Self's the Man

...He devoted himself to the study of the "fully human"—that 2 percent of the population who attain successful "self-actualization" and burst into creative flower...

...At the heart of Milton's wise and dismaying book is Abraham H. Maslow, the American spearhead of the so-called "Third Force" movement in psychology—neither Freudian nor behaviorist...

...Relentless hugging and ungodly confessional slobbering led inevitably, in a spirit of sisterly openness, to sapphic love...

...Although nothing seems more grassroots democratic than the belief in the inalienable right to be whatever you want to be, this wisdom actually percolated from the top down...

...To revive admiration for the best in humanity and to encourage emulation of the genuinely heroic—those impulses plainly moved Maslow in his efforts to remake psychology...

...It celebrates the "complete man" who cultivated body, mind, and (sometimes) soul with unexampled fervent audacity: "Whether they had before them as a conscious object harmonious development of their spiritual and material existence is hard to say...

...Thus, distressing speculations about the way God, or ungodly nature, dispenses good and evil to mankind find their resolution in self-acceptance and self-development, cultivating the garden of one's uniqueness...

...For a time—sadly, before our own—the nobility of good democratic man was the gold standard in art and political thought: Mozart, Tocqueville, Verdi, Whitman, Dickens, Nietzsche, all sought to define, each in his own fashion, what made for a noble man now that quality of being and not accident of birth determined who the supremely estimable persons were...

...A novelist of the highest distinction, with whom I was discussing the problem of evil, appeared to solve the problem with the proudly vehement non sequitur "I am myself...

...a notorious Easter mass featured LSD in the communion wine...

...intellectuals who supposed themselves sage and generous of heart distilled the essence of selfhood for all to partake and grow strong...

...In others a plaintive sweetness tinges their resolve to live by the revelation that showed them their way, as in another tune by a crooner whose name and voice are insufficiently individuated to linger in thememory: "I've gotta be me / I've just gotta be me / What else can I be / but what I am...

...yet perhaps because that question is so difficult, even insoluble to our earthbound selves, the novelist's assertion has come to seem not without a certain wisdom, however it might fail of satisfaction...

...To think of Goethe's being informed that he was a first-rank specimen of self-actualizing humanity is a nice piece of comedy...

...Maslow, who died in 1970, shifted the emphasis of psychological inquiry from the diseased to the abundantly healthy...

...A current commercial for a popular carbonated beverage caps its pitch with the surefire seducer, "Be You:' Although the Gospel instructs that one must first love God with all one's heart and soul and mind, and love one's neighbor as oneself, the smilier variations on Christianity exhort their followers above all to love themselves, for God loves them just as they are, no matter what...

...In some this takes the form of brassy, even belligerent defiance, after the thumbin-your-eye manner of a Frank Sinatra: "I faced it all / and I stood tall / and did it my way...

...For the self-actualizer, a certain animal lustiness was all to the good, along with a minimal level of anxiety and guilt...

...The emotional corollary to the self-love axiom is of course that everyone else must accept you for who you are...

...he was essentially a law unto himself, untrammeled by others' morality, but no less moral for that, and perhaps a harbinger of the serene ethics of the future...

...It is by the accomplishments of those several—such men as Alberti, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli—that the Italian Renaissance is renowned as the seedbed of modernity...

...it was an unseemly comedown from Goethe or even Wilhelm Meister...

...Where Freud had hoped at most to release some poor sufferers from the dungeons of psychopathology, Maslow wanted to launch brave and confident men and women into uncharted regions of the spirit...

...His best ideas may not have been novel, but they have a sufficiently distinguished pedigree that one must at least grant them the possibility of credence...

...The venerable order crumbled, in the face of what another Rogers disciple called "a religion of the self...

...Still, Maslow's hortatory excitement at bright human possibility continues to tug, sweetly and invitingly, at those dismayed by the ever-encroaching grayness, of the world and in themselves...

...Growth has of course become the favored term of art for the earnest nincompoops and breathy charlatans of the "human potential" movement that Rogers led...

...It makes life sunnier and generally more temperate than the old Jewish and Christian dispensations, with their cosmic storms and moral chiaroscuro, thrilling but fearsome, like a Kansas sky in tornado weather...

...During the course of the last century, Nietzschean wisdom and cat-house come-on converged in the American mind to produce a horde of individuals bent on sucking every last bit of available pleasure out of the too-brief life they have been given...

...F 4 specially in a democracy, the prevailing ideas of a particular time and place seem the work of nature itself, no more to be questioned than the prevailing winds...

...but in fact there were some things no aspirant to self-actualizationdared think of becoming...

...Rogers's associate William Coulson, a Notre Dame-trained philosopher, told the nuns that "when people do what they deeply want to do it isn't immoral:' Pandemonium beckoned, and the poor sisters tumbled right in...

...Milton cannot be faulted for the superb demolition job she does on the house of folly that Rogers and Leary and assorted other villains slapped together and touted as the palace of wisdom, open to the public for the price of their souls...

...Presumably as the numbers of cross-dressing fighter pilots and linebackers with tongue studs increase, such difficulties will pass into oblivion...

...If God—or godless nature—has created man too feeble in mind to answer the ultimate questions, He (or She) has nevertheless endowed us with talents and passions and capacities whose unfolding holds a richness of pleasure that compensates us for—or at least agreeably diverts us from—our forlorn inadequacy...

...Although Milton is less hard on him than on the others, she doesn't quite give him his due...

...So long as there dwells a morally unreconstructed and disapproving fighter pilot or middle linebacker or brownie-baking mother of six, the cross-dressing Diana Ross impersonator and the lesbian meat-packer with tongue studs cannot be secure in their coruscating distinctiveness...

...A Harvard psychology professor and an inveterate alcoholic whose adulteries drove his first wife to suicide, Leary promised his followers instant access to the Supreme Power, who is nothing like the wearisome and preachy old Jesus...

...It is a rare American today whose most cherished desire is loftier or purer or bolder than simply and happily to be himself...

...A boast like the novelist's claims the most authoritative modern provenance: Nietzsche, who wrote, "Become who you are:' Although there is scarcely any substantive difference between this wisdom and a Dr...

...Others, fed up with the whole patriarchal number, prostrated themselves before the Goddess...

...Perhaps he was simply too late: the coarsening tendency of democratic times pulled his star-travelers down to earth, hard...

...There is no thought sadder, yet none more bracing, than of the life we don't live now...

...If God exists, then we please Him by showing our appreciation for the earthly gifts he gave us and by ceasing to worry about eternity...

...Like Maslow, Rogers scorned the moral strictures of old-time religion and burst them whenever he got the chance...

...if our existence is just another accident of nature, then we can afford to appreciate those earthly gifts, and particularly the earthy gifts, with utter abandon...

...Good news, this modern gospel, at least for some...

...In the cult of the self, universal approbation is the only permissible response to one's flagrant singularity...

...Pepper ad, in the mouths of serious men the precept does sound more sonorous and imposing than in the mouths of television actors...

...In Chicago's merrily unbuttoned days there used to be a brothel that covered an entire city block and promoted itself with the monumental inscription, "Why Not...

...Fools at best and hustling scoundrels at worst, the purveyors of spiritual desolation to the masses deserve the full measure of opprobrium, and Milton's relentless volley of rotten eggs and brickbats puts the hurt on them admirably...

...We cannot be as gods...

...What Third Force psychology actually gave us was a whole new panoply of pathologies...

...To become everything one is capable of becoming" was Maslow's spirited motto...

...Why then Christians should believe in hell is left to sterner devotees...

...At the time of my conversation with the novelist, however, this struck me as bone-headed egotism and side-winding evasion of the most difficult question going...

...Maslow, however, deserves better...

...he would have said thank you very much but he preferred to think of himself as noble, or at least as aspiring to nobility, like his striving fictional hero Wilhelm Meister...

...We are all familiar with the consequences...

...perhaps we can no longer honestly hope for eternal life as blessed children of God;, but we can be our contented mortal selves, and know the joys of fulfilled humanity—life at full throttle, motor thrumming in love and work...

...Carl Rogers—an experienced clinician, unlike Maslow the academic theorist—declared in 1940 that the real purpose of psychotherapy was not to cure some ailment but to "assist the individual to grow...

...Milton's account of Leary's life is a riveting descent into hell in the name of spiritual freedom and transcendence...

...So our spiritual life turns away from eternity and our unfathomable maker, and it embraces instead the tdsk of making ourselves as complete and happy as we know how, here and now...

...It is hard to overstate the folly and wreckage of this mad experiment...

...Maslow's self-actualized heroine was the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, whom Milton presents as emotionally crippled and intellectually dubious...

...Maslow loathed religion, or at least the Western sort—he did have a soft spot for Taoism—which he regarded as a fatal impediment to proper spiritual growth...

...Researchers writing up psychedelic experiences tended to overlook the episodes of acute psychosis that occurred, for they would only discourage people from psychic adventure...

...Some took to the sexual pursuit of priests, reversing the tta, ditional order of the satyr-nymph chase...

...his really big chance came in 1965, when the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary hired him for an intensive dose of group therapy...

...Even among the most degraded faiths, there are degrees of abomination...

...Psilocybin and LSD were sacraments used by the new men-gods to drive out the antiquated God-man...

...but several of them attained it, so far as is consistent with theimperfection of all that is earthly...

...How the multitude happened to embrace self-worship as the one thing needful is the fascinating subject of Joyce Milton's The Road to Malpsychia...

...divinity students showed a particular eagerness for chemically induced revelation...

...and Rogers's human potential claptrap was not quite so dire and destructive as Timothy Leary's psychedelic mysticism...

...and numberless beneficiaries of their wisdom have grown several new sets of genitalia to accommodate the energies released by this exhilarating therapy...

...Indeed, his notion of self-actualization is more distinguished by his precursors than by his epigoni, and one must judge its effect in its noble originators as well as in the subsequent popularizers who cheapened and even perverted it...

...The ethos of the imperial self prevails even in the upper reaches of the culture...

...In a characteristically American fashion, Maslow was big on the future, which he hoped would bring self-actualization to the masses: a round of Zarathustra Lite for everyone in the place...

...No other modern time and place has surpassed in genius that improbably efflorescent epoch...

...Not even Milton's penetrating scorn can quite eradicate the hope that life might yet be better than it is...

...But there have been individuals since then of comparable many-sided dazzlement and accompanying pleasure in the gift of existence, Goethe being the most notable...

...In Jacob Burckhardt's path-breaking history The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1856, the most famous chapter is titled "The Development of the Individual...

...Spiritual aristocrats were hard to find, and in their absence lesser mortals had to serve as exemplars of the fully human...