As an educator, I spend time every spring introducing my students to Maslow’s moral hierarchy. We start by discussing the idea that humans must have their basic physiological needs met before they can move on to concerns about safety, love and belonging, esteem, and, ideally, self-actualization. Then I throw them a curveball, letting them know that Maslow himself later backtracked on his own theory and acknowledged that it was too rigid, and that our behavior is determined by many needs at the same time. It’s true that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is oft viewed as antiquated and outmoded, and many alternatives have been suggested as ways to visually summarize and explicate the motivations for human behavior. Nevertheless, Maslow’s work remains foundational in the field of human sociology. That’s why I include it in a unit I teach on moral decision making in my honors literature class. This year’s discussion left me wondering: where would Maslow place technology in the hierarchy of needs?
I cannot bring myself to think of technology as a physiological need (although some seem to). It is not air, water, or food. But looking at the next level of Maslow’s pyramid, I do wonder: is technology part of our safety needs? I point my students to this article to acquaint them with Maslow’s theory. According to the text, the importance of safety needs is that “people want to experience order, predictability, and control in their lives.” This strikes me as exactly what we’re trying to do with technology - we’re trying to force predictability into our lives and take control of chaos. We use technology to create systems - reliable systems that aren’t dependent on the weather or the constellations or the gods. We take what was disorderly and inefficient - think of manufacturing prior to the conveyor belt - and make it streamlined and strategic. Granted, we’re so reliant on technology that when it breaks down, our sense of order breaks down along with it. We lose control when our technology fails: when we can’t access our bank accounts, when there’s a systemwide airline outage. The predictable balance of our life - that the lights will turn on at night, that the trains will run on time, that we will be able to send and receive messages - is upended when technology fails. When we lose our balance, we feel unsafe. Is technology one of our safety needs?
It seems very likely, though, that technology belongs under the aegis of love and belonging needs. While seemingly an odd fit on the surface, it is in fact this level of the moral hierarchy that includes humanity’s need for connectedness. Our need for love and belonging has driven us, over the years, to go to great lengths to develop and maintain relationships. The fundamental need to maintain connection has morphed from messages carried by fleet of foot messengers in ancient Greece, to letters stuffed into the saddlebags of riders on the Pony Express, to telegrams dashed across oceans. The telephone ushered in a new era of connectivity via technology, and suddenly lovers could hear one another’s voices from afar. We leapt forward yet again with the dawn of the internet age, with chat rooms and MySpace filling anew our desire for a sense of belonging. And soon phones could be taken with us everywhere we go, so that we can be connected no matter where we are. We are never beyond the reach of those we love. Social media has evolved to become a place full of affinity groups and share sites and photo dumps. We are so connected that there are messages from our tribe that will disappear if we don’t see them soon enough. Of course there’s a downside to all of this. Our sense of belonging has become, for some, a desperate need, an addiction. Some of us have tied the fulfillment of the entirety of our love and belonging needs to technology. We have terrible FOMO - we will be devastated if we miss something, so we have to be connected all the time. According to this article from UC Davis Health, the average person spends 145 minutes per day on social media. That’s 2 ½ hours having their love and belonging needs met by a screen, rather than face-to-face interactions with other people. This, more than anything else, indicates to me that technology belongs in the hierarchy under love and belongingness.
Anyone who has looked at Maslow's hierarchy knows that the pinnacle is self-actualization. How, I wonder, does technology either facilitate or hinder this process? Many of us can remember the old ad campaign from the U.S. Army, “Be All That You Can Be.” This is self-actualization in a nutshell: the realization of one’s full potential. But in those old Army ads, no one was watching workout videos on YouTube specially tailored to helping cadets prepare for boot camp. In Maslow’s original hierarchical structure of the 1940s, he posited a strong relationship between self-actualization and creativity. Indeed, for Maslow, self-actualization was all about, as the name implies, the self. However, Maslow noted that these moments “associated with personally significant events such as childbirth, sporting achievement, and examination success, are difficult to achieve and maintain consistently” (Simply Psychology). And what if we are using artificial means to achieve them? Or if technology gets in the way of being fully present in them? I think about the video camera present in the delivery room as a mother meets her newborn for the first time. The athlete constantly, subtly conscious of the eye in the sky hovering above them during a football game, capturing every angle and down and violent, profanity-laced outburst. This mother, this football player - are they able to be fully present in their moment of self-actualization? And what of the student who achieves peak performance on an examination, but does it with the help of artificial intelligence? Is that a moment of self-actualization? Has that student reached their full potential? I suppose it could be argued that yes, they’ve reached their full potential to maximally leverage the tools available to them to succeed. And thus this is an example of self-actualization, a moment of the realization of their potential. But it could also be argued that their success does not represent self-actualized peak performance, because it is not the product of a melding of critical thinking and creativity. Or is it?
Yes, I know, Maslow’s hierarchy is outdated and has been improved upon and even Dr. Maslow himself offered caveats later in his research. But it remains a seminal work in sociology, and the reason it’s been picked apart over and over again is because of its importance. It continues to be valid course material, and I do wish Dr. Maslow himself was here to share his thoughts about where modern technology belongs in the moral hierarchy. Does it belong under safety needs? Love and belonging needs? What about the intersection of technology and self-actualization? Although I think I would start with a more specific technology-related question. For instance, where on the moral hierarchy does Truth Social belong?
Wow. That’s another blog.