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| Shanghai speciality, Four Happiness braised pork, one of those idiotically simple and unbearably delicious Chinese ways of slow-cooking pork, via The Spruce. |
David Brooks starts off aspirationally ("
When Life Asks for Everything"):
I’d like to offer you two models of human development.
Heh. He'd
like to, but unfortunately he didn't bring any with him. He's only got these Great Chain of Being hierarchies of—well, of two different things, one of which is sometimes applied to development:
The first is what you might call The Four Kinds of Happiness. The lowest kind of happiness is material pleasure, having nice food and clothing and a nice house. Then there is achievement, the pleasure we get from earned and recognized success. Third, there is generativity, the pleasure we get from giving back to others. Finally, the highest kind of happiness is moral joy, the glowing satisfaction we get when we have surrendered ourselves to some noble cause or unconditional love.
The second model is Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. In this conception, we start out trying to satisfy our physical needs, like hunger or thirst. Once those are satisfied we move up to safety needs, economic and physical security. Once those are satisfied we can move up to belonging and love. Then when those are satisfied we can move up to self-esteem. And when that is satisfied we can move up to the pinnacle of development, self-actualization, which is experiencing autonomy and living in a way that expresses our authentic self.
The first of these is is a philosophical paradigm, fundamentally the four different kinds of satisfaction different humans aim at, as defined by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics—material gratification, money making, political action, and contemplation—with the theotropic interpretation, God-haunting at the fourth level, projected on it by centuries of Roman Catholic doctrinal development, dimmed in the fog of Brooks's suburbanity, which can imagine only kinds of happiness available to guys at a certain income level living in Montgomery or Westchester County. The second is Abraham Maslow's psychological paradigm aiming at characterizing the different kinds of need that are common to all people. It's not about how "we start out" but how the world starts out with us. A primary way in which they are completely unrelated is right there: Aristotle and successors are addressing you on what you can do
for yourself ("What kinds of things can I want?") and Maslow, the therapist, is telling people how to help set goals
for others ("What kinds of emotions does my child or patient need?").
Brooks thinks both hierarchies are moral scales, arranged from the lowest to the highest good, but this is completely wrong.
