Music: The Song Is Ended

Abraham Maslow was a representative New York secular Jewish intellectual of the ’30s and ’40s, and a personal friend of Mead and Benedict. He believed that the highest level of human functioning was “self-actualization”; the self-actualized were the secular saints of the world of humanistic psychology. Maslow did not restrict his concerns to psychology, however. He wanted to transform society, proclaiming, “I some times think the world will be saved b psychologists—in the very broadest sense—or it will not be saved at all.” By “salvation” he meant the creation of a society filled with self-actualized people, those who had gotten beyond their “lower deficiency needs” (for example, the basic desires for safety and social belonging) and were now focused on such things as truth, beauty, and justice. He had no use for traditional religions, and even proposed a substitute for them: the “peak experience,” a kind of mystical (but explicitly secular) oneness with the universe. Maslow contended that to reach this goal, a person had to throw off the inhibitions and restrictions that resulted from our culture and family upbringing. He promoted these ideas with evangelical fervor.

Milton’s other key figure is Carl Rogers, who rejected his Midwestern Protestant heritage as a young graduate student and went ontobea major psychologist. Like Maslow, he proposed that the patient reject inhibitions, and self-actualize in a free-flowing contact with emotions and openness to life. Rogers was the ultimate anti-Puritan; he reduced reality and morality entirely to the personal choice of the individual, whose self was assumed to be entirely good. In his later writings, Rogers endorsed a complete subjectivity, in which each person is believed to create his own reality.

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Roger Scruton

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Abraham Maslow was a representative New York secular Jewish intellectual of the ’30s and ’40s, and a personal friend of Mead and Benedict. He believed that the highest level of human functioning was “self-actualization”; the self-actualized were the secular saints of the world of humanistic psychology. Maslow did not restrict his concerns to psychology, however. He wanted to transform society, proclaiming, “I some times think the world will be saved b psychologists—in the very broadest sense—or it will not be saved at all.” By “salvation” he meant the creation of a society filled with self-actualized people, those who had gotten beyond their “lower deficiency needs” (for example, the basic desires for safety and social belonging) and were now focused on such things as truth, beauty, and justice. He had no use for traditional religions, and even proposed a substitute for them: the “peak experience,” a kind of mystical (but explicitly secular) oneness with the universe. Maslow contended that to reach this goal, a person had to throw off the inhibitions and restrictions that resulted from our culture and family upbringing. He promoted these ideas with evangelical fervor.

Milton’s other key figure is Carl Rogers, who rejected his Midwestern Protestant heritage as a young graduate student and went ontobea major psychologist. Like Maslow, he proposed that the patient reject inhibitions, and self-actualize in a free-flowing contact with emotions and openness to life. Rogers was the ultimate anti-Puritan; he reduced reality and morality entirely to the personal choice of the individual, whose self was assumed to be entirely good. In his later writings, Rogers endorsed a complete subjectivity, in which each person is believed to create his own reality.