Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (15 page)

FIGURE 7.1
Maslow's hierarchy of human motives

But Maslow did not buy the argument about secondary drives. He argued, “We could never understand fully the need for love no matter how much we might know about the hunger drive.” He proposed instead that human beings have several completely independent sets of
basic motives. At the base of his hierarchy were physiological needs like hunger and thirst. These are biological priorities because you would die if you ignored them (that pizza was my top priority after a few hours of carrying people's luggage). If physical needs like hunger are satisfied, though, people naturally move on to worrying about safety—you will risk your life if you are about to starve, but once you are reasonably well fed, you cover your ass. (Maslow would have predicted that I would have been more likely to worry about the meanlooking junkie on the way back from my dinner than on the way there.) Next in the hierarchy are social motives—the desire to have some friends who will show you affection, followed by the desire to get some respect. (I'm fed, I'm safe, and now I have time to plug into the social network.)

At the pinnacle of the pyramid of motives was
self-actualization
—the desire to fulfill your unique potential, as a musician, a poet, a philosopher, or whatever you happen to excel at. Right now I am locked away in my summer house, ignoring the sounds of the goldfinches and chickadees that tempt me to go for a hike in the beautiful mountains, suppressing my desire to drive into town and eat lunch at my favorite Mexican restaurant, and avoiding any other contact with my fellow human beings. What I am doing instead is writing a book about sex, murder, and the meaning of life, pondering puzzling life experiences and big ideas while trying to integrate my writing and teaching abilities at their highest level—just the kind of thing I dreamed about doing when I was working as a summer doorman at the Paramount.

Maslow's ideas were avant-garde at the time, but several of them have been solidly supported by later research by neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists. Maslow guessed that people everywhere shared
a set of universal fundamental motives, and as I have already discussed in this book, he was right. Maslow guessed that human brains did not operate according to one simple set of rules but, instead, used different subsystems to accomplish different goals. There is now plenty of evidence that he was right there, too. Today we would call this the “modularity” hypothesis, one of the foundational ideas linking modern cognitive science and evolutionary biology. And although the evidence is not yet all in, Maslow's assumption that some motives take priority over others was probably also correct.

But we have learned a lot since Maslow's day, and although his pyramid is worth preserving, it needs some remodeling to bring it up to twenty-first-century building codes. With a bit of reconstruction, though, this skyward-pointing edifice can encompass the different building blocks from our earlier chapters. Indeed, a rebuilt pyramid can help us ascend from the gutter to the stars by clarifying the structural connections that link sex and murder with conspicuous consumption, art, religion, and the meaning of life.

Probably the biggest problem with Maslow's pyramid is this: He did not understand the central importance of reproduction to human life. Maslow did mention sex occasionally in his writings, but he discussed it mostly as a simple physiological need—an irritation we need to scratch before moving on to bigger and better things (like playing classical guitar or writing poetry). And Maslow had very little to say about other aspects of human reproduction, such as taking care of the children likely to follow from scratching our sexual itches.

Maslow's pyramid also had another basic problem in its blueprint. He believed that the motives at the top of the hierarchy are somehow disconnected from biology. In fact, he later called the lower needs “deficiency needs”—linking them to basic biological processes that keep us alive by avoiding starvation, bodily harm, and being cast out of our social groups. He placed intellectual curiosity and self-actualization on a higher plane, above biology, distinguishing them as “being needs”
or “growth needs.” This distinction flowed logically from his idea that previous psychologists had failed to distinguish humans from other animals. And at first glance, this logic seems reasonable: We share needs like hunger, thirst, and self-protection with other animals, but animals do not share our need to write poetry, play music, study philosophy, and build structures like the Egyptian pyramids.

There is actually a logical error in that line of reasoning, but the mistake is so cognitively compelling that many intelligent people find it hard to resist to this day (and it lurks behind some of the opposition to evolutionary psychology). Does the fact that other animals do not appear to write poems, compose music, or study architecture prove that our cultural inclinations are somehow on a different plane from normal biology? If you take our exalted selves out of the picture, you can see the problem more clearly: Most animals do not have the ability to create ultrasound images of the night world in their brains, as bats do, and most animals do not have the ability to navigate using polarized light, as bees do, but we do not place the unique characteristics of bats and bees in a special “nonbiological” category. Nor should we be so quick to do so for behaviors that seem to be uniquely human. As I will discuss in Chapter 9, there is now evidence that the highest realms of human creative genius are intimately connected to fundamental biological processes—processes that link us directly with the rest of the biological world. And as we will see, the same holds for a motivation that humanists literally and figuratively hold sacred: the inclination toward religiosity.

Over the last few years, with a team of brilliant colleagues and students, I have been conducting research on fundamental human motives, including many of the findings I have been discussing in this book. Based on that program of research and on the theoretical advances in evolutionary biology and cognitive science that underlie it, I teamed up with Vlad Griskevicius, Steve Neuberg, and Mark Schaller to develop a blueprint for a reconstructed hierarchy of motives, which you can see in
Figure 7.2
.

FIGURE 7.2
An updated hierarchy of fundamental human motives

There are three important differences between our new hierarchy and the old one. First, self-actualization is displaced from its hallowed position at the top of the pyramid. I am not saying that people do not experience all those “higher” strivings; when I play classical guitar, write creative essays, or try my hand at using watercolors on a canvas, it feels as if I am doing it for the sheer pleasure of creating. But if we think in terms of evolutionary function, a big part of what Maslow meant by self-actualization (including poets' and artists' and musicians' striving for perfection) can be neatly folded into the esteem category. Throughout history, people who perfected their creative performances or showed off their intellectual capacities often gained status, and that often improved their odds of reproducing. I realize that to many humanists that is the equivalent of saying there is no Santa Claus, but the fact of the matter is, although gifts do arrive under the Christmas tree, they were delivered there by a very nonmystical process, one involving a less jolly mortal driving a station wagon to Toys“R”Us with a credit card at the
ready. Likewise, the motive to self-actualize is based in more mundane strivings.

Second, there are now three new motives at the top of the hierarchy, all linked to reproduction. This change follows from a powerful biological theory of development called life history theory, which we have already briefly encountered but which I will describe in more detail below. Notice that none of the new goals is actually called the “desire for sex.” That desire is there, moved out of Maslow's lowest category of physiological needs and up into the mate-acquisition category. In some ways, sexual desire plays a minor role even there, because scratching the copulatory itch only happens after people have expended a great deal of time and effort finding and choosing the right person with whom to scratch it. Nevertheless, despite the fact that most people (who aren't porno stars) spend very little time on sexual intercourse per se, it is essential that we get around to it at some point. We are, after all, a sexually reproducing species, and our genes are not going anywhere without it.

After finding a satisfactory mate and convincing that person that you are also good enough to consider as a scratching collaborator, a whole new set of goals arises—maintaining that relationship. Sticking together with a partner involves a completely different set of problems from those involved in finding one, and some people (including me at several phases of my development) can be pretty good at the finding part but not so good at the staying together part.

At the top of the new hierarchy is parenting, which involves still another set of goals beyond finding a mate or staying in a romantic relationship. Romantic couples often experience a sharp drop in affection for one another after the arrival of a child, but they are nevertheless more likely to stay together after the new, and typically quite demanding, family member comes between them.
Homo sapiens
is in fact one of a small minority of mammalian species in which the father often sticks around to contribute to the offspring—and fatherly love is
an inclination that coevolved with the development of big-brained but helpless offspring who require tremendous doses of care and nutrition. The human parental bond is critically important; children in traditional societies are much less likely to survive without two parents working together to meet their seemingly incessant needs. Again, it might seem sacrilegious to replace self-actualization with something so mundane as reproduction, but I will argue later that not only is this change more scientifically correct, but it also puts a more positive spin on human nature.

There is a third difference between the new hierarchy and the old. Rather than stacking the goals on top of one another, the goals in the new hierarchy are overlapping. This graphic twist is meant to capture another important point: The higher needs develop later, but they do not replace the lower ones. Instead, our earlier-developing needs remain centrally important, receding into the background only until they are triggered by opportunities and threats in the environment. As part of his reaction against radical behaviorism (which completely denied the causal role of factors inside the person), Maslow liked to downplay the role of the environment. He also liked to argue that those self-actualizing poets, artists, and musicians, when they were at their best, had mostly risen above all their less exalted concerns over food, safety, friendship, and esteem. But again, at the risk of saying Grinch-like things about Santa Claus, it ain't quite like that down in Who-ville.

So why do we need love, esteem, pizza, and personal fulfillment? Let us first try to answer that question in terms of evolutionary function. At one level, everything any animal does is the product of mechanisms that enhanced what biologists call inclusive fitness (as I described earlier, that term refers to success at assisting one's genes on their trip into the future). But neither you, me, nor your pet parakeet
experiences any general motive to “increase my inclusive fitness.” Instead, we have toolboxes full of lower-level motives, each designed to solve a different set of life problems.

What Maslow called physiological needs, such as hunger and thirst, are clearly designed to help us survive. As Maslow pointed out, there are lots of specific needs. Even hunger can be subdivided into particular kinds of cravings for particular nutrients at particular times when we most need them. During pregnancy, for example, women get particular cravings for certain foods, but they get violently ill at the very thought of others. Pregnant women steer clear of vegetables containing high levels of toxins and foods likely to carry bacteria (such as fish), especially during the first trimester, when the growing fetus is especially sensitive.