ABSTRACT
There is something deeply amiss in human lives, in the human psyche, at the end of the second millennium. People who live in the (post) modern world too often live socially isolated, despiritualized lives, made anxious by overwhelming commitments. Phenomenal numbers of people find themselves aimless and without purpose, feeling that the life they lead is not what their body, mind, and spirit were designed to negotiate. Such a diagnosis is not all that difficult to make when one suffers or watches others suffer from debilitating depression and perpetual anxiety-the fashionable diseases of (post) modernity. When anthropologists study so-called "primitive" tribes people of Samoa, New Guinea, or the rain forests of South America, they often don't find mental or physical evidence of depression or anxiety. In contrast to such peoples, the inhabitants of contemporary Western societies have in their electronic isolation lost trust in one another, found social relations empty, and been stripped of the affiliative aspects of our cultural heritagelove, generosity, empathy, remorse, affection, etc. . . . Contemporary Western human beings live in (as the Unibomber argues) "conditions radically different from those under which (we) evolved" (Wright, 1995, p. 50). Evolutionary psychologists label the Unibomber's thesis "mismatch theory"—a social psychological approach that analyzes the maladies emanating from the differences between the contemporary environment and the ancestral environment-the one, proponents argue, for which human beings were designed.
