Are we cool?
Helen Dymond answers Abraham Maslow’s ‘thought-provoking charge against Quakerism’
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.’
Maslow’s charge is that not only non-religious scientists but ‘the liberal religions’ have turned from the way of the mystic – heartfelt, ecstatic, ineffable. They deny the impulse to kneel or shout for joy. This group includes Unitarians, Universalists, and
‘…the Quakers, even though they originally based themselves in principle on inner, personal, quasi-mystic experience. They have no place for the “warm” as well as the “cool”. They are rational, “simple”, sober and decent, and bypass darkness, wildness and craziness, hesitating it appears, to stir up orgiastic emotions. They have built themselves a philosophy of goodness that has no systematic place for evil. They have not yet incorporated Freud and Jung into their foundations, nor have they discovered that the depths of the personal unconscious are the source of joy, love, creativeness, play, and humor as well as of dangerous and crazy impulses.’
(Quotations are from Chapter 6 of the Viking Press seventh edition, 1973.)
This is the charge. How far (if at all), in our relatively quietist era, does it disturb you? Quaker literature abounds with testimonies to joy and creativeness and the Advice to ‘live adventurously’, but also, it must be said, with voices urging us to restrain ourselves, to let that inner light, whose wisdom transcends our own, shine on our egotistical impulses. He repeats the popular misconception that being ‘good’ is a necessary precondition of being a Quaker. Surely it must be a positive sign of how far the movement has re-evaluated itself since Maslow’s day that Twelve Quakers and Evil could get into print.
More concerning, I think, is his belief that originally Quakers based their faith on inner experience but that this has now been subsumed into behaviour: simple deportment, decent actions. Such an utter misreading of what is going on when Quakers meet together for worship demonstrates the enormous ignorance that still needs to be bridged between Friends and the society in which they operate, which may help to explain Maslow’s impression of:
‘a rather bleak, boring, unexciting, unemotional, cool philosophy of life which fails to do what the traditional religions have tried to do when they were at their best, to inspire, to awe, to comfort, to fulfil… No wonder that the liberal religions and semi-religious groups exert so little influence, even though their members are the most intelligent and most capable sections of the population’.
Comments
Thank you so much for this. I am a person who was brought up in the Society of Friends - but who,like most of my conteporaries from that time, am no longer active. The joke I tell to my relatives is that if Quakers ever have another Quietist period, let me know, and I will come back.
The first quote you give by Maslow helps me to understand some of my struggles with the Society, the second rather less so. Maslow does not not seem to be aware that Friends are sitting on one of the richest histories and traditions of western mysticism in existance. And many contemporary Friends are unaware of this as well.If one draws on this tradition it is possible to incorporate Freud and concepts of evil into our dialogue.
I am very enthusiastic about Ben Pink Dandelion’s work and hope that a spiritual renewal can perhaps light my way back to the Society
By zoeutter on 20th September 2014 - 7:29
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