Robert Wright (born January 15, 1957) is an American journalist and author who writes about science, history, politics, and religion. He has written five books: ''Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information'' (1988), ''
The Moral Animal
''The Moral Animal'' is a 1994 book by journalist Robert Wright, in which the author explores many aspects of everyday life through evolutionary biology.
Summary
Wright explores many aspects of everyday life through evolutionary biology. He p ...
'' (1994), ''
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny'' (1999), ''
The Evolution of God'' (2009), and ''
Why Buddhism is True'' (2017). As of 2019, Wright is a Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at
Union Theological Seminary, New York.
He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of
Bloggingheads.tv and the founder and editor-in-chief of Meaningoflife.tv.
Early life and education
Wright was born in Lawton, Oklahoma to a
Southern Baptist
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is a Christian denomination based in the United States. It is the world's largest Baptists, Baptist denomination, and the Protestantism in the United States, largest Protestantism, Protestant and Christia ...
family and raised in (among other places)
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...
. A self-described "
Army brat",
Wright attended
Texas Christian University
Texas Christian University (TCU) is a private research university in Fort Worth, Texas. It was established in 1873 by brothers Addison and Randolph Clark as the Add-Ran Male & Female College. It is affiliated with the Christian Church (Discipl ...
for a year in the late 1970s, before transferring to Princeton University to study
sociobiology, which was a precursor to
evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evo ...
.
His professors at college included author
John McPhee
John Angus McPhee (born March 8, 1931) is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the four ...
, whose style influenced Wright's first book, ''Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information''.
Career
Journalism
Wright served as a Senior Editor at ''
The Sciences'' and ''
The New Republic
''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hu ...
'',
and as an editor at ''
The Wilson Quarterly''.
He has been a contributing editor at ''The New Republic'' (where he also co-authored the "TRB" column),
''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and event (philosophy), events that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various me ...
'',
and ''
Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...
'',
and has written for ''The Atlantic Monthly'',
''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'',
and ''
The New York Times Magazine
''The New York Times Magazine'' is an American Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times''. It features articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors. ...
''. He contributes frequently to ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', including a stint as guest columnist for the month of April, 2007 and as a contributor to The Opinionator,
a web-only opinion page in 2010. Wright became a senior editor of ''
The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science.
It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...
'' on January 1, 2012.
As of February, 2015, the magazine's author page describes him as "a former senior editor at ''The Atlantic''."
University teaching and research
In early 2000, Wright began teaching at Princeton University and the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...
, teaching a graduate seminar called "Religion and Human Nature" and an undergraduate course called "The Evolution of Religion." At Princeton, Wright was a ''Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow''
and began co-teaching a graduate seminar with
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular ...
on the biological basis of moral intuition.
In 2014, Wright taught a six-week
Coursera MOOC
A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, m ...
on "Buddhism and Modern Psychology". As of 2019, Wright is a Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at
Union Theological Seminary, New York.
Also as of 2019, Wright is a Senior Fellow at the
think tank
A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-govern ...
New America.
''Meaningoflife.tv''
In 2002, Wright ventured into video-on-Internet with his ''MeaningofLife.tv'' website, developed by Greg Dingle,
in which he interviews a range of thinkers on their ideas about science, philosophy,
meditation
Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm ...
, spirituality, and other topics. ''Meaningoflife.tv'' is sponsored by
''Slate'' magazine, and made possible through funding by the
Templeton Foundation.
Other hosts include
John Horgan
John Joseph Horgan (born August 7, 1959) is a Canadian politician who served as the 36th premier of British Columbia from 2017 to 2022, and also as the leader of the British Columbia New Democratic Party from 2014 to 2022. Horgan has been the ...
, Daniel Kaufman, Nikita Petrov, and Aryeh Cohen-Wade.
''Bloggingheads.tv''
On November 1, 2005, Wright, blogger
Mickey Kaus, and Greg Dingle launched Bloggingheads.tv,
a current-events
diavlog. Bloggingheads diavlogs are conducted via webcam, and can be viewed online or downloaded either as
WMV
Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...
or
MP4 video files or as
MP3 sound files. New diavlogs are posted approximately 5-10 times a week and are archived. While many diavlogs feature Wright, other hosts at Bloggingheads.tv include
Glenn Loury,
John McWhorter,
Bill Scher
Bill Scher (born September 26, 1972) is an American pundit and liberal political analyst. He is the Politics Editor for the Washington Monthly. He also is a Contributing Editor to ''POLITICO'' Magazine, and a contributor to RealClearPolitics. He ...
,
Matt Lewis, Kat Rosenfield, Phoebe Maltz-Bovy, and Aryeh Cohen-Wade.
Views on religion
Wright has written extensively on the topic of
religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...
, particularly in ''The Evolution of God.'' In 2009, When asked by
Bill Moyers if God is a figment of the human imagination, Wright responded:
On ''
The Colbert Report
''The Colbert Report'' ( ) is an American late-night talk and news satire television program hosted by Stephen Colbert that aired four days a week on Comedy Central from October 17, 2005, to December 18, 2014, for 1,447 episodes. The show fo ...
'', Wright said he was "not an atheist" but did not believe in any of the three Abrahamic religions.
He opposes
creationism
Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation. Gunn 2004, p. 9, "The ''Concise Oxford Dictionary'' says that creationism is 't ...
, including
intelligent design
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Numbers 2006, p. 373; " Dcaptured headlines for its bold attempt to ...
. Wright has a strictly materialist conception of
natural selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...
; however, he does not deny the possibility of some larger purpose unfolding, that natural selection could itself be the product of design,
in the context of
teleology
Teleology (from and )Partridge, Eric. 1977''Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English'' London: Routledge, p. 4187. or finalityDubray, Charles. 2020 912Teleology" In ''The Catholic Encyclopedia'' 14. New York: Robert Appleton ...
.
Wright describes what he calls the "changing moods of God", arguing that religion is adaptable and based on the political, economic and social circumstances of the culture, rather than strictly scriptural interpretation.
Wright has also been critical of organized atheism and describes himself more specifically as a
secular humanist.
Wright makes a distinction between religion being wrong and bad and is hesitant to agree that its bad effects greatly outweigh its good effects. He sees organized atheism as attempting to actively convert people in the same way as many religions do. Wright views it as being counterproductive to think of religion as being the root cause of today's problems.
In ''
Why Buddhism is True'', Wright advocates a secular, Westernized form of
Buddhism
Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...
focusing on the practice of
mindfulness
Mindfulness is the practice of purposely bringing one's attention to the present-moment experience without evaluation, a skill one develops through meditation or other training. Mindfulness derives from ''sati'', a significant element of Hind ...
meditation
Meditation is a practice in which an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm ...
and stripped of the element of
rebirth (Buddhism)
Rebirth in Buddhism refers to the teaching that the actions of a sentient being lead to a new existence after death, in an endless cycle called '' saṃsāra''. This cycle is considered to be '' dukkha'', unsatisfactory and painful. The cycle st ...
.
He believes Buddhism's diagnosis of the causes of human suffering is vindicated by
evolutionary biology
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life ...
and
evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evo ...
.
He further argues that the modern psychological idea of the
modularity of mind Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions. However, different definitions of "module" have b ...
resonates with the Buddhist teaching of no-self (''
anatman'').
Personal life
Wright lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his wife Lisa and their two daughters.
They have two dogs named Frazier
and Milo,
who are featured in a few Bloggingheads.tv episodes.
Books
* 1989 ''Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information''.
* 1994 ''
The Moral Animal
''The Moral Animal'' is a 1994 book by journalist Robert Wright, in which the author explores many aspects of everyday life through evolutionary biology.
Summary
Wright explores many aspects of everyday life through evolutionary biology. He p ...
: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology''.
* 1999 ''
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny''.
* 2009 ''
The Evolution of God''.
Little, Brown and Company
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily ...
.
* 2017 ''
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment''.
Awards and recognition
*''The Evolution of God'' was one of three finalists for the 2010
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are awarded annually for the "Letters, Drama, and Music" category. The award is given to a nonfiction book written by an American author and published duri ...
.
* ''
The New York Times Book Review
''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...
'' chose Wright's ''The Moral Animal'' as one of the 10 best books of 1994;
it was a national bestseller and has been published in 12 languages.
* ''Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny'' was a ''The New York Times Book Review'' Notable Book in the year 2000 and has been published in nine languages. ''
Fortune
Fortune may refer to:
General
* Fortuna or Fortune, the Roman goddess of luck
* Luck
* Wealth
* Fortune, a prediction made in fortune-telling
* Fortune, in a fortune cookie
Arts and entertainment Film and television
* ''The Fortune'' (1931 film) ...
'' magazine included ''Nonzero'' on a list of "the 75 smartest
usiness-relatedbooks of all time."
* Wright's first book, ''Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information,'' was published in 1988 and was nominated for a
National Book Critics Circle Award.
* Wright's column "The Information Age," written for ''
The Sciences'' magazine, won the
National Magazine Award
The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Or ...
for Essay and Criticism.
References
External links
*
*
*
EvolutionofGod.net- A website for Wright's book ''The Evolution of God''
Nonzero.org- A website for Wright's book ''Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny''
Bloggingheads.tvMeaningofLife.tvWright's Mindful Resistance newsletterLiterary Nonfiction Piece on Wright
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wright, Robert
1957 births
Living people
American male journalists
American religious writers
American science writers
Critics of atheism
Critics of creationism
Douglas MacArthur High School (San Antonio) alumni
Materialists
Consequentialists
Utilitarians
People from Lawton, Oklahoma
People from Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton University alumni
Radical centrist writers
Secular humanists
Science journalists
Texas Christian University alumni
Video bloggers
Writers from Oklahoma
New America (organization)
American male bloggers
American bloggers