Robert Wright

Robert Wright (born January 15, 1957) is an American author and journalist known for his wide-ranging interests in philosophy, society, science (especially evolutionary psychology), history, politics, international relations, and religion.

A self-described "Army brat", Wright attended Texas Christian University for a year in the late 1970s, before transferring to Princeton University, where he studied sociobiology, a precursor to evolutionary psychology.

His teachers at Princeton included author John McPhee, whose style influenced Wright's first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information.

Wright was employed as Senior Editor at The Sciences and The New Republic, and as an editor at The Wilson Quarterly.

As a contributing editor at The New Republic, he co-authored the "TRB" column.

He has also worked at Time, and Slate, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine.

He has published five books: Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information (1988), The Moral Animal (1994), Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), The Evolution of God (2009), and Why Buddhism is True (2017).

In early 2000s, Wright taught occasionally at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, leading a graduate seminar called "Religion and Human Nature" and teaching an undergraduate course called "The Evolution of Religion."

At Princeton, Wright was a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow and co-taught a graduate seminar with Peter Singer on the biological basis of moral intuition.

In 2002, Wright ventured into video-on-Internet with his MeaningofLife.tv website, developed by Greg Dingle, where he interviewed a range of thinkers on their ideas about science, philosophy, meditation, 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, Daniel Kaufman, Nikita Petrov, and Aryeh Cohen-Wade.

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 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, Matt Lewis, Kat Rosenfield, Phoebe Maltz-Bovy, and Aryeh Cohen-Wade.

He has occasionally contributed to The New York Times, putting in a stint as guest columnist in April 2007 and in 2010 acting as a contributor to The Opinionator, a web-only opinion page.

Wright has written extensively on the topic of religion, particularly in The Evolution of God. In 2009, When asked by Bill Moyers if God is a figment of the human imagination, Wright responded:

"I would say so. Now, I don't think that precludes the possibility that as ideas about God have evolved people have moved closer to something that may be the truth about ultimate purpose and ultimate meaning... Very early on, apparently, people started imagining sources of causality, imagining things out there making things happen. And early on there were shamans who had mystical experiences that even today a Buddhist monk would say were valid forms of apprehension of the divine or something. But by and large I think people were making up stories that would help them control the world."

On The Colbert Report, Wright said he was "not an atheist" but did not subscribe to any of the three Abrahamic religions.

He opposes creationism, including intelligent design.

Wright has a materialist conception of natural selection; however, he is intrigued by the possibility of some larger purpose unfolding, natural selection possibly being itself the product of design, in the context of teleology.

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.

He has described himself as a secular humanist.

Wright makes a distinction between religion being wrong and bad and resists the notion that its bad effects necessarily outweigh its good effects.

He sees organized atheism as attempting to actively convert people in the same way as many religions do.

Wright has said that it is counterproductive to think of religion as being the root cause of today's problems.

In Why Buddhism is True, Wright investigates a secular, Westernized form of Buddhism focusing on the practice of mindfulness meditation and stripped of the element of reincarnation.

He believes Buddhism's diagnosis of the causes of human suffering is largely vindicated by evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, justifying his book's title.

Wright assumed the title of senior editor of The Atlantic on January 1, 2012.

In 2014, Wright taught a six-week Coursera MOOC on "Buddhism and Modern Psychology".

In February 2015 the magazine's author page describes him as "a former senior editor at The Atlantic."

Wright has taught at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania; more recently, in 2019 he was Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York.

In addition to teaching, lecturing, books, and journalism, Wright has been an innovator in the development of content on the Internet.

He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv, the founder and editor-in-chief of Meaningoflife.tv, the founder and chief correspondent of the Nonzero Newsletter and Nonzero Podcast (available on Substack), and the creator of the Nonzero Foundation.

His running commentary on current events can also be followed weekly on Patreon in his ongoing dialogue with fellow commentator Mickey Kaus.

Wright was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, into a Southern Baptist family and attended public secondary schools in San Francisco, California, and San Antonio, Texas.

In 2019, Wright was a Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York.

Also in 2019, Wright was a Senior Fellow at the think tank New America.