There is a lesson here not just for policymakers but also for the rest of us. “It is human nature always to want a little more,” writes the psychologist Timothy Miller in the recent book How to Want What You Have, perhaps the first self-help book based explicitly on evolutionary psychology. “People spend their lives honestly believing that they have almost enough of whatever they want. Just a little more will put them over the top; then they will be contented forever.” This is a built-in illusion, Miller notes, engrained in our minds by natural selection.
The illusion was designed to keep us constantly striving, adding tiny increments to the chances that our genes would get into the next generation. Yet in a modern environment–which, unlike the ancestral environment, features contraception–our obsession with material gain rarely has that effect. Besides, why should any of us choose to pursue maximum genetic proliferation–or relentless material gain, or anything else–just because that is high on the agenda of the process that designed the human mind? Natural selection, for better or worse, is our creator, but it isn’t God; the impulses it implanted into our minds aren’t necessarily good, and they aren’t wholly beyond resisting.
Part of Miller’s point is that the instinctive but ultimately fruitless pursuit of More–the 60-hour workweeks, the hour a month spent perusing the Sharper Image catalog–keeps us from indulging what Darwin called “the social instincts.” The pursuit of More can keep us from better knowing our neighbors, better loving our kin-in general, from cultivating the warm, affiliative side of human nature whose roots science is just now starting to fathom.
—Robert Wright in a 1995 cover article in Time Magazine entitled “The Evolution of Despair”. I bumped into this this week while working on a teaching and scrounging through some old sermon files. It’s appropriateness is, I think, quite evident in our time. Not especially this line also in the essay: we are designed to seek trusting relationships and to feel uncomfortable in their absence–KSH.
Philippians 4:11
Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.
You beat me to the punch, Dcn Dale. Good quote.
This is a very poor perspective and not biblical. It is not “natural selection” which causes the search for more.
It is a longing for the kingdom of heaven which we don’t have – a desire put into us by God himself. If we don’t long for the more of heaven, we pretty much die.
Contentment is not staying the same, it is an understanding of who that contentment comes from. Contentment is a person – Jesus – not in things.
Society says to us that we can fill this desire for more by adding things to our lives. The only way to get the more need fileed is through a relationship with God. One of the paradoxes we face is that when are complete in Jesus, the need for more is fulfilled, but this is not complete in our lifetimes and if we are complacent (another poor substitute for contentment) we are not content.
to Kendall’s point – again poorly made – the realtionship we need to pursue is that with Jesus. A realtionship with our neighbors leaves us unfulfilled. A relationship wth jesus allows our earthly relationships to be more fulfiling.
Yeah, it’s about relationships, but a relationship with the creator, God, His son and the Holy Spirit.