Sometimes, when reflecting upon the type of society we live within, certain people find it fruitful to declare that “human beings were not designed to [x]”. X is the specific facet of society which the speaker in question is refusing. Often it’s “human beings were not designed to stare at screens all day” for example, or they may claim “human beings were not designed to live in a population this large”. These types of sentences present themselves as self-evident, but with a slight interrogation of the statements proves them to be more complex than they first appear.
For example, the first statement can be interpreted in many ways. If we are not “meant” to be staring at screens, is this a claim that screens have a pernicious effect, that something about them prevents basic human survival, (they have a negative effect) or is it that they lack a positive effect (there is a demonstrable purpose for human beings which is not embodied in the screen). Arguably, the more complex question is the implicit fact that, if “human beings were not designed to [x]” there must be something they were designed for, and secondly, it presumes that human beings were designed at all.
Curiously this line of argument is normally quasi-scientific rather than theological. But it does bring to mind the idea of “intelligent design” – the idea that the complexity or unity between organisms and the ecosystem in the natural world proves that an intelligent force (IE: God) must have created the world. The scientific refutation of this is evolutionary theory and natural selection, organisms which exist now are well-suited to their environment because evolution allows lifeforms to adapt to their environment over millions of years.
However, this evolutionary “designer” has become itself a kind of pseudo-theology. When the Christian reflects on the purpose of humanity, they have the explicit intention of God himself as an explanation for the purpose of humans. To worship Christ, live a life free of sin, and eventually, enter the Kingdom of Heaven. However, in a world of believers in science over religion, evolution itself is proposed to have an intention for the purpose of humans, albeit tacitly. In 1974 psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan expressed concerns that “science substitutes itself for religion and is all the more despotic, obtuse and obscurantist”, and this sentiment seems to extend from the purpose of life to the realm of eschatology. Mark Fisher, on his blog K-Punk, referred to the same phenomenon:
“Why is [it] that the advocates of a punitively mechanistic theory like Darwininian evolution end up using teleological language? This is partly a consequence of the concept of “natural selection” being (rhetorically) converted from a negative into a positive thesis. The original negative idea was that brutal, blind randomness can account for the appearance of purpose in organisms; there is no need to hypothesise any guiding intelligence at work in nature, since only those organisms that happen to be adapted to their environment will survive and prosper. “
“If this seems like a statement of the screamingly obvious, it is worth reiterating because it is too often obscured, not by religious thinkers distorting evolutionary theory, but by Darwininans themselves, who, it seems, have a tendency to be seduced by their own metaphors. ‘Natural selection’ was itself something of a reification, which was always in danger of implying that there was an intentional agent doing the selecting.”
So this insistence that “human beings were not designed to [x]” remains a symptom. It is as though Darwin’s evolutionary theory put an end to the idea of Almighty God as the Intelligent Designer, and yet, through a return of the repressed, evolution itself has fallaciously been touted as a pseudoscientific Intelligent Designer. The compulsion to attribute any type of ethical claim an aura of scientism results in a conflation of what the human being is and what it ought to do. This can be seen in the fact that the “human beings are not designed to [x]” sentiment is always proposed in the sense that we should not be doing the [x].
As Julie Reshe writes in Negative Psychoanalysis:
“The view of selection-centred evolutionary theory implies a fantasy thatan ideal prototype of a fully adapted organism is possible, the one that is aresult of selection, the one that securely functions in a mode of auto-piloting. Chaos-inclusive intuition suggests that evolution should ratherbe interpreted as a chaotic variation. What is considered to be an adapta-tion is simply a particular temporary and conditional state of variation.Adaptation as such never comes; there is never a fully favourable result ofselection. Evolution is not a story with a happy ending but variations on atheme of bad endings.”
To suppose that human beings are not designed to do something in particular, is to believe that there is an ideal state of “adaptation”, which Reshe explains never actually comes. Each state is perhaps only the most recent variation of a series of bad endings.
Even taking the evolutionary argument seriously, the proposition that an earlier stage of evolution (perhaps in the wider sense of social/cultural development as well as literal biological evolution) is where the “truth” is, a kind of appeal to tradition in the sense of “what we did in the past must be right and whatever modernity is must be an aberration”, we may end up in an infinite regress. To take the evolutionary argument seriously, we can say we should be hunter-gatherers rather than denizens of urban cities, but then an ape might look at a hunter-gatherer and say the homo sapien is an aberration of development from the ape. Then the reptile would say the ape is an aberration of the reptile, the fish would say the reptile is an aberration to the fish and we can continue this notion down to the single-celled organism.
A single point in the timeline of evolution can only be selected arbitrarily; none has an inherent value or purpose over another. The reason why it’s not uncommon to remark, like the character Peter Gibbons in Office Space: ““Human beings weren’t meant to sit in little cubicles, staring at computer screens all day.” is because there is a poverty of moral philosophy in the world. Even for those who are fairly erudite in the realm of moral philosophy, pseudo-scientific arguments often prevail over claims for virtue or justice.