s e v e n
We have spoken already of the psychological shift that occurred when humans began to develop agriculture and the hitherto rather latent capacities of the human psyche for rational, abstract thinking. Humanity as a whole became increasingly incisive and decisive, both words carrying a concealed weapon, the Latin verb for “cut”.
Agriculture itself is based on cutting, the cutting of the earth by the blades of the plow. As agricultural tribes steadily gained the upper hand over neighboring hunter-gatherer and pastoral peoples, they entered into an arms race with one another– or, more accurately, a land race. To defend oneself was to amass more power, to amass more power was to amass more food, to amass more food was to bring more land under cultivation, under the cutting blades of the plow. Phantom nostalgia for the Garden of Eden aside, forests stood in the way of fields. Etymologically, woods became “wild” and forests became “savage.”
I think human beings have an innate appreciation for soul, and a corollary to this is that we have an innate reluctance to do unnecessary harm to anyone or anything we perceive as having soul, or being soulful. For us to psychologically come to terms with killing, taking, mistreating, we must convince ourselves that those we are infringing upon are without soul, or have less of it than we do. We see this in every armed conflict: we must demonize, dehumanize – both, perhaps, are different ways of expressing the act of de-souling -- the enemy before we can bring ourselves to seek their destruction. Agriculture, therefor, made it highly inconvenient for forests and their denizens to have souls. Woods, the wild, was simply in the way.
The retreat of soul from the world in the Western psyche has been steady. Like the mycelial strands of funghi, soul does not fare well with all of this cutting. Soul is a uniter, not a divider. We can almost hear the footsteps of soul hastening a retreat when Descartes purportedly told his assistants before vivisecting a dog not to be disturbed by the animal’s screams, that animals were mere machines.
Soul recognizes the verbiage we use when we intend to de-animate the world before exploiting it. It can sniff out reductionist, abstract language a mile away. It sounds something like this, like then-governor Ronald Regan claiming that if you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seem them all.” This is rhetorical desouling, clearing the way before clear cutting.
But our time together would be worth very little if we were simply lamenting a hopeless trajectory, an inexorable desertification of soil and soul. What our soil metaphor suggests about soul is that it can rebound and regenerate, and that human beings are part of, nay vital to, that process.
