religious belief but that might better be called religious professing. This is a feature that has long captivated me, while further persuading me that Hume's project of natural religion (evaluating arguments for and against the existence of God) is largely wasted effort. My interest in this feature grew out of two experiences, both of which involve events that took place in Lebanon more than forty years ago (though that is a sheer coincidence, so far as I know). I spent some of my earliest days in Beirut, where my father, a historian of Islam, was cultural attache (and a spy for the OSS). The rhythm of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the nearby minaret was my everyday experience, along with my teddy bear and toy trucks, and the beautifully haunting call never fails to send chills through me when I hear it today. But I left Beirut when I was only five, and didn't return until 1964, when I visited my mother and sister, who were living there then. We spent some time in the mountains outside Beirut in a village that was mostly Druze, with some Christians and Muslims thrown in. I asked some of the non-Druze residents of the town to tell me about the Druze religion, and this is what they said:

Oh, the Druze are a very sad lot. The first principle of the Druze religion is to lie to outsiders about their beliefs—never tell the truth to an infidel! So you shouldn't take anything a Druze tells you as authoritative. Some of us think, in fact, that the Druze used to have a holy book, their own scripture, but they lost it, and they are so embarrassed by this that they make up all manner of solemn nonsense to keep this from coming out. You will notice that the women don't participate at all in the Druze ceremonies; that's because they couldn't keep such a secret!

I heard this tale from several people who claimed to know, and I also heard it denied by a few Druze, of course. But if it was true, this would create a dilemma for any anthropologist: the usual method of questioning informants would be a hopeless wild-goose chase, and if he made the ultimate sacrifice and converted to Druze himself so as to gain entrance to the inner sanctum, he would have to admit that we on the outside shouldn't believe his scholarly treatise, What the Druze Really Believe, since it was written by a devout Druze (and everybody knows that the Druze lie). As a young philosopher, I was fascinated by this real-life version of the liar paradox (Epimenides the Cretan says that all Cretans are liars; does he speak the truth?), and also by the unmistakable echoes of another famous example in philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein's beetle in the box. In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein says:

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle." No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. —Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. —But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? —If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the languagegame at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. —No, one can "divide through" by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. [Section 293]

Much has been written on Wittgenstein's beetle box, but I don't know if anybody has ever proposed an application to religious belief. In any case, it seems fantastic at first that the Druze might be an actual example of the phenomenon. Am I just inflating a mean-spirited calumny of the Druze by their neighbors to make a dubious philosophical point? Perhaps, but consider what Scott Atran has to say about his attempts, as an anthropologist, to write about the beliefs of the Druze:

As a graduate student almost three decades ago, I spent some years with the Druze people of the Middle East. I wanted to learn about their religious beliefs, which appeared to weave together ideas from all the great monotheistic faiths in intriguing ways. Learning about Druze religion is a gradual process in the Socratic tradition, involving interpretation of parables in question-and-answer format. Although, as a non-Druze, I could never be formally initiated into the religion, the elders seemed to delight in my trying to understand the world as they conceived it. But every time I reached some level of awareness about a problem, Druze elders reminded me that anything said or learned beyond that point could not be discussed with uninitiated persons, including other Druze. I never did write on Druze religion and wound up with a thesis on the cognitive bases of science. [2002, p. ix]

It seems that we still don't know what the Druze really believe. We may begin to wonder if they themselves know. And we may also begin to wonder if it matters, which brings me to my second lesson from Lebanon.

In 1951, Kim Philby, a senior officer in the British intelligence service (SIS), fell under suspicion of being a double agent, a highly placed traitor working for the Soviet KGB. A secret tribunal was held by SIS, but Philby was found not guilty on the evidence presented. Although SIS had been unable to convict him, they quite reasonably refused to reinstate him to his most sensitive position, and he resigned, and moved to Lebanon, to work as a journalist. In 1963, a Soviet defector to London confirmed Philby's double-agent role, and when the SIS went to Beirut to confront him, he fled to Moscow, where he spent the remainder of his life, working for the KGB.

Or did he? When Philby first showed up in Moscow, he was (apparently) suspected by the KGB of being a British plant—a triple agent, if you like. Was he, in fact? For years a story circulated in intelligence circles to this effect. The idea was that when SIS "exonerated" Philby in 1951, they found a brilliant way of dealing with their delicate problem of trust:

Congratulations, Kim, old chap! We always thought you were loyal to our cause. And for your next assignment, we would like you to pretend to resign from SIS—bitter over our failure to reinstate you fully, don't you see—and move to Beirut and take up a position as a journalist in exile. In due course we intend to give you reason to "flee" to Moscow, where you will eventually be appreciated by your comrades because you can spill a lot of relatively innocuous insider information you already know, and we'll provide you with carefully controlled further gifts of intelligence—and disinformation—that the Russians will be glad to accept, even when they have their doubts. Once you're in their good graces, we'd like you to start telling us everything you can about what they're up to, what questions they ask you, and so forth.

Once SIS had given Philby this new assignment, their worries were over. It just didn't matter whether he was truly a British patriot pretending to be a disgruntled agent, or truly a loyal Soviet agent pretending to be a loyal British agent (pretending to be a disgruntled agent…). He would behave in exactly the same ways in either case; his activities would be interpretable and predictable from either of two mirror-image intentional-stance profiles. In one, he deeply believes that the British cause is worth risking his life for, and in the other, he deeply believes that he has a golden opportunity to be a hero of the Soviet Union by pretending that he deeply believes that the British cause is worth risking his life for, and so on. The Soviets, meanwhile, would no doubt draw the same inference and not bother trying to figure out if Philby was really a double agent or a triple agent or a quadruple agent. Philby, according to this story, had been deftly turned into a sort of human telephone, a mere conduit of information that both sides could exploit for whatever purposes they could dream up, relying on him to be a high-fidelity transmitter of whatever information they gave him, without worrying about where his ultimate loyalties lay.

In 1980, when Philby's standing with his overseers in Moscow was improving (apparently), I was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford, and another Visiting Fellow at the time happened to be Sir Maurice Oldfield, the retired head of MI6, the agency responsible for counterespionage outside Great Britain, and one of the spymasters responsible for Philby's trajectory. (Sir Maurice was the model for Ian Fleming's "M" in the James Bond novels.) One night, after dinner, I asked him whether this story I had heard was true, and he replied quite testily that it was a lot of rubbish. He wished people would just let poor Philby live out his days in Moscow in peace and quiet. I replied that I was pleased to get his answer, but we both had to recognize that it was also what he would have told me had the story been true! Sir Maurice glowered and said nothing.

These two stories illustrate in extreme form the fundamental problem faced by anyone intent on studying religious beliefs. It has been noted by many commentators that typical, canonical religious beliefs cannot be tested for truth. As I suggested earlier, this is as good as a defining characteristic of religious creeds. They have to be "taken on faith" and are not subject to (scientific, historical) confirmation. But, more than that, for this reason and others, religious-belief expressions cannot really be taken at face value. The anthropologists Craig Palmer and Lyle Steadman (2004, p. 141) quote the lament of their distinguished predecessor the anthropologist Rodney Needham, who was frustrated in his work with the Penan, in interior Borneo:

I realized that I could not confidently describe their attitude to God, whether this was belief or anything else…. In fact, as I had glumly to conclude, I just did not know what was their psychic attitude toward the personage in whom I had assumed they believed. … Clearly, it was one thing to report the received ideas to which a people subscribed, but it was quite another matter to say what was their inner state (belief for instance) when they expressed or entertained such ideas. If, however, an ethnographer said that people believed something when he did not actually know what was going on inside them, then surely his account of them must, it occurred to me, be very defective in quite fundamental ways. [Needham, 1972, pp. 1-2]

Palmer and Steadman take this recognition by Needham to signal the need for recasting anthropological theories as accounts of religious behavior, not religious belief: "While religious beliefs are not identifiable, religious behavior is, and this aspect of the human experience can be comprehended. What is needed is an explanation of this observable religious behavior that is restricted to what can be observed" [p. 141]. They go on to say that Needham is virtually alone in realizing the profound implications of this fact about the inscrutability of religious avowal, but they themselves overlook the even more profound implication of it: the natives are in the same boat as Needham! They are just as unable to get into the inner minds of their kin and neighbors as Needham is.