Maslow’s Misguided Needs: Thoughts on Humanity in America
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory that seeks to answer questions about human fulfillment. I am in no way an expert on his theory, and this article is not an attempt to articulate his position in detail. Rather, I want to think about the general idea within his hierarchy and apply it to the United States and Italy (where I studied last semester). So the general idea I have of Maslow’s theory is that: while humans have many needs, physical or nonphysical, certain lower needs must be met before higher needs can be sought. I do necessarily agree with all of the specific levels of needs that Maslow lays out or the hierarchy in which he puts them, but I do think his general idea is correct. A quick example: someone who lives on the streets spends the majority of his day searching through garbage in an attempt to find food. He needs to satisfy this hunger, which is always before him. Thus, he has no time to spend in conversation with other people, so naturally he forms few genuine friendships. Without friends or companions, this person has no sense of community, and therefore struggles to find his identity and self worth. This example is certainly not perfect, but you get the idea.
I have been thinking about Maslow’s hierarchy, because of a conversation I had over Christmas break. A friend and I were talking about why so many people seem to not care about religion and are not happy in the United States. He suggested that Maslow might have the answer. Most of us would agree that religion and being happy are not the lowest need on our own hierarchy, rather they would probably be towards the top. Think about it. Have you ever tried to pray when you were very hungry or had to go to the bathroom? Its not easy and inevitably one’s thoughts will slip back to the bladder or the belly. Therefore, my friend meant to say that too many people in our country are not having their more basic needs met, and thus they cannot even aspire to religion or happiness (not that those two must be or maybe even can be sought independently).
But what is the answer? How can we meet people’s basic needs? Well that cannot be that hard can it? Just eradicate hunger and crime and homelessness and…. okay so it is not that easy. But to complicate things even more, we do not only diagnose these problems in the poor or homeless but also, and maybe in more frequently, in the middle and upper classes. In the latter, we find depression, suicide, alcoholism and many other things suggesting that they despite their money are not happy.
Why so? Well, we in our wonderful American spirit have tried to reduce the complexity of life to Maslow’s actual hierarchy. I think that in our effort to meet our most basic physical needs (shelter, food, water, clothes, etc.) we have destroyed the aspects of culture that worked unknown to help us meet multiple levels of needs at once. In short, we have abandoned our own humanity for the sake of placating our animal instincts. It is like trying to reduce love to psychology, or faith to logic. These things help us to know what we love and believe in, but they cannot replace that real experience of true love or true faith. Neither can meeting basic needs suffice for human existence.
Think about the average American day say for a father in Indiana. He wakes up and prepares breakfast for his children with his wife by getting the cereal out of the cupboard and milk out of the fridge. After the family eats breakfast with the kitchen television on, they walk into the garage and get into the car. Dad then drives the children to school. After dropping the kids off, he drives from the suburb to work downtown. He sits at a desk for most of the day doing his work on the computer. After work, he drives to the grocery store fifteen minutes from downtown. After buying ready-to-prepare food driven to the store from all over the country, he drives back to pick the kids up. They then drive home and the family eats dinner and watches a football game.
So let’s see what needs have been met. Dad ate food and made money with which he bought food at the grocery. Then he ate again. But you say, “What about the time he spent with his family! And his coworkers! And the people he saw at the grocery! And his work brought him fulfillment!” Unfortunately, Dad did not take advantage of every moment he had with his children. They were all too busy watching television, listening to their iPods and playing gameboy in the car. Is working on a computer in the same room as fifty other people really working together? Is being at a computer really working? Dad did not have many genuine conversations with the strangers at the grocery store, because everyone was in too much of a hurry to have real interactions with other people. And Dad used the self-check out line to boot!
Sure some of these things could have happened, but it is more likely that they did not. Our culture is in no way set up so that in fulfilling lower needs the higher will be met. Rather they are usually at odds with one another. You see in reducing human life as we have done, we have made it more difficult to fulfill our various levels of need. Our whole existence is a divorced and transient rush. We know what our needs are, but we try to fulfill each of them separately. Work is in one place. School another. Shopping another. Entertainment another. We have to have “family time”. What does that even mean? Can we really reduce family to a reasoned organization of our day? Are the human beings we brought into existence really just reserved for one more hour on the scheduling application of our iPad?
Life would be so much happier and fulfilling if we just lived like humans. Think about the way humans have done two of their most basic actions for most of our race’s existence: eating and working. I honestly believe that, if we ate and worked like humans, the vast majority of our needs (and here I mean many needs including the higher ones) would be met. Yet Maslow and most Americans confine both of these actions to the bottom two levels and separate them from other needs like friendship and fulfillment.
Eating and working are both convivial; they bring people together. If people always actually sat down together with their friends and family and ate real food that they had prepared themselves, they would be happy. Because in one hour or so, they would have their hunger appeased, bodies nourished by real food rather than polluted with a chemical mockery, find joy in tasteful food, feel a sense of accomplishment about executing well the art of cooking, be able to learn about their children, most likely laugh with their companions, find support in people who love them, and talk about life and love and God. Our ancestors figured life out. We think we are efficient and smart because in our society we can look up why ice floats in thirty seconds? Our shared humanity has discovered how to be happy just in the way we accomplish our basic needs, nothing special.
Take work. No not organizing corporate records. Real work. Consider the Amish building a barn. When someone needs a new barn, the community gathers together and builds the barn with their hands and centuries-old tools. In diametric opposition to the construction of an American suburb, this activity of the Amish building a barn fulfills so many of their needs. Building disposable cookie-cutter houses in suburbia pretty much just builds a house. The Amish get a barn as well, do not get me wrong, but they also get exercise, companionship, and fulfillment from doing an old and beautiful craft.
We are slaves to Maslow’s hierarchy. We think that we can reduce life to a series of obstacles that must be overcome so that we can attain happiness. Two horrors occur when we do this though. First, we forget that happiness is found in the things that we have made into obstacles. Food is a good thing. It is not an enemy that is trying to make us fat. Exercise is not our cache of weapons against the onslaught of trans fat. Secondly, we try to take every “obstacle” by itself rather than embracing the beauty of our simple humanity, which has figured out how to answer all of our needs. Some ways of working, eating, and living are better for us (and better here does not mean living longer).
I hate when rants like the one I just made end without an exhortation of what can be done. So I will now turn to a case study of a much more human way of life.
I spent all of last semester studying ancient Rome in the modern city. Although, Rome is a developed city complete with supermarkets, malls, subways, McDonald’s, standard chain stores, and television, the problems of our culture have not been able to overcome the slow and simple life of many Italians. While living a human life in the United States (not allowing your children to watch television, eating home cooked meals every night as a family, having a garden, riding a bike to work, shopping at a farmer’s market) is seen as being counter-culture, in Italy all of those ways of life are the culture.
Life in Rome was full of so many more pleasures, and yet unlike in the United States I was healthier for pursuing them. My food intake increased by double at least, but I did not gain any weight. This is not because I spent hours on a hamster wheel. Rather life in Italy is such that you can just live without being too worried about how eating is killing you.
Things are much more balanced. For instance, I walked a good distance to get groceries whether at a produce stand, butcher, baker or market. I also made this walk everyday, because there is a difference between American and Italian produce. Their fruits and vegetables rot. Of course ours do as well, but the shelf life in Italy is terrible. But this is another reason why I was healthier in Italy. The food is actually healthier. A piece of advice, buy food that will rot quickly. This might seem counterintuitive, but it is actually very logical. If food is good enough for bacteria to eat than it is probably good enough for us. What does it take to make a tomato last two weeks without rotting? I don’t really know, but whatever it is I do not want it in my body.
Italy also looks a lot better than the United States, because their art and architecture (well at least the old things) are not committed to proving that beauty does not exist. Experiencing beauty might not be listed on Maslow’s hierarchy, but it should be. It is truly a blessing to walk out into the city after a long and difficult day in class and studying. For beauty sort of works its way into your soul, and it loosens things up that our fickle selves constantly try to bind together. We can so easily narrow our lives and worldview by focusing on our own problems, but beauty takes us out of ourselves and turns our minds to higher things, an experience unique to humans.
So again Rome is better at fulfilling our needs, because as a person travels to the grocery or wherever they not only accomplish their immediate task but also have their souls satiated with the sweet nectar of beauty.
I recognize that this article is incredibly idealistic and impractical at first, but if you start thinking about how the simple things we do throughout our day relate to our greater humanity, things start to make sense. In such a technological society as our own, we can ponder these questions in the numerous tools we use every day. As Neil Postman said in his Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change, “Embedded in every technology is a powerful idea…” So my exhortation is that you try to think about what idea is in the technology you use, and then consider if it is really helping you to live like a human. Do not buy into Maslow as the guide to life. One can do all of the things on his lower level and still not be human. This is exactly why so many people in our society are not happy; they are not living like humans. Being human is of course our destiny and the only true way for us to be happy.
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