What is Robert Wright’s basic view?
Robert Wright is reliably vulgar. He shows us how it’s done in a throwaway little piece in The American Prospect – one that’s smug, thought-free and pandering all at once. Rather like a piece of political advertising.
He didn’t like nerds when he was in high school. (No, I bet he didn’t.) Then somebody told him about B F Skinner.
As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.
Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller.
And I stopped trying to read it. What a cheap mind, what an impoverished vocabulary, what a stale way of writing and thinking.
He became “an ardent Skinnerian.” He would. If you don’t read many books or learn about many ideas, you’re vulnerable to bad ones. If he had known more nerds in high school he might be a less bumptious writer today.
He sums up with a punchy final paragraph.
I’ve held on to the essential spirit of Skinner — which, I now see, was also the spirit of my father. By that I don’t mean anti-intellectualism as much as a bedrock pragmatism. Got a problem? Analyze it as cleanly as possible, and then, having seen its roots, solve it. And don’t waste time dropping the names of any fancy French philosophers. This is still my basic view.
Good, isn’t it – he’s so pragmatic and so butch that he hasn’t got time for pronouns, but he does have enough time to sneer at the very idea of French philosophers – “fancy” ones at that. He sounds like a parody of Archie Bunker.
I didn’t find it objectionable, just disposable. And, if may say, just the kind of crap too often pointed to from the third column of A&L Daily, Stanley Fish’s home away from home.
I read the same article this morning and it irritated me as much as it does you.
(Google forced me to log in as vivepablo, but I’m Amos.)
Well, it’s precious how he spends most of the sheet talking up Skinner, then sneers at name-dropping. Still, the article is so shallow (and bland, really) that I can’t get worked up over it, any more than I can fathom being frustrated by a dog chasing its tail. “Sucks to be him,” I guess?
The Moral Animal was a great book.
This was a bad article. Not sure he deserves this much venom. I saw him speak once. He’s pretty low-key and intellectual acting…
Oh, I’m no Robert Wright basher. Along with The Moral Animal, I loved, for the most part, The Evolution of God, right up until the end, where he engages is some very bizarre and perplexing Templeton whoring. I came away with a much improved, and altered, understanding of history, and I recommend the book. He is a quirky character, though. (Ah, should be we all.)
I was saying Ophelia went a little overboard with the “reliably vulgar” comment. Absolutely coorect that he wrote a throwaway piece.
I would just save my ammo…
Well, I think Robert Wright is, in the main, usually wrong, usually too glib, and usually to willing to suck up to whomever he perceives as his Allies This Week. But I don’t think this essay was that bad, Ophelia, and I think you impute to him unfairly judgments that he’s actually parodying in his descriptions.
I say that with love,
J
I hated ‘The Evolution of God’, I’m afraid… It basically reproduced the Xtian conceit about how Xtianity discovered the real God of Love, coming up with an improved (or evolved) and loving version of irascible old Jehovah, it seemed to me; and the idea that Xtianity was a good thing because in the end it brought tolerance into the world struck me as a laugh… And I must say Wright’s latest essay gets quite as much up my nose as it does Ophelia’s.
@ Ken in comment #1: You highlight exactly why I stopped reading A&L Daily several years ago. It was brilliant when it started out: If I recall correctly, I may have even found my way to B&W from there. But it went further and further downhill, collating more and more links to unmemorable or memorable-for-all-the-wrong reasons essays, until I no longer found it an interesting or worthwhile place to visit at all.
As for Wright, I generally don’t bother reading anything with his byline anymore: Glib, shallow, and facile are among the more positive adjectives that his essays bring to my mind — and this piece has only re-confirmed my prior decision to avoid him, and added a few new adjectives to my usual assessment.
“Got a problem? Analyze it as cleanly as possible, and then, having seen its roots, solve it.”
Sounds very much like:
“If a problem comes along
You must whip it”
Although quite how one can analyse a problem cleanly and find its roots based on an ideology of maximal ignorance is left as an exercise for the (non-)reader.
Actually, I prefer ‘if you come to a fork in the road, take it’. From Yogi Berra I believe.
But I digress. My first and only unit of psychology was a fascinating revelation to me, and I particularly enjoyed the lectures on perception by the then Prof Bill O’Neill. But then a third of the way through the course the behaviourists moved in on it, and I totally lost interest. As did a whole bunch of others. So I finished up studying other things.
But Skinner did make one enormous contribution to understanding. Though to my knowledge it was never his intention, he showed the huge power one person can have over an animal or human subject if that human is in a position to take control over allocation of one of its vital resources: food and/or water particularly. (I don’t think they ever bothered to try for control via control of air.)
This enabled a behaviourist experimenter to induce animals to do a whole range of things they would never normally do.
To my knowledge, the enormous social implications of their work still elude them to this day.
> If you don’t read many books or learn about many ideas, you’re vulnerable to bad ones.
Brilliant! So true, and put succinctly and cleanly and…just perfectly.
That’s what ought to be plastered up on the sides of busses.
I think that’s Jonathan Haidt’s argument.
I read the article and wondered, at the time, why anyone would bother publishing it. I haven’t read any of Robert Wright’s books, and, despite the occasional plaudits here, don’t intend to. I simply can’t stand his simpering way. When he speaks there’s always an edge almost of tears in his voice which I find grating, and his face looks like he’s perpetually flinching. He may have disliked nerds in high school, but he is a nerd of rather modest intellectual ability. I agree with George: glib and shallow are the words that come first to mind. ‘Uncomprehending’ belongs here too. But knowing that he devoured Skinner is very revealing. Perhaps that’s why he seems so unnatural, as though he were in a Skinner box, just responding to stimuli. Long and short of it, though: can’t stand the man.
You’ve got to learn to say what you mean, Eric!
Yes, I know, I’ve always been rather retiring and shy. One day, I will learn to just come out with it, without apology!
This Robert Wright would be the same numpty who got himself all tangled up in “the evolution of doG” and claimed that doG and the electron were comparable, in part because the existence of the electron had, supposedly, never been proved? Okay then. Just so we know!
Actually what I like about ALdaily is that I periodically get hit with articles I strongly disagree with, as well as ones that I like. I never know what I’m going to find.
I don’t think there’s a Gnubasher I despise more than Wright. He’s the quintessential Gnubasher hypocrite—guilty of all the unattractive things he says Gnus do: arrogance, unfairness, and reductiveness. He preaches tolerance-n-understanding while exhibiting rather cavalier intolerance of new atheism. I can’t even concentrate on Wright for too long because I get all worked up. I need to lie down for a spell.
This article may have been written by an annoying person, but I’m afraid I don’t see what’s wrong with the content of these quotations. What’s wrong with Skinner’s ideas? Why are they bad? What’s wrong with analysing problems and then solving them? Isn’t contintental philosophy something that new atheists ought to be wary of? Doesn’t the analytic tradition yield more genuine wisdom?
@17…tell that to Ted Bundy (about the existence of the electron, that is)…
@11…actually, Yogi was being perfectly accurate in his description. He lived in Glen Cove at the time, which has a number of streets that fork and then merge back together a ways later. So, didn’t matter which fork you took, you’d get to his house nonetheless. (I know, a little bit of trivia that now will NEVER leave your brain).
Andy Dufresne (any relation to Lac Dufresne?) – you will of course have to close the drapes as well – strong light can be very upsetting at such a time. A little weak camomile tea may help the nerves some! And absolutely NO visitors!
I really liked Wrights book Three Scientists and Their Gods. Mostly I liked it for the part about Ed Fredkin. Wright also did a very interesting interview with Dan Dennett that you can see on YouTube, though Wright himself comes across as a bit clueless.
Ben M:
As you probably know, the three continental thinkers whom Wright disdains, Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre, are all atheists: Nietzche’s “The Antichrist” is one of the most powerful attacks on Christianity around. In any case, isn’t it provincial, narrow-minded and smug to dismiss all French philosophy off-hand, as Wright does? What would one say if a French philosopher were to mock all Anglo-Saxon philosophy and to jeer at, say, Mill, Russell and Rawl? Maybe Wright calls his French fries “freedom fries”.
One more for:
I might not have found it objectionable enough to object to (or I might have – I do hate glib reverse snobbery about books and ideas) if it hadn’t been by Robert Wright. But it was by Robert Wright.
A&L Daily might have slipped a bit over the years, but their motto is still a great anti-accommodationist jab: Veritas Odit Moras (Truth hates delay)
So, come on accommodationists, stop making truth sad and just admit that science and religion don’t play well together, epistemologically. You can say it as nicely as you please, but for crying out loud, just admit it.
Robert Wright can’t be very good at analysis if he can’t see the superior utility of the concept of the electron, proven or not, to the concept of “God.”