J.K. Rowling is having a rough ride at the moment. She’s stated some opinions on certain transgender issues have brought a storm of protest down upon her. Some of the people who accuse her of ‘hating’ have issued death threats, extending irony to breaking point.
I find myself becoming impatient with these increasingly vehement expressions of outrage by interest groups. Language is being twisted. Expressing a contrary opinion is now ‘hate’ and disliking or disagreeing with anyone else’s lifestyle or set of preferences is ‘phobic’.
In my impatience I found myself wondering ‘What would Jesus do?’ A much-mocked cliché, I know, but it still has some utility. I’m talking about the historical figure of Jesus here, as portrayed in the eye-witness accounts of his time, whether or not you believe him to be the Christ or the Son of God.
I concluded that he’d probably be found hanging around incognito among the transgender folk rather than in a conservative parish council meeting, convened to discuss the appalling moral decline of the current generation.
Jesus seemed to like the marginalised. In a religious and social structure based on principles of purity, he got into a lot of hot water for mixing with the ‘wrong sort’. Anointed by a prostitute, consorting with collaborators and low-lifes, he didn’t fit the standard picture of a religious leader.
It seems though, that he didn’t necessarily affirm these people and their choice of lifestyle. It was more that the whole tangled mess of their beliefs, experiences and behaviours was transparent to him; almost irrelevant. He seemed to look beyond it all to the essence of the person within and to love them without condition.
Let me give you an example.
Jesus and his band stopped at a well outside a Samaritan village. You’ll remember the Samaritans from the parable of the good one. The point of that story, you’ll remember, is that the Samaritan was the last person you’d expect to do a good deed. They were considered by the Jews to be degenerate and outside of God’s grace.
Jesus waits by the well whilst his followers go into the town to get food. After all, it’s probably best that the rabbi doesn’t mix with unclean outcasts. Unfortunately, though, they’re not sufficiently caged, and one, a woman, escapes and comes to draw water. She’s on her own, which is unusual, but we’re to learn why later.
Jesus engages her in conversation, asking for a drink. Now this is wrong on so many levels. He’s a rabbi and a man and he’s talking with a Samaritan who is also a woman. Taboos and social conventions are clattering to the ground all around them. Furthermore, how can she give him a drink? Samaritans and Jews don’t use the same utensils and anything that she gives him to drink from will make him ceremonially unclean.
So Jesus has completely ignored three elements that would normally have placed this woman beyond the pale. But there’s more to come. She works out that he’s a teacher and there’s a bit of chit-chat about one of the religious disputes of the day and then he asks her to go and get her husband. It looks as if maybe he’s starting to feel uncomfortable about the impropriety of the situation and feels that it would be better for appearances if he were to follow convention and deal with the man of the house. She responds by telling him that she doesn’t have a husband and he says, ‘What you say is true. You have had three husbands and the man you are living with now is not your husband.’
Now we understand why she came to draw water alone. She is an outcast. An immoral woman; unclean in every way. We have to assume that Jesus knew this from the moment he saw her and in asking this contaminated woman for a drink he’d swept aside everything that had caused her community to reject her. She soon was back in the town, dragging everybody she could out to see him saying, ‘Come and see the man who told me everything that I ever did.’
Think about that for a moment. Would you want someone to know everything that you ever did? What about that time when you were fourteen and you … This woman had already been rejected for what she had done and yet here she is, excited about the fact that someone knew it all and yet still loved her. None of what she’d done or what she was mattered now because he had accepted something far more fundamental about her than her ‘identity’. You could even call it her soul.
I don’t want to go into the entire history of the idea of the soul but let’s just take the Jewish tradition as a starting point. In the book of Genesis we hear that, ‘God formed a man out of the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being.’ You get the picture: inanimate body infused with an animating spirit. Clearly the ‘self’ or the ‘soul’ is both distinct from and more profound than the body.
Philosophically, this is known as Essentialism. It’s the belief that we possess an ‘essence’; something fundamental that is the font of all our thoughts and actions and determines our personality. We’re all inheritors of this idea in the West; it’s just part of the warp and weft of how we think about ourselves whether we’re aware of it or not. Ships still go down with two hundred souls on board and, even if we don’t believe in ghosts or of some kind of disembodied continuation of life after death, we still function as if there is a ‘me’ deep within us that is unique and autonomous.
But on a profound level, we’ve lost our souls these days. Since the Enlightenment the dominant paradigm for human life has been that of the machine. In fact the philosopher Gilbert Ryle used the term ‘the ghost within the machine’ to describe Renee Descartes’ concept of mind/body dualism.
There’s also been a trend away from essentialism, as some rebel against a paradigm that leaves us as mere slaves to a predetermined essence that we cannot control. It is, after all, much more attractive to feel that you can decide who you are and shape yourself, especially if what you appear to be now is not gaining universal acceptance. If you’re being rejected for what you actually are on a deep and immutable level, well then that’s game over.
If we believe that we are just complicated biological machines, the corollary is that we are merely the sum of our parts. Take a watch apart and you just have a collection of cogs and springs, you don’t find the soul of a watch living within it. All of the atoms that go to make up a human being began in the heart of stars and will be dispersed again after our death. If we’re merely machines then you can take them all apart, just like the watch, and there is no ‘life-force’, no ‘spirit’ no ‘self’ that is in some way independent of those atoms.
This seems much more logical. It’s good to do away with magical thinking now that we’re grownups. We have a problem though. If there is no deeper essence, no ‘me’ that is more than the sum of my parts then my worth has to be conferred upon those parts alone. And here we come to identity politics.
The woman at the well would be the woman at the coffee shop these days. She wouldn’t be interested in having her circumstances and life-choices overlooked in order to be loved for ‘who she was’. These things are who she is. She would be proud of her identity as a Samaritan and protest against the regressive attitudes and oppressive actions of the host community. She would demand the right to dictate her own sexual morality independent of the prevalent social norms of the wider society. She would own all of the characteristics that had caused her peers to reject her and would band together with other oppressed individuals to form pressure groups. They would march to the coffee shop together with chanting and banners rather than skulk in alone when everyone else was away doing other things. To Jesus all these things would be secondary as he reached to the person within who is so much more than a list of ideals and identities, but as far as she was concerned, these ideals and identities are who she is, and in not embracing them he would be rejecting her.
When we see it in these terms it becomes clear why some of us cling to identities so strongly and fight for them so vehemently. It is our very selves that are at stake. Insecure, we gather together in tribes and reinforce our views within the echo chamber of our chosen communities. This, I believe, is why there are people who want to kill J.K. Rowling: she’s threatening not just their views and opinions but the very essence of what they are.
So how do we rediscover the person within the activist? How do we recover our souls? You don’t have to believe in a magical spirit blowing some kind of life force into your nostrils. The traditional conception of the soul is over simplistic and deeply incoherent to the modern mind. There may be other interpretations though. Scientists are now speaking of consciousness as an emergent property; the inevitable consequence of complexity. Perhaps there’s room to view the essence of an organism in much the same way. Perhaps as an animal evolves and breaks through the ‘consciousness threshold’, it also breaks through into a new capacity for autonomy and differentiation.
Imagine a stand of tree growing above a vast complex of underground caverns, filled with rich nutrients that have been washed into them through millennia. The trees grow and the roots delve deeper until those of the largest trees break through into the caverns beneath. Drawn by the rich and nourishing environment, the root system grows and develops and begin to fill the space until the vast majority of the organism is now underground and the portion above ground is insignificant in comparison; a mere tuft on the surface.
Maybe what we’ve traditionally called a ‘soul’ developed in a similar manner at some stage in our evolutionary history. Perhaps we really are different and unique as individuals on a level far deeper than our thoughts, personalities and identities. If so, then perhaps this uniqueness is where our true value lies, rather than the things that make us the same as the person holding the other end of our particular banner.