THE WHOLE CANOEIST
“Body of missing canoeist recovered”, the newspaper headline reads. That can't possibly be what is meant, can it? They didn't find the body of the canoeist, did they? Yes, when someone or something dies it does appear that the light goes out. I get that. But referring to them in this way, suggesting that somehow their substance is absent, is to me a wild assertion. What else could this suggest but some kind of twelfth century Christian concept of a soul? Surely one's body is not anything like their armour, their exoskeletal shedding casts off at death. Bodies aren't the carafe to your milk, the ship to your cargo. Are they? Could they be?
There's a famous book of post-apocalyptic sci-fi from 1959, called A Canticle for Leibowitz. In it the author, Walter Miller Jr, sketched some dialogue that reads, “You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.” Sentiments very similar to this float around and pops up from time to time, often misattributed to C S Lewis. The earliest documented version I can find dates back to 1876, from the book Plain Words to Children, by William Walsham How. He argues:
What a wonderful thing the soul is, children! You cannot see it: you cannot hear it: you cannot touch it. Yet you know it is there. You do not want any proof that you have a soul. You are as sure of that as that you have a body. It tells you itself.
Now I think I am wrong, after all, in saying that you have a soul. Ought I not to say, you are a soul? Is not the soul really yourself? In truth, my children, it is the soul that has a body, not the body that has a soul; for the soul is greater surely than the body, and will last when the body is laid aside in death.
I hear you, but it just can't be anything like that – given what we say we understand in any number of domains (history, biology, medicine, psychology, philosophy, physics, chemistry...) Can it? Is there any reasonable doubt that what you are is your body; that your moment-to-moment constituent biology and chemistry is the gestalt whole of your being; and that if you have a brain aneurism or malfunctioning adrenal glands, a hip replacement or a skin graph, that new situation is now you; and, likewise, when you absorb lotion though your skin, eat a potato salad, or merely take a breath each is no less of a reconstitution of what it is that is you? You aren't this embedded, reflective, flux – and the moment-to-moment sum of your lived experience?
How could it be that you are a part apart? So what, if you develop schizophrenia at age 24, or Alzheimer at 77, after body-death the soul (that is the real you) reverts to some ideal prior average? Or are there immortal souls, surfing the immaterial void outside resonant space-time, forever suffering from profound, no doubt worsening, psychosis? Or are souls neutralized – with no sense of time or space, no memory or cognition, and remain formless non-beings blissed out on divine super-opiates? In this case, what's the difference between having a soul and not having one, exactly?
But let me suspend my disbelief a moment and pretend that what you are is a divine spark, temporarily riding around in a fleshy automobile. This suggestion is by definition a truly extreme underestimation and miscalculation of where our science is at, and has been for generations. If this idea is to be comprehensible at all the notion of a soul must remain so vague as to be irrelevant or souls must be so mysterious and uncommon as to not apply to humans. Right? I mean, that whisper of meta-magic that is you cannot have even the most stupendously discrete entanglement with its host biochemistry. Why? Because the biology and chemistry and electricity of even the faintest of synaptic misfirings (non-events residing deep in the density of your brain, so fleeting and non-impressive they don't even register in your own consciousness) are in approximately the same scale of measurable real-world activity as a world-ending volcanic eruption or meteor strike. And at this point in history we've predicted and then measured things so much less common and more profoundly strange than any description of souls, heretofore. You know full well that things like blood cells (8μm), viruses (0.04μm), even atoms (0.00034μm) are great big complex things far outside the scales of interest for, say, modern physics. Engineers across the globe have been for some time using atoms like cinder blocks or Legos for the construction of adult toys such as nanomotors, quantum corrals, and carbon nanotubes. And physicists have been in the business of finding and measuring profoundly mysterious things like neutrinos and muons (0.00000000000000000000001μm) – things reluctant to interact with matter, nevermind large-scale biology. (For scale, the difference between these things, an atom and a neutrino, is similar to the difference in diameter of Central Park, 4km, and the Milky Way Galaxy, 100,000 light years or 240 quadrillion Central Parks.) By contrast, there's no description of a soul that doesn't have them abundant, hugely substantive, and fused with or at least influencing biology. Such a calculus would mean the comings and goings of souls would not just be detectable (using even 20th century technology) but be more like the arrival and departure of a subway train or jet than on the scale and strange fleetingness at the observable edge of modern science. The only way around this is to demand that we live more in a Harry Potter-like universe than a biblical one (which is fine by me but rather upsetting for most people who say they believe in souls.)
Regardless of whether we're ensouled, or what consciousness is at its absolute bottom, or even whether either of these notions prove to be meaningful metaphors for anything, can we not be more convinced that it's the material temporality (the very fragile and fleeting being of the bacterium or Sequoia, orangutan or liverwort) that is the stuff that really matters? How could it be that it's the immaterial and immortal (and deeply hypothetical) bit which is of supreme importance and really real? But then, in light of the above, what of the bodies of canoeists? Does this headline mean our media (and population, thereby) is dominated by folks concerned more about souls (immortal transience) than bodies (fragile substance)? If that was true, what could possibly be more terrifying? This is all you have to believe, and all that has ever been needed, to make blasphemers and wrong-speakers, atheists and apostates, and homosexuals worthy of jailing or killing (and in a dozen countries at present.)
Seems to me that the idea of the soul – and the potential of miscalculation and misbehaviour resulting in eternal damnation – have incalculably tragic effects in the world, and transparently so. Honestly, any number of ideas you may think are repugnant and dangerous seem to me infinitely more palatable than any notion of a soul I've come across.
But I'm probably wrong.
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