Just for today, don’t make your primary aim to be unselfish, make your primary aim to love. Those are two different things. And CS Lewis, we’re in this journey together, passage to wisdom Lewis rice in a number of different places about how in our day, often the virtue of love or charity from the new Testament has been replaced by the idea of being unselfish. Now it’s not bad to be unself he’s way better to be unselfish than it is to be selfish, but unselfishness by its nature is a negative activity. I’m trying to refrain from doing things simply because I want to do them. But love by its nature is positive. I am seeking the good of the other. I am willing and praying and working for that. Good and trying to avoid something negative often has problems attached to it. I have a friend who knows a lot about golf and he says, it’s never good to have a negative aim.
Like if you say, uh, this shit, I’m gonna try really hard, not to slice it to the right. You may end up hooking it to the left when you avoid doing one bad thing, there’s lots of other bad things that you might do. Whereas when you aim at doing the one really good thing, you’ll be moving in the right direction. Aim at love, not just that. This gets to a much deeper issue about human nature and how we understand the human condition. Uh, 45 years ago, Richard Dawkins wrote a book called the selfish gene. It was voted by the Royal society, the most influential science book ever. And it has as its core, an idea which is often present, uh, in our day in secular perspectives, in what Maryland Robinson calls Darwinism, she distinguishes between, uh, evolution. The idea that organism species change, that there is natural selection evolution with a small versus Darwinism, which she says is a philosophy that claims to refute religion and to provide some kind of ethics.
And the idea in this selfish gene in other places very often is that nature itself rewards selfishness that we exist simply to pass on our genes, that there is really nothing beyond that at the core of humanity or human nature, that creation is kind of a machine and that, uh, it rewards the survival of the fittest. And so then altruism is understood to be a, uh, kind of an addon activity that can enable species to survive. One person who disagrees with a selfish gene says that a problem with it is it turns morality and understanding of, and the pursuit of what is right and wrong into a veneer. They call it a veneer theory. And you very often see this in the contemporary understanding of human nature. Sigmund Freud wrote a book called civilization and its discontent. And the idea was very, very similar that people are basically a collection of desires. We are basically biological organisms and we want to reproduce. And so the sex instinct is a real core part of that, but because we can’t all have what it is we want civilization comes along and does not enable us to be contented in our instincts. And therefore we have to accept the imposition of moral restraints and curb, our appetites, and so seek to be unselfish.
And the idea of religion then to Freud was that it was simply an illusion. Very interesting in Richard Dawkins book, the selfish gene, that’s the book that coins the term meme me, me, if you have ever seen that one around and he uses it in an analogous way that just as, uh, a gene is a unit of biological reproduction meme, then he says is a unit of cultural reproduction. It might be a hummable tune. You can’t get outta your head. And so it is reproduced in a cultural way. And Dawkin says that God is one of those memes. Now of course, evolutionary theory is not understood to be one of those memes because it is intended to be a reductionistic way to just simply dismiss an idea.
Now, the, the understanding that the writers of scripture, and of course Jesus at its core gives of human nature is quite different is that we were created not simply as a bundle of instincts, not simply to pass on our genes, but we were made as persons to love. So with all that by backdrop, we get now to screw tapes, uh, letter to wormwood, and the difference between unselfishness and love in this case, wormwood patient, the human being has fallen in love and he’s in courtship. My dear Wilwood yes, courtship is the time for sewing those seeds. What will grow up 10 years later into domestic hatred? That’s a scary thought. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results, which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity, avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word love, let them think they have solved by love problems.
They have, in fact, only waived or postponed under the influence of enchantment. The grand problem is that of unselfishness note. Once again, the admirable work of our physiological arm, the study of language in substituting the negative unselfishness for the enemy’s positive charity, the new Testament term for that is a gap. I think about first Corinthians 13 love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always persevere love, never fails. Love is far different than just the avoidance of selfishness. It is the act of pursuit of blessing. Now what happens? And this is part of what old uncle screw tape understands here is that when we fall in love, we are given a temporary, emotional disposition to be unselfish. And of course, part of that is because I wanna make sure the person I fall in love with loves me back. So I want to please them. I want to give up what I desire for their sake, but it’s emotion driven and that’s temporary.
The danger is I can think that it is a result of spiritual maturity and that it will be permanent. And of course, when that kind of hormone driven roller coaster of falling in love wears off. Then I am left with my character. Now screw tip goes on. Uh, when, once they sort of official legal nominal, unselfishness has been established as a rule, a rule for keeping of which their emotional resources have died away. They’re not love anymore or, or being in love and their spiritual resources have not yet grown the most delightful results follow in discussing any joint action. It becomes obligatory that a should argue in favor of B supposed wishes and against his own. While B does the opposite. It’s often impossible to find out either person’s real wishes with luck. They end by doing something that neither wants to do while each feels a glow of self righteousness and harbors a secret claim to preferential treatment for the unselfishness shown and a secret grudge against the other.
For the ease, with which the sacrifice has been accepted later on, you can venture onto what might be called the generous conflict illusion, the generous conflict illusion, such wonderful language. The game is best played with more than two players in a family with grown up children. For example, something quite trivial is proposed. Like he uses having tea in the garden. That’s too British. So let’s say going to the garlic festival in Gilroy, cuz nobody wants to do that. One member makes it, uh, quite clear though, not in so many words that he would rather not, but is of course prepared to do so out of unselfishness, the others instantly withdraw their proposal ostensibly through their unselfishness, but really because they don’t want to be used as the sort of figure on which the first person practices petty altruism. Again, this is great language, petty altruism by which I look like I’m sacrificing, but really I’m build up my building up my own sense of superiority in placing you in moral and spiritual debt to me, then you end up with a real quarrel with bitter resentment on all sides.
you see how it’s done. If each side had been frankly contending for its real wish, they all would’ve kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy, but just because the contingent is reversed, each side is fighting. The other side’s battle. All the bitterness, which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last 10 years is concealed by them. Now in social science, there’s actually something called the Abilene paradox. And it came out of a social scientist who knew about a family, where they ended up going to Abilene, even though individually, nobody wanted to go to Abilene because nobody was willing to say, I don’t wanna go there. It’s used to describe how often a group makes worse decisions than anyone individual in the group would’ve made on their own. But of course at the core of that is the desire to be thought unselfish rather than the aim of love.
So now today, aim at something grander and noble than just saying, I I’ll give up what I want to do. It’s so often leads to that sense of self-righteousness INESS. Ask two questions today. One, what do I appreciate desire long for want? When it comes to this moment, what am I gonna do? What will I read? What will I eat? It’s a good thing. It’s part of being a human being. God gives us desires. So to name them and to embrace them within the bounds of reason and humility is a good thing. Nobody enjoys being around somebody who, when you ask them, what do you want to eat? Where would you like to go? What would you like to do? It’s just kind of like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t care. You choose. We actually love to be with people who have desires and we love to see their joy in them.
But ask a second question. And that is how can I genuinely bring more joy and blessing to others to be able to let go of what it is that I would want freely, not like a martyr, not with, self-righteousness not making a show of my own selfness, but because I want to be the kind of person that draws more joy from building into you. We were made for that. We are not little species propagating. Gene machines created by nature for the selfish purpose of just passing on, uh, whatever race we happen to be a part of. We were made to love. We were made to be love by God, pass that love onto others. Let’s go for that today. I’ll see you tomorrow.