Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (40 page)

Setting realistic goals.
It has been reported that adults who commit themselves to very long-term goals, with few short-term rewards, are less satisfied with their lives than people who have easier, short-term goals (Bee 1987, p. 373). On the other hand, the flow model suggests that having too-easy goals would be equally dissatisfying. Neither extreme allows a person to enjoy life fully.

CHAPTER 10

Hannah Arendt
describes the difference between meaning systems built on eternity and immortality in her
The Human Condition
(1958).

Sorokin
worked out his classification of cultures in the four volumes of his
Social and Cultural Dynamics
, which appeared in 1937. (An abridged single volume with the same title was published in 1962.) Sorokin’s work has been forgotten almost completely by sociologists, perhaps because of his old-fashioned idealism, perhaps because in the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s it was overshadowed by that of his much more theoretically astute colleague at Harvard, Talcott Parsons. It is likely that with time this enormously wide-ranging and methodologically innovative scholar will receive the recognition he deserves.

Sequences in the development of the self.
Very similar theories of stages of development that alternate between attention focused on the self and attention focused primarily on the social environment were developed by Erikson (1950), who believed that adults had to develop a sense of Identity, then Intimacy, then Generativity, and finally reach a stage of Integrity; by Maslow (1954), whose hierarchy of needs led from physiological safety needs to self-actualization through love and belongingness; by Kohlberg (1984), who claimed that moral development started from a sense of right and wrong based on self-interest and ended with ethics based on universal principles; and by Loevinger (1976), who saw ego development proceed from impulsive self-protective action to a sense of integration with the environment. Helen Bee (1987, especially chapters 10 and 13) gives a good summary of these and other “spiraling” models of development.

Vita activa
and
vita contemplative
.
These Aristotelian terms are extensively used by Thomas Aquinas in his analysis of the good life, and by Hannah Arendt (1958).

A description of how the
Jesuit
rules helped create order in the consciousness of those who followed them is given in Isabella Csikszentmihalyi (1986, 1988) and Marco Toscano (1986).

Emergence of consciousness.
A stab in the direction of speculating about how consciousness emerged in human beings was made by Jaynes (1977), who ascribes it to the connection between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, which he speculates occurred only about 3,000 years ago. See also Alexander (1987) and Calvin (1986). Of course this fascinating question is likely to remain forever beyond the reach of certainty.

The inner life of animals.
To what extent animals other than humans have feelings that approach ours has been extensively debated; see von Uexkull (1921). Recent studies of primates who communicate with people seem to suggest that some of them do have emotions even in the absence of concrete stimuli (e.g., that they can feel sad at the memory of a departed companion), but the evidence on this issue does not yet appear conclusive.

The consciousness of preliterate people.
Among many others, the anthropologist Robert Redfield (1955) argued that tribal societies were too simple and homogeneous for their members to be able to take a self-reflective stance toward their beliefs and actions. Before the first urban revolution made cities possible about 5,000 years ago, people tended to accept the reality their culture presented to them without much question, and had no alternatives to conformity. Others, such as the anthropologist Paul Radin (1927), have claimed to find great philosophical sophistication and freedom of conscience among “primitive” people. It is doubtful that this ancient debate will be resolved soon.

Leo Tolstoy’s
novella has been often reprinted; see Tolstoy (1886 [1985]).
That the
complexification of social roles
has resulted in the complexification of consciousness has been argued by De Roberty (1878) and by Draghicesco (1906), who developed elaborate theoretical models of social evolution based on the assumption that intelligence is a function of the frequency and intensity of human interactions; and by many others ever since, including the Russian psychologists Vygotsky (1978) and Luria (1976).
Sartre’s
concept of the project is described in
Being and Nothingness
(1956). The concept of “propriate strivings” was introduced by Allport (1955). For the concept of life theme, defined as “a set of problems which a person wishes to solve above everything else and the means the person finds to achieve solution,” see Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie (1979).

Hannah Arendt (1963) wrote an authoritative analysis of the life of Adolf
Eichmann.
The autobiography of Malcolm X
(1977) is a classic description of the development of a life theme.

Blueprint of negentropic life themes.
The counterintuitive notion that transference of attention from personal problems to the problems of others helps personal growth underlies the work of the developmental psychologists mentioned in the note to page 221; see also Crandall (1984), and note to p. 198.

The best English-language biography of
Antonio Gramsci
is by Giuseppe Fiore (1973).

Edison, Roosevelt, and Einstein.
Goertzel & Goertzel (1962) detail the early lives of 300 eminent men and women, and show how little predictability there is between the conditions in which children grow up and their later achievements.
Cultural evolution
is another concept prematurely discarded by social scientists in the last few decades. Among the attempts to show that the concept is still viable see, for instance, Burhoe (1982), Csikszentmihalyi & Massimini (1985), Lumdsen & Wilson (1981, 1983), Massimini (1982), and White (1975).

Books as socializing agents.
For studies on the effect of books and stories told in childhood on the subsequent life themes of individuals see Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie (1979) and Beattie & Csikszentmihalyi (1981).

Religion and entropy.
See, for instance, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s early essay, written in 1798 but not published until 110 years later:
Der Geist der Christentums und sein Schiksal
(The spirit of Christianity and its fate), in which he reflects on the materialization that Christ’s teachings underwent after they were embedded into a Church.

Evolution.
A great many scholars and scientists, from a diverse variety of backgrounds, have expressed the belief that a scientific understanding of evolution, taking into account the goals of human beings and the laws of the universe, will provide the basis for a new system of meanings. See, for instance, Burhoe (1976), Campbell (1965, 1975, 1976), Csikszentmihalyi & Massimini (1985), Csikszentmihalyi & Rathunde (1989), Teilhard de Chardin (1965), Huxley (1942), Mead (1964), Medawar (1960), and Waddington (1970). It is on this faith that a new civilization may be built. But evolution does not guarantee progress (Nitecki 1988). Humankind may be left out of the evolutionary process altogether. Whether it will or not depends to a large extent on the choices we are about to make. And these choices are likely to be more intelligent if we understand how evolution works.

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