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As the evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has noted, television can also distort our self-perception. Being a socially competitive species, we naturally compare ourselves with people we see, which meant, in the ancestral environment, measuring ourselves against fellow villagers and usually finding at least one facet of life where we excel. But now we compare our lives with "the fantasy lives we see on television," Nesse writes in the recent book Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, written with the eminent evolutionary biologist George Williams. "Our own wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters can seem profoundly inadequate by comparison. So we are dissatisfied with them and even more dissatisfied with ourselves." (And, apparently, with our standard of living. During the 1950s, various American cities saw theft rates jump in the particular years that broadcast television was introduced.)
Relief from TV's isolating and at times depressing effects may come from more communal technologies. The inchoate Internet is already famous for knitting congenial souls together. And as the capacity of phone lines expands, the Net may allow us to, say, play virtual racketball with a sibling or childhood friend in a distant city. But at least in its current form, the Net brings no visual (much less tactile) contact, and so doesn't fully gratify the social machinery in our minds. More generally the Net adds to the information overload, whose psychological effects are still unknown but certainly aren't wholly benign.
This idea that modern society is dangerously asocial would surprise Freud. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he lamented the tension between crude animal impulses and the dictates of society. Society, he said, tells us to cooperate with one another, indeed, even to "love thy neighbor as thyself"; yet by our nature, we are tempted to exploit our neighbor, "to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]." The Unabomber, too, in his mode aas armchair psychologist, celebrates our "WILD nature" and complains that in modern society "we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other." This sort of cramping of our natural selves, he opines, creates "oversocialized" people He seems to agree with Freud's claim that "primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct."
Yet evolutionary psychology suggests that primitive man knew plenty of "restrictions of instinct." True, hatred is part of our innate social repertoire, and in other ways as well we are naturally crude. But the restraint of crude impulses is also part of our nature. Indeed, the "guilt" that Freud never satisfactorily explained is one built-in restrainer. By design, it discourages us from, say, neglecting kin through unbridled egoism, or imperiling friendships in the heat of anger--or, at the very least, it goads us to make amends after such imperiling, once we've cooled down. Certainly modern society may burden us unduly with guilt. After erupting in anger toward an acquaintance, we may not see him or her for weeks, whereas in the ancestral environment we might have reconciled in short order. Still, feeling guilty about spasms of malice is no invention of modern civilization.