Need

The human being is widely seen today as a bundle of needs. It is good to have needs, and meeting needs is considered the ultimate good—a very different view from that espoused by Buddhism and Christianity. Needs may result from progress or from manipulation by advertisers, but this does not explain the popularity in everyday language of needs talk, which is better seen as a modern secular ethic.

The Modern Language of Need

It is often asserted that ours is a society that values hedonism, pleasure and personal autonomy. What is rarely noticed, however, is how often people justify actions not in terms of pleasure or choice or wants but in terms of need. Advertisements are as likely to say, “You need Vim!” as “Choose Vim!” or “Vim is fun!” In everyday language people say the car needs washing, the housework needs doing or a holiday is needed in order to make their choices and preferences carry more weight. In pressure-group politics, you advance your cause more by saying you need X than by saying you merely want X.

At the level of pop psychology, needs talk is very common. People are said to need work, love and affirmation; child rearing is seen not as teaching children values but as meeting their needs for love, security, praise, play and new experiences. Marriage is seen as a mutual meeting of needs, and when either or both partners cannot meet the other’s psychological needs, divorce is deemed justifiable. Abraham Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of needs (life, safety/security, belonging/affection, respect/self-respect, self-actualization) has been particularly influential. In his view, only as lower-order needs are met can higher-order needs be attended to.

In previous centuries the word need was used primarily as a verb in circumstances such as “I need the hammer. Can you pass it to me please?” In the twentieth century its use as an abstract noun proliferated: the need for affection, the need to be needed, the need for affirmation, health-care needs, special educational needs, basic human needs and so on. Such language removes each need from its specific purpose and portrays it as existing in itself within the human race or within a particular population or individual. The human being is seen as a bundle of needs, and life the project of meeting needs.

Much needs talk is only rhetoric: we do not need everything that advertisers, therapists, governments, parents and spouses tell us we need. It is curious that a fun-loving, choice-loving population persists in using a language that portrays itself as dominated by necessity. At the same time, many needs are real, and needs are expanding. With the decline of mass transportation, people need cars to get to work and to the shops. With dwellings now built without basements or verandas, people need air conditioning in order to keep cool. Psychological needs for identity and affirmation may well be on the increase. As society becomes more affluent and welfare services more widespread, needs increase.

Other Approaches

Other cultures and philosophies have seen need in very different ways. In Buddhism needs or wants are minimized as they cause suffering. Favorinus, one of the ancient Greek school of Cynics, likewise noted that “great needs . . . spring from great wealth; and often the best way of getting what we want is to get rid of what we have.” This idea that wealth does not meet but creates need was taken up by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and more recently by various advocates of simple living.

The Old Testament acknowledges that as a result of the Fall, scarcity and toil have entered the human condition. Meeting needs has indeed become the human project, but it is a curse, not something to be gloried in. The Judaic hope is of a society whose members are motivated not by their own need but in response to an ever-loving God. This hope is embodied in the jubilee legislation that aimed to ensure that each family would always have access to the goodness of the land (Leviticus 25). And it is elaborated in the New Testament’s discussion of God’s unmerited grace.

Jesus did not have many of today’s basic human needs met in his own life. By present standards he was materially poor, his sexual needs were not met in marriage, and he gave up his job in order to become an itinerant, unpaid preacher and healer. Far from basing life on the needs of the self, he taught we should take up our cross and deny our self. Yet people criticized Jesus not for being an ascetic but for enjoying life. Christians therefore see the perfect human being, Jesus, as one who was unconcerned with his own needs and lived instead in response to God’s grace. Paul wrote of conflict between the spirit and the flesh, indicating that we should master some things that claim to be needs, not give in to them (Galatians 5:16-26).

Explaining Need

There are two common explanations of the modern proliferation of needs. Both are deficient, and I will propose a third explanation.

First, needs are seen as progress. In this view, as the economy and civilization advance, new needs become apparent and may be attended to. In Maslow’s view personal as well as economic growth reveals new needs; indeed, this is vital to the very process of growth. It is difficult, however, to believe that all needs represent progress, such as the need for nuclear weapons to defend ourselves. Nor is it certain that all needs need to be met: a man’s sexual needs do not excuse his raping a woman. In fact, any need that is not self-evidently good demonstrates that what makes a need good is not that it is necessary but that it is underlain by good values and purposes. Needs do indeed proliferate, but that does not mean they should all be met or represent progress.

Second, needs are seen as ideology. Some critics have proposed that needs are manufactured by big business, psychiatrists, doctors and social workers in order to keep themselves in business. Other critics have argued that rather than subject ourselves to expert definitions of material, medical, social or other need, we should instead assert our self-defined wants, possibly in relation to communally agreed-upon rights. From the 1960s, this critique was articulated by socialists such as Herbert Marcuse and Ivan Illich, but from the late 1970s it become central to the New Right’s critique of the welfare state and of centralized government planning.

This critical explanation entails many dubious assumptions, for example, that advertisers are able to manipulate us at will and also that we could ever independently of experts define our own wants. It fails also to explain the currency of the language of need in everyday life, removed from the worlds of advertising or welfare.

Third, I propose viewing need as a secular ethic. I argue that the key to understanding need in all its forms is the word’s implied imperative that purports to be about facts. The needs of human beings, of women, of children, of workers—whether for love, education, employment, security or whatever—are portrayed as facts. But unlike most facts, needs imply action: if you have a need, it must be met. This combination of factuality and necessity provides a powerful motive. It is especially powerful in the modern secular world, in which motives based on revelation, duty or tradition are out of fashion. In a society that pays lip service to science and to facts, need provides a motive that smuggles ethics and morality back in without anyone’s noticing. People must justify their actions to self and others, and need provides a strong justification. Need is the most common form today of an ethic based not on revelation but on nature.

Many needs, especially those derived from humanistic psychology, are believed to reside within the individual self. They therefore provide an apparently objective way of talking about an otherwise very subjective self. The language of need resolves the modern tension between the objective language of science and the subjective language of feeling and desire.

Logically, however, needs have imperative force because of implied values. “This starving man needs food” means that he needs food and that we should give him food, not only because of his objective state of starvation but also because the speaker values human life. Because the underlying values are unstated, a popular pseudoscientific ethical language has been developed without its user realizing it.

» See also: Justice

» See also: Poverty

» See also: Simpler Lifestyle

» See also: Social Action

References and Resources

A. Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); P. Springborg, The Problem of Human Needs and the Critique of Civilization (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981); T. Walter, Need: The New Religion (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1985).

—Tony Walter