NONZERO: The Logic of Human Destiny.

• Author: Judis, John B.
• Position: Review

NONZERO: The Logic of Human Destiny

by Robert Wright Pantheon, $27.50

FOR THE FIRST HALF OF THIS century, if not longer, to be an intellectual meant to be concerned with the meaning of life and history. Darwin, Freud, and Marx loomed large. Today, there seems to be little search for transcendence, and the meaning of history has become a question of whether the Dow will break 35,000. Robert Wright is a notable exception to these trends. As I learned when we were colleagues at The New Republic five years ago, he is interested in, even obsessed with, the big questions. His last book, The Moral Animal, was about the nature of humanity: how our animal pasts still live within us, not only as the lascivious and murderous id, but as impetus to what Wright called "reciprocal altruism." His new book, Nonzero, is even more ambitious. It is about whether history has a direction. It is a more difficult read than The Moral Animal, but it is well worth it. I am not qualified to comment on Wright's biological speculations, but I can say that his theory of history is defensible and provocative, and as far as I can tell, a genuine advance in our understanding of how we came to be, and where we are headed.

The attempt to devise a purely secular theory of history dates from Vico's cyclical New Science of History in 1725, but the attempt to envision history as a progressive succession of stages dates from Hegel's Philosophy of History in 1830. Hegel envisaged history as the unfolding of a world-spirit, divided within itself and in conflict through time, until mankind reached a point where consciousness, embodied in man, could achieve freedom through mastery of itself and nature. Marx put Hegel's theory in materialist terms: history, driven by class struggle and revolution, would lead finally, through the technological subjugation of nature, to a prosperous society in which human beings would no longer be divided into classes and thrown into war and revolution, but would control their own destiny. They would be truly free. Marx's vision of communism was fanciful, but his and Hegel's theory of history as stages of progress triggered often unwittingly by war and revolution has not been superseded.

Since Marx and Hegel, political philosophers from Spencer and Croce to Lenin and Spengler produced variations of these early theories, but after World War II, the effort was largely abandoned because it became identified with the nightmares of Nazism and Stalinism...