Personal Development - is it a Good Thing? Analogy with development in the arts and literature.

In the early 1970s, it was a standard aesthetic criterion that "development" was a good thing, a necessary thing - and that the developed was better.  

I first came across it in pop music. e.g. The idea that The Beatles were good because their music developed, from album to another the style (and subject matter) changed - and later Beatles was better than earlier. 

Anyone who thought the opposite, and preferred "their early stuff" was shallow, simple-minded, dumb... 

Same in classical music, as I later discovered. The "Great Composers" all (supposedly) developed, and all kept on getting better. 

Critics seemed unanimous that middle period Beethoven was better than early - with which most lay-people agreed; and best of all were his latest works (especially the last string quartets), with which the music-loving public certainly disagreed.  

The same applied across the board really - whether in other arts and literature, or in intellectual pursuits; and even in the spiritual realm. 

CG Jung's most influential concept was perhaps the desirability of "personal development" as the proper goal of human life - through the middle and late twentieth century this ideal became almost a new religion. 

So what was this development that was so good? 

The direction of desirably-development was (nearly-) always towards less-immediate appeal; more serious/ less fun (or funny); longer; more complex - more difficult.   

Those qualities that had initially attracted people to, say, The Beatles or Beethoven and which brought them to notice, popularity, high status; were thereby downgraded. 

In particular that rather indefinable quality of "freshness" that characterizes early work and accounts for its immediacy of appeal; that unselfconscious spontaneity and fluidity; the absence of that striving, effort, and contrivance which typically dominates later (more serious/ complex/ lengthy etc) work...

That naturalness of expression and clarity of achievement was looked-down-upon; together with the responses that went with it - such as laughter (instead of sophisticated "wit"). 

In an overall sense; it was hard for an honest observer to conclude that development meant "better" - because the developed was almost a different thing altogether! Indeed; literally so in the case of developments in Modern Art and Architecture, and modern Classical Music - where "the developed" was often unrecognizable in terms of the aims and virtues and appeal of the starting point.  

What about personal development? Well, the analogy seems close. 

The direction of PD was towards self-consciousness, seriousness, effort and control, a balancing and integration of multiple complexities by means of complex theories and learned-practices.  

This can be linked-back to the development of personality in religion; where a similar trajectory was observed. 

There was little doubt that people could be (usually were) changed by prolonged religious training, increased knowledge, study, and practices; and these differences were of the same sort as seen in the arts. 

But whether that differentness from his starting condition actually made the person "better" in any kind of overall or basic sense was very debateable. Often enough it made them worse! 

This is where we now stand - at the end of an era in which development was the ideal, and its benefits were assumed; to one in which such claims are seen to be a false generalization, and often self-serving. 

But Men cannot live without purpose. And if development is discarded then it must be (indeed, it will be) replaced with some other ideal - even if that ideal is implicit, unconscious, denied. 

If we cannot truly develop in any genuinely religious or spiritual fashion - then what should we be doing, aiming-at, instead? 

(As usual, the necessary first step to finding an answer, is to acknowledge the question.)