A beacon of realistic hope for living better together

Review of Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization
Book by Scott Barry Kaufman
Review by Todd I. Stark
Review on Amazon

I was so excited to see this book come out at this particular changing and turbulent time of global crisis when the frailty of many of our systems and the political and social ideas that bolster them is being exposed.  This new review of Abraham Maslow's vision strikes me as a very welcome beacon out of the traps that we tend to make out of our fears and insecurities and aggressions.

The vision is bolstered here by many observations and experiments that help us make sense of it and recognize just how realistic it is.      Transcend assures us that even in dark times, when reminders of our mortality are all around us, those very reminders can help us grow if we pay the right kind of attention to them.

Transcend offers a way to do better, to be better, by building on the psychology behind human growth and development which we have just begun to understand.

This is a book about the realistic possibilities for human beings living better lives.  Can we do better, and what does better really mean?  Transcend suggests an answer to both of those questions in a way that can be tested and justified empirically.  This takes the book out of the realm of wishful thinking or idealistic philosophy and makes it more like a justification for projects that build on that vision.

There's a crucial message here; we don't have to give up on human nature as inescapably corrupt and selfish.  There is strong evidence that human beings are, for the most part, trying to meet their needs, and having developed past mere deficiency, will naturally aspire to growth in a way that reaches out to and supports other people.

In times of global crisis, we see a variety of ways people are trying to get their needs met in spite of enormous fear and uncertainty.  So it is particularly appropriate now that we think about what it means to be human and recognize our commonality and shared fate.

Is there a psychologically realistic vision of good people populating a better world, or is it just a utopian fantasy?  Scott Barry Kaufman takes it on as a serious and important project to find out whether we can really justify the claim that people are good and can become better.

The starting place is the early humanistic psychologists who went through a world of pain and violence and cruelty in the mid-20th century and saw in it some glimmers of hope from a psychological understanding of the causes.  They saw humans as fundamentally good, but sometimes twisted onto a darker developmental trajectory by having to meet their needs by treating other people as objects.  As we come to understand this twisting, we have the potential to mitigate it rather than accept it as unavoidable.  One of the things Kaufman finds is that we all seem to have elements of darker and lighter traits within us.  The distribution is very much affected by the experiences we have trying to meet our needs as we develop. 

There seem to be several challenges with this thinking.  Are there people who cannot help themselves from doing cruel and selfish things and are we forever stuck with that aspect of ourselves?  Does  trying to understand people who do bad things just give them a chance to take advantage of us?   Doesn't a focus on developing the best each of us can be lead to focusing on the selfish aspects of ourselves?  These are real and significant questions and I think Kaufman takes them as such and tries to address them in this book using empirical data wherever he can.  He doesn't ignore the dark elements about us, but I think he does help put those into perspective.   Unhealthy strategies for meeting our needs are widespread in some times and places but understanding them may at least give us a way to address them better if we have the will and a better vision of humanity. 

Maslow's concept of self-actualizing as a way of describing us at our healthiest functioning remains intact here.  However it is further clarified by pointing out its relationship with growth, purpose, love and a very specific notion of how the healthiest people manage to step out of their selfishness, fear, and defensiveness for periods of time.  That is, the healthier we are psychologically, the more we experience periods of that can be said to transcend our narrow typical experiences and offer in a sense a better vantage point for seeing life.

Among the most interesting and unique characteristics of self-actualizing involve the reconciliation of apparently opposed values. This includes reconciling agency and communion; reconciling in-group love with unconditional love; reconciling self-love with love of others; reconciling selfishness and selflessness; and reconciling the quiet ego with the strong self.  The self-actualizing person is distinctly able to draw from both sides of what appear to others to be opposites.  Transcend has many fascinating examples of research into just how self-actualizing people manage to do this by drawing on their own unique strengths and how it helps them function in a more healthy way in alignment with a sense of purpose.

Transcend doesn't stop at merely painting a picture of what healthy meaningful thriving looks like in human beings, it also offers specific strategies for facilitating our growth, from the distinctive properties of leadership that help pull us toward our best, the distinctive properties of culture that help us grow and explore and love, and the strategies for how we can recognize and make best use of our own unique strengths in our own development.

If we want to do better, Transcend stands as a new lighthouse drawing us toward that possibility.  I don't know whether we will make the world better.   I have seen glimpses of this vision of growth in myself at times, going beyond the petty and the fearful and the aggressive in myself and getting unstuck from apparent paradoxes.  And I've seen it in many other people as well, who learn to accept and embrace a wide variety of strengths and learn to use them to make things better for others as well as themselves.  So I know it is at least possible and I truly believe it would make a better world if we built more upon those qualities.