WHY DENTAL FLOSS WON’T TUNE AN ENGINE

I just happened to pick up a book lying around the house written by Thomas Moore, a kind and caring psychotherapist, called CARE OF THE SOUL, and read the opening lines of its Introduction. I’m immediately struck by the fatal flaws which weaken so much of Moore’s kind of approach to modern troubles: “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is ‘loss of soul’. When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning.“

I can’t argue with Moore’s worry that America may be in the grips of “addictions”, etcetera. In CONSILIENCE, Wilson more than once suggests that we’re now in a position where we can make cultural decisions which may be self-destructive rather than adaptive. And Moore’s sort of evaluation is well-meaning enough but to approach modern problems in his way will lead to no good result. In the first place can a thing so personal and immediate as a soul be lost? Where does it reside? Where does it go to be lost? Who knows what a soul is? Are they all alike, made of a common substance or as highly variable in construction as an individual face or fingerprints? Does one cure cure all? Is the Christian soul different from a Moslem soul? Do they react to different patent medicines?

As far as any concrete study of consciousness can find, no seat of the soul exists in the body, no central location where all the incoming signals from the senses arrive and where thoughts take place or decisions are formed, and from which commands back to the body originate. The studies which reveal this lack of central authority are many and detailed. The facts are in on it. No central decision making authority, no soul. The evidence is harder and more obvious, more complete than all of the evidence for evolution, which is plenty. To talk about the soul and its care is like talking about using dental floss to tune an auto engine.

The facts are that this human consciousness of ours, our psychology, was evolved and remains basically a tool for making the decisions and meeting the problems of survival on a savannah. It’s equipment is useful for hunting and gathering. The trouble is that we are now engulfed in a cultural revolution too, which also calls for adaptive responses if an individual’s genes are to survive, and culture changes so rapidly that evolutionary change is left far behind, almost of no consequence. We are like animals in a zoo without keepers or like tigers wondering city streets.

We must be more realistic than to talk of “souls” when it comes to human potential. We must look at the measurable consciousness of the human animal and look to how culture impacts the hunter gathering equipment and wounds it or diminishes its capacity to reproduce itself. We must know quantitatively and qualitatively how culture effects the psyche, the physiology of the natural man or woman, so to speak. The good thing about the problem we face is that it does not lie in an immaterial soul; it lies in the emotional damage and psychological twists in the plastic wiring of the brain, the synaptical patterns which are observable and measurable things. Eventually, we should not have to guess about “spiritual” causes. We’ll know as certainly as we can detect a cancer where the human problem resides and what remedies to apply. All that remains for we humans to do is to admit that we have psychological problems galore, caused by our living in body/brains which aren’t evolved far enough to guarantee our survival as a species. To put it bluntly: when we quit talking about souls and begin talking about the origins of consciousness in the human animal, then we’ll begin making progress.
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"We are ready for any unforseen event that may or may not occur." —"W" [That's right. He's a moron.]