Ariel Glucklich sent the following letter in response to Bruce Lawrence’s review of his latest book. In it, Prof. Lawrence wrote that Dying for Heaven is a “bizarrely casual, yet deeply serious, treatise,” adding that, “the thesis of the book itself would be a laughing matter were the author not intent on altering the way that the defense establishment—and not just academics or scholars of religion—think about ‘holy pleasure.’”
Prof. Glucklich writes:
Dying for Heaven is a tightly argued deductive theory of religion that must be read from beginning to end, without skipping around, in order to be understood and appreciated. Its basic premise is that behavioral adaptation and hedonic psychology can help us understand religious motivation. Hedonic psychology, needless to say, has nothing to do with Timothy Leary or Harvard University. It has a great deal to do with Michel Cabanac, Kent Berridge, Daniel Kahnemann and many others.
The argument is that pleasure should be understood as an adaptive signal and instead of being divided into domains such as sensory, emotional, intellectual and so forth, the adaptive criteria are novelty, mastery-achievement and exploratory. The book proceeds to examine what religions do with pleasure in a variety of contexts and concludes, to give a simplified summary, that religions tend to act as methods of transforming novelty pleasures into mastery pleasures. They do this, among other methods, by teaching self-restraint and insisting on morality as a means of achieving happiness.
In other words, religions have been critical in social and cultural evolution because they transform individual interests into group-oriented enjoyments. The book then builds on this insight to demonstrate that the highest forms of religious enjoyment—mystical raptures—are group oriented and that the mystical language of love is predicated on these same dynamics. Professor Lawrence did not follow the argument; he gives no evidence that there is even an argument. Instead he derisively drops terms such as Prozac, which recurs frequently in Dying for Heaven, in order to caricature the book as a silly reductionism.
Here is where Prozac fits in: I argue that pleasure is a vertical phenomenon, one that cannot be articulated properly. It is also the effect of cause, which takes place beneath the level of awareness (at the brain). As a result pleasure is often associated with attribution error, which I call the “Prozac effect.” I also call it the “espresso effect.” The reference is to false attribution of brain states to objects in consciousness, which are falsely associated with the pleasure. This is a technical discussion that has to be carefully read and understood. Only then can the last part of the book, on martyrs, be properly situated in context.
I believe that most readers of Religion Dispatches understand that books have to be taken seriously enough to read from start to finish. If only Bruce Lawrence shared this quaint notion your readers would be able to judge Dying for Heaven on its proper merits.
Bruce Lawrence responds:
I never review a book without reading it. This was a tough read, and I read many parts more than once. Let the reader decide between my critiques and the author’s protests in evaluating this book—both its chemical assault on religion and its specious singling out of Muslims, especially Sufi masters, as humorless provocateurs of mindless terror.
