The 21st Century Learning Initiative Blog » The Evolution of Despair


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It was 14 years since Time Magazine published The Evolution of Despair, by Robert Wright, the rapidly rising star of the new discipline of evolutionary psychology. [It] attracted great attention. As an evolutionary psychologist, he quoted the Unabomber – the man who, as his personal demonstration against the dehumanising aspects of modern life, conducted a seven-year bombing spree across America in the 1980s: “I attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved.”

There is, Wright wrote, a gentler side to human nature and it is this which seems to be increasingly the victim of repression; “The problem with modern life is less that we are over-socialised,” he wrote, but that we are under-socialised – or that too little of our ‘social’ contact is social in the natural, intimate sense of the word.”

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