Lamenting the Loss of ‘Soul’
understanding this is me getting onto some mighty thin ice
I was born in Georgia (the one in the U.S.) in 1952. I was coming of age as the cultural revolution that, with the counter-revolution that arose in response to it, has been roiling our society ever since was getting underway. So I was eleven when JFK was assassinated, turned thirteen in the year of the Civil Rights Act, turned 16 in the watershed year of 1968.
Back then the micro-culture of Americans of (more recent) African heritage (according to scientists, all humans are of African heritage if we go back far enough) had produced something called soul. It eventually got co-opted — and trivialized — like all positive things do anymore, by the marketing industry, but there was a time when such soulfulness was something very real. I can’t help but lament in some sense its passing.
I say I lament the passing of such soulfulness, but make no mistake: that its genesis is a thing of the past is a good thing. Soul came from an inward commitment of people to their self-worth as human beings in the face of totalized oppression enforced with acts so vile, so sickly cruel that most people cannot even imagine such things. It was the avowed intent of the racists, aided and abetted by their cowardly enablers, to crush any possible sense of being human out of their victims.
People could only endure that ongoing crime against humanity and remain human by turning to their souls. They could only survive as human beings by living their lives under the understanding that it was their souls that gave them humanness. Their souls could not be touched, much less harmed, by even the worst atrocities that the racists, enabled by cowards, could invent.
Soul was the expression of a profound, but implicit, dignity. It never had to be claimed; for that matter, it couldn’t be. It could only be demonstrated — by the way the people imbued with it were, informed by a knowledge of the humanness in all people so deep and so sure that it forged them into beings with soul: a soulfulness that it could literally be seen with the naked eye.
The conditions that created such soulfulness are gone. That most certainly is not to say that racism, much less bigotry, is in the past, but the extreme oppression that existed then does not exist today. That is a good thing.
Gone with it is the forced necessity to acknowledge, if only at the surface, the power of that oppressive reality. BLM and similar organizations — not to mention truly militant outfits — signal that nothing approaching the oppression that was perpetrated back then will be allowed to happen again: the days of superficial capitulation to a different status — a status of difference— those days of bowed heads, shuffling feet, and cloistered suffering are gone for good. Even so, overt, outward resistance is inimical to the development of soul. [Hopefully, enough Americans of European heritage (and Americans of any other heritage) are also ready and willing to do what we must to make it absolutely clear to any who might desire a return to anything like those days that nothing like that will happen here again — ever, no matter who or what.]
So, such soulfulness is gone because the conditions that generated it are gone. That those conditions no longer exist is something to be glad of (if to say ‘celebrated’ would be premature, given how precarious progress in that aspect of our society, such as it has been, has become). Yet knowing that soul is gone, too, is something I can’t help but lament in a way.