I recently came across a book that contains, in passing, a thought-provoking charge against Quakerism. It is Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences by the psychologist Abraham Maslow: universally remembered for his theory of human motivation, the pyramidical ‘Hierarchy of Human Needs’, with ‘self-actualisation’, or integration of the whole personality, at the top. Self-actualizing people, he says, are our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation.

This book spoke to me immediately because it is inclusive. ‘Peak-experiences’ happen to secular and religious people alike. Whether the stimulus is great art, music or natural beauty, love of another, or contemplation of what the individual holds to be divine, the individual is lifted outside the self to a wondrous sense of harmonization with universal powers. Well before Dawkins’ onslaught on religion caught the public imagination, Maslow was lamenting the tendency of rational science to eliminate ‘values… goals, ends, yearnings, aspirations, hopes, …the inexact, the illogical, the metaphorical, the mythic, the symbolic… it is not yet understood that they are characteristic of the human being at his highest levels of development as well as at his lowest.’

• Username
• Password
• Log in
  

• Forgot your password?

If you don't have an account you can register here