Are there ways of bringing up children that will consistently (if not always!) lead to partnership characteristics such as non-violence, peacefulness, tolerance, caring, sharing, cooperation, gender equality and independence of mind? The answer from a massive amount of research is a clear ‘yes!’ And equally clear is the reverse message that dominator characteristics are associated with methods that cause stress or trauma in various forms.

Despite many changes, and with some exceptions such as Scandinavia, growing up in the modern western world is still a matter of learning dominator roles. There is strong gender differentiation from an early age. Most boys are taught, often with emotional, verbal or physical violence, to be little men: strong, tough, dominant, action oriented, insensitive, aggressive and violent. They get to play with guns, machines and war games, and dress in jeans and T-shirts. Most girls, on the other hand, get to wear frilly dresses and make-up, and play with dolls. They rapidly learn, also often with violence, that women are submissive, passive, weak, soft, nurturing, and empathic.

It is apparent from comparisons between cultures and extensive research on child-rearing that these are learned traits, not innate gender differences. This is also clear from the fact that many men today are voluntarily taking on the nurturing, child-rearing and home-making roles, and choosing ‘women’s’ careers such as nursing. And women are becoming truck drivers, construction workers, engineers, corporate managers and politicians.

So ... if we want our children to grow up to create a partnership world, how should we go about it? I believe the essential points are:
•    Start before conception!
•    Consistent loving care that meets the child’s needs;
•    Freedom that enables the child to achieve her goals within emotionally and physically safe limits;
•    Discipline based on reason, explanation and distraction rather than punishment;
•    Early assignment of responsibility;
•    Toys, games and entertainment that encourage peaceful cooperation; and
•    Modelling of partnership behaviours by adults.

Before birth

Most research on child-rearing has focused on the time after birth, but there is increasing evidence that birth, pre-birth and even pre-conception experiences are important. These ideas are no longer limited to the alternative, New Age movement, but are emerging from reputable mainstream science as described by Bruce Lipton in The Biology of Belief. Not only can life before birth predispose us to a variety of physical diseases such as heart, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and osteoporosis, but also it can affect mood disorders and psychoses.

It is not surprising that the emotional state of the mother affects foetal development since they share the same blood supply. If your mother was stressed and her system constantly flooded with adrenaline, so was yours, and your development was stunted accordingly. And if your mother smoked, drank, took dope or other toxins, these also affected you. These experiences, it is now clear, programme the subconscious mind so that we come into the world with ready-formed and deep-seated beliefs about life and survival. And it is not just the mother who is responsible. The father, family and friends are also implicated since their support, or lack of it, and relationships with the mother are major factors in her state of mind and well-being. It is now possible with ultra-sound scanning to watch the foetus react when its parents quarrel!

Bruce Lipton quotes Verny on the importance of the experience in the womb (from Verny and Weintraub, Pre-parenting: Nurturing your child from conception):

In fact, the great weight of the scientific evidence that has emerged over the last decade demands that we reevaluate the mental and emotional abilities of unborn children. Awake or asleep, the studies show, they are constantly tuned in to their mother’s every action, thought and feeling. From the moment of conception, the experience in the womb shapes the brain and lays the groundwork for personality, emotional temperament, and the power of higher thought.

Far more surprising for many of us are the findings on pre-conception influences. Bruce Lipton cites recent research that “In the final stages of egg and sperm maturation, a process called genomic imprinting adjusts the activity of specific groups of genes that will shape the character of the child yet to be conceived. ... Research suggests that what is going on in the lives of the parents during the process of genomic imprinting has a profound influence on the mind and body of their child.” And quoting Verny again: “It makes a difference whether we are conceived in love, haste or hate, and whether the mother wants to be pregnant ... parents do better when they live in a calm and stable environment free of addictions and supported by family and friends.”

Even more radical are the theories of Grant McFetridge of the Institute for the Study of Peak States. He believes that the effects go right back to the time when our mother’s eggs are developing while she is still a foetus in our grandmother’s womb.

Challenging stuff!

Loving care

Infants in peaceful societies get lots of attention and fondling, and cry little because their needs are met immediately. Often, they are carried everywhere, and are in constant physical contact with their mothers. By their very presence, warm, caring, empathic parents demonstrate that the world is a benevolent, safe place, thus boosting their children’s self-confidence. This confidence, coupled with the example of loving behaviour, facilitates the development of independent, caring children who feel safe in reaching out to others. By contrast, when a child’s needs – whether emotional or physical - are not met promptly, it becomes frustrated, angry and potentially aggressive. Gentle touch, encouragement and affection also help release ‘feel-good’ hormones that not only enhance emotional and mental well-being, but also stimulate brain development and strengthen the ability to control aggressive impulses.

Children don’t need to be looked after by their parents all the time, but it is important that they know and trust their carers. Consistent caring leads to confidence and trust in the world, whereas inconsistency results in dependency, and a need for approval. Extended families and small communities where child care is shared by all adults work well in this regard. But even highly-skilled professional child-care is less good because the relatively large number of children per carer leads to less intimate relationships. Children also become distressed when personnel change.

Orphans raised in institutions and children with cold, rejecting parents tend to become hostile, and their emotional development is stunted. Deprivation of loving care for the first 3 years can lead to permanent temper, aggression, social withdrawal and inability to form close relationships. Early stress (ie trauma) stunts brain development, and is associated with problems such as attention deficit, hyperactivity, anxiety and destructive behaviour. However, over-protectiveness has undesirable effects too, resulting in conformity rather than independence.

From these studies it is clear that western practices often encourage aggression and violence. We still often separate mother and child for long periods soon after birth; expect the infant to sleep in a different room, let alone a different bed; try to synchronise feeding with our schedules rather than the needs of the baby; limit physical contact to feeding, cleaning and play times; and so on.

Freedom within bounds

Aggressive behaviour is linked to frustration of needs, goals and desires, and may be associated with a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability. Hence, in order to minimize aggression it is important not only to meet needs for love and care, but also to provide the freedom and resources that enable children to achieve their legitimate, acceptable personal goals. However, children need to learn that they can’t do anything they choose, and to inhibit aggressive responses. They must learn to consider the needs of others as well as themselves, and that some things are dangerous.

Partnership parenting seeks to provide this bounded freedom. Sometimes called authoritative, it is not only warm and responsive but also firm and directive. It treats children seriously as independent people whose feelings, preferences and questions matter. It explains the reasons for limits, encourages understanding of the needs of others, and diverts attention away from inappropriate desires rather than simply imposing rules. Partnership parents try to balance the needs and rights of adults and children, and to provide firm control when necessary without hemming the child in. The resulting independence of mind is important in resisting charismatic dominating leaders and peer pressure.

By contrast, the offspring of controlling and coercive (ie authoritarian) parents tend to be frustrated and aggressive. Children of permissive parents who are warm but lax also tend to be aggressive because such behaviour is not actively discouraged. To the child, the absence of limits may appear as indifference, or a lack of love. Strong outward aggression is produced by permissive, rejecting and punitive parenting, such as when children are allowed with indifference to do as they please most of the time, punctuated by occasional explosions of anger. By contrast, children of controlling and rejecting parents tend to direct their aggression inwards at themselves.

Discipline

Bounded freedom obviously needs to be enforced at times when the child’s desires are dangerous or inappropriate. However, peaceful societies and partnership parents rarely use physical punishment, preferring to tolerate, laugh at, or divert the unwanted behaviour. They allow a certain amount of verbal give and take, and praise and encourage good behaviour. They take the time to reason with the child, and help to develop empathy by explaining the effects of hurtful behaviour. But it is not good enough to follow the old dictum “Do as I say, not as I do.” Success depends on living the values espoused. In these ways, discipline is embedded in a warm, nurturing, and empathic learning environment.

It is notable that most peaceful societies and partnership parents believe in the inherent goodness of children. Hence they aim to draw out the best, rather than beat out the worst. By contrast, belief in original sin, or a similar doctrine, often leads to the idea that ‘sparing the rod spoils the child.’ There is abundant evidence that children who are spanked are more likely to be aggressive. Harsh discipline demonstrates that might is right, and teaches the domination and submission roles of the dominator society. Discipline based on power or withdrawal of love can get conformity in the short term, but it discourages internalization of the desired norms and values. Being good comes to be equated with obedience, and the objective becomes to avoid being caught.

Responsibility

If children are to learn to be part of a cooperative family or community, they need to take real, significant roles in the life of the whole group from an early age. This happens naturally in traditional societies where children are part of the economic unit - cleaning the floor, or looking after the hens, or making other useful contributions. When coupled with praise and encouragement, early responsibility increases self-confidence and independence, as well as cooperation and caring.

Such roles have disappeared from western society, and are often regarded as exploitation. But the reality is that children need to have genuine and appropriate ways of being integral parts of the whole. Many people have argued the need for a reintegration of children into family and community life, including the workplace. Children’s roles should be ‘real’ and not invented ‘make work’. Nor should they be imposed duties under authoritarian control. They should include tasks that are genuinely important and that require judgement, decision and risk. This means that parents and other adults must trust the child, refraining from following up, and being willing to accept occasional failures without discipline.

Research in schools shows that children respond well to responsibilities such as caring for or tutoring younger children, deciding in groups how best to achieve learning goals, keeping their classroom clean and tidy, and even working out standards of behaviour and means of discipline. But again, this needs to be combined with genuine autonomy, for example in how they want their classroom to look.

Choice of toys and games

For decades, the tobacco industry denied and obfuscated the evidence that smoking kills. Oil and other interests still deny the evidence for climate change and block effective action. And in a similar way, the media deny the overwhelming evidence that violent TV shows, films and computer games feed violence in the real world, whereas peaceful and cooperative ones have beneficial effects. More radical critiques point out that all films, TV and computer games reduce time given to human relationships and the learning that comes from the experience of real games, cooperative activities, arguments and other interactions.

The evidence is clear that if we want children to grow up peaceful, cooperative and caring we should choose activities that pit the child against herself or her environment, not against others; and that require cooperation rather than individualism or competition. However, the chosen toys and games must meet other needs for excitement, physical action, challenge, controlled danger and the chance to imitate important adult activities. However, the power of the media and peer pressure is such that it is very difficult for partnership parents and alternative schools always to choose appropriate toys, games and equipment. I well remember that when I refused to buy my young son a toy gun, he went and made his own!

In the classroom, research shows that cooperation rather than competition amongst students improves learning and achievement, particularly where student teams have responsibility for working out how best to carry out the assigned task. The social skills learned through interaction also enhance self-esteem, and encourage trust, sensitivity, communication, caring and sharing. Similarly, course materials such as reading practice can be chosen to reinforce partnership values and behaviours.

By contrast, toy weapons and war games encourage violent play. And they teach children that these are normal parts of life, and that violence is an acceptable way to resolve conflicts. Less well-known is the fact that competitive sports also have negative effects. There is a common belief that taking part in, or watching, competitive sports discharges an aggressive drive, thus reducing aggression afterwards. However, the evidence suggests the reverse: such activities reinforce aggressive behaviours and reduce learned inhibitions against them. For example, people are less caring and sharing after watching a football match than after watching gymnastics.

As Buddhists express it, the mental seeds that grow are the ones we water. If we water aggression and violence, greed and competition through books, films and games, these are the characteristics that will grow. Conversely, if we water the seeds of love, peace and cooperation, they are the ones that will grow.

Modeling of partnership behaviours

This key point hardly needs elaboration. It is not enough to preach partnership relationships, we must live them to the best of our ability. Indeed, the inconsistency of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ is often a source of confusion and stress (or trauma) for children, producing negative effects.

Conclusions

The evidence indicates that the right methods of child-rearing and education can greatly enhance the development of partnership personality traits and behaviours. The most important requirement is a loving relationship with parents and other adults through which needs are met as they arise, and restrictions are imposed as necessary for the well-being of the child. Discipline should be firm, but based on explanation and reason, not force. As far as possible, children should be given meaningful and responsible roles in the adult world. Toys, games and entertainments should be chosen to encourage cooperation, caring and sharing rather than competition and individualism.

By contrast, the methods that lead to dominator characteristics are all ones that cause distress, stress, or trauma in one form or another. In other words, it appears that aggressive, dominating, violent relationships and behaviour result when the needs and desires of the child are not met appropriately.

A clear conclusion is that training for parenthood and the reform of education are priorities in the struggle to create a better future. But reforming child-rearing is not sufficient for several reasons. First, these cannot prevent or heal traumas experienced at birth or in the womb. Similarly, a lot of trauma is accidental and unavoidable, but may nevertheless divert personal development towards the dominator track.

A second issue is a matter of time. Parenthood training and educational reform cannot be introduced overnight, and in the meanwhile the next generation of children will continue to be traumatized. And even with training and the best will in the world, traumatized parents will still damage their children unless their own trauma is healed first. With hindsight, I can see this in my own family. And I believe this is what the Bible means when it speaks of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children.

In other words, a partnership society will take generations to evolve in this way, and I’m not sure we have that much time before civilization self-destructs. Effective, rapid and widely available means of healing both individual and collective trauma are needed.


On the Wisdom Trail
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I began this series of entries with the question “Why is it so hard to change the world?” In response, I argued that a fundamental cause is trauma. The trauma of climate change was probably a major cause of the loss of the early partnership culture, and the rise of harsh dominator civilizations – a process immortalised in the myths of humanity’s ejection from the Garden of Eden. Trauma continues to lock us into a self-perpetuating feedback loop that strongly resists a return to more peaceful, egalitarian, cooperative relationships and societies. Despite this resistance, much progress has been made towards partnership over the last century, but it is a slow and painful process.

Part of our resistance is due to the belief that human nature is aggressively competitive, territorial and hierarchical. But, as I argued a couple of entries ago, this case is hard to sustain when we look at the huge diversity of human cultures, many of which are non-aggressive, cooperative and egalitarian. Great volumes of research reveal how we can foster these characteristics by raising and educating children appropriately. And it turns out that the key criterion that differentiates partnership from dominator child-rearing is trauma. Children who are cherished and experience appropriate adult models of behaviour tend to grow up non-aggressive, cooperative, caring and sharing. They suffer relatively little emotional, psychological or physical trauma compared to those who become aggressive, violent, selfish and competitive.

This trauma model is only one of many possible explanations of the human predicament. In this entry and the next I want to start looking at other explanations to see how they relate to the trauma model, and what further insights we can draw from them.

The Influence of Worldview

My book, The Science of Oneness: A worldview for the twenty-first century, arose from my belief that we need a new worldview in order to solve the planetary problems of war and violence, poverty and social breakdown, climate change and environmental destruction. The fundamental beliefs and assumptions we hold about the nature of reality constitute our worldview, and determine how we perceive and experience that reality. Indeed, in a very real sense, our worldview creates our reality and the future we forge.

Individuals and civilizations alike resist changing their worldviews. These fundamental beliefs are so deeply embedded that they are accepted unquestioningly as ‘the way things are’. And to question them can threaten our very existence. It can shatter our sense of identity, meaning and purpose; and destroy our emotional and psychological security. It can pitch us into an alien world where we no longer know the rules, and where there are no reassuring answers to our deepest questions. In other words, a change of worldview can be traumatic.

This being the case, why do I believe change is essential? Wouldn’t it be better to avoid this trauma by hanging onto our core beliefs? The answer, I think, lies in balancing the trauma of change against the trauma caused by our current worldview. Our present ‘reality’ produces emotional and psychological trauma that flows through to physical trauma. We can choose to continue this trauma for the foreseeable future, or to endure the relatively brief trauma of a transition to a more positive belief system and a future of less trauma.

How, you may be wondering, does the modern worldview create trauma? To answer that question I’ll quote passages from an article on Worldview and Peace that I wrote for the journal Dialogue and Alliance published by the Inter Religious Federation for World Peace. I have already quoted the first section in an earlier entry on The Danger of Truth. The second section, on Individualism is quoted below. Although the idea of ‘trauma’ is not emphasized, I think the message is clear.

Individualism

Over three centuries ago, René Descartes believed he had cracked the problem of identity when he declared “I think, therefore I am” – a statement which has become one of the foundation stones of the modern western worldview. Its consequences are profound.

My mind is a highly personal world which I cannot share directly with you, and which you cannot comprehend fully even with the latest high-tech equipment. I believe this will remain the case no matter how sophisticated our brain scanning techniques become. So if I am my mind, I am cut off from direct relationship with other humans and other living beings. Inverting John Donne’s conclusion, I am, and will always be, ‘an island, entire of itself.’

This sense of isolation is reinforced by the reductionist approach of science that seeks to understand how the world works by breaking things down into separate components, and then studying their properties and interactions. Thus physicists have been engaged for centuries on the search for the fundamental particles of matter in the belief that discovery of this holy grail will open the door to a ‘theory of everything.’ Following the same track, social scientists often study the behavior of individuals, or social atoms, in order to understand society as a whole.

These two factors are significant sources of the individualism that has swept the modern world – a belief system that is justified by the nineteenth century philosophies of social Darwinism and capitalism. Inspired by the traumatic social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, and drawing on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, social Darwinism envisages society as a fierce, competitive struggle for survival in which only the fittest individuals survive. The strong and ruthless prosper, while the weak and merciful go to the wall – an idea that inspired Hitler’s drive for Aryan supremacy. In a complementary theory, Adam Smith claimed that when individuals pursue their economic self-interest, they are led by an invisible hand to serve the good of the collective as well. And so we need not concern ourselves with issues such as poverty and exploitation.

For a period after the Second World War, the worst excesses of individualism and capitalism were moderated by Social Democracy. But in the greedy eighties and beyond these reforms were swept aside by revitalized right wing political and economic ideologies, and the collapse of the Communist bloc.

Individualism and the sense of separateness that it brings is implicated in many of our problems today. It has led us to regard nature as no more than a cornucopia of riches for our exclusive benefit, and to cause the greatest number of species extinctions for hundreds of millions of years. It justifies our brutal treatment of animals on factory farms and in experiments, claiming with Descartes that they are unfeeling machines whose cries of pain mean no more than the squeaking of a wheel. And it enables us to stereotype other races, cultures and religions as sub-human, leading to torture, pogroms, and genocide.

If we are isolated individuals, it is to be expected that we will pursue personal self-interest rather than the good of the collective. Hence, this belief feeds our greed, and erodes community and social ethics such as cooperation, compassion and charity. What were once social functions, such as care of the elderly, sick and young, become absorbed into the economy, dependent on the impersonal exchange of money rather than loving human relationships. People no longer work together to meet their social needs but rely on government and business to provide for them. Alienation, fear and loneliness increase as the sense of belonging to a caring community fades.

Individualism implies uniqueness and diversity. And yet we mostly strive to conform to group norms by holding acceptable opinions, wearing the latest fashions, listening to ‘in’ music and watching the most popular films. Our culture actually encourages only superficial differences and denies and rejects genuine diversity. We stereotype Jews, Muslims, Blacks and others, and our tolerance has very strict boundaries. We believe conflict arises from difference, and hence aim for cultural simplicity and homogeneity. But there is another view that conflict arises from lack of diversity because, if we are all similar, we have to compete with one another for status rather than being able to express our true uniqueness. Also, social diversity is like a library of alternative forms of social organization that we can draw on as we face the growing challenges of the future.

Individualism encourages an emphasis on individual rights, and neglects the essential counter-balance of responsibilities. People grab all they can for themselves, and opt out of responsible citizenship and community involvement as far as possible. Individualism similarly erodes values such as honesty and the honoring of contracts on which capitalism itself depends. Without these values, greater and greater reliance must be placed on law and regulation to prevent abuses. But such systems are costly and it is impossible to police every situation. Besides, if we all pursue our own self-interest, where will we find incorruptible guardians of public morality? These issues underlie the rapid rise of corporate and government corruption, with scandals such as Enron and the financial collapse of many retirement pension schemes. Simultaneously, the salaries and benefits that top corporate management pay themselves have exploded while the lid has been kept firmly on wages.

The growing gulf between the few obscenely rich and the many on the edge of survival is now a global phenomenon. In the ‘two-thirds world’ large corporations play country against country, continually moving production to gain rock-bottom wage rates and lax environmental regulations. Free markets and free trade give them the freedom to operate as they choose; the freedom from responsibility that allows them to pass on the social and environmental costs of their operations to peoples and nations that suffer the resultant social breakdown, ill health and ecological devastation. Economic freedom gives them the right to ‘discover’ traditional healing plants and patent them; to force indigenous peoples off their land in order to exploit mineral and other resources; to assume ownership of water resources that the poor can no longer afford; and to ignore the unprofitable diseases of the poor.

Meanwhile, in wealthy nations, corporations use both sticks and carrots to control the workforce. The sticks include the threat of unemployment due to competition from poor countries and new technologies. The carrot is an ever-rising flood of consumer goodies and gadgets to feed insatiable consumer wants stimulated by advertising. The population is further tranquillized by manipulation and sanitizing of media information.

More directly related to the issue of war and peace, it has been estimated that as many as half the scientists and engineers in advanced countries are employed on military research. Not only does this emphasis draw funds away from urgent problems such as poverty and climate change, but also it has led to the increasing use of military superiority by rich nations to dominate others, and the use of smart weapons to avoid the risks of military engagement.

This brief overview reveals that capitalism is aggressive at heart, thriving on inequality and exploitation. It is an economy of violence of the haves against the have-nots. It is dividing the world into two camps as the rich build defensive barriers against the poor while continuing to exploit them to meet their selfish ends. The violence may be non-physical most of the time, but it is violence nevertheless. Gross inequalities and injustice breed anger, resentment and violence. They incite anti-social behavior, crime and terrorism, and they exacerbate old racial and ethnic conflicts rather then resolving them.

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It may seem far-fetched to attribute so many of our problems to individualism. But let’s imagine how things might be if we identified not only with our minds, but also with our bodies, emotions, relationships and souls (if you believe we have souls); and if our worldview emphasized not only our individuality but also the fact that we are integral parts of larger wholes.

Our contracted sense of identity would expand to embrace more of who we are. Descartes’ declaration that “I think therefore I am” would be joined by the Buddha’s “I breathe therefore I am”, Nicholas Humphrey’s “I feel therefore I am”, and the social and ecological perspective that “I relate therefore I am.”

The last of these is particularly important. It recognizes the indisputable fact that our very existence depends on the support of natural and social systems. Without our brothers and sisters, the bacteria, fungi, plants, insects, birds and mammals that form our ecosystem we would have no food to eat, no air to breathe, no water to drink. Without the Living Planet and all her life-support systems, we would not exist. Without our fellow humans, we would scrape a bare subsistence living at best. Without our society, we would have no language or culture, and no role or identity beyond that of an animal bent on survival. We are not only precious individuals with rights, but also totally dependent parts of larger wholes with the responsibility to care for them.

Once we recognize that we have no existence or identity apart from the whole, our sense of self starts to expand to include not only our minds and bodies, but also our families, our communities and our ecosystems. They become acknowledged parts of us. We come to understand that protecting and nurturing them is protecting and nurturing ourselves; that our true self-interest lies in the well-being of the whole. From this perspective, exploitation of other beings becomes exploitation of ourselves; violence against another being becomes violence against ourselves.

As with our belief in Truth, the pendulum has swung too far. We need to move towards a new balance in which individuality is complemented by an equally powerful collective identity – a strong belief in human and ecological community. With such a worldview, an economy of sufficiency and a society of cooperative communities would naturally emerge.


On the Wisdom Trail
If you enjoyed this article and would like to join a discussion of ideas raised in this blog, why not join my Pod “On the Wisdom Trail”?

In a meandering way, I’m exploring the role of our worldview in creating trauma, and the role of trauma in creating our human predicament. The last entry looked at how our belief that we are separate individuals contributes to violence, war and other traumas. Today, I want to continue this exploration by looking at the importance of our ideas about the meaning and purpose of life.

The following is another extract from my article on Worldview and Peace written for the journal Dialogue and Alliance published by the Inter Religious Federation for World Peace.

Meaning

Science and atheistic humanism tell us that life is a meaningless accident in a purposeless universe. The cosmos is seen as a lifeless, mindless machine with every object and event determined by chains of physical cause and effect. Life evolved by chance through processes that are driven by aggressive competition for survival. Mind and consciousness are mere by-products of complex material systems with no independent existence. There is no life force, no soul or spirit, no God. There is nothing beyond death.

Capitalism presents a similarly bleak vision. Its purpose is endless growth of economic activity without regard to its non-monetary costs and benefits, the quality of life, human welfare and happiness, or its impacts on nature. A mother who stays home to raise her children contributes nothing to GNP, but if she goes out to work both her wages and the cost of childcare are counted. GNP rises when money is spent to clean up industrial pollution, or to fight crime and drug addiction caused by social breakdown, or to treat ill-health caused by stress.

The drive for material growth ignores the fact that nothing can grow forever without limits. When cells in our bodies lose their self-limiting mechanism, they become cancerous and eventually destroy us. The human race, with our ever-rising numbers and per capita demands, already absorbs more than half of all nature’s production, leaving insufficient to sustain the natural systems that sustain us. We have become a cancer on the face of the Earth, and are in danger of destroying our own home. Paradoxically, our greatest hope for the future lies in the crisis of climate change which may yet shock us into collective action before it is too late.

Capitalism sees the meaning and purpose of life as ever-increasing consumption of goods and services rather than in relationship, community, artistic creativity, or spirituality. But the satisfactions of consumption are transient. Like a drug, each fix soon wears off and we need more. Material wants are insatiable because they mask the enduring emptiness and inner hunger of life rather than fulfilling it.

Our culture leaves us, as individuals, to discover or create our own deeper meaning and purpose rather than providing a secure philosophical and psychological basis for existence. Given this situation, is it any wonder that so many people succumb to despair, depression, apathy, alienation and anomie, or fill the existential void with hedonism, sex, drugs or retail therapy? Is it any wonder that so many are being drawn to fundamentalisms and cults that bring meaning and certainty to life? Is it any wonder that young people find a sense of belonging and a kind of love in street gangs? Is it any wonder that many react with anti-social behaviour, aggression and violence against the black joke the cosmos and society has played on us?

Purpose

The nearest western civilization comes to a sense of purpose is the ideal of progress. Belief in the possibility of a better future, was stronger in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than now. Two world wars and countless lesser conflicts, the nuclear age and the era of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, the rise of international terrorism and the looming crisis of climate change have sapped our confidence. When I was young, in the 1960’s, we faced the prospect of nuclear annihilation and global hunger, but it was still possible to believe we could save the world.

Today, faith in progress is much harder to sustain, and emphasis has shifted to the less inspiring goal of sustainability and security against crime, terrorism, resource scarcity and environmental destruction. In their drive for security, the rich nations are becoming ever more aggressive both towards other nations and their own citizens. We are destroying our own freedoms, and violating our own rights due to irrational, faceless terrors. And rather than examining inner causes, we are projecting our problems outwards onto other nations and religions, creating enemies in our minds and in fact. Terrorism is the harvest from seeds we have sown.

Progress and security are goals that keep us focused on the future; on a time when things will be better if not perfect; when poverty, disease and violence will be banished, and peace and harmony will reign. We feed this yearning for a better future by perpetually forecasting and planning, and, paradoxically, by gazing in the rear-view mirror to see where we have been. We plot trends of every imaginable statistic to see if we are indeed making progress, and we take great interest in the lessons of history as guides to the future. We behave similarly in our personal lives, always imagining that things will be better when we have the latest gadget, another qualification, promotion at work, a new partner, more money … And always dwelling on past trauma, regret and guilt.

However, as Eckart Tolle argues in The Power of Now, this focus on past and future is a root cause of our violent civilization. By nursing painful memories, we feed the desire for personal vengeance. History keeps alive ethnic and racial memories of past wrongs that often explode into fresh violence, thus feeding a perpetual vicious cycle. Similarly, violence often arises from desires or fears for the future. The Vietnam war was sparked by fear of future expansion by China. Intervention in Iraq was due as much to the desire for secure oil supplies as by fear of WMDs.

Living so much in the past and future prevents us, individually and as a culture, from living fully in the present. Yet this is the only time we actually have, as all major religions have proclaimed. The Buddha taught that the root of suffering lies in constant wanting and craving. And Jesus urged us to take no thought for tomorrow, and to learn from the example of the flowers and birds which are cared for by God.

Despite our cowboy ethic that peace grows out of the barrel of a gun, security cannot be gained by violence. Violence breeds violence. We can create peace and security only by accepting the feared stranger not just as our brother, but as part of our selves; by healing the pain and suffering; through love, trust, justice, understanding, reconciliation and forgiveness. Examples from many parts of the world show it is possible.

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I concluded the last post with the image of a pendulum that has swung too far one way, and whose balance needs to be restored. In this case, perhaps one pole is unquestioning acceptance of the meaning and purpose of life as promulgated by religious authorities, and the other pole is reliance on individual exploration and discovery. In the last few centuries, the pendulum has swung from authority to individuality, and now perhaps needs to swing back towards the centre. What we need is a range of alternative, authoritative and reliable traditions from which individuals can choose on the basis of critical evaluation and resonance with their inner selves.


On the Wisdom Trail
If you enjoyed this article and would like to join a discussion of ideas raised in this blog, why not join my Pod “On the Wisdom Trail”?

One of the simplest and most powerful models of human psychology is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. I have thought for a long time that many of the problems of the rich world arise from a ‘short-circuiting’ of this hierarchy that keeps most of us trapped at the lower levels. But it was only recently that I realised that trauma may be the cause of this short-circuit. In this entry, I’ll summarise Maslow’s model and describe the effects of trauma on it.

An outline of Maslow’s theory

From a lifetime of study, Abraham Maslow concluded that there are certain psychological as well as material things that are needed for health and well-being. He arranged these in a hierarchy from basic material needs to higher ‘self-actualization’ needs. He claimed that once a lower-level need is more or less satisfied, a drive emerges to attain the next higher level, and we forget our earlier lack.

In Maslow’s own words, “Apparently we function best when we are striving for something we lack.” And “the blessings we have already achieved come to be taken for granted, to be forgotten, ... even, not to be valued any more – at least until they are taken away from us.” Hence an underlying consequence of his theory is that our most fundamental psychological need may be for a meaningful goal - an idea that supports my discussion of meaning and purpose in the last post.

Abraham Maslow identified five levels of human need, as shown in the diagram below (taken from Wikipedia). At the base are bodily survival needs including clean air and water, nutritious food, elimination of wastes, and sleep. Although not strictly a survival need, sexual satisfaction is included in this level. At the next level are safety needs, which take a variety of forms including protection from hazards of all kinds, stability and consistency in the material and social environment, freedom from fear and anxiety, and the need for structure and order in our lives.

 


The third level is the need for love and a sense of belonging. We form affectionate relationships with our families, friends, neighbours, gangs, colleagues, animals, and others. Without them, we may feel lonely, ostracised, rejected, friendless and alienated. Similar ties are formed with places including our home, village or homeland, and with organisations such as churches, clubs or companies. Love needs are two-way – we need to love and give service as well as be loved and served.

A sense of personal worth and self-respect, coupled with the need to be held in high esteem by others, form the fourth level. The first aspect includes the desire for achievement, mastery, competence, independence and freedom, whilst the second covers the longing for reputation, status, prestige, recognition and fame. Satisfaction of these needs generates self-confidence, and builds a sense of identity and being useful in the world. By contrast, thwarting leads to feelings of inferiority, weakness and helplessness.

At the top of the pyramid is a drive to realise our full potential as human beings – what Maslow called ‘self-actualization’. This is the realm of creativity and spirituality, of personal growth and enlightenment. As one writer expressed it: “We need fulfilment. Where there are holes, we will have aches as long as the air passes through our beings. It is a perpetual and fruitless search, which ends in death anyway. But we are doomed and blessed with this dilemma.”

Although Maslow presented his model as a hierarchical pyramid, he emphasised that we do not follow this progression rigidly. Most people remain partially unsatisfied in all basic needs, with satisfaction generally decreasing at each succeeding level. And even the poorest societies devote some resources to meeting higher needs through celebration, ritual, artistry and play. Indeed, many materially-poor hunter-gatherer societies spend more time in such ‘leisure’ activities than wealthy westerners.

There are also exceptions to the order. Often, creativity bursts forth despite the lack of lower needs, rather than being unleashed by their satisfaction - the starving artist in a garret is a cliché of western culture. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that, as Aldous Huxley put it, “A man who is hungry is preoccupied with only one thought, which is food. He is reduced to something sub-human – an empty stomach and an emaciated frame – and nothing more. It is the same with safety. If one is continually menaced, it is extraordinarily difficult to feel any of the higher needs.”

Short-circuiting the pyramid

Modern western society is the wealthiest and most secure there has ever been. We are largely free of material want and disease. And war, to the extent that it touches us at all, is mostly remote from our homes and daily lives. On the whole, our physiological and safety needs appear to be well satisfied, and we should be free to pursue higher needs. Instead, we have become neurotically obsessed with things, and protecting ourselves from their loss. Many lack self-esteem, and feel unloved and alienated. Relatively few are happy and fulfilled, and even fewer can claim to be self-actualized, or to have reached their full potential. Why is this? A few personal speculations follow.

In the capitalist world, relationships have become impoverished. We have replaced caring, sharing and cooperation with paid professional services in which love plays no part. And we have up-rooted ourselves, moving frequently from place to place. In consequence, we have lost both our sense of belonging to a loving, supportive family and community, and our sense of being at home in the physical world. We have tried to fill this void in the only ways we know how. We try to buy ‘love’ in the form of commercial sex, partnership ‘contracts’, obsequious hotel staff, club membership, or other services. And we seek a sense of place by buying houses and holiday homes.

When these fail to satisfy, we indulge in ‘retail therapy’, pampering ourselves by buying things that we don’t really need and only briefly want. And when things also fail to meet our needs, we indulge in mind-altering substances to dull the pain and make us feel better, ranging from coffee to cocaine, and tobacco to tranquillisers. At the heart of consumerism lurks emptiness and a lack of real love and belonging.

A similar picture emerges when we look at esteem needs. Status, prestige and esteem are given to those with money, youth and beauty; the cult of the star. As discussed a couple of posts ago, we have created a culture of individualism in which each of us has to make our own way and no longer has a secure, valued place in a stable community. We have become judgemental – basing our valuation of others on their qualifications, professions, income, and possessions, and no longer accept and value them for who they are. As our efforts to gain status and earn respect and self-esteem fail to satisfy, we once again try futilely to buy them with designer clothes, the latest gadgets, fast cars, and big houses. 

We have become so absorbed in earning the money to buy security, love, belongingness and esteem that most of us have no time or energy left to wonder about self-actualization. At least until the mid-life crisis hits when we may restlessly change partners, jobs and cities before settling into another materialist rut. A few break free of careers and other responsibilities to follow their bliss, as Joseph Campbell so often expressed it, through personal growth, spirituality, creativity, community and alternative lifestyles. In these ways they find the meaning and purpose of their lives, and the freedom to strive towards that elusive potential.

In short, the lack of love and esteem has led us into consumerism and other addictions in a misguided effort to meet our needs. As with any addiction, the desire for things is insatiable. We crave ever more and bigger fixes to block out the trauma of loneliness, unworthiness, emptiness and meaninglessness. Trauma that, at least superficially, appears to be due largely to our worldview (as discussed in my last two entries), and our resultant culture.

This short-circuiting of our drive for love and esteem is exacerbated by our culture’s denial of the spiritual realm. Life, science tells us, is a meaningless accident, and our lives are without any deeper purpose. For most people, there is no vision of heaven or enlightenment to draw their eyes upwards, and fuel their aspiration for self-actualization. And yet, as I argue in my book The Science of Oneness, spirituality and science can be integrated into a coherent worldview.

For most of us, other causal traumas are lurking beneath the surface of the subconscious. Many of us were undoubtedly affected deeply by the pain and dramatic change of the birth experience, often exacerbated by modern practices such as chemical induction, forceps, early cutting of the umbilical cord, caesarean section, and separation from our mothers, including isolation in a humidicrib. There is growing evidence, too, that many foetus’s are traumatised in the womb by toxics (such as nicotine and alcohol), and physical injury during sex, domestic violence or accidents. And some researchers are now tracing effects back to implantation, conception and even the formation of the egg in our grandmothers. (See entry on Partnership Parenting)

No matter what the root cause, there is no doubt that addiction to money and things is consuming the Earth on which we depend. And it is sapping our health and vitality. Rather than material affluence enabling us to break through to higher and higher levels of being, most of us remain stuck, our energy short-circuited at the bottom two levels until our fuses burn out.


How can we mend this short-circuit? In my view, amongst the priorities are:
•    The need for a new worldview that brings a deep meaning and purpose to life. One possibility is described in my book The Science of Oneness: A worldview for the twenty-first century.
•    The need to heal our traumas, both as individuals and as communities and nations. Amongst the traumas that we must heal I include the obvious ones such as child abuse, rape and war; the deeper-seated ones due to experiences before and during birth, or in previous lives; and the more subtle ones due to our beliefs and worldviews.
•    The need to open our hearts and re-create a society in which relationships, not things, are primary; relationships in which, in Martin Buber’s terms, we meet ourselves, other humans, and all beings as ‘thou’ not ‘it’.
•    The need to minimise the number of traumatised children by adopting partnership parenting practices.

When we do these things, we will heal the planet as well as ourselves.


On the Wisdom Trail
If you enjoyed this article and would like to join a discussion of ideas raised in this blog, why not join my Pod “On the Wisdom Trail”?

As I wrote the last entry, I began to ask myself: Just how relevant is Maslow’s hierarchy to the planetary crisis? Is it any more than narcissistic navel-gazing by the rich while the planet burns? After all, the great majority of humans don’t have the freedom to pursue self-actualization because of poverty, disease, famine, exploitation, oppression, war and other basic traumas.

This train of thought was sparked by reading a description of life in northern Uganda where the Lord’s Resistance Army operates.

As the Lord’s Resistance Army grew throughout the 1990’s, so did the ferocity of its violence. Anyone found moving along roads or riding a bicycle without permission was told they had broken LRA law and had their lips severed with a machete, their ears sliced off or an eye gouged out with a piece of wire. Recruitment was forced upon the vulnerable, supplies were stolen from the weak. In most cases, the victims were children or young women. Some children were forced to murder their parents, beating them with sticks or torching their family home, because the rebels knew if a child thought it had nothing to live for, it would be acquiescent to their cause. At times they simply forced children walking home from the fields or school to carry their belongings and did not let them go.

What possible relevance can the idea of self-actualization have to people trapped in such horror? Suffering such appalling atrocities? How could they possibly think beyond bare survival? How can they and their children, and their children’s children, conceivably heal from such trauma and move towards achieving their potentials? And unless they, and the countless others suffering similar traumas, do heal, how can humanity and the planet heal?

Those questions led in turn to a fruitless effort to imagine the state of mind of those who commit such atrocities. What motivates such brutality? What is going on in their minds when they commit such acts? What traumas did they suffer to bring them to this? How can they possibly believe their leaders are inspired with divine Truth when they are so clearly Evil incarnate? 

The relevance of Maslow’s hierarchy

I find the distinction between freedom to and freedom from is helpful here. Those who lack the material necessities of life have little interest in political freedom, and are likely to support any government that offers hope of a better life. Similarly, those who lack security will support the promise of peace and stability. Thus, freedom from grinding poverty and insecurity is a prerequisite of freedom for love, esteem and self-actualization. It is only when physiological and safety needs have been more or less met that freedom to pursue higher goals emerges as a serious need.

From this perspective, Maslow’s hierarchy applies only to a minority of the world’s population - the affluent rich and middle classes. So why do I think it’s important compared to the more urgent needs of the majority?

One reason is that it feels right to me as a simple, easily-understood model of how things could be, of how they ought to be for everyone. We pride ourselves on the superior intellect and abilities of our species, and yet the majority of our kind suffer far more trauma than any other animal. Other species may have their lives cut short by predators and occasional famine, but none is deliberately killed, tortured or imprisoned by its fellows, and none wages war against other groups. True, the competition for territory or a mate is violent at times, but it is ritualised so that death is rare. Likewise, no other species, with the possible exception of social insects, enslaves and exploits its fellows as we do. Humans deserve a better fate than this, and Maslow’s hierarchy provides a vision of a greater meaning and purpose for human life without the need, necessarily, to adopt a religious worldview. It is a vision of individual and collective self-actualization.

Maslow’s hierarchy is also important because it helps us understand why the insanity of capitalist economics arose, and shows us a possible way out of the planetary crisis, as described in my last post. The minority of humans whose physiological and safety needs are more or less met actually use the great majority of the world’s scarce resources. Hence, a shift away from our short-circuited and short-sighted focus on consumerism towards the goal of self-actualization would have a disproportionate effect in reducing human pressure on the Earth, and easing violent competition for increasingly scarce resources.

In the long term, such a transformation would have an even greater effect. The consumer lifestyle of the rich, as portrayed by the media, has set the aspirations of the poor throughout the world. But the Earth simply cannot supply these demands, and so-called economic development will result in disaster as more and more people assert their right to own a car as well as an air-conditioned home and endless consumer goods. Transformation of the ideals and values of the rich western world towards self-actualization would feed through to the poor, also transforming their goals. And this would have a dramatic effect on long-term resource demands and environmental pressures.

A final benefit of switching focus to self-actualization would be a reduction in the trauma inflicted by the rich on the majority of humanity to feed their addiction to materialism. Sweat shops and child labour, environmental destruction and pollution, invasion to ensure resource supplies, and other negative impacts would all be reduced.

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We need to change humanity’s aspirations. And Maslow’s hierarchy provides a potent tool for this.