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The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

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Robert Wright
Robert Wright

Robert Wright, born in 1957, is an accomplished journalist known for his work in politics, science, and culture. His career has spanned various fields, and he is recognized for his in-depth investigative reporting and unique analytical perspective. Wright's work often delves into complex social and philosophical issues. more

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“Much of our reasoning about human life and other beings on this planet now rests on the theory of natural selection. Most educated people believe (at least vaguely) in the scientific principle that the living organisms on earth have evolved over billions of years from other organisms that were unlike them, and are now mostly extinct. When this story is told of humanity, it wholly eliminates the role of personal meaning and human intentions in the development of societies and the lives of individuals. The ‘master molecule’ of the gene, falsely endowed with an autonomous power, is most often used to explain personal desires, intentions, and actions. The term ‘gene’ or ‘adaptation’ has replaced intention, purpose, and meaning in most psychological accounts of the ways in which people thrive or fail to thrive in their everyday lives. All of our struggles—such as finding a mate or becoming a compassionate person—can now be recast in terms of their supposed ‘advantages’ of leaving the greatest number of offspring.”

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“The more than 2,500 respondents to the WCS that I constructed while at the University of Missouri reported that they “occasionally” experienced the pain of a loved one at a distance. In Stevenson’s review of 160 published simulpathity cases, one-third involved a parent and child. Friends and acquaintances were in- volved in about 28 percent. Husband and wife pairs were involved in about 14 per- cent and siblings about 15 percent. The similar relatively high percentages of par- ent-child and friend-acquaintance simulpathity suggests that emotional bonds, rather than genetic similarities, facilitate these interactions. Stevenson’s reports are well-documented by follow-up interviews with both the coincider and the people who witnessed the event. I decided to name this coincidence pattern simulpathity, from the Latin word simul, which means “simultaneous,” and the Greek root pathy, which means both “suffering” and “feeling,” as in the words sympathy and empathy. With sympathy (“suffering together”), the sympathetic person is aware of the suffering of the other. With simulpathity, the person involved is usually not consciously aware of the suffering of the other (except for those pairs with whom this shared pain is a regular occurrence). Only later is the simultaneity of the distress recognized. No explanatory mechanism is implied.”

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“Birds may commemorate some human deaths. On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old security guard, killed fortynine people and wounded fifty-three others in a mass shooting inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Orlando Police Department officers shot and killed him after a three-hour standoff. In a subsequent vigil, the names of the forty-nine victims were being read as a flock of birds flew by. A photographer noticed them and snapped a photo. Later, she counted the birds in the photo. There were forty-nine. The photographer showed other people and asked them to count. “We were all stunned,” she said. A spokesman for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, where the vigil was held, said that the center had not released the birds during the vigil. The mind was the collective and individual grief of the mourners of forty-nine deaths. The object was the forty-nine birds.”

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“A sane psychological religion can be constructed, and Jungian psychology is the best route to it. Jordan Peterson should be using his undoubted intellect to create a new religion for a new Age – a psychological religion, by which is meant a religion that is predicated on the work of the great psychologists. Jungian psychology will of course be at its core. The last thing we need is the rebirth of Judeo-Christianity. Rather than draw archetypes from the past, which lock us into the past, we need archetypes to lead us into the future. We need the world’s greatest psychologists working on constructing the healthiest, sanest religion there has ever been, one which changes human psychology forever and makes us the masters of our own fate.”

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“Two days after the German occupation, my mother called the pediatrician. "Would you come to see Gabi?" she requested. "He has been crying almost without stop since yesterday morning." "I'll come, of course," the doctor replied, "but I should tell you: all of my Jewish babies are crying.”

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