Whole without Soul?
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” C.S. Lewis
Pete Docter is ambitious. Why would Disney, which famously avoids religious topics and images in its films, allow him to produce a full-length, Pixar animated film to explore the soul?
Disney’s Pixar Soul Image from Google
Because Soul is less about the afterlife and more about how to live here and now. It’s timing last year could not have been better. COVID-19 has forced us, or perhaps allowed us, to think about both our now and our next. Thank you, Disney, for giving Pete the green light long before the virus reminded us of our mortality and invited us to appreciate aspects of life that we were too rushed to appreciate before.
Almost twenty years ago I had the privilege of hosting author and journalist Tom Wolfe at the US Capitol. He was there to talk with senators about his views of the shifting sands of cultural norms that had been chronicling in his narrative fiction. I had just read his novel A Man in Full, which explored the soul (as much of Wolfe’s work did). As we chatted over lunch, he mused that although the book did explore religion, perhaps more particularly the philosophy of religion, it was really about the nature of man. A few years later he wrote an essay titled “Sorry, Your Soul Just Died” about genetic determinism, a perspective which can lead one to conclude that we don’t have agency, we just have genetic predispositions.
Journalist Tom Wolfe Image from Google
Reinhold Niebuhr once claimed that, “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith,” I believe there is another. We know, empirically, that we are more than our DNA. We know we have a soul.
Two weeks ago Jesse Hamm, my co-author on the graphic novel The Blessed Machine, died unexpectedly of a blood clot. He was too young. His passing made me reflect on our project, a narrative exploration of the question “is this all there is?” Last week I lost another friend, Foster Friess. From a materialistic perspective, when his body is gone, so is he. But isn’t there more? We know empirically there is. In fact, despite the recently announced dramatic drop in church attendance, the percentage of teens who believe in a soul and afterlife is the same as adults.
Yes, Virginia, there is a soul, and you know it.
Jon Batiste image grom Google
When the musician and Stephen Colbert sidekick Jon Batiste accepted his Oscar for best score for Soul, he said:
“You know what’s deep is God gave us 12 notes, it’s the same 12 notes that Duke Ellington had, that Bach had, Nina Simone, it’s the same 12! Every gift is special. Every contribution with music that comes from the divine into the instruments into the film, into the minds and hearts and souls of every person who hears it, the stories that happen when you listen to it and watch it and the stories you share, the moments you create, the memories you make…man, it’s just so incredibly special…I’m just thankful to God for those 12 notes. That’s so dope.”
Jon shared his Oscar with Trent Rezner, the principal songwriter and founder of thel rock band Nine Inch Nails. Rezner wrote the song “Hurt”, which was recorded by Johnny Cash before his death. Cash interpreted the song via a music short film depicting a man in full, filmed in the Cash Museum with broken gold records littering the floor. “Is this all there is?” Cash sings, looking over his “empire of dirt.”
The point is this: we are more than our bodies, and we are more than our accumulation of things. We are souls, and most of us know it. We cannot thrive unless we are attentive to this truth. But not everyone is willing to accept it.
Over the years Clapham has consulted with a number of nonprofits and foundations regarding “flourishing.” Improving education. Addressing racial injustice. Promoting opportunity and mobility. Exposing animal cruelty. Supporting the family. All these issues are worthy of our attention, but they can never make us whole without also being attentive to the soul.
One of these longstanding clients was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It has been with great sadness that we have read of their marital breakup, and the possible contributing factors to it. Melinda is a regular church attending Catholic while Bill is a self-identified atheist. I’ve often wondered how they have navigated this worldview divide in their personal life together, and whether the divide plays itself out in how the Foundation chooses to attend to the soul, or whether it chooses not to.
All I know is that foundations and other stakeholders will be unsuccessful in promoting personal and social flourishing if they are not attentive to the soul. (Lewis, Baptiste, Rezner and Cash are right: after all is said and done, we are souls.)
One of our friends and colleagues, Michael Wear, wrote about this blindspot in a recent editorial in the Religious News Service:
“Indeed, while it is certainly within the rights of philanthropic institutions to ‘not do religion’, such an approach undermines any meaningful, holistic commitment to community or place-based philanthropy in much of this country and in many places around the world.”
In That Hideous Strength, the concluding book in his science fiction trilogy, C.S. Lewis explores the inevitable consequence on society of the elite’s dismissal of the soul:
“The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already... begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result… The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.”
Industry, government and philanthropy are needed to bring resources and expertise to bear in addressing human challenges. But they cannot be depended on to understand much less care for the human soul. For this they need to work with and alongside people of faith, storytellers and culture creators to holistically work for true human flourishing -- and this is the work we at Clapham are committed to.