When my downstate Illinois grandmother talked about "keeping
body and soul together," she meant making enough money to put
food on the table. In her day, most people assumed that God would
take care of the soul. The body might starve, succumb to consumption
or the flu, or be killed in an industrial accident -- but the
soul would live forever.
Grandma couldn't foresee that for many the soul did
die, at least as an object of belief. With the arrival of the
Age of Reason and the waning of belief in a traditional God, scientific
and materialist attitudes brought drastic changes in how we see
ourselves, especially in terms of the time-honored conviction
that our makeup includes a metaphysical dimension. My grandmother's
generation may have been the last group for whom this ancient
view of human nature prevailed. Nowadays, the mechanistic view
has become so widespread that alternatives are difficult to grasp,
let alone accept. Although we don't worry about the soul's postmortem
existence any more than my grandmother did, that's because many
no longer believe that the soul is real.
Our bodies, of course, are empirically verifiable objects, and
we're remarkably adept at seeing them as purely physical mechanisms.
This is the viewpoint of science, and its benefits have been impressive.
We live longer and healthier lives, and diseases that once carried
us off by the millions have been relegated to history. We are
much smarter than our forebears about the role of diet, exercise
and environmental factors in the proper functioning of our bodies.
When we talk about our improved "quality of life," we almost always
mean the quality of our physical lives. The well-being
of our bodies has never been better.
We might wonder, however, whether such progress has made us
any happier. We've beaten influenza, cholera and a host of other
diseases, at least in the developed countries, but "depression"
has emerged as the quintessential disease for our times -- and
the epidemic shows no signs of letting up. Despite enjoying levels
of physical health unparalleled in history, many Americans have
lost a sense of purpose. The news, with its relentless accounts
of crime, greed and cynicism, constantly reminds us of the more
extreme cases of such purposelessness. Even those of us who seem
to be doing fine feel an ill-defined restlessness, an unscratchable
itch in the heart. Most of us try to quell this vague unease by
resorting to popular entertainment and commercial consumption.
Many flock to spiritual and quasi-spiritual doctrines and self-help
regimens, often careening from one program to the next. Still
others turn to alcohol or drugs, a devastating commentary on modern
life when you consider why people drink or take drugs.
Millions of us have grown so dissatisfied with our lives that
we routinely drop out of those lives altogether.
This epidemic of unhappiness suggests that the biggest danger
to our biological future may be the assumption that a biological
future is all we have. The real question is not whether there
is more to us than biology. It's whether we can continue to live
as if there is not. Although I have no idea whether the
"soul" actually exists, I do know that for centuries
people like my grandmother believed that it did -- and that such
belief had decisive ethical and experiential consequences for
their lives.
Living as if we contain nothing beyond the physical has equally
decisive consequences. While our future as a population of physical
organisms might seem reasonably assured, I'm not so certain about
our future as human beings. This latter future, it seems to me,
depends on the continued survival of that forgotten dimension
of homo sapiens, a dimension that we once called the
"soul."
When people live as if they possess a spiritual dimension
that cannot be reduced to mere biology, their actions reflect
this belief regardless of its truth or falsity. Living as
if -- with an openness to the possible and the hypothetical
-- takes us into a realm in which mere factuality is animated
by the imagination. This realm, this meeting place of the actual
and the possible, is where our hominid ancestors evolved into
people. If we wish to re-inhabit this realm, we would be wise
to keep body and soul together.
Biblical writers asserted that human beings, though fashioned
from clay, were animated -- that is, made fully human -- by the
"breath" of God, a Hebrew word that also meant "spirit" or "soul."
Adam and Eve were the only creatures to receive this divine in-breathing.
This old story defined the Western notion of the human being as
a unique creature, part corporeal and part immaterial: a physical
animal with a divine soul.
The Bible, of course, is a document of faith. Science cannot
gauge the breath of God nor prove whether the soul exists. Still,
we might learn from the ancients and reap the practical benefits
of assuming the soul's existence. Indeed, it might be necessary
for our continued human existence to embrace what used
to be called the "soul" as a thing to be taken on faith precisely
because its benefits reach beyond the realm of faith.
Recuperating the soul, even as just a working model or construct,
might check the rampant body-ism that currently grips us, the
tyranny of a philosophical materialism that values only what can
be seen and measured. Embracing the soul as a useful fiction would
surely temper our obsession with gratifying physical desires at
the expense of other needs, less tangible but equally pressing.
The alternative, with its continued focus on materialism as the
source of our values, will likely produce only more of what we
already see: stress, cynicism, directionless lives -- and unhappy
people.
The recuperation of the soul might also counter the popular
emphasis on external appearance. When physicality is idealized,
individual bodies are disrespected to the degree that they veer
from the ideal. Millions of young women suffer from eating disorders
linked to our unreasonable concern with just this sort of physical
ideal. Millions of young men -- and not-so-young men -- are caught
up in a mania for body-building that places appearance above health
and common sense.
The body-obsessed nature of contemporary culture puts middle-age
people at risk, too. In a youth-oriented society that values physical
appearance above all else, aging is a thing to be denied, resisted
or concealed. A recovered belief in the soul -- in something
that transcends the body -- would surely diminish the popularity
of cosmetic surgery. It might also calm those of us who are obsessed
with "beating" death, keeping one step ahead of the Reaper in
our sweats and running shoes.
Within a soul-less culture, death is a failure and an embarrassment.
Science, for all its benefits, unwittingly reinforces this view.
Mainstream medical science, exclusively physiological in its assumptions,
can keep us alive, but it cannot tell us how to live.
"Alternative" medicine is even worse, unchecked as it is by reason
and discretion. The embrace of "health" foods and "organic" supplements
reflects a denial of the immaterial as sweeping as that pursued
by the health care industry. The buyer of St. John's Wort and
the mainstream neurologist would agree on one thing: Everything
that ails us has a physical origin and a physical remedy.
In essence, the drug and alcohol epidemic is merely the flip-side
of scientific and medical materialism -- of the conviction that
we are soul-free, the sum and substance of cells and the electrochemical
processes by which those cells function. Whatever interferes with
such functions can be fixed with a drug. A doctor usually prescribes
the remedy, but the more desperate among us medicate ourselves,
often illegally. Convinced that the human machine can be revved
up, tuned down or shifted into neutral for a bit of tranquility,
we try to change our lives by manipulating our bodies, whether
we get what we need from the pharmacist, the herbal therapist
or the corner dealer.
The tyranny of mechanistic thinking also has affected contemporary
social policy and moral discourse. Political definitions of health
and well-being tend to be quantifiable, an understandable tactic
given the need to assess results. But policy decisions based exclusively
on statistical premises are limited to things of the body. They
have little to do with souls -- that is, with the peace
of individuals. An equally obvious result of a soul-less society
is our national obsession with sex, especially as promulgated
by the popular media. Contemporary morality, based as it is on
what can be seen, is ill-equipped to handle such intangibles as
"love" -- a force that dwells in the non-measurable realm of the
soul.
The question of how to live in ethical balance with the natural
environment also has been influenced by body-centered thinking.
To deny the soul's existence is to deny a unique status to humanity.
This has been a useful notion for heightening our ecological awareness.
Still, taken to extremes, the people-as-animals model begs the
hard questions regarding our relation to other species. The more
radical environmentalists claim that the life of a human being
is worth no more than the life of a laboratory rat. If the human/animal
relation is considered solely in physical terms, this conclusion
is perfectly logical. But how many of us could actually live under
that premise? And what would life be like if we did?
At root, the denial of the soul reflects a misguided rage for
order. It is an attempt to assert control over what cannot be
controlled. But if we trust only what we can observe and predict,
we will have an excessive fear of the random, the unusual and
the abnormal. This fear, when applied to the challenge of easing
human suffering, has done much good, as in our progress in eliminating
birth defects and congenital diseases. But taken to a mechanistic
extreme, bioengineering runs the risk of applying a perfectionist
aesthetic to human beings. That could lead to the devastating
moral consequence of moving from ensuring healthy babies to insisting
that all babies meet a cultural ideal of beauty.
In the end, like cures like. Spiritual unease cannot be addressed
through physical remedies. Nor would it help to swing to the opposite
extreme and pursue an otherworldly asceticism that completely
denies the body. The historical trajectory of Western civilization
reveals the danger of both extremes. While the Middle Ages placed
excessive stress on the soul, at the cost of immense physical
suffering, modern heirs to the rationalist legacy of the Renaissance
and the Enlightenment have made a fetish of the body, at the cost
of a great deal of spiritual anguish.
I believe the answer lies in restoring a better balance of the
material and the immaterial in our lives. This means keeping body
and soul together in that mysterious and paradoxical tension that
the ancients called mens sana in corpore sano -- a sound
mind in a healthy body. By reasserting this balance, we'll have
to give up some of our most cherished excuses. A body cannot feel
guilt or assume responsibility for its actions. Such a response
requires a human being -- a body with a soul.
Admittedly, keeping body and soul together poses the challenge
of living with more difficult choices. The body's needs are easily
tracked: When we're hungry and thirsty, we eat and drink. But
the soul has its own needs. It gets hungry and thirsty, too, and
at such times it's not easy to know what to do. Americans are
confirming this hunger in the current popularity of self-esteem
workshops, seminars and tapes, and books like Chicken Soup
for the Soul. Millions of us are enacting a largely unconscious
backlash to materialist philosophies and lifestyles. In so doing,
we are seeking answers to precisely the sort of questions that
mechanistic thinking cannot address, much less answer.
Too often, the answers offered by the new wave of popular spiritualities
are suspiciously easy. We often turn to them because the answers
posed by traditional religion are too hard. Moreover, we may have
gone too far down the road of empiricism and rationality for traditional
religion to offer a realistic alternative for many of us. Still,
we would do well to confront the fundamental issues surrounding
human nature that religion addresses. Chief among those issues
is the possibility that our bodies are not the measure of all
things human. Although many of us dogmatically hold to a disbelief
in that possibility, even the most empirically minded among us
would agree that when it comes to the existence of the soul, the
data aren't all in. Indeed, the data for proving or disproving
the soul's existence never could be in. Recognizing this
fact might in itself prove liberating: Empirical criteria alone
cannot answer every human question.
Even if we grant that what I've been calling the "soul" might
be important for our happiness, however, our 21st-century minds
will inevitably ask the question: Is it real? If by "real"
we mean empirically verifiable, then the answer is no. But if
by "real" we mean having an impact on our ethics and the quality
of our lives, then the answer is a definite yes. This becomes
obvious when the question is asked in the negative: Has the absence
of a soul affected who we are and how we live? The anxiety and
restlessness of modern life provide a fairly clear answer.
Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that we are not born
knowing how to be human. This has to be taught and learned. The
"soul" may well serve as ethical and metaphysical shorthand for
our capacity to absorb this complicated bundle of lessons in the
course of becoming fully human. Even if the soul is a fiction,
a romantic and sentimental relic from bygone days, it may yet
prove a useful and even necessary fiction for our survival,
like those arbitrary chalk lines which make baseball or football
possible. At the very least, the soul is a powerful and enabling
construct that allows us to play the game of being human as deeply
and completely as possible.
Many of us have tried to get by without souls for some time
now, and it may seem that we've been doing just fine. The historical
record and our current discontent, however, might be telling us
that this particular game -- the one with no chalk lines -- is
starting to grind down in restlessness, boredom and dissatisfaction.
It might be time to reconsider the old rules. Even if we cannot
bring ourselves to believe those rules in the same way my grandmother
did, they might well serve us as they served her.
Grandma did not have an easy life, but she knew who she was
and why she was here. She and Grandpa lived through two world
wars, an economic depression and a Cold War in which nuclear bombs
could drop at any moment. They went from horses and gaslights
to jet aircraft and television. The changes they had to accommodate
would surely have disoriented most of us beyond recovery.
Much of what my grandparents saw convinced them that things
were going to hell in a handbasket, but they never got depressed.
On the contrary, they were equipped to cope reasonably well even
as the world grew increasingly alien to them. After all, they
enjoyed the benefits of the oldest coping mechanism known to humanity:
They had souls.
Jeffrey Hammond, a professor at Saint Mary's College of Maryland,
is the author of Ohio States: A Twentieth Century Midwestern.
His articles have appeared in such publications as Salmagundi,
American Scholar and Antioch Review.
(April 2005)
