Paul Morton speaks with one of America's most creative public intellectuals.
An Interview with Robert Wright
By Paul Morton
In 1994, Robert Wright published The Moral Animal, an often misunderstood book that became, for better more than worse, one of the great conversation pieces of the ’90s. Wright described the history of mankind’s moral development, in matters sexual and platonic, as evolutionary adaptations from its infancy in the hunter-gatherer age. Some of our mores were necessary for survival. Some had proved vestigial. “Mr. Wright's main lesson comes from the very fact that morality is an adaptation designed to maximize genetic self-interest, a function that is entirely hidden from our conscious experience,” Steven Pinker wrote in his review in the New York Times. Ian McEwan consulted the book for his novel Enduring Love. Wright wrote a less-noticed book Nonzero (2000), which attempted to explain human progress, optimistically, as a nonzero-sum game. His new book The Evolution of God, in which Wright, whose own religious beliefs are vague, treks the history of the three Abrahamic faiths to understand how they were used to aid human progress. His style is wry but respectful of religious faith, for all its very human failings. The book, on at least one level, is a conscious response to the new angry atheists, like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher.
I met Wright on June 16 at the café of the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. right before he gave a short talk to a packed audience. He was quickly approached by a fan, a bearded Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, who recognized him from his Web site Bloggingheads. Wright enjoys a species of celebrity.
You don’t have much of your biography in the book, except for a little piece on the first page. You grew up in a Southern Baptist home in Texas. And you talk about your coming-to-the-altar moment when you were nine and your baptism a few weeks later. I want to know if there was an ecstatic feeling you had in that moment that you’ve missed in your later years.
I wouldn’t call it ecstatic. It was a strong sense that it was the right thing to do and that the prompting was external. It just seemed right...walking to the front of the church as they were issuing the altar call. Do you mean do I miss faith?
Yes. Or that brand of faith.
Well, you know, being sure that there was an omnipotent god looking out for you would be a nice feeling. (small chuckle) But, honestly, it’s been so long since I had it I don’t remember if by itself it made me very happy or not. I never had [an] ecstatic religious experience or anything or [a] rapturous union with the divine. I think there was largely this sense of what people call the conscience...coming from beyond my confines. It was a very strong sense of an externally emanating right and wrong. In a funny way, I think I still have that. I think I still have a feeling of being judged even though I no longer have any special confidence that there’s a god actually doing the judging. It’s a feeling that’s beyond the reach of reason, apparently, in my case.
Do you mean that you have a sense that there is an aura or a universe around you that is judging you?
No, no. I have the sense that some father figure is doing it. The sense that I had back when I believed in a Christian god never left me. But it’s just my version of the conscience. And that’s the way I think of it. But in my conversations with people I get the sense that some people feel it, but their conscience just feels different than mine feels. If that makes sense.
Do you feel you had a different sense of God as you were growing up than other children or your fellow parishioners?
I don’t think so. I don’t really know what they were thinking. But I don’t think so. And I should say that although it’s true that I grew up mostly in Texas, my father was in the army. There were a variety of religions [I was exposed to.] We went from church to church.
I think I was more neurotically conscientious than the average kid, but that would probably have been true regardless of religion.
I saw you on Bloggingheads recently where you said that your conception of God or god or “god” was nearly Buddhist. And I had that sense in this book, even though you don’t mention Buddhism in it except as an aside. I felt suggestions of the version of Buddhism that doesn’t involve a deity. You have a sense of a force in a universe that pushes existence along.
In the book, I focus on Philo. He’s mystical - he’s not Buddhist - he’s mystical and says some kind of Buddhist things. The main thing about Buddhism that impresses me is, I think, the accuracy of [its] diagnosis of the human problem. And its awareness of how pervasively humans put value judgments on things in a way that’s not really warranted.
It’s not the theology of Buddhism that attracts me to it. And there is no single theology of Buddhism. Some Buddhists are essentially atheistic. Most [in Asia] are not. Most of the things Americans think about Buddhism in Asia – that Buddhists meditate and don’t believe in god – are for most Buddhists in Asia, wrong. Most of them...are theistic and don’t meditate. The monks meditate.
My theology is about as vague as what you’re suggesting. I genuinely don’t know. I feel more confident that there is, in some sense, a larger purpose working through nature than I do the source of that purpose.
You don’t define an idealized religionist in your book. But I thought that if you were to do so you would probably come up with the current Dalai Lama. He’s a religious leader with profound respect for other religions. In interviews, when he’s asked why Buddhism is growing so popular in the West, he says that it is because no one in the West realizes what a great religion they have in Christianity, meaning that everything they are looking for in Buddhism actually exists in Christianity. He’s very comfortable with technology and science. And people who have met him have come away feeling that they just had a great experience in a way they don’t always feel with the current pope. Someone explained to me that the reason for that is that when you meet the Dalai Lama he has a way of making absolutely everything all about you. It’s not in a fake politician’s way, a Clintonian way. It’s profound. He has so denied the self that when he’s talking to you, everything is about you.
Well, I do think that the central moral distortion that we’re all subject to is the belief, both conscious and unconscious, that we’re special. And that our welfare is more important than the welfare of others, by and large. And anybody who to a considerable extent overcomes that bias, yeah, should be made the world’s role model. I don’t know enough about the Dalai Lama to know how nearly he approaches that ideal. But it’s ultimately about the behavior. So if he seems like he approaches it then for practical purposes he approaches it.
I did this one-week meditation retreat which I don’t talk about in the book.
Where did you do it?
Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. It’s in the Vipassana tradition. By the end of the retreat I was much closer to being the way the Dalai Lama seems, but alas, it evaporated shortly thereafter. (chuckles) I, to some extent, have sustained a practice but it’s very hard. But, by the end of the retreat there had been a really considerable erosion of the walls between myself and others and the rest of nature. And I was way less inclined to make judgments about people based on very little evidence, which is something I’m prone to. And I was just a better person. I called my wife on the phone and she right away was very pleased with the new Bob. It was almost like the sound of my voice was very different. But when you look at the regime it took to achieve that: A week of five-and-a-half hours of sitting meditation a day [and] five-and-a-half hours of walking meditation [a day]. No speech. No writing. No communication with the outside world. That gives you some idea of how stubborn the forces of human nature are that you’re fighting against. If that’s what it takes to even stay in that zone for a few days. That’s my deal.
The salvation of the world doesn’t require everyone becoming like the Dalai Lama. But it probably requires us to do something that he’s very good at, which is putting ourselves in the shoes of other people and appreciating what they’re like.
You call the book The Evolution of God which suggests, and which I think you more or less write, that religion becomes more sophisticated or more complex as the centuries unfold. Yahweh was not a universal god. He was a tribal, national god. And he remains a national god in the time of the historical Jesus. And he doesn’t become a universal god until Paul or the later gospels. I remember a tiff between you and Mickey Kaus on Bloggingheads about Ann Coulter’s line that Jews needed to be perfected into Christians. You could read that as a very crude description of what you lay out over 200 pages in your book. Where do you draw the line between your book and Ann Coulter?
Well, first of all, I’d say that I do argue that after the [Babylonian] exile, the Jewish god becomes more broadly compassionate and arguably universal at least so far as the bounds of the Persian Empire go. So his compassion does start transcending national bounds. And, even in that sense maybe, [transcends] bounds of religion. I guess I’d say that. Second, I’d say the Christian God isn’t truly universal so long as non-believers are condemned to hell. That’s not a truly universal god. That’s a god [who] can cross ethnic and national bounds, which is good. But it’s not a god whose salvation reaches everything. And you can say the same thing about Islam. I made both of these points [in my book]. [A.] You do see a burst of moral progress before Christianity shows up. B. Christianity is not truly universal. I maybe should have underscored that more.
As for evolution: On the one hand, the word [“evolution”] doesn’t denote progress. All it has to mean is a change over time, especially through the selective retention of traits that accumulate. It’s true that it has connotations of progress for many people. And it’s true that there has been, I think on balance, net moral progress in religion...[T]wenty thousand years ago the norm seems to have been to not extend consideration to people much beyond the village...All three religions have made great strides beyond that and shown their capacity to adapt to a multi-national environment by extending God’s compassion across national bounds. I’d say there’s been net moral progress, but it’s far from some sort of smooth inexorable progress and there’s backsliding.
The other thing is there is no monolithic version of God in any of these religions, because there is so much diversity of belief. In every religion there is a universally compassionate god that at least someone believes in. There are people who are Christians who believe that nobody goes to hell. And in every religion there are people who have a much narrower conception of God’s love. So it’s hard to give a kind of “State of the Deity” report at any given time. But in broad lines, I think there has been net moral progress and the main thing is that all three religions have shown the capacity to make progress under the right circumstances.
So you’re saying that there is a progress in each religion but that Christianity isn’t necessarily an improvement over Judaism?
It’s hard to say. I think I would say that. Certainly, I don’t think you can make the case that in the contemporary world Christianity is superior to Judaism. Christianity is trans-national. So is Judaism. Nationality, was – 2,500 years ago or 2,700 years ago - the boundary of the Jewish God’s, the Israelite’s God’s, the Hebrew God’s love. That’s not the case anymore. I don’t know enough about the Jewish conception of salvation to do a close comparison there.
I do think at the time that Christianity developed the doctrine of trans-national love and Paul got explicit about it and said there was neither Jew nor Greek, [that] that was an improvement over thinking that any one ethnicity is better than another. And you actually see evidence in the Bible itself that Jesus actually thought that one ethnicity was better than another. And that this more trans-national love was an add-on after Jesus. But anyway, it was progress. It’s just that I’m not sure that Judaism hasn’t caught up with it in a certain sense. And again, it’s tough. There are variations of Jews, including some of these settlers. But there are much more cosmopolitan Jews and internationalists. And I don’t know [if] many of them have clear ideas of what happens to non-Jews when they die. So I don’t feel capable of doing a comparison along that axis. That would be interesting. Certainly, I don’t think it speaks favorably of Christianity that many Christians think that even if you live a perfectly upright life you go to hell just because you don’t believe Jesus was the Son of God.
You made a point that Islam, at least with the suras written in peacetime, had a place for religious minorities. And that it got to a point that Islam started banning converts because the society needed [non-Muslims] to tax. Besides that need to tax, does every major religion need that other, that smaller religion, to define itself against?
Maybe the presence of minorities helps unify the majority. And in the absence of [a] minority, the majority sometimes fragments and thus creates another minority. I’m trying to think if there’s ever been a society –not that I’d necessarily know – of uniform belief, where there was no alternative. And nothing comes to mind. Throughout the Hebrew Bible there seems to be contention about whether to worship Yahweh alone or to worship others. And one thing that comes out of my book is how continually fluid religious belief is. And how alternatives of belief along various dimensions are being created just like biological mutations and give the evolutionary process something to work off of. My intuition leads me to think that you’d never have a stable situation where there was complete homogeneity of belief in a society.
Zionism was not a religious movement at its beginning and it didn’t really become one until after the state of Israel was founded. So you see that fluidity in religion even now this late in history. And knowing that, how do you trek those changes when you go back to texts that are 2,000, 3,000 years old?
Well, it’s very hard. You have to make some simplifying assumptions. I basically accepted mainstream dating of the texts, for example. There’s a lot that we just don’t know about the context of various scriptures, but if you focus on case studies, sometimes it’s reasonably clear. The point about Zionism illustrates one of my favorite fallacies that have come out of the new atheists. It reminds me of Richard Dawkins saying in The God Delusion [that] if it weren’t for religion there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that’s like the opposite of the thesis of my book, okay. (laughs) My argument is that the religious expressions of belligerence are just a surface manifestation of deeper underlying material conflicts. And this is a perfect example. The establishment of Israel was secular. The reaction to the establishment was fundamentally secular. And it was an argument about land and that’s about as zero-sum as things get. And that, with time, as the thing was not resolved, it became more of a religiously belligerent thing. I know this isn’t the question you asked but it illustrates the point that it’s fundamentally not about religion.
You gave a pithy summation of your Paul chapter in your interview with Deborah Solomon, saying that Paul sold Christianity as Judaism without the circumcision. And this is why Christianity is so popular today and Judaism is not. But why did Judaism survive at all?
Why did Judaism survive at all?
It was just one of many religions of its time.
It’s a good question. I had a little exchange with David Plotz, who wrote this book Good Book, on Bloggingheads, where I started out by saying that for all we know there were other people in the Middle East who had texts comparable to the Hebrew Bible, but they did not survive to keep their texts alive. And they did not survive as a coherent people, as an ethnic group, and so we don’t know about them. And he said, “But is it to some extent the case that the text helped the people stay together?” And that’s an interesting question. Whether there was something about defining a text as defining your ethnic group, [whether] that helps your ethnic group survive. And I don’t know the answer, but it’s possible. I hadn’t thought of it before.
I haven’t done the kind of sociological analysis to think about why Judaism survived. You’re right that not that many religions that small have survived. And I have never even thought about that before. The ratio of adherence to years of survival is probably lower than any other [religious group. But then] there are still Zoroastrians. So maybe I’m wrong, because there aren’t as many Zoroastrians as Jews.
So, I don’t know.
The story of Mormonism is fascinating. The story of Scientology is almost as fascinating. Did you look at the history of Mormonism and Scientology and the success that these two religions have had as being a key to understanding why certain religious ideals were successful and survived and why some didn’t 2,000 years ago. In other words, did you look at the history of Mormonism in the 19th century, during which we have a very clear historical record of what happened, in order to hypothesize what was going on with Christians in the first or second century AD.
Well [Mormonism and Christianity] both had robust growth rates. It’s probably clearer in the case of the Mormon record. They both benefited from the commercial and financial success of their adherents. And part of the appeal was that the religion became a network that was an avenue to commercial success. You can say the same thing about Islamic traders during the height of the Islamic Empire. Religions that do not lead to material success tend not to last. So in a way, that goes well beyond Mormonism and Christianity. But I think you see in the case of Mormonism clearly what I believe to be more conjecturally the case with Christianity, which is that it served as a networking tool. Of course, Mormonism has the disadvantage of having its origins lie in an age when there was much more documentation of what actually happened. And so, as a result, it’s easier to cast doubt on Joseph Smith’s authenticity than it is on Jesus’s. But that’s a different matter. And Scientology...I don’t know. I mean Scientology hasn’t been wildly successful. How many Scientologists are there?
Christopher Hitchens called religion the infancy of mankind. I tend to agree with him to the extent that I don’t need to believe in God to feel guilt. You may still have a sense of a god-like father figure, but your rational self does not. So why can’t we think of it as the infancy of mankind? Why can’t we pass it off? You answer the question in your book, but I didn’t quite understand your argument.
I think religion was the infancy of science because at the beginning what it was largely about was explaining why things happen in the world. And it was, relatively speaking, a crude attempt to do that. On the guilt issue: Actually back in hunter-gatherer days, guilt was unrelated to religion, as well, because religion did not have a big moral component, as far as we can tell. I guess where I would differ with Hitchens is [that] I think he believes we can cast aside all notions that there is a larger purpose at work in the universe. I think he would say that. And I just think he’s wrong. I think there’s actual evidence that there is something you could call a larger purpose unfolding in the workings of nature. I want to emphasize that. Because I’m not necessarily talking about any spooky forces or any intervention. I guess what I would say is that if that winds up being true – which is still a plausible hypothesis - then you could view religion as being an early stage of the development of thought that led to a clearer view of what a larger purpose is. It can be viewed not as something to be abandoned but as something that evolves into a more mature philosophy.
Whereas, if [Hitchens is] right and there is no larger purpose then it’s easier to see religion as just a dead end that wound up being wrong. And that’s where I would say the difference is.
I believe you disagree with me on this. I remember you coming out very much against the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark.
I didn’t think they should be banned.
But you didn’t think they should have been done.
I thought it was something that there should be moral sanction against. In other words, we shouldn’t think, “Oh what a cool guy. He published these cartoons with the express purpose of making people feel that they’re not respected.”
But there is a difference between making fun of a religion, which is making fun of an ideology, and making fun of someone’s ethnic background.
Yeah, there’s a difference.
And I think a very important one. I would say that making fun of someone’s ethnicity is much worse.
You mean because people can’t change their ethnicity.
There’s a difference between making fun of someone for the DNA with which he is born and making fun of someone for an ideology and culture into which he is born.
You could make that argument. There’s definitely a difference. I don’t know. If you’re saying that the difference is that people choose their religions but don’t choose their genes. I’m not sure how meaningful that is in a lot of cases. If you’re born in a Muslim nation you’re going to grow up Muslim.
Would you hold the Danish cartoonists to the same level as you would hold Salman Rushdie?
I doubt that Rushdie’s intention was that malicious.
But he jokes about Islam.
Yeah I actually haven’t read [The Satanic Verses] so I don’t know exactly what he says. What most bothered me was something you heard a lot. “Look how different Muslim culture was from Western culture. In Muslim culture they think there are some things that are taboo.” Well we think there are plenty of things that are taboo. And it’s just a question of which things are taboo. There are things that American newspapers will not print about American religions. There are cartoons about Christianity they will not publish. So it’s just not clear to me where the qualitative difference is. And I’m not against newspapers being sensitive to [the] sensibilities of American religions.
But why shouldn’t there be less of a moral sanction against arguing over ideological differences than ethnic ones.
I wouldn’t call this ideology. I would call ideology a third thing. Religion is not by its nature [an ideology]. Believers do not think of religion as something where doctrine is amenable to rational dispute in the way that ideology is. Political ideologies are supposed to stand or fall entirely on how much sense they make. I don’t think adherents of a religion generally think of religions that way. They are just received doctrines. And you may not like that but it’s the way religion is. In that sense...[under that] analogy it may be more like ethnicity than like ideology. Right? Your genes are a given.
I’m assuming you watched Life of Brian.
I’ve never watched the whole thing.
I’m assuming then that it bothered you on the same grounds.
No, because the sensibilities are different. I’m sure there are some forms of criticism of religious figures that are tolerated in Islamic society. It’s not the binary question of whether any form of criticism or mockery is allowed. It is the question of what is and isn’t considered sacrilegious. But for all religions, some things are considered sacrilegious, and, traditionally, American culture has respected those bounds. That may be changing now. But if it’s only changing now, then we don’t have much of a basis for acting as if the Islamic world is qualitatively different from the Western tradition.
If you think of the difference between Obama and the second Bush there seems to be a softening between the two [in their employment of faith]. Hitchens would like that softening to continue to the point where it disappears. Would you like the idea of it softening to the point where, in 30 or 40 years, the president is an atheist?
I would like that. I don’t like the idea that politicians have to feign religious devotion, whether or not they feel it, in order to be elected. And I particularly dislike a politician’s dependence on a particular religion for his support. I’ve been surprised, actually, to the point where Obama has been willing to [go to] defy standard expectations [concerning the] frequency of [his] church-going. I’d be happy if we quit expecting politicians to be Christian or any other [religion.]
But would you be comfortable with a proudly declared atheist president?
Well, I’d disagree with him, but, then again, I would disagree with a Christian president. I’m not a Christian. If you had a president who couldn’t credibly assert belief in certain kinds of absolute values you’d have a problem. But I’d be fine with an atheist. Just not with Chris Hitchens.
