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I lay no claim to fundamental reality. As far as I can see no human has been able to coherently offer, much less prove, any theory about the mystery of human consciousness that has any solidity beyond speculation. We have no way to verify if our consciousness is (or is even capable of) providing a guide to fundamental reality.
Our consciousness certainly appears to operate within a consequential reality though. If we jump off a cliff we fall to our deaths, if we lack food we starve and our actions or inactions have consequences that we can see and measure. It may be that this consequential reality is a simulation or an illusion but as the saying goes “it’s good enough for government work”. It is the human condition to be obliged to deal with this consequential reality however it manifests in our consciousness and any refusal to acknowledge it and work within it ought to give us serious pause.
Every assertion about the fundamental truth of our existence, ought properly to be considered a leap of faith for we have no way of verifying any conclusion we come to. Within this mysterious life I have my faith – and part of that faith is to believe in the existence of souls.
A soul is a mystery wrapped inside another mystery, a paradox of our consciousness. All our material swagger crumbles into dust in the end, so perhaps nothing really matters. It is the gift of having a soul that makes life matter to me. While I am deeply sympathetic to the idea that things matter in purely material humanist terms, as a human I insist on having a soul, it is fundamental to my faith.
I feel moved to point out that I am not an adherent of any of the major religious traditions, I simply follow my own heart as much as I can. I believe that all of the major faiths have much to teach us if we sift through them sympathetically and much to reject if we ingeniously approach them with critical thinking.
You may remember this article which finished with these words:
“I say to all the good people who have yet to protest against the ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians – act now. Speak out today for soon it will be too late to save the children of Gaza…or your own soul.
A soul in my faith is a a spiritual substrate that endures beyond this life and perhaps many lives, I believe it is the true core of our existence, both a container for our growth and a record of our choices. I believe that we each have an individual soul and that humanity has a collective soul. As such there is nothing more political for me than the battle for the human soul.
Our souls don’t float above the development of our intellect or cognition, they are intertwined with our growth as conscious beings and created uniquely in response to the choices that we make and (most crucially) in the faiths we choose to embrace or reject, in the stories we tell ourselves.
In an interview with Owen Jones the Israeli academic Ori Goldberg offers some superb insight into some of the stories that Israelis and members of the Western political and media class are choosing right now. He asserts that for many (most?) Israelis and western elites, there is no blood as cheap as Palestinian blood.
Ori says that for Israelis the war against the Palestinians is sacrosanct and that support for it is nearly universal. He describes a schism within the mind of each Israeli Jew in which they recognise and fear the gathering consequences for Israel of what they are doing in Gaza but also imagine they can float above those consequences forever.
Most chillingly Goldberg states bluntly that most Israelis just don’t CARE about the deaths of Palestinians. He ascribes this indifference to decades of propaganda in which Palestinians are routinely vilified and dehumanised. Most Israelis feel completely detached from the atrocities committed by the Israeli Defence Force in their name, as if the ends of Israeli security justify ANY means and that Palestinian suffering, while regrettable and horrible, is by definition the fault of the victims – not the perpetrators.
[a mindset echoed word for word by Western political leaders like Ursula Von Der Leyen, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer]
Israelis have had it drilled into their heads that what happens to the Palestinians is never their fault – even if they are directly and solely responsible for pulling the triggers and dropping the bombs. While a vocal minority in Israel actively and gleefully call for the massacre of all Palestinians, a far greater majority simply don’t care what happens to them, despite seeing the atrocities currently being committed in Gaza. Ori states the obvious cost of dehumanising others like this. you lose your own humanity, or from the perspective of my faith, you poison your soul.
I have said many times that what happens in Gaza will not stay in Gaza and there are countless examples within the consequential reality of the human zoo that the fascist turn in Israel is spreading. The real battle being waged right now though, is for the collective soul of humanity, for it strikes me that as a species bereft of access to transcendent truth, our lives swiftly become the sum of the stories we tell ourselves.
While I am proud to stand with a committed and vocal minority that are shaken to the core by Israel’s genocidal rampages in Gaza and the West Bank, I am well aware that a far bigger majority simply don’t care enough to join in the protests against it. All manner of rationalisations are offered in defence of this inertia and much lazy sentiment surrounds it, but in truth the real reason that people don’t protest these outrages is because they just don’t care enough about them enough. Many seem to imagine as the Israelis do, that what happens to the Palestinians is somehow their fault and many more seem to share in the Israeli schism that the consequences of Gaza will never effect them.
This indifference in the West is by no means limited to Gaza. As the Western media has wilfully lost interest in the slow agony of Ukraine so has the vast majority of the Western public. It seems people were more willing to ‘stand with Ukraine’ as the ‘winning’ team and are now indifferent to the deaths of losers. Even the threat of nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine doesn’t seem to disturb the comfortably numb.
The schism that Ori Goldberg describes within Israelis about Gaza can be seen just as clearly around the world as regards to climate change. This week saw the latest installment of hand-wringing despair from Climate Scientists as nearly all forecasts predict that global temperatures will blast past 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial norms very soon. A great many people are deeply worried about this, but we do nothing about it. Somehow we imagine that a global climate catastrophe will not effect us, only other people.
Whether you believe in the existence of souls or not, you might pause to consider on what basis you rule them out, by what reasoning you imagine we won’t be held to account for our choices, for the stories we choose to believe in. But if you feel comfortable to rule out the existence of your own soul and that of collective humanity, then at least acknowledge this: ignoring the human truths of consequential reality is a robust working definition of insanity.
Just as westerners like me seek to hold up a mirror to the quixotic relationship that many Israelis seem to have with consequential reality, we might care to extend that to the many Westerners who are quite happy to buy into exactly the same justifications for Western complicity in genocide that the perpetrators deploy. We are also citizens of an empire and a global community apparently untroubled by the threat of nuclear war and a global ecocide, either of which will kill us all.
It strikes me that the prevailing faith of modern times is in nihilism. We don’t believe in souls and thus have no need to reflect on the stories we tell ourselves about either fundamental reality or consequential reality. We fear no moral accountability in this life or what may follow death. All most seem to believe in is materialism, in the ability of brute material power to define all moral standards in the material interest of the already materially powerful. Make no mistake, this is a faith of a kind, because we cannot verify if materialism is truly all there is to life; it is merely a story, one of many that we tell ourselves to take the edge of our terror of the unknown.
Israel in many ways is a military bastion of Western values – its just that we don’t have any values any more, or faith in anything we can’t buy with a credit card or blow up with a bomb.
In protesting against Israel’s genocide, my protest has a double meaning. Yes I am there to protest against genocide, injustice and to try to rescue the Palestinian people from death, starvation and disease. But I am also there to protect my soul from the twin evils of insanity and indifference, to show my 11 year old son that I believe in so much more than materialism and being on the ‘winning’ team.
I have said recently that the correct way to view Israel is as a hyper-dangerous cult and I stand by that 100% – in addition I now add that this battle to save the Palestinians from Israel’s final solution is actually part of a wider battle for the very soul of humanity – and I stand by that even more passionately.
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