Souls

At the moment I'm reading Discipline and Punish by Micheal Foucault. He died of AIDS in the 80's. He was French, bald, gay, and really freaking smart. I'm reading this book because I was informed that it was his most ground-breaking book. Foucault uses history to bring forth social philosophy. This book got a lot of acclaim for his unearthing the concept of power. I still don't think I fully understand his stance on the issue, provided he ever actually took one, which is debatable.

I talked to a friend of mine a while back about what a soul is. A soul, in my estimation, is the synergy of all the aspects of human existence. Body, spirit, mind, emotions, history, environment, and social context all come together in this unique reality of person that can be understood as a "soul". I don't think this is Foucault's particular understanding of soul, but I'll get back to that.

In Western society we've been gorged on individual autonomy so much that we've sufficiently become blind to the way that "society" is one particular part of our soul. Indeed part of what makes us truly unique is the interaction we have had with other people. I think this accounts, to a large degree, for the postmodern craving for community. We've continually realized the shortcomings in individualism. We've realized there is more to ourselves than our self. I think this amounts to more than some genetic programming for community. In fact I think there is an aspect of the human soul that is incapable of understanding self apart from the interpretation of others like us. Surely we can all seek self-understanding in solitude, but I truly believe this is only a fragmentary and meaningless grasp on one's own soul. Yet, there is a danger in this inter-connectedness. There is a tension between the isolation and meaninglessness of autonomy and the repression and slavery of 'herd-thinking'. Certainly modernity arrived at its hyper-individualism in reaction to the oppression of medieval traditionalism, which prescribed violence to any who thought outside the traditions of society-at-large. Now, we find ourselves on the opposite end, surrounded by empty selfishness and the terrifying thought that in our quest for total freedom of our soul we have surgically removed the social organs of soul. Our souls, missing this integral aspect, are dying slowly.

Discipline and Punish is about the evolution of penal systems from medieval times to now. The more subtle discussion underlying this concerns the use of power in social context. To oversimplify, his point is that in the last few centuries we have witnessed a shift in judicial actions which have slowly excluded the direction of punishment toward the body. Whereas in medieval times punishment was directed at the body: torture and physical punishment being the norm, we now see the practical exclusion of physical punishment from our judicial systems. Perhaps this is reflective of certain ethical shifts in our penal system, but in Foucault's view there is more. What we are seeing now is a judicial system which aims its practices at the soul of man. Now, as I said before, Foucault does not share my concept of soul. Instead he refers to soul as a construct whereby power is exerted over people. To Foucault, the soul is a political tool. It is a mental program which allows the animal nature in people to be controlled by a self-imposition. People in our atomized Western democracies are granted with a terrible freedom which poses the greatest danger to human society. Therefore political control is maintained not through fear of maltreatment towards the body as in medieval times, but rather through the influence of micro-politics over the soul. In our times, justice has ceased to focus on making criminals "pay" for their crimes, but rather to impose on them a heavy burden of soul by which they can be downloaded with a certain self-imposed social conformity.

Truthfully, it could easily be seen that this is a phenomena which is certainly not limited to our prison system. In fact elements of it can be seen in our educational system from kindergarten to Ph.D. candidacy, in media, in corporate structures. Because of this, Foucault points out that what we see more and more of is the terrifying reality of human beings attempting not to shake merely the perversion of social influence, but in fact attempting to shake the very soul that they come to see as the construct of inhuman coercion!

Consider the events at Virginia Tech recently, or Columnbine, postal workers, disgruntled workers with AK-47's, indeed terrorism on any level. Foucault points out that in many prison revolts of the 19th and 20th centuries this is an obvious drive: the prisoners were not seeking better conditions in their prisons, they were seeking to free their bodies from the political coercion which relied on them adopting a certain understanding and attitude toward their "soul". Not much has changed. Why are prison sentences so ambiguous? Why can one sentenced to 20 years get out in 5 "with good behavior"? Doesn't this signify that we are less concerned with just punishment, and far more with the criminal becoming a certain kind of person. The question remains, who is truly fit to pass such judgment on a person? What many are beginning to fear is that anonymous forces, corporations, politicians are in control, and their power is growing. The question many are now wondering is how can the human soul be entrusted to anonymous powers?

Staring at faceless corporations, bureaucratized governments, corporations with endless chains of computerized voicemail systems, we are infected by a perverted concept of social interaction. Our souls become sick, suffering the loss of what makes us human. People spend their lives at a job, for a corporation that cares nothing for them as a human. They are taught they are replacable. People begin to treat each other as such. Co-workers further the dehumanization. And then one snaps, and in a moment of hatred and insanity shakes the soul which has begun to amount to nothing more than an accomplice to such anti-human forces.

And has religion on the whole amounted to anything different? Has Christianity provided an alternative? Rather haven't our churches merely served to such means to the subjugation of souls to anonymous or semi-anonymous forces. Our mega-churches serve the same model, teaching an individualistic conformity relying on approval-based control of the human soul.

Again I am reminded of Martin Buber's concept of "you" vs. "it". It seems that what is needed is people who have found the spiritual capacity to breath life into others. People who in action can restore life into other souls by restoring the social aspect of soul; one not based on political coercion, but respect, understanding, and perhaps love. We need a shift back to 'face-to-face' society that reminds the other that they are a person and not a thing. Frankly it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if this is in the name of Christ or not; it matters that it happens. Our whole world suffers from the terror of forgetting how much more it is. We have all been infected and beaten down with the lie that we, or the world we live in, can be summarized. Community of any kind, and most of all Christian community, must remind us all of how much more we amount to than the summaries we have been lead to believe. In doing so people can be freed to realize that "soul" is much more than a tool for anonymous control, but is the uniqueness, indeed the irreplacable quality of their existence.