Increasingly, only the collective human ego—what I call “the Big I”—bounds and defines this constructed world. We subordinate, alter, and reinvent almost everything around us according to our own interests, from the mountains of Vancouver Island to the Isle of Dogs and the very sky overhead. Seduced by our extraordinary technological prowess, many of us come to believe that external reality—the reality outside our constructed world—is unimportant and needs little attention because, if we ever have to, we can manage any problem that might arise there. And, in any case, as the pace of our lives accelerates, we have less time to reflect on these broader circumstances.
The left-wing critique of liberalism is chiefly an attack on liberal faith in reform.
This biography . . . stands in a tradition. It is the tradition of good lives, inaugurated by Aristotle, amplified by Aquinas, liberated from Christianity and given the doctrine of the “civil affections” by David Hume and Adam Smith. Our tradition is rooted deep in its own history by Hegel as being the only foundation it could possibly justify, and thereafter domesticated by the British tradition that made Hegel tolerable and culminates (for our purposes) in R. G. Collingwood.
This tradition teaches that a good life may be lived only in terms of those virtues which an individual truly possesses and is capable of. The trouble with the word “tradition” is that it has, damnably, been so monopolised by the political Right, which contrasts the stability of tradition with the crazy enthusiasms of revolutionary struggle. But a moral tradition is no less than the embodiment through time and in a place of those principles which permit that version of a good life to be lived, revised, challenged, and transformed in the biographies of the traditionalists.
Maslow’s ‘holistic’ model of the psychic organism led him to three major conclusions: (1) Neurosis may be regarded as the blockage of the channels of self-actualization. (2) A synergic society—one in which all individuals may reach a high level of self-satisfaction, without restricting anybody else’s freedom—should evolve naturally from our present social system. (3) Business efficiency and the recognition of ‘higher ceilings of human nature’ are not incompatible; on the contrary, the highest levels of efficiency can only be obtained by taking full account of the need for self-actualization that is present in every human being.
Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it.
