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July 15, 2003
Acknowledging the Soul
My brother reminded me yesterday that there is a very fine line between life and death when it comes to reasons for suicide. He's a cop and he gets to see a little bit.
On this particular occasion, a musical composer of some sort had a very bad day. He couldn't find a job, his motorcycle broke down, and his car broke down. So he took a big bottle of pills. It's a sad state of affairs when such are the symptoms of suicide. I try to be mildly amused and embarrassed by American middle-class materialism, but this is truly tragic. How is it that a person arrives to believe the value of their life is equal to the value of their possessions?
Cornel West put it in a way that I had never heard before, it being the necessity of other types of social institutions to keep capitalism in check. He's right of course. Organized religion is a way to build social capital which offsets capitalist capital. What does it profit a man if he lose all his possessions and forget he has a soul?
At the heart of this is the idea, not unique among ways of coming to knowledge, that each individual is precious. I like buddhism's conception of a single global soul because it encompasses our Western ideas of ecology. But the idea of the individual soul, if taken logically, allows us to treat all humans equally. Within the scope of human rights, the Buddhists, Christians, Jews and Muslims are all speaking the same language. There is a soul which cannot have a price attached to it, any affront to it is equally wrong no matter the person's station in capitalist, communist, fuedal, tribal or anarchic society.
I do not believe that Western thought has arrived at the idea of individual rights completely independent of the influence of the religious concept of the individual soul. So we ought to give credit where credit is due.
Posted by mbowen at July 15, 2003 06:18 PM
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