Nix the Negative

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:21-24 and James 3:1-12:

When Charles Darwin was originally formulating his idea of evolution, he said that one of the things that almost undid it for him was the idea of kindness and altruism, let alone sacrifice. After all, if it’s about the survival of the fittest and making sure that your genes survive for future generations, taking care of your own makes sense, but why would you ever want to help others, especially strangers. But later on, according to Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley, he says that Darwin actually came to believe that our need to be social and caring may actually be stronger than our desire for self-preservation, and it’s ingrained not socially learned. Indeed, Dr. Keltner says, “evolution [has] crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups.” That is, kindness is ingrained in us, and we can see this even from the earliest age.

In a study done with six-month-olds, they were shown a round piece of wood that had eyes glued onto it and it was struggling to climb up a felt mountain. After seeing the circle struggling, a triangle piece of wood, also with eyes glued on it, came along and tried to help push the circle to the top. But then along comes a square piece of wood, with eyes, that tries to push the triangle and the circle down so they can’t make it to the top. What experimenters wanted to know was how the infants would respond, and while they couldn’t verbalize how they felt about the pieces of wood, they could express it by which blocks they played with, and which do you think they refused to play with? The square. The block that wasn’t kind. They even introduced a neutral observer block who did nothing to hinder or help, and the children still preferred the triangle to the others. So, even before we know what’s happening, we have a natural preference for those who help and are kind over those who are unkind. And what scans of the brain have also found is that when we participate in acts of kindness that the pleasure centers of our brain are activated, and so kindness in and of itself can be its own reward. And so with that we continue in our series on the Kindness Challenge, which is based upon a book of the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn.