Environmental Vow: Part Twelve

The Ethic of “Self-Actualization”

The decline of faith and honour as motivating emotions only partially explains why so many people seem incapable of motivating themselves beyond despair in order to deal with environmental collapse. A decline in a previous emotion doesn't explain why nothing better has come along to replace it. We also need to understand the motivation that most people have used to fill the void left when these two older ideals disappeared. The best label that I can think of to describe this replacement is “self-actualization”.

The term itself is most strongly associated with Abraham Maslow (it seems there is some debate about the actual origin of the phrase.) In a nutshell, his overall psychological theory posited that human beings are motivated by what he called the “hierarchy of needs”. These are hierarchical in that one particular need needs to be met before the next one presents itself to the human being. Starving people will take great risks to get food. But once someone has enough food and water, their willingness to take risks declines dramatically. And until someone has a certain sense of security in their life, no one cares about what other people think of them. Finally, until someone feels a certain level of self-confidence about one's place in the commuity, no one is going to invest much effort in following their particular dream. In Maslow's view, therefore, “self-actualization” is the pinnacle of human achievement.


The meaning of self-actualization is encompassed in the title. The idea is that each individual (i.e. “self”) has a certain potential to achieve a variety of things. Once the lower-order essential needs of that individual have already been met, then a drive manifests itself to work on and realize this potential (i.e. “actualize”.) Maslow summed this up by saying “What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.” According to this theory, people who have achieved this goal, tend to manifest the following personality traits:

• They tend to have a realistic appraisal of both themselves and the world around them.
• They tend to be interested in solving the problems that they see in the world around them.
• They tend to be spontaneous and can at times be unconventional in behaviour.
• While capable of being gregarious, at times they embrace solitude as an opportunity to focus on developing their skills and potential.
• Self-actualized people do not become jaded with the world. Instead they continue to experience a sense of wonder all through their life.
• They also often experience what Maslow termed “peak experiences” of seemingly profound emotional importance.

Maslow's theory makes a lot of sense if you understand the time at which it was written. The Great Depression had ended, the Second World War had been won, and modern technology was promising limitless material wealth. For the first time absolute want was gone for the vast majority of people in Western nations. Secondly, the great totalitarian threat posed by the Axis dictatorships had been removed which meant that many people felt safe and secure for the first time in decades. Finally, the postwar growth of the welfare state and the spread of democracy to the whole of the “Western world” implied a great “leveling out” of the old class structures that had once placed the majority of citizens in a precarious social position (think, for example, of the great strides we have made in civil rights.) And indeed, during the 1960s it seemed that huge numbers of people were following the dictim of “What a man can be, he must be.”

I'm prepared to give Abraham Maslow the benefit of the doubt as to what exactly he intended with this theory. He was attempting to offer a descriptive definition of the sort of life that he thought the very best of humanity pursued. Unfortunately, this viewpoint inevitably morphed into a prescriptive ideal that was offered to individuals who were perplexed about how to live their lives. Probably the most famous prescriptive statement in this vein was by Joseph Campbell: “My general formula for my students is 'Follow your bliss.' Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.”

Unfortunately, this ideal became debased to the popular “do your own thing”, which often ended-up being bastardized into not much more than simple ego gratification. And, if we think about the implications of what his theory says, the spread of this “dumbed-down” version shouldn't come as any great shock. First of all, the ideal of “self-actualization” makes no mention whatsoever of anything outside of the “self”. The traditional virtues of faith and honour were not inward directed towards the individual, but outwards directed to either God or society. To replace this outward focus, the most that Maslo could come up with to replace this was the concept of “peak experiences”.


“Peak experience” was the label that Maslow used to identify what had previously been described as a “religious” or “mystical” experience. It is very clear from his little book, Religion, Values and Peak Experiences, that he was consciously trying to come up with a way of describing the experiences of religious people in terms that excluded all reference to “God” or any other sort of supernatural reality. In effect, he was trying to pull out what he considered the “core” of spirituality from the incidental cultural and historical effluent (e.g. “religion”) that had built up around it.


This may or may not be a valid thing to do, but the practical result of his particular formulation (and all its subsequent popular incarnations) makes the entirety of the “peak” experience revolve around the ego of the individual experiencing it. This completely inverts the traditional relationship that exists between religious mystics and their conception of the Divine. If you read the literature of mysticism you will find time and again that mystics humble their ego to embrace the “God within”, “Buddha Mind”, “Brahman, “Dao” and so on. Ultimately this puts the religious mystic into the headspace where their prayers boil down to not much more than “Thy will be done, Lord”. Because Maslow decided to pull out all the---what he thought “extraneous”--- religious stuff out of mysticism, the casual reader cannot help but think that the only option left is to understand “Peak Experience” as being not much more than “My will be done.” As a result, mysticism ceases to be about shrinking the ego in order to embrace the universe and becomes instead a glorification of the ego.


This becomes obvious if you think about how one of the supreme virtues under the Maslow viewpoint, “spontaneity”, can very easily slide into being an out-and-out vice. As I have pointed out above, the ritual and routine of monastery and regiment have proved essential to inculcating the willingness of individuals to place the needs of the many before the desires of the individual. The ideal of spontaneity turns this totally on its head and suggests that it is a very bad thing to think of the greater good and the long-term instead of the here and now.


If the Benedictines had viewed spontaneity as an ultimate virtue, they would never have submitted to the routine of the monastery---which involved things like rising in the middle of the night to chant the divine service. It is also very hard to believe that they would have drained the swamps and built the abbeys that were necessary to tame the howling wilderness that Europe had become after the barbarian invasions. And if soldiers in the Allied armies of WWII had valued spontaneity very highly, it is doubtful if they would have submitted to the tyranny of drill seargants and “official regs”. And the end result of that would probably that we would all be currently living under some form of totalitarian nightmare.


It is understandable that a psychologist living in Maslow's time and place would suggest that spontaneity is a virtue and that the highest good is to “self actualize”. He was writing when the USA was going through a post WWII boom that had brought prosperity beyond the wildest dreams of any other human civilization. Moreover, he was addressing a population that had suffered regimentation and external discipline that was also unparalleled in human history. Millions of self-employed farmers had been forced to migrate to the cities and learn to follow the dictates of the clock and foreman on an assembly line. Moreover, because of conscription, almost all adult males had been forced to submit to military discipline while in the armed forces. Given the extreme regimentation of personal life in the 1940's, 1950's and early 1960's, it was almost inevitable that some sort of backlash would present itself. And once prosperity and peace took away the fear of poverty and invasion, people were ready to accept any notion that suggested that submitting to authority was not only annoying, but wrong.


But if an entire civilization gives itself over to “doing its own thing” it becomes fundamentally incapable of dealing with any sort of existential problem. I would argue that one of the reasons why our society seems incapable of dealing with the environment is because far too many people have bought into a watered-down and bastardized version of Maslow's philosophy of life. As a result, they think that any idea that they should “do without” and “suck it up” for the greater good is not so much unnecessary as it is existentially wrong or even immoral. The ordinary members of the public who are simply casting about for an excuse to do nothing can latch onto this ideal and use it to ignore any calls for sacrifice. And the people who are in a leadership position in the environmental cause refuse to use the language of morality, civic responsibility and self-sacrifice because they buy into the Maslovian “ur-philosophy” of the West to the point where they feel it would be “wrong” to use such language.


Of course anti-environmental politicians and religious groups have no such scruples. They routinely mobilize their followers using the language of morality and sacrifice. The fact that liberals refuse to engage in this sort of discussion reinforces their belief that the Left is a danger to society specifically because it is “amoral”. In their description, liberals are proponents of “situational ethics” who do not understand the difference between right and wrong. Unfortunately, these right wing people who do have an ethical bedrock have chosen a bizarre set of fundamental issues to ground it upon. Most seem to believe that denying the right of women to have an abortion is far more important than preventing wars that kill and maim innocents through “collateral damage”. Many also seem to believe that preventing the use of contraceptives is more important than preventing the spread of terrible diseases like AIDS. For almost all, the right to use private property trumps all attempts to deal with poverty and structural inequality, or any other calamity such as environmental collapse.


The ethical choices that the Right grounds its politics upon have convinced Liberals that it is fundamentally wrong-headed to even use the language of morality. This discredits appeals to morality of all sorts---which in turn reinforces their commitment to the Maslovian worldview.


Society seems to be stuck in the self-reinforcing situation that Yeats described all so well: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. People of good will who might get involved in saving the planet if there were any sort of leadership find themselves adrift, which leads to despair. And people of good will who might be able to be leaders in the fight for Mother Nature find themselves intellectually incapable of actually pursuing this goal in an effective manner because their commitment to the self actualization ethic makes it impossible to articulate the environmental crisis in terms of moral faith and/or patriotic duty.

Living Without a Car

In my last post I mentioned that I've taken a vow to never own an automobile. A fellow asked me to write a few words about this, so I'm making the time to do so now.

I tell people that I decided to never own an automobile or fly in an airplane again as part of a pledge to limit my footprint on the earth. It was relatively easy to do both of these things because my interest in travel pretty much died-out at an early age. Moreover, I grew up in a family of traditional peasants from Southern Ontario. People in that class never did travel much because they needed to be present twice a day to take care of their livestock. (Farmer's called it "being tied to their cow's or pig's tail".) In a couple decades of marriage my parents went on one two week vacation to Chatham Ontario, and only because my father had won the trip by selling seed corn and my brother and I were old enough to take care of the chores while they were gone.

Of course, times change. And it is essential for country people to drive cars. I got my driver's license at 16 like everyone else, and did things like drive to movies. But one thing I did do from a much earlier age was drive tractor. And sitting in a tractor seat for 10 hours a day taught me to hate sitting on my butt bored out of my skull. Long distance driving ultimately seemed to be more of the same, so I never really thought that "road trips" were all that cool. That was reinforced by a job that I had one summer for the Ministry of Agriculture---it involved spending 10 hours a day driving down dusty back-roads auditing crops.

What this did for me was dramatically lower any interest I might have had in acquiring a car. Everyone else in my family moved heaven and earth to get their first one, whereas I just built my life around doing without. This meant I tended to live in the older parts of town, which were built before most people bought cars and where it is still possible to live without one. Once in a while I would rent a car, but eventually so many years had gone by without doing this I let my license lapse and can no longer legally drive.

A lot of people find it hard to believe that anyone can live without a car, but this is easily refuted by the fact that many people do. The issue is one of adaptation. Without a car large areas of the community are simply off limits for living, working or shopping. If might be that there is public transit, but unless it is very good---and in many places it isn't---it just isn't worth the hassle. This needn't be quite the problem you might think if you just build your life around it.

I live close enough to work that I walk there every day. I also live close to the down-town, the farmer's market and transit hub. In a world without autos, this would be a "desirable" place to live. It once was, as you can tell by all the once very nice homes that have been converted into cheap apartments and rooming houses. I bought one with another person, which we have converted back into the top/down duplex it once was. We paid a very low price for it, but it needed a lot of work. My friend the Mayor tells me that as the price of energy increases and the city intensifies, our neighbourhood will only improve in value while the more remote suburbs will collapse in value. Paradoxically, in my town the cheapest place to live is the one where it is easiest to live without an auto.

I say "paradoxically" because you save a pant load of money not having a car. The average middle-class person in Canada spends about $8,000 annually on their transportation. Since a bus pass in our town only costs about $72/month, or $864/year, the pass costs a little under one tenth of a car. I don't use a pass because I rarely take the bus and either walk or bike. For larger purchases, I have a bike trailer that I got for $100 (I got a heck of deal by buying a prototype from a person who owns a company that builds them.) For even bigger purchases, I will take a bus and hire a cab to bring home what I've bought. I also bike over to lumber yards and have things delivered. I also have friends with pickup trucks who are usually more than willing to do barter deals where I help them with stuff in exchange for the odd dump run or trip to the building supply store. If worst comes to worst, if you look at the classified advertisements on things like Kiiji or Craig's List, there are always people you can hire with pickups who are willing to do your small jobs for a modest fee.

Needless to say, if you are saving $8,000 a year on not having a car, this gives you a lot of flexibility with regard to other things. This raises an important point, however. Some people see not having a car as a way of avoiding the necessity of making that extra $8,000 per year. In a sense this is true, but people have to remember that it is much, much, much easier to live a modest lifestyle on a middle-class income than on a poverty one. Really poor people can't buy homes in areas where it is easy to live without a car. They can rent, but one of the things that comes from low rent is instability. Land lords that only ask for cheap rent are usually "land banking" the building until they can tear it down and build something new. This means that people on reduced income often find that they have to pack up and move over and over again.

This is not only wearisome and potentially expensive (there are always moving costs---even if it is just goodwill amongst friends), but it stresses the lifestyle you've built up. People who live without cars exist in an ecosystem in the same way that hunter/gathers do. If you move a culture from one area to another, there are problems in that people lose some of the cultural knowledge about where the best hunting, fishing, plant gathering areas, etc are. In the same way, if people have to pack up and move on a regular basis they have a hard time building relationships with neighbours and don't learn important survival skills like where the cheapest necessities are to be had locally.

Another thing to consider when doing without a car is what sort of impact it is going to have on your personal relationships. In North America many family members have adopted lifestyles that are totally car dependent. This means that if you opt out of owning a car you could end up being frozen out of family events like Thanksgiving and Christmas because it is impossible to get to the homes of people hosting these events without an auto. Also, just because you decide to not own a car doesn't mean that any significant others you may have in your life want to do so. This means you run the risk of either "bailing" on these connections or ending up forcing people into becoming your chauffeur. If you do end up relying on others to drive, it is imperative that you make big efforts to show how much you appreciate this by doing things like offering to buy gas, take people out to supper, etc. You are saving a lot of money buy not owning a car, show that you appreciate the help with some of that money saved.

One other thing that you should remember is that it changes your consciousness dramatically when you stop driving. It means that you no longer can do things as spontaneously. You have to plan out your itinerary around transport so you don't end up wasting time on extra trips. It also means that you have to be careful to only buy as much as you can carry on your back or on your bike in one trip. My ex and I really noticed this fact when we got involved. She ran around in her car from place to place and would make plans on the fly. I would carefully think out what I needed and how I was going to organize my trip to get it. The car enabled her to do what she did whereas not having one forced me to do what I do.

Another thing thing people probably won't think about unless they try it, is how not owning a car changes your understanding of velocity. If you drive a lot you get used to several ton objects flying around at very high speeds. This is a very odd and dangerous state of affairs, as our annual accident reports will bear out. If you don't drive or even ride in cars much, you being to start experiencing how very odd this state of affairs is in a visceral fashion.

This means that I am literally afraid of cars. I see them roaring down the street, controlled by people who have precious little control over their emotions and who are not terribly bright or self-conscious. This makes me very careful when I do things like cross the street or ride a bicycle. It also absolutely terrifies me when I ride in a car. I usually try to hide in the back seat and recite mantras in order to avoid freaking out. Unfortunately, people often force me to ride "shot gun" because of their misguided attempt to show me "respect". This makes things even worse. If I don't watch myself, I end up flinching or even crying out at various situations---which bugs the hell out of drivers. Lately, I've developed a strategy that helps by envisioning Daoist immortals flying around the car and defending it. This at least keeps me from freaking, which helps. (I doubt the driver would be helped much though if he knew what I was doing.)

One last point. Part of living without a car has to mean living where it is possible to do so. I read somewhere that during the last big hike in gasoline prices that poor Americans suffered much more than poor Canadians. Poor Canadians tend to live in urban areas and are serviced by public transit. Poor Americans tend to live in rural areas and drive everywhere. I suppose it is possible to live in rural areas without a vehicle, but it would be a lot harder than it is for me to live in the middle of a Canadian city that has done a lot more than most to keep its downtown viable. But then again, choosing where you live is part and parcel of the whole livestyle.