I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In his book The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium (1993), flow theoretician Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that it is better to become complex than stay simple:
To help guide the progress of evolution it is not sufficient for a person to enjoy merely any kind of life, but a life that increases order instead of disorder. To contribute to greater harmony, a person’s consciousness has to become complex. Complexity of consciousness is not a function of only intelligence or knowledge, and is not just a cognitive trait—it includes a person’s feelings and actions as well. It involves becoming aware of and in control of one’s unique potentials, and being able to create harmony between goals and desires, sensations and experiences, both for oneself and for others. People who achieve this are not only going to have a more fulfilling life, but they are almost certainly more likely to contribute to a better future. Personal happiness and a positive contribution to evolution go hand in hand.
Csikszentmihalyi believes that humans can direct life towards positive progress:
If there is a central task for humankind in the next millennium, it is to start on the right track in its efforts to control the direction of evolution. Much irreparable damage could be done either by ignoring the necessity confronting us, or by a panicked overreaction that could lead to the kind of racist applications of social evolution that the Nazis attempted earlier this century, and the Serbs attempted at the century’s end.
When he refers to evolution he’s not talking just of Darwinian-style adaptive reproductive fitness. He’s talking about cultural evolution too, the kind that operates via memes instead of via genes. Cultural and social evolution produces practices, technology, ideas, and more such as the worldwide use of fiat currency, the development of guns for punishing people or getting them to do what you want, and the idea of Aryan supremacy as the basis of a political movement.
How much are we in control?
I’ve just watched a five-part documentary on Netflix Turning Point: The Vietnam War. I was struck by parallels between that war and what’s happening now with Iran. Then, the U.S. presidential administration was dishonest with the U.S. population about what was actually happening and what the chances of success are. Then, the U.S. government thought that their superior military might would mean an easy victory. Then, the U.S. government became mired in a terrible war of attrition that sometimes was only pursued for political gains (as when Nixon continued with it so as to secure his second term).
We don’t know exactly how the U.S./Israel/Iran War will resolve. But it’s striking that in the more than sixty years since large U.S. combat operations started in Vietnam there has been little to no progress in the actions of U.S. presidential administrations with respect to unwinnable wars. Each one thinks “this time is different.” And it’s not.
I find Csikszentmihalyi’s idea that someone can become more complex and then direct (cultural) evolution somewhat questionable. But that is not to say that individual people can’t affect cultural evolution. It is to say that there’s very little opportunity to override the worst parts of human nature: the development of tribalism, nationalism, and racism; the will to power of fascistic leaders; the use of dishonesty to persuade the citizenry that government actions are justified; the pursuit of personal gain via political office instead of seeking societal benefits.
Back to the transcendent self
Nevertheless, I like Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of the transcender, or “T-person”: someone who nurtures harmony and “whose psychic energy is joyfully invested in complex goals.”
Like many developmental psychologists, Csikszentmihalyi proposes that to advance and progress as a person you need to differentiate from the culture and society around you. I wrote about Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski’s idea of positive disintegration on Sunday. That’s another example of a theory that suggests that living only according to cultural and societal dictates leaves you in a state of underdevelopment. To progress further you need to question societal norms and throw off those that don’t suit. And then you need to pursue a new level of integration after differentiation (or disintegration). You move towards values that you evaluate and select yourself, that perhaps (and ideally) lead you towards a more virtuous, more contributory, more meaningful, altogether better life.
Csikszentmihalyi suggests that to become a transcender, through differentiation and integration, you should:
- Learn to enjoy life ideally via the practice of flow
- Seek out complexity, cultivating curiosity and interest, finding new challenges, continuously developing new skills
- Master wisdom and spirituality, seeing through the deceptions of cultural memes and achieving a deeper level of understanding of the reality of life
- Invest psychic energy in the future, in a non-self-centered way
This is an appealing prescription to me but seems somewhat lacking in concrete details (which may be somewhere in The Evolving Self — I have only skimmed it so far). And I am skeptical that there is much individual people can do to stand against the tide of history and human nature.