Healthy regression as a necessary element of progress...

When I studied Maslow for the first time more than 4 years ago, now, while I was in grad school, he introduced me to so many new ideas in his really remarkable theoretical work, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature...

But one idea that I don't think I had encountered before was the idea of healthy regression...

At the time, I didn't understand it very well...I appreciated the idea as an appreciation of the human experience...but I didn't quite understand what he meant...

But I think I'm beginning to understand what he means...

What I think Maslow meant was that progress is not an automatic march forward...that's why I didn't understand the idea when I first read it...because at the time I thought of progress as more of an automatic march forward, or regress as some kind of temporary reaction by a society...

But I think I'm beginning to understand, better, what Maslow was saying...at the cultural and political level as much as at the individual level...

Freedom is central to Maslow thinking about people and their thinking and values the ways that their thinking and values evolve over time in response to realities...

And I think what he was saying, now, is that we don't get better in some steady, automatic march...quite to the contrary, we have all kinds of moments of weakness and foolishness and ignorance and hurtfulness...

And there are times when we indulge or give into that weakness and foolishness and ignorance and hurtfulness...

And progress results from our thinking about our experiences and making choices from experiences and reflections on experiences...
But experiences include good and healthy choices...and they include bad and hurtful and ugly and unhealthy choices...

So, while the choice, itself, may not be a good choice...the need for freedom to make the choice...and the need to experience our choices and their consequences results in learning that is absolutely necessary to progress...

Meaning, not only is there some inexorable march forward to progress uninterrupted by regress or bad choices or reactionary cultural and political moments (which I think America and the world is in the midst of, right now) and poor reasoning and adaptation of values to realities...

But bad choices are necessary for us to better appreciate and internalize values and good choices...they bring a reality to our experience and learning that is only abstract until the experience is a part of our choices and lives...

There is no life where people don't make bad choices...that's the insanity and futility of trying to beat bad choices out of people...people need to make bad choices if they are going to learn better values and ideas and experiences...

And the irony is that the more we try to beat bad choices out of people, generally, the more they are attracted to the very choices we are trying to steer them away from because, fundamentally, people have a healthy aversion to control and a need to make choices freely...they can repress that need, but it has consequence in their lives, first and foremost being both an insecurity about a world full of uncertainty and their own propensity toward making bad choices, but also an internal conflict that never gets resolved while people try to live lives of perfection that are not possible and unhealthy until people are able to learn from their choices...

As the really brilliant play, Genesis, performed by EMU recently and written by high school kids, amazingly enough, at the Manhattan Theater Workshop, says, choices, including moral choices -- meaning including sin or serious mistakes -- are epistemological...we're not quite sure if what we've been told about sin or mistakes or choices is true...so we want to try it out to see if we can trust what people tell us...because we are all individuals, living individual lives and cultivating individual judgment...and that judgment, quite naturally and healthily, is skeptical of the judgment of others...

So we try to choice...and if it's a real sin, we get burned...or perhaps we
don't but the thrill of the sin wears off as we are humanized to our experiences, good and bad...

Jonah Goldberg is just wrong...hurting people for making mistakes is not necessary or helpful...protecting ourselves from people who engage in seriously dangerous or violent behavior is reasonable...but hurting them is often retribution, not justice...they are not the same thing...retribution is our rationalization of our desire for revenge...a weakness or sin, not a value of nobility...there are just many among us who have a hard time looking honestly at themselves, enough, to be honest with themselves about this weakness...many, many people have a hard time being honest with themselves, constantly absorbed in their defenses of their egos...

But a loving, compassionate attitude towards are sins and mistakes and choices allows us to live more functional lives where we make choices -- good and bad -- and learn from them, rather than being obsessed with tasting forbidden fruit, hiding our true selves, lying to ourselves and others about our behavior for fear of being found out and suffering sanction, pretending that we believe things we don't for fear of being hurt while believing otherwise in our hearts, and otherwise compounding our original mistakes with all kinds of deception and self-deception...punishment creates the need for deception and self-deception, in fact...there is no need for it, otherwise...and ironically, punishment is generally our own flawed belief and habit of indulging a weakness for revenge or for believing that punishment actually makes a behavior go away, which any basic psychology student could tell you does not happen, since punishment generally wears off over time...that's why we have to go to more and more severe punishments, because lower level punishments -- from the time of our childhoods -- wear off over time...

Punishments hurt people without really leading them to think differently...to the contrary, they often obscure the reflection process which is responsible for behavior changes because they lead to deception and self-deception to avoid hurt as a defense mechanism and thus shortcircuit the reflection process which is really the critical process...

The key to behavior change is thinking differently...and punishments often obscure the terrain, unnecessarily burden people with stresses that serve very little real function -- except perhaps to cower some people, but even then either temporarily or with the counterproductive consequence of cowering them from worthy pursuits, as well, as cowardice becomes a habit...

Our propensity to want to hurt people for most reasons is often related to our own pain -- whether we are honest about or recognize that or not -- that, as Desmond Tutu and Pablo Freire teach, we often want to inflict on others out of a illusive hope that it will make us feel better...it generally doesn't, as most people who hold onto various bitternesses either figure out or live in misery not figuring it out...

But it doesn't serve any objective purpose in promoting better behavior, generally, except as an indirect means of prompting reflection that is often shortcircuited or undermined by the punishment itself as people try desperately to avoid facing painful realities and sharing painful realities with others...

The truth is that people like Jonah Goldberg just haven't thought about this very much, I generally think...because almost never do I hear a reasoned discussion of the matter...almost always it is to reinforce our biases and vanities about our desire to see ourselves as successful in changing behavior in ways that are generally inaccurate and untrue...
I think the reason why less educated people tend to be, often though not always, more aggressive is because they have the hardest time learning to reflect on their aggression enough to consider whether it has been effective in achieving their goals or not...and when it doesn't achieve their goals, then often just go on doing the same dumb thing again and again...especially if they have people all over the culture reinforcing that stupid original mistake, as is the case now...

We are amidst a period of regress, I think, because everyone is reinforcing the same dumb mistake that somehow change in behavior can be forced (which it clearly can't to anyone who is looking seriously and not just reinforcing the same biases...it can influence behavior, short term, but choices and the conscience that develops from those choices always controls behavior, long term...

It's just a really dumb mistake that people can't let go of, for whatever reasons...

Which is fine, because as I said, earlier, eventually we have to face the consequences of our choices...good and bad...we can't just keep making the same dumb mistakes into perpetuity and never learn from them...ok, some of us can, but a lot of people don't, and most people end up following stronger wisdom once people get off the stupid notions...

This is a regressive period, in my view, because it is a time when a mistaken notion -- that serious behavioral change can be forced -- that this idea is holding sway and choices in that direction are being reinforced like gangbusters...so people follow the idea, no matter how bad it is, because an awful lot of people look more to others to answer the question, "Is this a good idea?" then they look to their own developed thoughts and consciences...we all do, is the truth, though there are those among us with more developed thoughts and consciences to deal more effectively with the problems we face and to develop values that are consistent with better thinking about those problems...

But it is a healthy regression, insofar as bad choices are necessary to understand, better, what good choices look like and to internalize rather than just abstract why choices are good or why choices are bad...

There just is no way to make forward progress all the time...life is not a race where we do the simple task of running over and over again into perpetuity...life is a long and dynamic experience that involves thought and choices about how to navigate that experience, and making choices involves making good choices and bad choices...

There is no way out of that, no matter how much parents and teachers and politicians try to force people to only make good choices...it's not possible to only make good choices...and those who are trying to are fooling themselves...we can make better choices, over time...but better choices necessarily involve bad choices as well...there is just no way around that...if we can develop patience for that fact...which we clearly can...though so many people -- most people -- are still foolishly convinced that somehow we can force away bad choices, which is just a mistaken way of looking at our experience as people...

Freedom is fundamental to our natures because freedom is necessary to learn...it always has been and has had to be stolen in the night when it was more closely guarded, restricted and repressed...

But more open freedom has allowed us to both make better decisions with more freely made choices in a way that is sustainable wisdom rather than relearning the wheel each generation and more open freedom has allowed us to be more realistic about people's learning and experiences that contribute to learning rather than fruitlessly repeating the same mistakes from past generations...

This particular regressive period has involved people romanticizing a fairy tale past, I think, believing that there once existed a moment in time when mistakes were not made...or when repression served us better than it really did...and giving into the weakness and foolish belief that such repression can actually make choices we don't like go away, rather than just allowing the mistakes and the learning that comes with them...

The latter is much more healthy and was what Maslow was referring to with the concept of healthy regression, I think...and I think we are wise to heed his thinking about the matter rather than to foolishly and arrogantly make the same mistakes from past generations...

So much more to write, but I'm exhausted and need some sleep:)...another time:)...

Love,
Ben