Get your own Free Home Pagefrom writing by Abraham Maslow and R. Buckminster fuller
Maslow admonition:
"Therefore I would urge all biologists, as I would urge all other people of goodwill, to put their talents into the service of these two Big Problems." [Maslow, pg 20]
"The first and overarching Big Problem is to make the Good Person. We must have better human beings or else it is quite possible that we may all be wiped out, and even if not wiped out, certainly to live in tension and anxiety as a species." [Maslow, pg 18]
Buckminster Fuller explained why this 'Big Problem' is not addressed more often by scientists:
"The more specialized a society becomes, the less attention does it pay to the discoveries of the mind,...Specialization tends to shut of the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerfull generalized principles." [Fuller, pg xxvii]
Maslow was president of the American Psychological Association from 1967 to 1968. In effect, one of his job duties was to think about the "Big Problems" of psychology. He also addressed the Big Problem of sociology:
"The equally Big Problem as urgent as the one I have already mentioned is to make the Good Society...By Good Society I mean ultimately one species, one world." [Maslow, pg 19]
Maslow discovered that there can be values in science, independent of nationalism, tribalism, and dogmatic religious teachings. Because the notion of 'multiculturalism' employed in most public schools is not well defined, some clarification of culture-free values is needed.
Willaim James, who was also a president of the American Psychological Association, concluded that some religious values were positive or "life affirming" while others might have a negative influence on health.
Maslow, after studying healthy people, came up with a list of values that science should seek.
"The above considerations have strongly supported my feeling that the classical philosophy of science as morally neutral, value free, value neutral is not only wrong, but it is extremely dangerous as well. It is not only amoral, it may be antimoral as well. It may put us into great jeopardy. Therefore I would stress again that science itself comes out of human beings and human passions and interests as Polyani [1] has so brilliantly set forth. Science itself must be a code of ethics as Bronowski [2] has so convincingly shown, since if one grants the intrinsic worth of truth, then all sorts of consequences are generated by placing ourselves in the service of this one intrinsic value. I would add as a third point that science can *seek* values, and I can uncover them with human nature itself. As a matter of fact, I would claim it has already done so, at least to a level that would make this statement plausible, even though not adequately and finally proven. Techniques are now available for finding out what is good for the human species, that is, what the intrinsic values of human beings are. Several different operations have been used to indicate what these built-in values in human nature are. This is, I reiterate, both in the sense of survival values, and also in the sense of growth values, that is, what makes man healthier, wiser, more virtuous, happier, more fulfilled." [Maslow, pg 20]
[Maslow] "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature", An Esalen Book, Abraham Maslow, 1971
[Fuller] "Synergetics, Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking", R. Buckminster Fuller. 1975
[1] "Personal Knowledge", Polyani, M. 1958
[2] "The Values of Science", Bronowski, J. in "New Knowledge in Human Values, A. H. Maslow editor. 1959
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