Robert Wright: Suggestions of a Larger Purpose

introduction

For Robert Wright, his own interest in human nature and evolution was born with the field of evolutionary psychology. "I'd always been interested in human nature and in psychology," Wright told us on the phone from his Princeton, New Jersey, home. "And I was also independently interested in evolution, just in the idea of it as the creative process. When I was in college in the late seventies, these two fields started to come together, the study of evolution and the study of psychology. It was then called sociobiology and came to be called evolutionary psychology." Perhaps because of his traditional Christian upbringing, Wright's deep interest in the meaning and purpose of life—what he calls "the cosmic question"—has led him from a successful career in journalism, writing for magazines such as The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly (and currently writing "The Earthling" column for the online magazine Slate), to a position as a visiting scholar in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in recognition of his achievement as one of the new breed of evolutionary psychologists.

Wright's passion for the big questions led us to want to speak with him about evolution after Darwin. In his first book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, he ingeniously used Darwin's own life and career to show the implications that an understanding of evolutionary psychology brings to everyday life. Looking straight at the fact that so many choices we seem to freely make are governed by the genetic imperative to reproduce, Wright took on, without flinching, the tough moral issues raised by a deeper understanding of the mechanics of human nature. Ending with a guarded optimism about the potential for humanity to choose a morality for the greater good rather than following relentless genetic self-interest, Wright did not stop there. His next book, Nonzero, widened his scope even further, looking not only at biological evolution but at the development of human culture as well. His bold thesis is that, even despite ourselves, evolution proceeds through cooperative arrangements rather than "survival-of-the-fittest" competition. From this enormous perspective on the creative logic of life, Wright recognizes that the next step in evolution demands from us an ethic of cooperation based in the true interdependence of human life.

Most impressive about Wright is his intellectual honesty and integrity. He holds a firm line between empirical science and metaphysical speculation that few scientists maintain. Even though he asserts that natural selection can explain nearly everything about the development of life on this planet, including the complexity of human life, Wright, unlike many Darwinists, will not infer from this that there is no God or higher principle at work in the cosmos. He also finds the spiritual perspective of the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin to be deeply compelling even as here, too, he cannot verify Teilhard's spiritual claims. In the following interview, Wright takes us to the edge of where empirical evolution can go, to the suggestion of a greater meaning that the evolutionary evidence points to—and reminds us that if life's experiment is to continue on this planet, it is up to us.

interview

WIE: In doing research about evolution, we came across your latest book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. We were intrigued and fascinated by the breadth and scope of what you were presenting about organic and cultural evolution. I'm also familiar with your previous book, about evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal. What struck me is your real interest in Darwin and, particularly, your interest in the moral dimensions and implications of evolutionary theory. So I was wondering how did your interest in Darwinian evolution and morality develop?

ROBERT WRIGHT: I was brought up in a conventionally religious way, as a Southern Baptist, which gives you a pretty intense concern with religious questions. It's just a very intense experience being a Southern Baptist! I don't know if that's the reason that even long after I ceased to be a Southern Baptist, I was still interested in the "God" question. Not necessarily the question of whether there's exactly the kind of God that Christians envision, but the question of whether, in some sense, there is a larger purpose or a transcendent source of meaning—whether there is some kind of hidden order that one should align one's self with. I'm actually paraphrasing the way William James defined religion—as the idea that there is a hidden order and that your supreme interest lies in aligning yourself with that order. That's a definition broad enough to encompass a lot of religions.

That, I think, gave me an interest in the direction of evolution—the question of whether evolution has a direction and, if it does, whether that direction is indicative of any larger purpose, whether it's a morally significant direction, you might say. If the question is whether there is some larger purpose to being human, you have to look at the process that created human beings and inspect that for signs of larger purpose. And evolution by natural selection seems to be that process.

WIE: Can you give us a brief overview of Darwin's theory?

RW: Well, of all the important scientific theories, it's perhaps the simplest. In a certain sense, it can't help but be true; it's tautologically true. I don't mean tautological in a bad sense, necessarily, but the basic idea is: Those genetically based traits that are most conducive to getting genes into subsequent generations are those traits that will accumulate in the course of evolution. With some human psychological traits, it's obvious why they were favored by natural selection. For example, take the hunger drive. If you imagine ancestors that weren't inclined to eat, you are imagining ancestors that actually wouldn't become ancestors. They would die before they could reproduce. And it's the same with the sex drive. It's clear how lust would help you get genes into future generations.

WIE: You also speak about cultural evolution. Could you explain what that is?

RW: If genetic evolution is the selective transmission of genetic information, then cultural evolution is the selective transmission of non-genetic information: everything from technologies to religious doctrines to songs. Everything, every kind of information that goes from person to person and isn't genes, is part of cultural evolution. And because people are selective in what they transmit—I may hear a song and choose not to whistle it or choose to whistle it—the collective body of cultural information changes all the time. And that's what got us from the Stone Age to where we are now.

WIE: Obviously, the difference between the Stone Age and where we are now is enormous. What is it that has created this difference? What kinds of principles seem to be at work?

RW: One thing I talked about in Nonzero is how we got to a kind of globally interconnected and interdependent society. I contend that the way we got there is that people have this penchant for playing what are called "nonzero sum games," that is, potentially cooperative games. And for that reason they have, over the ages, invented technologies that have allowed them to play these games on a larger and larger scale. And that's especially responsible for the evolution of information technologies. While it's a very incremental and slow process, the fact is that you can trace the lineage of a laptop computer back to the invention of writing in ancient Sumer or ancient India or the Americas, and further.

Cultural evolution is a very gradual thing, but over time it becomes momentous in its implications. So that today, we are all involved in these kinds of nonzero sum games with people halfway around the world, and we're not even aware of the various cooperative webs that we're embedded in.

Cooperation and Cultural Evolution

WIE: Could you explain what "nonzero sum" or "nonzero sumness" is?

RW: Yes. The basic idea of a nonzero sum game is just that there doesn't have to be a winner and a loser. When you play tennis against somebody, every point is good for one player and bad for the other one. That's a zero sum game. But if you're playing doubles, then the relationship between you and the other person on your team is nonzero sum because the point can be good for both of you or bad for both of you. You are in the same boat. Your fortunes are correlated positively. So you can both come out winners—that is, both people on a doubles team—or both be losers. In most real-life situations, what you have is a mixture of nonzero sum and zero sum dynamics. Rarely are you so completely in the same boat with someone as you would be in doubles tennis. But that's where the term "nonzero sum" comes from. The main point is that in a nonzero sum game, it's usually in your self-interest to cooperate with another person, and it is in your self-interest to do something that is good for the other person. Being in a nonzero sum situation is, in a sense, a somewhat cynical basis for moral behavior, which you might consider to be a contradiction. In other words, it's a reason to worry about the welfare of other people, but it's a reason that's grounded ultimately in your own self-interest. For example, one reason you don't want to launch a nuclear war against Russia and have a bunch of Russians die is because that would probably lead to a bunch of Americans dying. That's not a really pure form of moral concern but, on the other hand, its practical upshot is to make the world better off. Its practical consequences are, in many ways, like the consequences of truly moral behavior.

WIE: One point that you made in Nonzero was about the relationship within societies between zero sum and nonzero sum dynamics. Genetic reproduction is always a zero sum game—in other words, one set of genes wins out over the others—and the drive to reproduce one's genes is at the root of so much behavior, animal and human. But, as social or cultural systems become more complex, nonzero sum behaviors often lead to a better outcome overall, making it more likely for more organisms to reproduce.

RW: Yes. There are a lot of ways that competitive dynamics have cooperative outcomes, or as you said, that zero sum dynamics can give rise to nonzero sumness. One example is certainly found in genetic evolution, if you just look at your genome. Your genome is a team of genes that cooperate in very intricate fashion. The reason they do that is because they are united in playing a cutthroat zero sum game against other organisms, or at least they were doing that during much of evolution. That's the historical reason. So, first of all, at the level of the genome, there are all these nonzero sum cooperative dynamics that are the result of zero sum competition. But then at higher levels, as you suggest, you also get cooperation among organisms that results from competition between groups of organisms.

You see this in cultural evolution as well. One of the main reasons that societies became more complicated and more elaborately cooperative over the last eight or ten thousand years is that they were competing with other societies. Now, what's interesting about the period that we're entering now, with globalization, is that at the global level of social organization, there's no longer another huge team to compete against. There's no other planet out there that we're going to fight a war with. There still is competition in the world, economic competition and so on. But as far as large, geographically distinct populations fighting against other large, geographically distinct populations, which is a big part of human history, that, I think, or at least hope, is grinding to a halt. In part that is because war is increasingly becoming a nonzero sum game, in the sense of a lose-lose game.

The point is that I think this is all a product of a basic direction of cultural evolution. I think it was in the cards that we would reach this kind of watershed in human history. It's just a very morally and spiritually interesting watershed. What happens next—whether we make big mistakes that lead to global chaos and destruction, or we usher in an era of some harmony—depends largely on whether we accurately perceive the commonality of interest among human beings around the world, and show some interest in their welfare. In that sense, it's a challenge to our level of enlightenment.

More and more, we do have the capacity to blow up or at least ruin the whole world. Our not doing so really depends on just fundamentally getting the picture. So it's a challenge intellectually, as well as morally and spiritually. And I think it's something the world has been driving toward ever since the Stone Age.

WIE: Why do you feel that it has been in the picture since the Stone Age?

RW: From assessing the evidence. In Nonzero, I make the case that the basic direction of technological evolution has been unstoppable. When you look at these key technological thresholds, like the invention of writing or the invention of farming, you find that these transitions happened independently multiple times, in societies that were not in touch with one another at the time. Okay, so there seem to have been things that were very likely to get invented. Since taking advantage of these technologies made societies stronger and able to out-compete societies that lacked these technologies, there was a very strong impetus behind the gradual accumulation of these new technologies. It's an empirical question, in that sense. It's an empirical argument I make in the book, that this was in the cards, at least in a statistical sense, in a sense of being highly likely.

WIE: So you're talking about cultural evolution happening as a result of technological innovation. Is it only due to innovation in technology?

RW: No, but I think that technology is fundamental, and in that sense—and possibly only in that sense—I'm a little bit of a Marxist. Marx stressed how changes in technology change the relations of economic production, and then other things change in reaction to that. But these other things are what later Marxists called "superstructure," whereas the technology and the relations of production are more fundamental. Those are like infrastructure.

So religion, for example, is something that Marx would consider to be largely a by-product of the deeper technological and economic imperatives. And that I agree with, but it's interesting to me that the technological and economic change has tended to drive religion toward greater and greater inclusion. In other words, we're in a period now where most people, especially in economically modern nations that are interconnected with the whole world, will say, "I think human beings everywhere have human rights. They deserve respect. They shouldn't be enslaved," and so on. That was not something people were saying ten thousand years ago. That would be an outcome of this historical process, and to me it's a very interesting one. So when I say that religion is a by-product of technological evolution, I don't mean to belittle it. In a way, this outcome is more interesting than technological evolution itself. And it is morally deeper.

Everything changes—religion changes, art changes and so on—but at least in my view, the thing that is fundamental, really, is the technological change. It's not all that's important, but I do think of it as being the prime mover and the thing whose direction is predictable in the most straightforward sense.

The Direction of Evolution

WIE: You also make the case that organic evolution has a direction.

RW: Yes, in the sense that I think the evolution of intelligent life—or the evolution of life with an intelligence, something like the human intelligence—was very likely. That's not to say that every lineage gets more and more complex all the time, by any means. But there is enough growth in complexity and intelligence in the ecosystem as a whole that sooner or later I think you are very likely to wind up with a species smart enough to set in motion this second process of cultural evolution in a big way, which is what our species did.

As with the argument about direction in cultural evolution, this is controversial. People disagree about it. But at the same time, there is some factual basis for the argument. For example, multicellular life was invented independently multiple times, and a number of other key thresholds in the evolution of intelligence were passed through independently more than once. And that's evidence that, sooner or later, they were fairly likely to happen. That's evidence that there was a fairly strong evolutionary dynamic behind them. Of course, you can't go back and replay the tape. We can't conduct the whole several-billion-year-old experiment over again. So the arguments will always be somewhat speculative.

The question is: How likely was it that greater complexity and intelligence would arise? And there I would not just point to the fact of the growth of complexity and intelligence. Again, I would say we have to look at the dynamics that got us here, and at the thresholds we had to pass through, such as multicellularity. Or little things like the grasping appendage, which was vital to our manipulation of tools, which itself then accelerated the growth of human intelligence. You look at these thresholds and try to figure out, "Why did we pass through them? How likely were we to pass through them? How many different times were these thresholds passed through independently in the course of evolution?" And that's the kind of evidence that I think is most germane to the question of how likely was the growth in complexity and intelligence.

WIE: And you believe that this entire process—the fact that these thresholds have been repeatedly passed through in evolution to create greater intelligence and greater complexity—occurs as a result of natural selection.

RW: I think that you can satisfactorily explain this in terms of natural selection, yes. We can even explain something as ephemeral as "love." We do have this genetically based capacity for empathy, for love, for affection, for compassion. The first time this showed up in our lineage is in the love of kin. Then, subsequent to the invention of love, an evolutionary dynamic known as "reciprocal altruism" kicked in. That's what gives us the capacity to feel pretty deep affection for people we're not related to, and to build up bonds of trust with them and feel real compassion and real empathy for them. So, I think there are fewer and fewer fundamental challenges to the theory of natural selection, in that sense.

And, by the way, the dynamic of kin selection, which gave birth to love, is something that has manifested itself repeatedly, independently. So if you accept the idea that a fairly complexly sentient organism was bound to show up sooner or later, you have to include that the likelihood of the evolution of love was fairly high, too. Because in complexly sentient beings, the dynamic of kin selection is manifested in love.

But I'd like to get back to your question. While I think natural selection provides a satisfactory account for this, I do think there is still one massive mystery, and that is why consciousness, or sentience, exists at all, why there is subjective experience. And I don't think many evolutionary biologists appreciate the depth of that mystery; although some great ones do, like John Maynard Smith. The more I say about that, the less progress we'll make. Consciousness is just one of those things that as soon as you start talking about it, all the people who disagree with you get turned off and don't even understand what you're saying, and all the people who already agree with you don't need further enlightenment, so why go on? It's just—

WIE: Let's go there.

RW: Well, don't say I didn't warn you.

The Problem of Consciousness

WIE: I found it very intriguing in Nonzero that you talk about consciousness as a mystery that science, I think you say, can't solve. It hasn't, certainly.

RW: It certainly hasn't solved the mystery and it's hard to imagine that it would, in part because consciousness doesn't have what scientifically explicable phenomena need, which is public observability. Anything that is to be explained scientifically has to be something that you can point to—point to the physical phenomena and say, "See, I'm predicting that it will behave like this when you do that." Consciousness, by definition, doesn't fall into that category. Now, of course, you can register brain waves and you can do MRIs, and you can look at various physical manifestations of consciousness, but by definition that's not consciousness itself. Consciousness itself is a subjective experience. So it's very hard to imagine how science would really go about tackling the fundamental problem of consciousness. In any event, I certainly don't think it has handled it successfully to date. And there are too many people who are under the impression that science has answered all the important questions in the world or can answer them.

One reason I think it's fascinating that science can't handle this question, at least so far, is that the existence of subjective experience, of consciousness, is the source of all the meaning in the world, so far as I can tell. If I told you that there was a planet out there that looks just like Earth, and there are these things that look just like people, and they walk around doing exactly the things we do, and they utter phrases and stuff, but they have no subjective experience, it isn't like anything to be them. They are zombies. You would probably think, "Well, who cares what happens to that planet?" And I would agree. I would think, "Well, there's really nothing especially immoral about annihilating some of those creatures on that planet because we are not going to cause them any pain by doing that, and we are not going to deprive them of any future happiness or anything. So, who cares?" In my view, the whole basis of meaning and of moral significance is the fact that it is like something to be alive. And that is the one thing that, it seems to me, science cannot explain.

WIE: What role do you see consciousness playing in human evolution?

RW: Well, that's the mystery. A common view among scientists, and one that is not entirely implausible, is that consciousness is a mere side effect. It's an epiphenomenon. In other words, it really plays no role. Like when you move your hand and it makes a shadow, all the action is in the hand, not in the shadow. The shadow's not doing anything. That's what an epiphenomenon is. It's at least an easy answer to visualize clearly. I know exactly what they mean when they say that. In a way, it's intuitively attractive to me precisely because it's a clear, comprehensible answer.

So let's take the example of love: what's being selected for by natural selection is altruistic behavior. And then as it happens, the neural processes that give rise to altruistic behavior also give you the feeling of love. But that's just a kind of lucky coincidence in this view. So what's always being selected for is behavior, or the neural mechanisms governing the behavior, but the subjective experience per se is not being selected for; it is just a by-product. That is the view of consciousness as an epiphenomenon. And as I said, it's in many ways an attractive view, but it does raise the question of what consciousness is doing here if it doesn't have a function. So the epiphenomenalist position is, in a way, the scientifically most attractive view, precisely because it is so clear and doesn't force you to rethink the nature of causality.

But it does pose that one very challenging question, "Well, then, why is consciousness here if it has no function?" Now, the alternative to that, at least the main alternative as I see it, is to say that consciousness actually does play a causal role in the world. But then you are getting back to some kind of Cartesian dualism that is itself a challenge to the principles of science because science sees all the causality as residing in the material world. So one way or another, it seems to me, consciousness is this profound problem for science. Now, there are people who think they have a way around this, but I disagree. Yet, I have to add, consciousness is such a perplexing problem that I don't think anyone's view deserves to be dismissed out of hand. I don't know of anybody who seems to have the problem totally under control.

As I see it, there is really no way around consciousness being a fundamental mystery to science. If you take the Cartesian dualist approach, then it's a real problem for science at the most fundamental level, because it challenges the whole basic assumption of science that all causally significant things are happening in the material, publicly observable world. If you take the epiphenomenalist approach, it's reduced to not necessarily a fundamental problem, but a really perplexing question.

Suggestions of Purpose

WIE: Let's talk about purpose and evolution. You're very clear that evolution has direction. What are you saying about purpose?

RW: Well, I'm saying that the direction is at least suggestive of purpose but at the same time I'm conceding that that's all it can be. Suggestive is the most it can be because whether something has purpose is just a very difficult question. Unless you know that it was designed and you know what the designer was, you can never be sure whether something has purpose. You can make an educated guess, based on the way it looks.

In order to confidently assert the purpose of something, you have to know what the thing or process was that designed it. And so, too, with any human artifact. You can look at a car and be pretty confident that it's designed to move along the road, but the reason you are 100 percent sure is because you know who designed it and why.

Now when we look at the process of evolution, we're in the dark about the designer. That's the question we are grappling with here. If you accept directionality in evolution, you can say things like, "Well, like an animal, evolution seems to develop in a certain direction." Just as an animal matures in a certain direction, evolution seems to develop in a certain direction. And in fact, the combinations of genetic and cultural evolution have led the entire planet to seem increasingly like an integrated organism. Every decade it seems more like that. Every year the Internet seems more like it's drawing people into a giant planetary brain.

So you can point to these patterns that are suggestive of a larger purpose, but you just can't say for sure. My only point is that a scientific worldview gives you more evidence of some larger purpose at work than most scientists concede. And you can argue about what the purpose is, and you can argue about what the nature of the designer would be. It could be that some intelligence set evolution in motion and then went to another universe or something. But I think there is more evidence of purpose than most people concede.

WIE: So what you are saying is that the direction is suggestive of purpose, but that, by definition, if there is a purpose, we cannot know it scientifically.

RW: We can't know it scientifically, but I do think we can argue intelligently about it on the basis of scientific evidence. In other words, there are facts that are relevant to the question, even if it will forever remain a matter of speculation. For example, whether it's going to rain tomorrow is a matter of speculation. We cannot be 100 percent sure, but there are facts relevant to the question. There are facts that make it more likely or less likely that it's going to rain. So it's in that sense an empirical question, even if we can't pronounce on it with 100 percent certainty. And I think the purpose of evolution is that kind of question.

WIE: I also understand that the position you hold is not the same as the "intelligent design theorists," those who argue that there is some intelligent force or creativity that is at work in the unfolding of the greater complexity of life. How is what you are saying different?

RW: Well, they are saying that natural selection is not adequate to account for the growth in complexity. And I'm saying it is.

WIE: Okay, you are saying that the mechanism of natural selection is enough to account for it all.

RW: Yes. Now, as I said, why life seems to be accompanied by sentience, by subjective experience, is a mystery in its own right. But once you grant that life does have that property, then I think natural selection can account for the rest. I'm not sure that I'm being clear.

WIE: Well, actually that's very interesting. You said, "Once you grant that life has sentience." In other words, if life itself has sentience, then natural selection makes sense, and then you can account for everything by natural selection.

RW: What I mean by that is, for example, animals ferociously attacking other animals is accompanied by feelings of hatred, animals affectionately caring for one another is accompanied by feelings of affection, putting your hand in an open flame is accompanied by pain, and so on. Once you accept all that, then natural selection can account for the evolution of human love, human hatred, and so on because it can account for the behaviors that are correlated with those things.

But, as I said earlier, why there is that initial correlation between certain kinds of behavior and certain kinds of sentience, or why sentience exists at all, remains a mystery. So when I say that natural selection can account for everything about being human, when I say it can account for love, and remorse, and compassion, and so on, what I actually mean is that it can account for the behaviors that are accompanied by those feelings. And the existence of feeling in and of itself, the existence of sentience, is a question that in my mind is beyond the scope of natural selection to explain.

But still, there is a clear-cut difference between me and the "intelligent design" people. They don't think you can even get the behaviors out of natural selection. They don't think you can have an organism smart enough to design a 747 produced by natural selection. Leaving aside the question of whether there has to be conscious experience associated with designing a 747, they just don't think you can get the brain cells.

Conscious Evolution

WIE: Do you know who Sri Aurobindo was?

RW: He was in India early in the twentieth century, right?

WIE: Yes, he was part of the independence movement in India. He was also a philosopher and a spiritual sage, and he was nominated for a Nobel prize in poetry—quite a remarkable human being.

RW: I know very little about him. I was just talking to Michael Murphy at Esalen, who is a devotee of his, I think.

WIE: Yes, Michael Murphy does respect Sri Aurobindo immensely. Both Aurobindo and the French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, with whose work I know you're very familiar, brought an evolutionary dimension to spiritual life. So I wanted to read you a quote from Sri Aurobindo and get your response to it:

We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true, and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life. As there, so here, the impulse exists more or less obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties... The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the God. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is.... If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.

RW: It is a lot to take in. It does sound very Teilhardian in places. It's the kind of speculation that I think scientists should be more open to and less threatened by. Again, if you think clearly about the limitations of science and the difficulty of the problem of consciousness and so on, you have more respect for those kinds of speculations than you would otherwise.

He says evolution doesn't explain why mind evolves, why mind comes out of matter. I think natural selection actually does explain why brains come out of matter and why brains look just as they do, but if, by "mind," you mean the subjective experience, then I think he's right. As for the speculation that the human species is—I don't know how exactly you would put it—the medium of the creation of something larger and in some sense better than us, something that might merit the term "Divine," I think that's the kind of speculation whose legitimacy you appreciate if you really step back and look at the big story that science is telling. If you step back and really look at the movement from the very origin of life to this giant interconnected world we have now, I think you see the kind of directionality that is consistent with that kind of spiritual scenario.

Now at the same time, science certainly can't confirm a scenario like that. But I do think that science is more spiritually suggestive than a lot of scientists acknowledge, and that what you just read is one very plausible line of suggestion.

WIE: At the end of both The Moral Animal and Nonzero, you speak of our responsibility as human beings to evolve consciously, to embrace the moral implications of what it means to be conscious beings on this planet at this time. You said earlier that if we could get the picture of what's actually happening now for us human beings on this planet, then something could happen. But if our brains have been created to respond to an environment that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago, then what even makes it possible for us to be able to do that—to comprehend such a vast picture?

RW: In a sense, it does call for transcendence, in the sense of going beyond your natural instincts, beyond basic self-interest. And this transcendence can be of a purely rational sort. In other words, you can just size the situation up and say, for example, "Oh, I get it. If millions of Muslims around the world are mired in poverty and hate America, that's bad for me. Maybe I should do something about it." That's a purely rational version of transcendence. But there is another type of transcendence. If you want to go further and exercise the kind of spiritual discipline that gives you a deeper, more heartfelt appreciation for the plight of people who are very different from you, then that would be a different kind of transcendence. I think both of them are to be commended. If you can manage both of them, then you are to be commended, too. I honestly don't know to what extent the second kind of transcendence is necessary. I certainly think that the sheerly rational kind is important. Policy makers, for example, need to understand the interconnectedness of the world and understand that the welfare of Americans is positively correlated with the welfare of people halfway around the world. That's important. But I don't know if just this rational transcendence is going to be enough. And so, although I think they're both good, of course, it's best when they're symmetrical. So, ideally, we would have both kinds of enlightenment.

WIE: Can you say more about that? What is our role as individuals in this evolutionary event that's happening right now?

RW: I guess at a mundane level, I'd like to see us all conscious of the need to, if nothing else, keep the experiment going. That is to say, to sustain the living world and give it a chance to evolve further. I think that doing that will require the insight that the fortunes of people around the planet are more and more interconnected, so that more and more people really can do well by doing good. Just keeping the experiment going, that is to say, sustaining a fairly harmonious existence on this planet for human beings, has this morally rich dimension in itself because it does involve more and more thinking about the welfare of others. Then beyond that, it may ultimately have the kind of spiritual/theological payoff that Sri Aurobindo is referring to. There may be something divine that's in the process of being created, but that we may not live to see. But still our descendants presumably will be part of it in some sense.

WIE: In Nonzero you hinted that the evolutionary future might involve something happening at a global level—perhaps a giant planetary brain—could you say more about that?

RW: What I mean is, who knows? Five hundred years from now, maybe the whole kind of techno-social organism on this planet will be sufficiently cohesive to have a unified field of subjective awareness. Maybe it will be like something to be Planet Earth, in a sense. But you know, fifty years ago, well before the Internet, when Teilhard de Chardin coined the term "noosphere," which he called the giant thinking envelope of the earth, he coined that term in conscious relation to the term "biosphere." The idea was very much that the biosphere is akin to the body of the planet and the noosphere the mind of the planet. Well, if he's right that, more and more, there is such a thing as the collective mind of the planet, and that human beings are kind of neurons in some giant global brain, then maybe someday the planet will, in some sense, have a unified consciousness.

WIE: But I think you are right that it will take a conscious effort to think about our interconnectedness for something truly to change.

RW: Yes, although some people would be alienated by that kind of scenario, by the idea of some kind of transcendent societal awareness slowly coming into existence.

WIE: We have no idea what that would be like.

RW: No, that's true. We don't. I think the concern that people would have is that it would involve a very mechanized, automatic life for individual human beings. Life could be very routinized, whether the mechanism of control was centralized, in a fascistic way, or decentralized. It could still be routinized for the individual humans. I mean, who knows? What scares people is a scenario where we'll be completely subordinate to technology and will slowly lose our freedom to it. I don't know—this is all kind of the twilight zone—but I do think that if we want to be living a nice life thirty years from now and we want our descendants to be living a nice life, fifty or seventy years from now we really have no choice but to increasingly acknowledge the interests and needs of people around the world, and increasingly recognize that we have common interests, common policy interests, and so on.

WIE: To come together in some greater way.

RW: Yes, as we are doing incrementally, without really realizing it.

WIE: What is your hopeful prognosis?

RW: My hopeful prognosis for the future, generally, of the species? It's that we'll become aware that the basic direction of history has been to make relations among people more nonzero sum, and among polities, more nonzero sum. And we'll become aware that we're entering a time when war is more and more a lose-lose game, and that increasingly, cooperation is the only alternative to a very dismal future.