Soul destroying

There’s a picture by Lee Miller of an SS guard from Buchenwald taken just after the camp’s liberation. The man stares wide-eyed and shocked, his faced bloodied by a beating from his former prisoners. Here’s a portrait of an individual who, we can assume from context, did evil. Look him in the eye. What do you see? Is it possible to sense human commonality in the wide, startled gaze frozen by the camera?

That’s the test isn’t it? If we all share some deep sense of inner unconstructed self, then it must be as real in him as it is in me, something that precedes the thoughts and actions that form the self that acts — however it acts — in the world.

By that thinking, evil is not innate to that point of existential origin, but a sum of what we think and do. The consequence? That even the evil have a pristine soul.

There’s a profound, and useful, idea here: that we are not just our thought-made selves. That the essence of our existence is a deeper thing that is felt rather than thought, an essence that is the shared energy of all existence. A soul, to give it a name. Perhaps some pure point of inner light, elusive to thought, that is love.

Chewing this over as the days count down to Christmas, and the news is still filled by the downstream consequences of recent violent evil. Those Bondi killings have several lessons but the one sticking with me now is how much our political consciousness has strayed from that idea of shared humanity. It seems sadly obvious to say that the currently popular conservative — and it is almost specifically conservative — political position is to exploit fear and division. To create them if needs be; or, opportunistically, if possible. The offer is not to elect for hope, but to elect to deny the hope of others and find a sense of safety in that thought. ‘Other’ is a key word in this: a politics that first creates a social other and then promises its active subordination. Progressive politics, by contrast remains a collection of others combined to pursue some notion of a common good. Feels too glib to write that, but it also feels fundamentally true. It also feels sad to note that in that contest the progressive idea struggles now for public traction, even as it has the potential to feed that deeper sense of inner selves.

The bleakness of that division is recent; media led, and led by the example of successful angry populists. It’s possible to recall times in Australian political culture when the reaction to an event of the extremity of Bondi would have been contained within a public sphere that saw its first duty as being to some idea of public certainty and collective safety. That’s gone. The fear is now exploited.

I guess this matters all the more because of the dominant position of that political conversation as a leading contemporary sense of our collective selves. It feels like a barren moment. A time utterly absorbed in the constructed worlds of the material, and worse, one capable of dwelling on our darker instincts as a preferred common social denominator. It’s a moment that is somehow profoundly inhuman. It feels rich to say it, but a time that is a betrayal of our souls.