Is Utilitarian Progress at Odds with Existential Health?
According to Maslow’s hierarchy, basic needs like food and shelter come before higher needs like a sense of meaning.
For Victor Frankl, who lived through the Holocaust, this is not quite true. A sense of meaning is a biological need without which we cannot survive in dark times.
Optimism, grit, and resilience—all those character words that positive psychology helped popularize (before it fell out of favor)—these aren’t just add-on features, according to people like Frankl, but leading indicators of over-all health and success.
It’s easy to criticize “thought leaders” as naively privileged when it comes to these matters (“Are you really telling me that “hope” can compensate for all kinds of material disadvantages, including being exploited and discriminated against?”)—but when a Holocaust survivor says it, it’s harder to argue. Of course, correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Ascetics (of the dualist variety) take the view that materialism is not just a distraction from spiritual and existential focus, but an obstacle to it. To put their view in business terms, materialists are overly focused on generating revenue, but not nearly focused enough on margins—by keeping their “burn rate” low, the non attached net higher than their Yuppy compatriots, even as they gross lower.
The Talmud says it is rare for someone to “eat from both tables,” meaning to enjoy both prosperity and spiritual fulfillment—but that’s a sociological statement, not a normative one.
Even if, on an individual level, you agree with Maslow that a base-line of comfort is needed to advance into existential territory, what about on a macro-level, where there seem to be tradeoffs between the “bigger is better” mentality and the recognition that local cultures and personal idiosyncrasies are where we discover meaning?
If there is a trade-off, how do we find the right balance between a base utilitarian sensibility focused on lifting the bottom out of economic misery and a spiritual concern for the state of human experience as we go about uber-industrializing and streamlining everything? If you think there isn’t a trade-off, what are your examples and role models of people and systems that have unlocked prosperity and spiritual-existential health?
Here are some of my reflections on Heidegger in the form of a mega Twitter thread that touch on today’s question.
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I wouldn’t universally say that the fulfillment of basic material needs are a prerequisite for spiritual growth, but they are hellpful because they free up space in the mind. A life of material precariousness, in which the loss of a paycheck, an unexpected bill, a ticket and towed car that prevent someone from going to work, produce a lot of anxiety and fear (in the parents and also in children that are around it). It causes stress and that stress changes what we think about. I say this not coming from that world, but in relaying what I’ve learned from people who have. I marvel, actually, at the depth and spiritual richness that some friends of mine have who were raised in pretty brutal poverty, but they themselves always say that they are the exception from a pretty dreary rule. I do think that struggle and setbacks are helpful for existential health, but I worry that I romanticize or otherwise excuse poverty if I justify it by its existential possibilities. The life of the monk or ascetic is often chosen. Diogenes threadbare cloak was not because he wanted a velvet robe but couldn’t afford one, but was a chosen way of life and conscious rejection of his former life as a merchant. On the other hand Aristotle was known to walk around in expensive purple clothing and was something of an aesthete. Trappist monks produced delicious beer, and going to (or sending your children to) a monastery was historically as much an economic decision as a spiritual one.
From personal experience what I find the greatest impediment to my existential growth is (1) that time becomes more scarce and if you sell your time for a living it becomes harder to carve out time (and I become a bit of a morning and weekend warrior) for the existential bit, (2) there’s a path dependency to bourgeois economic thinking and planning, the more you enter the world of money the more money and material goods enter your thoughts and surround you, it’s the thing people care about, talk about, think about - it’s not hard to be an existential contrarian in this world with the right training and mindset, but one also wants to have big wins and hunt big economic game as well and that requires smart thinking too and in this way material focus is a distraction from existential focus (3) ideally one would like to combine an existential focus that is also materially rewarding such that eating from both tables is not preconditioned to leading a mixed life but is part of an integrated life. I don’t particularly have heroes on this score, other than Churchill who I think was a marvelous mix of both (he had large taste and actually had to produce books to help support it) and I see it sometimes in surgeons or people who are driven by a cause and start companies to solve a problem that matters to them. in the American context I wonder how Wallace Stevens kept it up - was it that there was just a more humane work day, that technology wasn’t as ubiquitous and interrupting? Are there other people like Wallace Stevens?