3.5 Social soul, political soul
In my childhood church, I learned that my soul was…
Invisible, immaterial, insubstantial, and incorporeal.
Which are…
Adjectives of nothingness.
At the same time my soul was supposed to be a divine presence, because God shot it into my body at birth from his dwelling place in the heavens above, out there beyond the clouds, beyond the stratosphere where the airplanes travel. No wonder it felt cold. Outer–space cold.
In common parlance, the word soul is used to mean many things…
Essential self, transcendent spirit, deepest calling, driving passion, anchoring force, what makes you you, that something that survives death.
But I use it to mean just one thing…
My soul is my deeply personal, daily practice of moral decision-making.
My soul is not imported, it’s not divine…
It’s mine.
It’s…
A handmade, homemade soul.
I made it myself and I keep making it through my daily decisions. So it’s not a fixed or frozen thing. It grows, it matures. Which means…
My soul is developmental.
And I love this, because day by day as I wrestle with moral decisions—with decisions about people and about love—I become a deeper, richer person.
But if my soul is so personal to me, does that mean it’s too much about me, too self–centered? Not so, because…
It’s not solo and it’s not selfish.
It doesn’t have a restrictive, exclusive, tribal kind of boundary.
Instead, I have…
A social soul.
It’s not socially–determined, but it is social. Which makes sense, because…
My relationships with other people are at the center of my concerns.
And that means…
I’ve got a moral soul, focused on how I want people to treat each other.
And…
How I want us to pull together to upgrade love.
I’m very fond of the word soul, but there are some days when I have a flashback to childhood and suddenly feel allergic to it. Not a problem, though, because I’ve got alternatives. Actually I think of “soul” as a nickname for…
What’s deepest in my heart.
And this is not just another pretty phrase, because that deepest place is…
My place of moral labor.
And moral contentment.
Now that’s how it is for me personally, but what about the bigger political picture? Joe Biden often said he was fighting for the soul of our nation.
But what did that mean? He didn’t define it with any precision. It just seemed to have something to do with being a democracy. But a democracy can hurt people. It can do terrible things.
Some people say that Nazi Germany had a soul, an evil one. Hitler believed in the Kampfgesetz, the Law of Struggle, more than anything else. Which means he believed in brutality above all else. That was his substitute for religion.
Technically, yes, Nazi Germany had an evil soul. But I don’t want to put “soul” into that context, because the Nazis were nihilists and nihilists have given up on nurturance and love and morality. Which is why they could be so murderous and monstrous.
So I don’t want to credit them with any kind of soul, even an evil one. To me…
They were soulless.
So what about my country, the US? Can we be said to have a national soul, which would mean the summation of our national decision-making about the lives of the people within our borders, and also outside our borders.
If so then we’d have to say…
The soul of America is putting wealthy and powerful white men first above everyone else.
And that’s been true from the first days of our country right up to the present.
If we look at what America actually does, instead of what our leaders preach in their pretty, prime-time speeches, we’d have to say we’ve got a meager and repellant soul. And something in me doesn’t even want to associate the word “soul” with such nastiness.
I would like for America to have a vigorous and vibrant and visible and undeniable soul, and for that soul to be anchored in the values of…
Mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy.
But while lots of us share in those values, our country is too conflicted and divided to be said to have a singular soul. And I can’t see how we can get to such a thing in the foreseeable future, or even the long-term future.
What about our species?
Can we have a species soul?
Again, I wish. And when I’m in the right mood, I can even imagine what that might look like…
A species that runs entirely on mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy.
But I can’t imagine how we would get there.
Still, what I do know is that for some of us, it’s helpful to conceive of our work as taking us in the direction of having a truly moral national soul and a truly moral species soul. Moral in the nurturing sense of that word.
As I’ve said before, such an ambition can shape who we are. It can be good for us—as long as we understand that the odds are against us getting that result.
Don Quixote titled at windmills. He was delusional. But not us. We may be ambitious for something that’s ultimately next to impossible, but that’s different than being delusional. It’s something much more noble.
We have our hearts set on the very thing, that if it could be achieved, would be…
The greatest of human victories.
