Robert Wright & John Horgan [The Wright Show] (full conversation)

Good evening everyone, welcome to the third of these lectures. I am Serene Jones, the president here at Union Theological Seminary, and this evening I have the pleasure of introducing Robert Wright, who is a visiting professor of Science and Religion here at Union. It is science and religion, not religion and science, to be carefully noted. We can explore what that means. He is here for 18 months on a grant from the Templeton Foundation. You have heard much, if you've been here for the two previous lectures, about his long list of accomplishments as a journalist, an author, a leading thinker. Works like Nonzero, The Evolution of God, now his project entitled The Meaning of Life TV. All of these are tied together by a unique vision, although perhaps not as unique as some would like to think it is, but a vision that Robert has for a new way of envisioning the interplay between science and religion in such a way that the findings, the insights, the explorations of science not only support but in fact expand and deepen many of the deepest principles and practices embedded in religious traditions. And what we are privy to in this series of five lectures is Robert laying out for us his worldview. Now, how many people get a chance to give five lectures on your worldview for the world to participate in hearing and giving feedback on? The series is called The New Agnosticism and Its Spiritual Implications, and tonight we are going to hear the third of those talks, and the title is The Force Is With Us: History, Game Theory, and Moral Progress. So I'm delighted to invite Robert forward.

So, Bob happens to be married to a childhood friend of mine named Lisa O'Neal. I think they met about 30 years ago. And so I found out that this friend of mine is dating this guy who's a science writer, as I was and still am. And when I first met Bob, I thought he was a little bit of a know-it-all. Obviously a very smart guy. But what I realized pretty quickly was that our interests are remarkably similar. You know, Bob really is obsessed, I think it's fair to say, with the biggest questions: what's the meaning of life, is truth attainable, is there a God, and what sort of God is it if there is a God. And I feel very privileged to have known Bob now for 30 years. He's actually a great guy. He's, you sound as if they should be surprised by that, he said, well, because he can be very tough as an intellectual, he can have a real edge. Although I think the meditation thing is working for him. Also age. Yes, age, that's my path, just getting older. And so it's been wonderful for me to see Bob engage with some of these big questions that I also am wrestling with. And what I've realized over, we disagree on a lot of things, but I think it's more important to agree on what's important to think about. It's more important to agree on...

The questions than the answers, although we actually agree on a lot of things. And what I wanted to do, just to get things going, is to spell out a couple of areas of agreement, and then I feel obliged to disagree on something important, and I'm going to do that. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit. But also, I want to point out that there are some similarities between us. We both grew up in Christian homes. I think you're Baptist. I grew up Catholic. I started having problems with Catholicism by my early teens. Maybe one difference between us is that I'm a little older than Bob. Is this... you're good? Does this sound okay? I just want to make sure. And so I was kind of a '60s child, and I took a lot of psychedelic drugs, and that had a big impact on my spirituality, such as it is. I am still a Catholic in the sense that I think thinking about God and transcendent purpose and meaning and so forth, those are questions that I still find fascinating, and I can't get them out of my head. I even wrote a book called Rational Mysticism. Also, like Bob, I think that science is our most powerful way of understanding reality, and that if you have any kind of moral and spiritual worldview, it has to be consistent with science in some way. All right, so I've tried to figure out how that's going to work in my own writing. My biggest point of agreement with Bob is that I'd say we're both optimists, and I think that puts us in the minority of people these days. It's extraordinary to me how depressed, how despairing—I mean, this preceded the current presidential election—most people are really fatalistic about where humanity is headed. And so I am thrilled when a major intellectual like Bob lays out this really positive vision of humanity as definitely having an upward arc. And the thing is, what bothers me when I meet other intellectuals who scoff at the very idea of progress—they have to put scare quotes around the word—you know, I have to point out to them that progress is empirical. It's this massive trend. The world today, humanity today, is healthier, it's wealthier, it's more free, and believe it or not, it's more peaceful than it has been at almost any time in the history of civilization.

Proportionally, like violent deaths as a percentage of the overall...

Yes, and the percentage of people who are living under some kind of democracy is greater now, much greater than it was even a hundred years ago. People are living longer. I mean, these aren't subtle trends, these are massive trends. Things are getting better in almost every important way. We should be concerned about global warming, but I, you know, I moved to New York in 1980, and New York was filthy then. Some of you older people who lived in New York back then remember the Hudson River was disgusting, it was a cesspool. The air was so bad that your eyes would itch on some days, and that's not true anymore. I also agree with Bob, even though you didn't really talk about this, but I think it's important to bring up that there's this current wave of religion bashing among some scientists, including somebody that was sitting right here a few months ago, the physicist Lawrence Krauss. And even if you're an atheist, I think it doesn't really serve much purpose just to tell religious people that they're idiots. Which, first of all, I mean, the people who have been here know that new atheist bashing has been a little bit of an obsession of mine in the earlier talks, particularly the first one. I just want to say that in terms of my issue with them, ultimately, that's just one of the main ones, is that I think they are a tribe, the so-called new atheists. They act like a tribe, and there's nothing wrong with that inherently, but I think they exacerbate tribal antagonisms precisely by gratuitously offending religious people for no good reason. I'm not against the intellectual criticism of religious ideas or theology, but the gratuitous insulting of people—and not all of them do this, I don't hear Dan Dennett doing this, but you know, I would some others I do. And in these earlier talks, I contrasted this with what I call the new agnosticism, and one of the principles I ascribed to that was just judging people by their behavior and not their beliefs. Okay, just kind of deed over creed, as the old saying goes. So yeah, anyway, I completely agree. You know, one of my greatest concerns now is the militarism of our society, and how the United States is, I think it's pretty obvious, is the most warlike nation-state on the planet right now. You know, we've got by far the biggest military, and we're the most aggressive in using it. And I think you would agree that we need to model better behavior. I think, you know, moral modeling can be an extremely powerful force. I think the United States can find some other ways to show how conflicts can be resolved than by, you know, bombing and droning, and be more cognizant of how we are perceived and how things we do play out in perceptions abroad. I find—I'm now doing a recap of past lectures—but the thing I emphasized last week was moral imagination, putting yourself in the shoes of others, and I think America, including American foreign policy, could use a lot more than that.

Yeah, and so I might be even more positive than you. I, you know, that question mark at the end of their cartoon, I am—maybe it's reached the point of pathology—but I am really hopeful about the future. I think that we're at this turning point. It has reached the point of pathology...

You can seek help. Well, I think that in the same way that, you know, the Soviet Union collapsed so quickly and relatively peacefully, that we're at this turning point in human history where if we get some enlightened leadership—and maybe that's asking a lot, this country right now, that looks likely right now, I still think it could happen, I was actually hopeful that Obama could do it—but that we could get past this current warlike period, which relatively speaking is still pretty modest. All right, but now I want to—so I actually think that some kind of Frazer utopia is possible for us even in our lifetimes. So now for the disagreement, and I'm not even sure how much of a disagreement it is, because you're so cagey about what you really think when it comes to God and, you know, the divine and all that sort of stuff. You build a lot of deniability, I think, into your writing when you talk about these sort of things. But you know, you started off with the Shardan, so this religious figure, and you obviously see some affinity to him. So the disagreement I have with you is why you need that stuff. Why you can't have a totally secular vision of human progress, which is mine. And by the way, I'm not an atheist, because I often suspect—and this goes back to some of my psychedelic trips, but now it's something I feel all the time—this is all, it's hard to believe this is a coincidence, you know, all this. And when you look at human history...

What do you mean by all this?

I mean, you know, the fact that we're alive, reality, the human condition. It's just that there is something rather than nothing, for starters. That there is conscious life. That there are, you know, creatures like us who ponder their own existence, and that there has been this great adventure that humanity has been embarked on. I can't—there's no concept of God that is coherent to me because of the problem of evil. Again, this is a throwback to my Catholic upbringing. So I, you know, I have my suspicions, but I've decided that for practical reasons, it's just a bad idea to bring God into these discussions or any sort of transcendent force. I think it's also a bad idea to frame morality in any kind of absolute transcendent terms. This is another point of disagreement between Bob and me. I think we get into trouble when we try to convince ourselves that our sense of right and wrong has some sort of transcendent foundation. So I guess that's—so here's a question: Why do you need—first of all, do you believe in God? I mean, what is it, what's your spirituality? And if so, why do you need it for this wonderful, optimistic, uplifting vision of our future that you have?

If you want the answer to that question, I'm afraid you're going to have to come to the fifth leg. So there's a lot there. First of all, on my caginess, I take that as a compliment. But as for the question of like why I equivocate, like why—in the next lecture I'm going to talk about reasons I think to suspect that there is a larger purpose at work, and I'm going to even use Richard Dawkins's own, the structure of his own argument to make that case. Why am I confining it to that and not telling you that I've seen God? Well, again, you'll have to stay tuned. But part of the answer is, you know, what I'm doing here is developing a worldview that you can argue for. Okay, it cannot, you know, by definition, cannot depend on special revelation, scriptural authority, or anything else. I think there's value in that just as an intellectual exercise, just saying, suppose we can confine ourselves to a scientific framework, what can we reasonably conjecture about the meaning of it all? Um, you—now why I'm interested in the question, I'm sure it was because I was brought up Southern Baptist, but I also think it's an interesting question just intellectually. Aren't you curious, I mean, as to whether God exists? Well, anything, you know, a purpose in any sense. I mean, there was a—you said there was a debate the other night about whether we are part of a simulation, in which case there would be like a couple of hackers somewhere who like created us. Well, that's one answer that would be interesting to know, yeah, if that's the case, right? Whatever is the story, it is amazing that there's something rather than nothing. It is super amazing that it's like something to be alive. I talked about this in an earlier lecture. I made the argument that ironically, scientific progress has highlighted how amazing and mysterious it is that there is subjective experience. I won't rehash the argument, but that's totally amazing, and it's what gives life meaning, and we have no clue, right? And that's worth like pointing out. And I think, you know, figures into the argument of, well, maybe there's something more here going on in terms of the whole thing having a larger purpose or been set up or something. But so now when you—I'm not sure if you accused me of dabbling with transcendent stuff. I certainly didn't in this talk.

I was accusing you. Okay, but I didn't in this talk, right? Well, bringing up the Shardan, that's transcendent stuff.

The reason I set up that table was to head off exactly the kind of interpretation you're—you perhaps you dozed during that part—but there was this thing where I said I have a mechanistic explanation of what's going on. He appeals to the transcendent to explain it, right? But you were saying also that those aren't incompatible, the transcendent...

No, no, what I was saying was that a mechanistic interpretation is not incompatible with a larger purpose. The classic, the most straightforward example of that is deism, where God wound up the universe and let it go. It's clear that's a machine, but there's a purpose. Okay, so that's an example of reconciling a mechanistic worldview with purpose. You also kind of seem to equate my talking about moral truth with appealing to the transcendent, or so...

Maybe, maybe. But by moral truth, I'm talking about something pretty concrete. The moral truth I'm confident of is that no one person is more important than any other person. And the fact is, we are designed by natural selection to deploy our moral sentiments as if it were the case that some people are more important—yes, our family, our friends, and so forth. Right there, I'm not saying I know the ultimate moral truth, but it's pretty clear what we could do to move closer to something that I consider a pretty plausible characterization of at least some of the moral truth, which is just like, you're not special, I'm not special, and the world should not be set up to serve relatively few people at the expense of a bunch of other people. So that's some of—I guess it's a matter of rhetoric that I'm talking about.

Your rhetoric seems to evoke some of these traditional hopes that we can find—that our sense of purpose and our sense of morality isn't entirely our own invention. That it is, I don't know, maybe in the sense of mathematical truths being transcendent, at least according to some mathematicians, that it has some more durable existence beyond us. And I'm just—the older I get, the more I've become convinced that humility, when it comes to trafficking in truth claims and especially moral truth claims, humility is a very important virtue.

Absolutely. And it seems to me that the tribalism that you're worried about comes from people being pretty sure that they know how the world works. And there are secular versions of this. You know, when you talked about Homo progressivist, I was thinking of, you know, socialists and communists who thought that they had the correct ideology under which humans could organize themselves socially and economically, and that certainty led to horrors. It was actually—Marxism was a great idea, it's still a pretty good idea, but the certainty of the Marxists ruined it, at least for most of the 20th century. The same obviously is true of religions. The same is true of scientific ideologies like eugenics and social Darwinism, which also became convinced that these are the correct ways of looking at human nature, and there should be consequences to this, and those consequences turned out to be disastrous.

I certainly agree on the importance of intellectual humility. Another little recap of the last couple lectures is a value I ascribed to the new agnostics is intellectual humility. I even argued that ironically, since Huxley coined the term agnosticism, science has given us more grounds for intellectual humility. Although scientific knowledge has accumulated, science has also highlighted so many imponderable mysteries—quantum physics and so on. Evolutionary psychology has highlighted what imperfect instruments our minds are, how riddled with bias and distortion they are. So there's that reason for intellectual humility. So I'm very big on intellectual humility, and I take your point. You know, I think we are all susceptible to these tribalistic biases. I'm constantly fighting them. You know, and I'm aware that when I think about the new atheists, I'm falling prey to them already, because it's them versus me, and I try to depict them in intellectually honest fashion, even though, of course, human nature militates against that when you view another group as a rival. So we do have to strive for that. And I take your point about the danger of certainty and too much confidence in your value system. On the other hand, if you don't believe in any values at all, I mean, okay, right? I mean, we all do. And I think I'd like to think that the values that I'm emphasizing are relatively humble values. I'm just saying nobody is more important than anybody else, gratuitous belligerence is bad, and seeing things from the point of view of others is a valuable exercise that's often good for both of you, and things like that. Now, on the question of transcendent truth, you know, do moral truths exist in the sense that mathematical truths do? Well, philosophers refer to that as moral realism, and I think that—I haven't closed the door on moral realism. There are serious philosophers who, not on religious grounds but on philosophical grounds, take seriously the idea of moral realism, of moral truth being a thing. And I guess I do think that in some sense it is out there, and in at least a kind of broad and minimalistic sense, it's possible to have a characterizing it. You know, so long as sentience exists on the planet, it's better for animals in general to feel good than to feel bad, and no animal is special. You know, the way I—I actually like the analogy. One of the reasons I use the analogy with mathematics is I think the way I like to look at mathematics is that it is constructed, it's totally our invention. I don't agree with the Platonists who think that pi is waiting out there for us to discover. But here's how it's analogous to morality: that there are certain axioms that most of us can agree on, that, you know, pleasure is better than pain, and, you know, that killing is wrong, and so forth, and that certain people shouldn't be privileged over others just because of how they were born, and those sorts of things. So we can start with some axioms, but those axioms aren't truths, those are things that we agree on. That's how mathematics works as well. But on those, you know, you just sort of say, okay, here's some of my axioms, what do you think? You get common agreement, and then you can build up a reasonable moral system on those. But I just think it's a mistake ever to confuse that with genuine truth, which is what science discovers about reality.

You know, those—but the existence of consciousness itself tells us that there are things that are not amenable to traditional scientific exploration. Science can explore, can study things that are, you know, as they say, publicly observable, by which they mean more than one person can look at them and they can compare notes. So even an electron, it's not publicly observable the way a statue in a park is, but more than one person can look at the same electron and they can compare notes. Subjective experience, nobody but me knows what my subjective experience is. So right there, you know, science is not going to give us a complete description of reality. And you know, there are philosophers who take metaphysics seriously, not as like a spooky, you know, kind of new age thing, but as a serious speculation about, in a certain sense, the underpinnings of the observable world or the correspondence between the observable world and something deeper. Right? And I think that's, you know, totally legitimate. Now, I'm mindful of the time. I mean, we should before too long probably wrap it up and open it up to questions from the audience, and then before too much longer after that, give people a chance to gracefully exit if they want to. But I've got one more question I wanted to ask you about. You know, it's about the Omega Point, and I was waiting for you to connect that to this new idea of the singularity. Has everybody here heard of the singularity? Has anybody not heard of the singularity? Oh, I'm sure they—okay, so a few. So the singularity, the basic idea is a term from physics about when the laws of physics stop making sense—so black holes, the big bang, and so forth—and it's been applied to this idea that there's going to be some kind of superintelligence emerging very soon. Either computers are just going to do it on their own, or we're going to be cyborgs and we're going to have brain chips implanted in us, and something really dramatic is going to happen and we're going to transcend our current selves. And dramatic forms of this are psyches are extracted out of our bodies and downloaded into computers, and where we can all merge into one kind of mega-mind. This is the extreme version of the singularity, and it's very similar to the Omega Point theory of Teilhard de Chardin. And there was actually a physics version of the singularity that was called the Omega Point Theory, that was published in a book about, I don't know, maybe 25 years ago by Frank Tipler and John Barrow. I find it creepy. I want to remain—I don't want to merge into a giant mega-mind. I find, you know, in part because of my interest in mysticism, where unification is held up as the ultimate good, I got turned off by that. And you know, I am left with the feeling that I want to stick to my primitive individual self. So I just wanted to bring that up as something that your talk of...

Okay, yeah. I mean, I'm not that conversant in the idea of singularity, but the part of it that has always seemed to me craziest is apparently the scenario like technological change starts happening faster and faster and faster and faster, and then nirvana, right? Whereas it seems to me that one thing you can say with confidence about technological change is that even if it's good in the long run, in the short run it can be very destabilizing, and human society can have a hard time accommodating it. So I do not see any need to accelerate technological change. And in fact, I've argued that, you know, when you talk about global governance and you talk about things like, for example, suppose you said, as I've said, that international trade accords should include environmental dimensions and even labor dimensions. So for example, if nations that want to be part of a trade accord with us have to at least grant the right of unions to organize, and people say, oh, that kind of thing slows globalization down, I'm like, wait, globalization isn't going fast enough? I mean, seriously, the presidential election is showing us that change is happening at least as fast as it can be assimilated. So this idea of the singularity is that like, hey, faster is better. I mean, I have no idea where, you know, the plaus—I don't get—I mean, I, you know, in addition, yeah, I'm skeptical of all the mega-mind stuff, probably if I took a good look at it. But just the idea that, you know, and again, I'm in many ways—a lot of good to be said for technology, and I try to say it at any event, it can't be stopped. But the idea that faster is better seems to me naive. By the way, the heads of Google are believers in the singularity, is that true?

Yes, and they hired the leader, the guru of the singularity movement, an engineer named Ray Kurzweil, to be their chief technology officer recently. So to me, it's a crazy idea, it's a cult, but it's believed by some of the richest, most powerful people on the earth. That's why, as a science writer, I feel obliged to pay attention to it. So I'm just pointing out that when you talk about the Omega Point, it's going to set off some associations in some of your audience.

That's true. I spoke at a conference organized by the Kurzweil organization—it's like the Institute for Accelerating Change or something—like ten years ago. And Kurzweil, you know, it's like, acceleration of technology, wonderful thing, and Kurzweil was going to address this remotely by video hookup, and they couldn't even get that to work. So I took some heart in that, actually, that maybe things aren't moving as fast as I had feared. Classic. Okay, so why don't we, you know, it's getting late, like I said, let's take a few questions, and then we'll give—and then provide an opportunity for exodus, and then if other people want to stick around and ask questions, they can. So are there—okay, these two right here, first the second row, then the third row.

Hi, I was going to say that the life that existed on Earth, let's say a million years ago, would not recognize us as their ancestors or progeny, let's say. And wouldn't that trend tend to continue? So I kind of—I guess I'm a little more pessimistic than you guys. I can't really—so what do you think life will look like in a million years? And will it be a bunch of good Europeans, happy Democrats living together in peace and love, or will they be so different from us to not share any morality, maybe even biology with us?

What do you mean by the fact that past human beings would not recognize...

Not human beings, the life on Earth. So whether it's bacteria, cells, wild animals, would not recognize us as...

Well, there were protohumans a million years ago.

That's fine, you can make it a billion if you like. But I'm just asking a question about time scale. And you know, I get the feeling from you guys that you think the future is just a somewhat better version of us. That's my question.

You're right. I was going to say—I reviewed a book by singularity-influenced futurists a few years ago called Year Million or something like that. It was basically what's going to be going on a million years from now, and it was all sort of, I don't know, whole planets that had been turned into giant computers and are thinking. My question is always, what will the giant planet or the giant galactic gas cloud be thinking about? I asked one of the leaders, one of the inspirers of the singularity movement, a physicist named Freeman Dyson, this question once, and what was interesting is that he hadn't really given it much thought. And so he thought about it for a second, and he thought, solving math puzzles. And you know, I would say I don't dismiss some fairly outlandish scenarios. I mean, look, Teilhard was a reasonable extrapolation back then. I mean, it was a non-obvious extrapolation to say more and more like a giant superorganism. The extent to which history has borne him out is kind of remarkable. I mean, the internet and so on. So I don't dismiss the further extension of this kind of thing. I don't even think, in my wilder moments of speculation, that it's crazy to think of a truly unified consciousness in the sense that it's like something to be planet Earth, you know, like that kind of consciousness. And that I don't think that has to be incompatible with the continued feeling of individual consciousness. Right? So like if you believe that individual cells had some measure of sentience—like you know, back when bacteria had some measure of sentience, like you prod one and it feels a little crude pain—well, then when cells came together to form organisms, you were integrating previously independently sentient organisms, and now there's unified sentience. For all I know, my cells have independent sentience. It's not totally crazy to think there could be a global consciousness. You know, for all I know, there's one now, who knows? But I—man, a few hundred years from now, the rate things are changing, I don't know. But again, I think at a minimum, I'd like to keep the thing going long enough to find out, and that's what I'm focused on, because I think there are all real perils to that. I mean, the great threat I see is that in responding to things like terrorism, we keep doing exactly the opposite of the smart thing, making the problem worse. You know, and people like Donald Trump start talking about, you know, whatever, doing whatever to Muslims, that only makes things easier for terrorist recruiters, and so on. So you get a positive feedback cycle where things get worse and worse and worse. I'm now responding in delayed fashion to your optimism about war ending. So I'm focused on the short term, and we can worry later about whether we turn into a giant superorganism. I think I'd rather do that than just not exist.

So there's—yeah, in terms of the comparison between the math and morals, C.S. Lewis made the same comparison, and I tend to think that he's wrong, because if you break the laws of mathematics, then things that you're designing with math won't work. But society has broken moral laws for thousands of years, and they seem to relatively work. But what I really wanted to talk about was the Homo progressivist. It seems that—I haven't read your articulation of the tribe within the tribe, but I guess I would trace that somewhat back to the Enlightenment, because it seems that that was the first time where there are a number of thinkers who belong to different tribes or different thought processes or spiritual backgrounds, but they seem to agree on some fundamentals. And it seems as though that group of people is always a very small minority, but they're able to dispense that influence to the rest of humanity over time, and that humanity over time seems to share the values of the tribe within the tribe from a previous time period. My question specifically about resources is, how do you all see us moving forward as a species, overcoming, I guess, individual ego? Because it seems that more and more, as a civilization, as a global civilization, we can agree on the fact that because someone's born into wealth, they don't necessarily deserve it more than someone who's born into poverty. But as you bring up Marx's ideology, the problem with Marx's ideology was how—exactly what specific mechanism do you use to transfer that wealth from someone who has it to someone who doesn't have it? And it seems that Teilhard's kind of ultimate goal was kind of quasi-Marxist, in believing that we'd have a society in which everything was one and everyone kind of had everything. But how do you see us overcoming those obstacles?

Oh, well, we've got some work to do. At least we're paying attention to inequality right now, and I think that's a good sign. I'm not sure if Bernie Sanders is the answer. I'm still hopeful that we can solve that problem, and in part because severe poverty has decreased as a proportion of humanity dramatically over the last few decades. And you know, so I see maybe some tweaking of the system we have. I don't think revolution has turned out to be a good idea. It's just too disruptive and destructive. So I think we can figure it out. We've got models in Europe of very highly functioning countries, very prosperous, with much less inequality than we have.

You know, and on the question you raised about just, you know, egocentrism and breaking that down, I mean, as a matter of spiritual practice, I'm again a big fan of meditation, and it's an explicit part of Buddhist philosophy that one of the aims of meditation is to, you know, break down what is considered in Buddhism kind of false conception of the self. But in any event, the practical payoff of that is to actually increase selflessness in a moral sense of that term. And look, you can find versions of this doctrine and of spiritual practices geared to it in the great faith traditions broadly. I mean, the problem tends to be that the people practicing the meditation aren't the people who are the biggest problem to begin with. Like you go to these meditation retreats and they all have these bumper stickers about, you know, climate change and income inequality and stuff, and you're kind of thinking, I'll bet they had those bumper stickers even before they started meditating, right? So there is that. But at the same time, I mean, it's growing, and I do have some faith in just the power of getting the scientific knowledge out there, growing scientific knowledge about how the human mind is engineered by natural selection to mislead us in various ways, many of which are ultimately selfish, these various cognitive biases that exacerbate, you know, strengthen this perceived line between us and them. You know, in the long run, I'm hoping that that scientific knowledge will kind of fuse with various kinds of spiritual practice and spiritual thought and lead to progress. But it's a huge challenge. So, are there any other—why don't we just take these last three in succession without us immediately responding, and then we'll give each of us a last word, and then liberate everyone.

Thank you. Perhaps not so much a question, but my nostrum for making myself feel better when the world feels too much with me, which is to sort of adopt the stance, the voice of the narrator in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where for reasons that I find very mirthful but also very apocalyptic, he's describing this world that's been sort of wiped out, and the world that the character of Douglas Adams's novel knew is gone, but he's not gone. And in the movie, it's narrated by Stephen Fry, which is very wonderful to hear. And so I despair at times for the next train wreck you hear about. Sometimes it seems like evolution has been more and more transportation elements that can go more and more awry. But even when I hear these things, I do feel somewhat—I don't know if it's Buddhist—but a bit of detachment, regret, mourning, grief for the suffering, but also we go on, it goes on, the world goes on, and it somehow—it sometimes it just makes me feel with a bit of distance. Okay, sorry if that's not a question, but I take...

Hi, just so I understand, the idea of the zeros, some non-zeros, some—is the idea that civilization or Homo sapiens remain the same species over time, over the millennia? But the of technology and science that these create a situation in which there's less zero-sum thinking, more non-zero-sum thinking. And if that's the case, how does the model deal with the fact that the human species with its aggression drives for aggression, violence, etc., hasn't evolved? Is it really that the society or the civilization that in effect mutes those qualities?

And finally, one more. Hi, this question is for Mr. Robert Wright. I know you don't want to attribute a certain direction, either fatalist or optimistic, about history. And I'm just wondering if you would consider this an indication of a certain direction, that very much so, in the same way that Joseph Campbell's concept of, you know, a hero of a thousand faces, that regardless of what societies historically have won out, that there is a certain narrative within that society with similar narratives of heroism, about justice, about equality, about inclusion, and that narrative—so if we can separate the victors of one religion versus another, the narrative is the same, and that is an indication of perhaps a certain direction.

Mhm. Should I go?

You definitely go. You want to pick up the one...

Final, I want to know the real reason behind your optimism of progress. You know, in Asia, at least, we talk about among theologians, after Fukushima, we cannot do the theology in the same manner because we all have this nuclear power all around the world. And Fukushima happened not because some technical mistake, so-called natural disaster made this explosion, and it is just a kind of doomsday scenario. And Hollywood and popular culture, they talk about doomsday so much. And also climate change is—I don't think they are the Shardan. In their generation, they really think about this kind of Fukushima, kind of nuclear disaster, and climate change. So my question is, what is the reason for your optimism? Is it like human intelligence based on natural selection, evolutionary process, or do you believe that there are something divine, providence, or transcendent intelligence somewhere out there or within us, it will be connected and we will get this big awakening? So what is your real reason for this progressive vision of the future?

I'll answer. That's a—I guess I'm more hardcore optimist than even Bob. All right, so when I was a kid, I was terrified that the world would end at any moment because of a global nuclear war. We still have a lot of nuclear weapons, but many fewer. The Cold War has ended. All right, you know, Putin is a little bit of a scary guy, but the possibility of the end of everything is much less. The South was segregated when I was a little kid. I had a grandfather who lived in South Carolina, visited, and you know, saw segregated restaurants and so forth. Girls getting an abortion was illegal in this country when I was a teenager. It was a really serious thing if a girl got pregnant. In just so many ways, things are so much better. Fukushima was terrible, but natural disasters in the past killed so many more people just because buildings weren't as strong as they are today. So that's—I mean, I see progress. That's really why I'm optimistic. And I'm not looking forward to some kind of—when I think of a utopia, I think of something like New York City, which is this really fractious place, incredibly diverse, but there are not people going around blowing each other up. I actually think ego is going to be a constant. We're selfish, grasping, occasionally hateful people, but if we're not killing each other in massive numbers, then that will really be fantastic. We're not diverting a huge proportion of our gross national income to creating giant death systems, then that would be a huge step forward, and I think it's very much within our grasp.

Yeah, human intelligence and basic moral decency, which is connected to intelligence. And you know, this is what Bob has written about so brilliantly, is that moral progress and rational self-interest are completely compatible. Yes, so again, I'm not as optimistic. In fact, you know, when the book Nonzero came out and people were talking about how optimistic it was, I actually—when the paperback came out a year later, I amended the introduction, and this was before 9/11, this was early 2001—to emphasize that I was saying that globalization had been essentially inevitable, there were forces that were at work, but it was far from clear we would respond to the challenges at the global level required to really consolidate a peaceful global society. There were problems peculiar to that level of organization. So I'm at best a guarded optimist, if that. But there are reasons for hope. One of them is human reason, you know, when it works well. Again, we need to be mindful that it is naturally warped, right? The way we use it, the psychology, the so-called psychology of tribalism naturally warps it. But we have a lot to work with. And this gets at a couple of the other questions. So the question on, you know, yes, I mean, I just be clear, I am not talking about—with this whole zero-sum, non-zero-sum thing—I am not talking about biological evolution. I mean, you can apply game theory to biological evolution and use it to explain why biological complexity evolved, but that's not what I'm talking about tonight. I'm just talking about—in other words, I'm not talking about humans evolving biologically to get more cooperative. No, we all, human beings everywhere, have fundamentally the same human nature, and it is designed to help us cooperate under certain circumstances. And we have that to work with, you know, and we have the corresponding impulses of, you know, sympathy and so on that go along with that. It's a question of deploying them wisely, right? But there's a whole set of kind of moral intuitions, you might say, or inclinations that are the common heritage, the common biological heritage of humankind. And it's a question of using them wisely. And I think this also gets at the question of why you find common narratives in various cultures of, you know, justice and equality. Well, I think the sense of justice is at some level—we all have a natural belief that, you know, good deeds should be rewarded, bad deeds should be punished. That seems to be common to human cultures everywhere. There's a plausible evolutionary story as to why that might be. There's, you know, hunter-gatherer societies are very egalitarian, by the way, in their professed ethos. They're very much against the aggrandizement of surplus. And there is, I think, an intuitive attraction to the idea that you should extend what you demand—that there should be a symmetry in moral discourse. I think that's natural. So, you know, a lot of these impulses, I think, are the common heritage of people. Now, the dark side is, yes, we agree that one good turn deserves another, badly should be punished. Well, there are issues with how good a thing that latter belief is to begin with. But anyway, the bigger problem is that we all tend to convince ourselves that we're the ones who have done the good things and they're the ones who have done the bad things. That's an actual bias. So, you know, that's what distorts the deployment of certain moral intuitions that might in themselves be more benign. Okay, and then the first question was about distance and detachment. You get a certain consolation, I guess, out of being able to just extract yourself from all the suffering in the world and go, well, hey, we're still muddling through. I mean, you know, we're surviving and it's going on. You know, there is such a thing as being too caught up, so caught up in the troubles of the world that you just can't do anything, or that you cause yourself too much, you know, a paralyzing amount of anguish. At the same time, there's such a thing as too much detachment. And one of the things that concerns me a little about meditation is—I think we had a whole panel discussion here in the fall about mysticism and activism—and the concern was that sometimes people become so at peace with the world that they don't feel any passion about changing it. And I think I've seen that happen with people. So I think that would be too much detachment, in my view. I mean, I think the ideal thing is that when people get enough serenity to have a kind of objective view of the world, they use that objectivity, that degree of detachment, to get clear on what wisdom is, what is the wise way to proceed if you're not kind of so emotionally involved in it all, and then give people guidance or actively push the causes that you conclude are in order. That would be my preference. So is there anything else you want to say about this?

No, that's okay. So I want to say first of all, I meant to mention more of John mentioned his book Rational Mysticism. I mentioned more of his books when he came up. Most famous probably for The End of Science, but a number of others, including The Undiscovered Mind, your End of War book—you're probably very—this one you're most passionate about promoting, probably it's the most recent. And the point of it—it's an extremely optimistic book. I'm arguing that war is—that we can get past this period of war and militarism, but as a first step, we need to think it's possible. So I'm a big believer in the power of wishful thinking. It's a term that's commonly disparaged, but I think all successful social movements—the end of slavery, civil rights for women, for blacks, for gays—started with wishful thinking in periods of our history when these goals looked completely impossible. And so that's why, every chance I get, I try to persuade people, because I know how the vast majority of you probably think that world peace is impossible. I try to get you at least to question that belief. That's what I wrote this book for. Okay, and blogs regularly for Scientific American, and very much worth reading because he's not a cheerleader for science as some science journalists are. And so, and thank you all for coming. So Tuesday, a week from today, my fourth talk. Thursday, the final one. I see some faces out there that I've seen before. Thank you for your attendance record. The end is near, I promise. And so I'll be talking about purpose, consciousness next week. The final week, I'll cover God and salvation, and then, you know, I'll do a kind of a grand summing up, and then we'll be done. But thank you so much for coming, and again, thanks to John Horgan for...