Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

I’m not saying that social anxiety isn’t in any sense a product of natural selection. The ancestral environment—the environment of our evolution—featured lots of social interaction, and this interaction had great consequence for our genes. If you had low social status and few friends, that cut your chances of spreading your genes, so impressing people mattered, even if PowerPoint wasn’t the thing you impressed them with. Similarly, if your offspring didn’t thrive socially, that boded ill for their reproductive prospects, and hence for your genes. So genes inclining us toward anxiety about our social prospects and our progeny’s social prospects seem to have become part of the human gene pool. In this sense our social anxieties can be considered “natural.” But they’re operating in a very different environment from the environment they were “designed” for, and this fact may explain why they’re often unproductive, sponsoring illusions that are of no value at all. Thus can we have beliefs—about, for example, the near-certainty of impending disaster—that are false both in the literal and the pragmatic sense: they aren’t true, and they aren’t good for us. If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.