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Soul
written by: SAH
"At some finite point, multiplying human connections no longer expands our consciousness, but begins to suffocate it. Sven Birkerts referred to what is lost in the beehive as 'soul.' 'My use of soul is secular,' he wrote. "Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectiveness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public . . . Soul is private. Solitary.'" -- Hal Crowther ("One Hundred Fears of Solitude")
In the article referenced above, Crowther spends most of his time ranting curmudgeoningly about how social media is destroying our sense of privacy; in particular, the privacy of America's youth, who seem to have been duped by technology and the illusion of "friendship" into sharing things publicly that Crowther's generation would never dream of sharing at all.
Crowther cries and pleads and warns of an impending end to privacy, as the young lose the battle with self-restraint and post every waking thought on the Internet. It struck me as an article I might write if I were 40 years older. (And probably will write 40 years from now when kids are letting their antonymous holograms roam the streets in their stead, doing who knows what kind of damage to their virtual virtue.)
The other thing about the article — available in the current issue of Granta (111: Going Back) — is that it was a warning from a generation, much older than me, which I see (at least in instances like this) as out of touch, to a generation that is much younger than me, and I'm sure would see me (if I even existed to them) as out of touch. I can quite easily, almost disturbingly so, see both sides of the issue. I don't believe, as Crowther seems to, that privacy is being ripped away from the young, but I do think they are perhaps giving it away too easily.
As usual, I've been digressed from the very beginning. I didn't really want to analyze Crowther's almost irrational fear of Facebook and Twitter (though his ranting is not entirely without merit – as anyone who's ever perused Failbook could tell you). What I wanted to touch on is his quoting of Sven Birkerts and his secular definition of the soul. I'm not 100% in agreement here, but Birkerts does tap something here that I like.
I feel there is no reason why religious and secular perspectives cannot share the broadest definition of soul. When a secular person talks about something emotionally profound touching their soul, they don't mean the same thing a religious person might, but spirituality is arguably grazed. And when a religious person says something is soul crushing, they likely mean something more close to what a secularist would relate too — an inner definition of self that can in fact be damaged and which exists, contain, or defining the core of an individual.
I believe cooperative understanding and definitions of the soul are what lead in large part to broad acceptance of art, creativity, spirituality and religion. The definition can (and must) alter itself from one person to the next, but most people, regardless of their perspective, know what's being discussed when someone mentions anything affecting the soul. The shared understanding of self-defined terms is one of the things that allow cohesion in societies that would otherwise seem like they would come undone for their sheer diversity alone. Clearly I'm working up to a handful of tangents here, so I'll stop myself.
This issue of Granta was particularly good, the best in a year perhaps and there are more in it than just this article likely to resonate with me for a while.
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