Maslow is an excellent illustration of how a writer’s message – as so often happens – is vastly oversimplified by disciples. Privately, he regretted that he could find very few self-actualised people in real life; perhaps only 2 per cent of the population could reach that state, he said, and on closer examination they were sadly ‘imperfect’ and ‘not well-adjusted’, suffering from anxiety and guilt, ‘capable of extraordinary and unexpected ruthlessness and surgical coldness’. Though they were wonderful lovers, ‘good marriage is impossible unless you are willing to take shit from the other’. Maslow’s childhood, battling against anti-semitism and against his dogmatic mother, had left him with few illusions: even though he was devoted to making the world a better place, he was also sceptical about the possibility of turning his hopes into reality. He was disappointed that his students did not measure up to his ideal and he complained he could not understand how Hitler, Germans or Communists fitted into his theory.
Besides, he said, very few people could understand his theory. Each of his colleagues, clever professors from Europe who had found refuge in the U.S.A., had their own theory, and did not quite agree with anyone else, for that is how academia encourages the critical spirit; they took from each other what suited their purpose. The neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965), who had not long before popularised the term ‘self-actualisation’ in America with different connotations, disapproved of Maslow’s appropriation of his language. In reality, the idea dates back to Aristotle, and numerous philosophers had advocated different varieties of it ever since. Maslow was unusual because he insisted that he knew how ‘shaky’ were the empirical foundations of his own theories, which were based on the study of only ‘three or four dozen people carefully and perhaps a hundred or two but not as carefully or in depth’. This was a ‘bad or poor or inadequate experiment. I am quite willing to concede this – as a matter of fact I am eager to concede it, because I am a little worried about this stuff which I consider to be tentative being swallowed whole by all sorts of enthusiastic people.’ The practical application of his theories also left a lot unclear. He recognised that ‘self-actualised’ creative people tended to be wayward, disobedient and ‘crazy because every really new idea looks crazy at first’. ‘I told this to a company – but I don’t know how managers can work with creative people, who tend to cause trouble. This is not my problem.’ He left it to the managers to solve it, hoping they would see management as ‘a psychological experiment’ and encouraging them with the thought that they were as ‘spiritual’ as ‘professionally religious’ poets or intellectuals, except that they had a ‘different jargon’ and ‘conceal their idealism under a mask of toughness, calm and selfishness’.
These reservations and obscurities did not deter large numbers of Americans, and then people of many nations, from seizing on the idea of self-actualisation or self-realisation as the key to the successful life and to profitable work, as though an El Dorado of talent was suddenly being discovered and everyone would soon become wonderfully rich and fulfilled. The failure of sages in both East and West to transform the ignorant and the sinful into models of self-realisation was forgotten when a new generation of management experts, led by Douglas McGregor of MIT and Peter Drucker (just becoming famous for his study of General Motors), gave this universal panacea their blessing, and it is now embedded in every human resources training programme that claims to convert ordinary people into exemplary leaders. The New Age gurus of the 1960s turned Maslow’s psychology into an instant fast food that they could add to their mystical recipes, and through them it percolated, variously diluted, into a myriad self-help books promising wealth, happiness and fame. As one advertisement explained, all that was needed was ‘awareness that you can be, do and have anything you want’. Betty Friedan (who majored in psychology at the very time when Maslow’s ‘humanistic psychology’ was just becoming fashionable) used its language when she famously wrote in The Feminine Mystique, ‘The problem that has no name – which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities – is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.’ ‘Positive psychology’, which is the successor of ‘humanistic psychology’, and acknowledges Maslow as one of its inspirations, is now an academic discipline which teaches people to be happy, to ‘nurture their strengths’ and ‘find niches in which they can best live out [their] positive qualities’. Not least, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs gave captains of industry a ready formula that could convince employees that their jobs were helping them in ‘self-development’. Feeling good about oneself, and being oneself, became the ultimate goal of life. It is as though the only possession of which individuals now have full ownership is their feelings, and they need protection from criticism because judgement which would make them feel bad. But is asserting and defending one’s identity the supreme ambition? Where does cultivating self-esteem lead?
It is not clear that there are more Beethovens today than in the past, or fewer tyrants, or fewer fools. Nor, as yet, has anyone produced a theory proposing that since so many geniuses, prophets and artists have suffered poverty or persecution, the best preparation for attaining the summits of eminence is to live on bread and water in a garret or a prison. This is not the first time in history that humans have embarked on this friendless journey, searching for meaning inside themselves. It has happened whenever official institutions fail to satisfy anxious minds. The twentieth century made the journey more arduous by persuading many individuals that they had only their own solitary ego as a companion, leaving it to the lonesome sperm and the frustrated egg to make peace between them.
Attaining self-realisation is not the same thing as having a full life. Can anyone conscious of their limitations be satisfied with having nothing more to hope for than the fulfilment of their obviously inadequate ‘potential’, using only the meagre talents they were born with? Though self-realisation has become an officially endorsed orthodoxy of many nations aiming to liberate individuals from the obstacles that prevent them from being ‘truly themselves’, it may not be humanity’s final goal. Those who govern the world, having variously tried to make people happy, or wealthy, or empowered, or free, but seldom giving them all they wanted, may sooner or later search for some other elixir. Happy people can be selfish. Becoming wealthy does not automatically make one a better person. Power not only corrupts, but is the virus that spreads megalomania. Freedom, however essential, can be blighted by uncertainty about what to do with it. Only very rarely have official prescriptions to improve human welfare produced the expected results. Climbing pyramids, one step at a time, knowing where each foot must tread, is a restrictive metaphor for life. At the age of twelve, I climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and wrote my name on its roof as all tourists do, but then there was nothing left but to climb down again.
I shall not know what life signifies until each person reveals what they have found or failed to find in their life. I can only see a minuscule corner of the universe, and I cannot begin to construct a bigger picture until I discover what others see. Being alive is not simply a matter of having a heart that beats, it is also being aware of how other hearts beat and other minds think in response to one another. The fatal disease that attacks the living is rigor vitae, rigidity of the mind, which burns up curiosity and replaces it with repetitive and numb routine; it is more dangerous than rigor mortis because it gives the illusion of being alive. One is only nominally alive if one is incapable of giving birth to thoughts one has never had before and of being inspired by what others think.
There could be no change in understanding life until there was a change in understanding death, and that at last has happened, now that microscopes have watched closely the process of dying. Death is not what we thought it was. Fruitful conversation is not only what makes it possible for us to enjoy one another’s company, it also takes place, in a form only recently discovered, silently and invisible to the naked eye, in
side our flesh and blood. Our physical survival depends on a dialogue between the cells out of which we are made. A cell is kept alive by the links it establishes with other cells around it. Billions of cells die every day inside my body, but old age is not enough to kill them; on the contrary, most cells commit suicide. They are born with a capacity for suicide, which they trigger when they fail to exchange signals with their neighbours; they survive when they succeed in combining with other cells to produce something more than themselves. Cells are constantly transforming themselves by fusing with other cells, different from themselves, and the proteins in them adapt to the other proteins around them, like dancers joining a ballet. Every cell has the power to destroy itself in just a few hours, and the suicide is decided after a whole series of attempted conversations between it and those around it fail: when it cuts off all contact with its neighbours, the punishment for silence is death. This process means our bodies are perpetually renewing themselves, with huge quantities of cells vanishing like autumn leaves falling off a tree. Our minds, too, acquire and discard ideas we borrow from others.
It is not just cells which commit suicide by shutting themselves off. Humans who become absorbed in the contemplation of their own navels miss out on life too. The gift of life includes an invitation to connect with the limitless variety of the natural world and with the imagination and ingenuity of others, appreciation of which can grow to become affection; and expanding the radius of affections makes one more alive. When I discover interesting qualities in another person, and am able to give that person some kind of inspiration that no-one else can, I add something to life. Each meeting between two people that is not merely superficial is an opportunity to enlarge it beyond the banal, through discovery and invention. When others inspire fear in me and I do not know how to speak to them, nor they to me, or we have no sympathy for each other’s needs, we are in the same state as cells for whom existence no longer has any purpose. But though fear is as unavoidable as hunger, there are more or less elegant ways of responding to them both. Exploring fears is one of life’s missions, as is redrawing the map of one’s fears.
Institutions, governments and businesses, whose purpose is to iron out the irregularities caused by temperament, anger, boredom and accident, and all the other misadventures of each day, may continue to think that private conversations have less influence than mission statements and rules of conduct that everyone must follow. Orators may still on occasion be able to suddenly transform crowds of humans into swarms of locusts. But the world has new possibilities when the interaction of individuals sharpens minds, softens fears and creates unexpected synergies. There is no shortage of talk, but talk is not conversation, which is the engine of thought. There are more opportunities for interaction today than there ever have been, and also more obstacles. Technology, though its inventions may work perfectly, has not eliminated the fears that make humans break down. That is why every person’s experiences, their trials and errors, are an essential part of the understanding of life.
In 1085, the king of England ‘had deep speech with his counsellors and sent men all over England to each shire to find out what or how much each landholder had in land and livestock, and what it was worth’. The result was the Domesday Book, a record of what mattered most in those days, property. Today there is room for another kind of investigation. How well others understand you, and you them, makes more difference to your life than what you own. There is a much longer book waiting to be written, composed by individuals saying what they value, believe, dread and hope. Giving people the vote was only a timid beginning. Everybody has much more to say than can be summed up in a cross on a ballot paper. Eighty-one per cent of Americans have told pollsters that they have an idea for a book and would like to write one. That need not remain a pipe dream. Public libraries, which contributed so decisively to the self-education of the masses, can turn the threat to close them down into a spur propelling them into a second phase, not only lending books but also creating them. They can facilitate and store self-portraits in which people record what their lives signify and what they would like others to know about them; and be the place where it is possible for them to discover how they can benefit from the talents and hopes of neighbours they know only superficially or not at all. Already the public librarians of one of the greatest cities in the world have agreed to embark on this adventure.
This book is my contribution. I hope that eavesdropping on my conversations will make my readers want to interrupt and disagree, and feel impelled to start their own book, from their own perspective, evoking the past that is most meaningful to them, and imagining a future that would give more hope to the present.
Where can one find nourishment for the mind?
All the people I have ever met, all those who have been kind and sympathetic, and who have opened their doors to me, as well as all those who have puzzled, shunned, terrified or horrified me, all the books by the dead or the living that I have read in my life, all that I have ever seen and heard are the co-authors of this book. All have been muses to me, though usually they do not know it.
Unlike the Giant Panda which likes to eat nothing but bamboo, human beings can turn almost anything into mental nourishment. This book is my attempt to expand our tastes, which involves discovering the tastes, opinions, experience and hopes of others. You can discover practical ways in which you can participate in this endeavour by looking at the website of the Oxford Muse Foundation (www.oxfordmuse.com), a charity established to encourage the kinds of conversations, portraits and experiments in work and culture described in these pages. Though you may feel that you are powerless to diminish the absurdities and cruelties that plague our lives, you can undoubtedly make the world a very tiny bit wiser by enabling it to understand you, your ways of thinking, the vagaries of the occupations by which you have earned or failed to earn a decent living, and the methods you have developed to respond to your misadventures. Every literate person is a writer as well as a reader, and this is an invitation to you to write down what you normally keep to yourself. By placing your self-portrait in our gallery, as anonymously as you wish and in visual form if you prefer, you become a muse to others.
The website also invites you to participate in a new project to demonstrate that what distinguishes humans is their capacity for thinking, and that thinking can be as exciting and as satisfying as any entertainment.
Finally, just by buying this book, you are sustaining a charity whose ambition is to remember the past in more useful ways, its illusions as well as its achievements, so that it becomes possible to do more than repair potholes on an old road strewn with contradictory signposts.
The Oxford Muse website records more fully my gratitude to the very many people who in different ways have encouraged and contributed to our activities through the years. But every object deserves to have the names of its creators engraved on it, so on this last page I wish to mention those who transformed my writing into a physical book, with delightful imagination, and made publication such a pleasurable and interesting experience: Christopher MacLehose, Katharina Bielenberg, Auriol Bishop, Paul Engles, Bethan Ferguson, Lucy Hale, Corinna Zifko and their colleagues, Rukun Advani and Michael Salu, and Andrew Nurnberg and his colleagues, and not least the indispensable booksellers who have expressed a willingness to act as foster parents to the book until it finds a gentle reader.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 35
