Review: The Evolving Self, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Last year in the doldrums of my first semester of law school, I began to understand why law school is hard. Time. No concept is so difficult that, without sufficient time, anybody cannot make heads or tails of the ideas behind the law, or at least how the law works.
Once I understood that rule of the game, I sought ways to improve how I use my time. Not just time management. I thought of movies that had depicted the state of being I sought to emulate. Spotlight’s scene where the Boston Globe reporters scour old church directories searching for bad apples. The King’s Speech’s reel of Lionel and Bertie slowly but steadily overcoming a life-long stammer. The Imitiation Game’s scenes depicting an engrossed Alan Turing on the verge of invention that could tilt the outcome of world war. Listen to any one of those movies’ scores, and you’ll find each composer telling the same story.
In Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a psychology professor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi summarizes his research on the underpinnings of positive human experiences. He calls it “flow,” an emotional and intellectual condition one may enter when undertaking an activity that is autotelic, done for its own sake; with: clear goals; opportunities to act decisively that match one’s perceived ability to act; total focus; a sense of the potential for control; loss of self-consciousness; and an altered sense of time.
The crux of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow is that simplicity brings boredom and that complexity brings joy. Here, complexity means doing things that are hard and that require you to stretch yourself in different ways (like painting!). If you are seeking an entrée into the world of positive psychology, are willing to take what the author suggests to heart and actively seek avenues of cultivating complexity in everyday life, I cannot recommend the book enough.
One year later, after a good faith effort at finding flow, I picked up the the sequel to Flow: The Evolving Self. The first book is for the inquiring indivudual eager to understand how to cultivate flow. The second book is for the enterprising individual eager to see how flow can be made to work on a grand scale. The Evolving Self undertakes an ambitious task: it provides a way to cultivate not only flow, but meaning. The thrust of his argument is that self can be evolved over time, and that meaning can be found in participating in directing that evolution.
After a survey of evolutionary psychology, the author delves into a discussion of the “Veils of Maya,” a Hindu concept of belief that interprets reality as a distortion of something more actual or eternal. Understanding the distortions is the first step in directing psychological evolution. The Veils consist of our genes, cultural influences, and personal ego. Understand how each functions, and one might be able to lift the veil to see reality for what it is.
Next, the author introduces an intellectual foil to genes: memes. Memes, here, are not just the Instagram photos, but anything; electricity for instance. At first, memes are human creations or discoveries. At the moment of conception, however, memes take on a life their own. Electricity, for example, suggests an infinite number of new applications. The meme, in other words, is very much alive — it reproduces in and across minds, it replicates and morphs in and across human consciousness (think Baby Shark, or antisemitism).
A nutritionist would say “you are what you eat.” Csikszentmihalyi would say “you are what think.” We should, the author argues, individually and as a society, devote ourselves to cultivating and propagating memes that are constructive and positive. The point is prescient — this book was written in the 1990s, well before our memes began to circulate on social media. Simply by recognizing how memes work and can steal the mind, even if only for a moment, an individual can acheive some degree of control over her consciousness and therefore a commensurate degree of liberty of self.
The next portion of Csikszentmihalyi’s book is a plan of action, an instruction manual for the vanguard of evolution. The author instructs to form a fellowship of the future, small circles of like-minded individuals devoted to cultivating complexity in society; something like a neighborhood group in between the Vienna Circle and the Oprah Book Club.
Striking to me was that the author’s solution to the problem of a society becoming less complex, his proposal for actualizing a psychology for the new millenium, is a Havurah.
In a sermon on Rosh Hashanah in the 1970s Rabbi Harold Schulwies implored his flock: “We are challenged to decentralize the synagogue and deprofessionalize Jewish living so that the individual Jew is brought back into a circle of shared Jewish experience.” His solution, too, was the Havurah. And for a time it worked. Even my grandmother was in one for many years. The Havurah was popular, for among reasons, that it re-directed congregants’ energies away from the professionalized pulpit toward individualized worship. The necessary implication of that re-direction is that worship itself is susceptible to individualization. God is not the preserve of the professional pulpit.
The Havurah failed, however, meeting the same demise as many of the other initiatives aimed at building a Jewish future.
Or did it. I read a book, mulled it over, recognized a connection to Judaism, and wanted to share my thoughts about it. I and you have no formal membership in a group that focuses on such things. Yet, here we are, you reading my thoughts with a channel of feedback now open. Perhaps the Havurah lives on (it, along with other sources of kinship, like Judaism, is a meme, after all). Its intellectual, small-d democratic underpinnings jibe powerfully with many of the of the technological, cultural, and social developments of late.
One book review I read from the Los Angeles Times from when the book was released in 1993 was rather negative:
“Csikszentmihalyi, in other words, may want us to view flow as a state that can lead to some magical social and individual enlightenment. But in fact, whether people find flow in rain dancing, meteorology or even in gang warfare (one of Csikszentmihalyi’s students found flow states in Japan’s notorious Kamikaze Bikers), it is just as likely to lead to prejudice as insight, ethnocentrism as objectivity, war as peace.”
I think that reader may have missed the point. Complexity, pure and simple, is not the solution Csikszentmihalyi proposes. Nor was a mere group of peers meeting in person Rabbi Schulweis’s.
There is something delightful about The Evolving Self. In an age of media consumption where deeply moral men and women are not the beneficiaries of viral spread (except for Tom Hank’s award show speeches), The Evolving Self is a nice change of pace. In preparation for my bar mitzvah, I spoke with Rabbi Schulweis, who, by then neared the twilight of his life. He told me something that I had heard him mention in sermons: God is a verb. Judaism is as ethical a religion as it is spiritual. Csikszentmihalyi’s and Schulweis’s proposition are one and the same: our actions have a decisive impacts on our planet, the future is in our hands, chance is indifferent and merciless, we must take a side and evolve ourselves, if we are ever to find transcendent meaning.
