Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (36 page)

The Evolution of Religion

Dennett invites us to imagine a world in which our experiences put all kinds of ideas—memes—into our heads. Some of those ideas will survive, and get passed along to other people. Others will get completely forgotten by us. At one time, many of these ideas dealt with supernatural forces—gods, demons, spirits, angels—that allegedly controlled the world. Some of these forces controlled the sun, others the seas, still others the rain, and so on. It’s easy to imagine how human beings first came to have ideas about beings like that. Human beings evolved, Dennett says, with “an instinct on hair trigger: the disposition to attribute
agency
—beliefs and desires and other mental states—to anything complicated
that moves” (p. 114). If something happens, our first instinct is to ask ourselves, “Who goes there?” An instinct like this makes a lot of sense. If you’re not sure whether that long thin thing on the ground is a snake or a stick, assume it’s a snake. If you assume it’s a snake, and it’s really a stick, the false alarm doesn’t do you much harm. But if you assume it’s a stick, and it’s really a snake, the results could be fatal. And so human beings naturally produce a lot of false alarms, as we are readily disposed to imagine everything is caused by some intelligent being or other.

Obviously, this is not the whole story about the origin of religion. It explains a lot about Judaism, the religion into which Cohen was born. It explains less about Buddhism, the religion Cohen practices today. (He’s an ordained monk, in fact.) But supernatural beings are incredibly important to religion. This is so true that Dennett defines a religion as a social system “
whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought
” (p. 9). For this reason, these beings must be front and center in any story told about the way human beings developed religion.

And so people came to believe all kinds of things about the world. Some of them involved supernatural beings, and some did not. But real beliefs have consequences. If you believe that the rain god will deliver rain if you sacrifice a goat to him, then the rain had better follow the sacrifice. Most of the time, we update our beliefs when the real world demonstrates their inadequacies—by giving us a dry goatless day, for example. This makes our beliefs better suited to help us cope with reality. But sometimes we respond to challenges to our beliefs by modifying them so as to render them unfalsifiable. Such beliefs become immune to evidence, impossible to confirm or to refute. This has happened with many of our beliefs, including our beliefs about supernatural beings. (If it failed to happen with a supernatural belief, the belief would get weeded out by our minds as soon as it conflicted with reality.) “The transition from folk religion to organized religion,” Dennett remarks, “is marked by a shift in beliefs from those with very clear, concrete consequences to those
with systematically elusive consequences” (p. 227). This applies to our surviving religious beliefs. It still happens today, and it works to push religious beliefs into the unfalsifiable category. Dennett gives the example of the athlete who prays to God for a win in a big game, but then invents excuses afterwards if he loses (p. 311).

As a result of all this, it has become very hard to say just what religious beliefs mean nowadays. It was pretty easy to say what Zeus was like; he was a guy with a beard who sat on a cloud and threw lightning bolts when he got mad. But what do people mean today when they claim to believe in “God?” Who knows? Because these beliefs have no observable consequences, different people can mean very different things when they say they believe in “God”—they might not even know what they mean when they say it—and it’s virtually impossible to notice the differences. But then do people who all claim to believe in “God” all believe the same thing? As Dennett writes, “If Lucy believes that Rock (Hudson) is to die for, and Desi believes that Rock (music) is to die for, they really don’t agree on anything, do they?” (p. 209). Much the same could be said about religious belief in the modern world.

But surely there’s
something
religious believers all have in common. What could it be? Dennett believes the answer is
belief in belief
. Religious believers all believe that religious belief is a good thing. People
should
be religious, believe in God, be Christians (or Jews or Muslims or whatever). (Cohen, from a certain perspective, seems to agree.) People believe that religious belief makes life better, that life without religion would somehow be worse, and that therefore it’s very important for religious belief to survive and thrive. And so they keep on promoting religious beliefs—by teaching those beliefs to their children, for instance—even if they can’t really say just what those beliefs really mean.

To return to the subject of memes, religious memes enjoy two massive advantages that help to ensure their continued reproduction and survival. One is that they’ve been rendered immune to evidence that might refute them. People can
attach almost any meaning they like to these expressions, so long as they take care (most of the time) not to attach a meaning that could be disproved by evidence. And yet despite this immunity from evidence, people continue to believe these memes are immensely important, and need to be spread. Religious people may have many different ideas about just who or what God is—they may not even be sure just what they mean when they say “God”—but they can all agree that everyone should believe in God. The religious therefore have a natural reason to spread these memes, and the memes escape any easy effort to shoot them down. All things considered, it’s good to be a religious meme.

Dennett admits that the story he tells about religious memes is tentative and needs further development. But it does account for many features of religious belief. In addition, it sheds a great deal of light on the nature of the appeal of “Hallelujah.” Alan Light’s book
The Holy or the Broken
analyzes the song in some detail. It also contains many examples of both musicians and nonmusicians explaining why they cherish the song. Dennett’s account helps a lot in trying to make sense out of the story Light tells about the song.

How the Light Gets In

Judging from the history of the song, it’s easy to see how the song is seen as expressing religious ideas and themes. But it does so in a highly ambiguous manner—allowing people to draw upon as much of the religiosity as they like, any which way they please. As I mentioned before, religion is the most important, but not the only theme in the song. This is because Cohen himself did not wish the song to be exclusively religious. Light quotes Cohen as saying, “I wanted to push the Hallelujah deep into the secular world, into the ordinary world. . . . The Hallelujah, the David’s Hallelujah, was still a religious song. So I wanted to indicate that Hallelujah can come out of things that have nothing to do with religion” (p. 25).

It’s quite understandable that Cohen would wish to allow for secular readings of “Hallelujah.” After all, people often
use religious expressions (such as “God bless you” or “God damn it”) without intending to make any religious point. Nevertheless, the religiosity of the lyrics is still there, and so the song allows for many different levels of religiosity. The different verses of the song reinforce this ambiguity. Cohen slaved over the lyrics for the song for a very long time, as he does for virtually all of his songs (unlike Bob Dylan, who supposedly can dash off a song quite quickly). And it appears that he deliberately tried to push the religiosity into the background. Here’s Alan Light on the subject:

It seems that the breakthrough in Cohen’s editing—the vision that allowed him to bring the eighty written verses down to the four that he ultimately recorded—was reaching a decision about how much to foreground the religious element of the song. “It had references to the Bible in it, although these references became more and more remote as the song went from the beginning to the end,” he once said. “Finally I understood that it was not necessary to refer to the Bible anymore. And I rewrote the song; this is the ‘secular’ ‘Hallelujah.’” (p. 18)

And yet the Biblical references are still there, from David and Bathsheba to Samson and Delilah. And that’s just Cohen’s original recorded version; Cale used different Cohen lyrics, Cohen and others made use of those changes, and now singers regularly pick and choose which lyrics they want to use. But as a result the religiosity of the song changes depending upon who is singing it. More importantly, the seven verses commonly used today do not fit together perfectly, especially in terms of religiosity. The lyrics, after all, vary from “maybe”—
maybe!—
“there’s a God above” to “remember when I moved in you” (Buckley’s “hallelujah of the orgasm”). Light explains the result:

Unlike the breathtaking precision of some of Cohen’s songs mentioned above, the lyrics to “Hallelujah” are confusing, slightly out of focus. Perspective shifts between verses. Images from different stories are crosscut, adding up to a mood more than a single coherent
narrative. The effect is that, whether you hear it on your iPod or in a wedding ceremony, it can be as “religious” a song as you want it to be—a contemporary hymn or just something with a vague aura of holiness. (pp. 217–18)

This fact—that the song is as “religious” as you want it to be—may make it confusing, but it may also help its ability to survive and propagate as a meme.

Of course, there are lots of songs out there with ambiguous lyrics, and that ambiguity does not always help them. But religiously ambiguous songs have an added advantage—belief in belief. People have many different ideas about what religion is or ought to be; some don’t really have a clue what it is. But many of them agree that religious beliefs are
important
. And so if you can write good religious lyrics—lyrics that are both well-written and yet sufficiently ambiguous—those lyrics will benefit from this belief in belief. Different people will put their own spin on those lyrics, and even people who have no idea what those lyrics say will still regard them as having special importance. This is a great way for a song to spread.

Something like this certainly seems to have taken place with “Hallelujah.” A few examples from Light should suffice to show the gamut of different religious attitudes taken towards the song. Given Cohen’s Jewish background, it’s not surprising that many Jews appreciate the song’s religious attitude; it is apparently even played every Saturday night on the radio network of the Israeli Defense Forces (p. xvii). Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan, of Jerusalem’s Nava Tehila synagogue, has often made use of the song while conducting religious services (including her daughter’s bat mitzvah). “‘Hallelujah,’” she claims, “is not a hymn of the believer—it’s a hymn of the one who is full of doubt, a hymn of the heretic.” The idea of heretics and doubters having hymns might seem a bit contradictory, but apparently that doesn’t bother Kagan: “Asked how she can reconcile this skeptical sensibility, and the language of Cohen’s song, with the more traditional aspects of the High Holidays, Kagan answered
immediately. ‘I don’t want to reconcile!’ she said. ‘The whole reason of bringing it in was that it
doesn’t
reconcile’” (
The Holy or the Broken
, pp. 182–83).

But many Christians also appreciate the religiosity of “Hallelujah.” According to Alexandra Burke, who sang the song when she won the UK television show
X Factor
in 2008, “to anyone who’s a Christian, that word ‘hallelujah’—full stop, that’s what you’re going to hear” (p. xxiv). Some Christians appreciate the song as is, perhaps for reasons similar to those expressed by Rabbi Kagan. Others, however, appreciate the religious message of “Hallelujah,” but feel the need to embellish or add to it. The Holy Trinity Church, in the Channel Islands, has sung the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” to the tune of Cohen’s song. The idea for this came from Helen Hamilton, who “presented the salvation offered by Jesus Christ as a counter to the idea that ‘it all went wrong.’ That, for Hamilton, completed Cohen’s narrative—‘we will be able to stand there, at the end of time, with nothing on our lips but hallelujah. Not through anything we have done, but through amazing grace’” (
The Holy or the Broken,
p. 184). Needless to say, this “Hallelujah” is rather different from both the “Hallelujah” of traditional Judaism and the “Hallelujah” of the heretic.

“Looking at these different usages of ‘Hallelujah,’” Light concludes, “one thing that stands out is not only how the song remains so open to interpretation and flexible in meaning and construction, but also how easily it fits into services and celebrations of multiple faiths” (pp. 184–85). The religious language in the song is compatible with an almost infinite variety of interpretations, and is even capable of appealing to people who are unsure which interpretation they ought to buy. Note that the song’s appeal would be much less limited and circumscribed if it made clear claims about the nature of God, religion, or the afterlife, claims that could be evaluated or falsified. But as Dennett points out, religion makes regular use of both the untestable nature of its claims and a generalized belief that religious claims, whatever their nature, deserve respect. “Hallelujah” benefits from this phenomenon,
and as a result its continued success as a meme is very likely. Amanda Palmer, a former member of the musical duo the Dresden Dolls, said that the lyrics of “Hallelujah” were “like the
I Ching
of songwriting” (p. xxv). Palmer is quite correct, and both the
I Ching
and Cohen’s song benefit from this fact.

Happy Memes

Dawkins introduced the idea of a “selfish gene” to help us understand the nature of evolution. But people often misunderstand him to mean that people have genes that make them selfish. Dawkins clearly denies this. The forces of evolution, he writes, may favor genes that are good at propagating themselves—genes that are “selfish”—but those same forces have given us genes enabling our altruism, compassion, and fairness. Much the same could be said about memes. They are selfish in the sense that the memes that are good at propagating themselves—at getting us to remember them and repeat them over and over again—are the memes that will survive. But those memes themselves need not make us selfish. Religious memes have a very good survival strategy, for the reasons given by Dennett. But clearly religion does not lead directly to selfish behavior. Indeed, it often promotes self-sacrificing behavior. (This is often a good thing, but not always, as the September 11 attackers demonstrated.)