I Am a Strange Loop

brains is not at the state where I can pinpoint this suffrage physically, I’ll just say that it’s essentially “one desire, n votes”, where n is some weight associated with the given desire. Not all values of n are identical, which is to say, not all desires are born equal; the brain is not an egalitarian society!

In sum, our decisions are made by an analogue to a voting process in a democracy. Our various desires chime in, taking into account the many external factors that act as constraints, or more metaphorically, that play the role of hedges in the vast maze of life in which we are trapped. Much of life is incredibly random, and we have no control over it. We can will away all we want, but much of the time our will is frustrated.

Our will, quite the opposite of being free, is steady and stable, like an inner gyroscope, and it is the stability and constancy of our non-free will that makes me me and you you, and that also keeps me me and you you. Free Willie is just another blue humpback.

CHAPTER 24

On Magnanimity and Friendship

Are There Small and Large Souls?

HERE and there in this book, alluding to James Huneker’s droll warning to “small-souled men” quoted in Chapter 1, I have somewhat light-heartedly referred to the number of “hunekers” comprising various human souls, but I have never been specific about the kinds of traits a highhuneker or low-huneker soul would tend to exhibit. Indeed, any hint at such a distinction risks becoming inflammatory, because in our culture there is a dogma that states, roughly, that all human lives are worth exactly the same amount.

And yet we violate that dogma routinely. The most obvious case is that of a declared war, where as a society we officially slip into an alternate collective mode in which the value of the lives of a huge subset of humanity is suddenly reduced to zero. I needn’t spell this out because it is so blatant. Another clear violation of our dogma is capital punishment, where society collectively chooses to terminate a human life. Basically, society has judged that a certain soul merits no respect at all. Short of capital punishment, there is incarceration, where society treats people with many different levels of dignity or lack thereof, implicitly showing different levels of respect for different-sized souls. Consider also the phenomenal differences in the measures taken by physicians in attempting to save lives. A head of state (or the head of any large corporation) who has a heart attack will receive far better care than a random citizen, not to mention an illegal alien.

Why do I see such unequal treatments by society as tacit distinctions between the values of souls? Because I think that wittingly or unwittingly, we all equate the size of a living being’s soul with the “objective” value of that being’s life, which is to say, the degree of respect that we outsiders pay to that being’s interiority. And we certainly do not place equal values on all beings’ lives! We don’t hesitate for a moment to draw a huge distinction between the values of a human life and an animal life, and between the values of the lives of different “levels” of animals.

Thus most humans willingly participate, directly or indirectly, in the killing of animals of many different species and the eating of their flesh (sometimes even mixing together fragments of the bodies of pigs, cows, and lambs in a single dish). We also nonchalantly feed our pets with pieces of the bodies of animals we have killed. Such actions establish in our minds, obviously, a hierarchy within the realm of animal souls (unless someone were to argue in good old black-and-white style that the word “soul” does not even apply to animals, but such absolutism seems to me more like received dogma than like considered reflection).

Most people I know would rate (either explicitly, in words, or implicitly, through choices made) cat souls as higher than cow souls, cow souls higher than rat souls, rat souls higher than snail souls, snail souls higher than flea souls, and so forth. And so I ask myself, if soul-size distinctions between species are such a commonplace and non-threatening notion, why should we not also be willing to consider some kind of explicit (not just tacit) spectrum of soul-sizes within a single species, and in particular within our own?

From the Depths to the Heights

Having painted myself into a corner in the preceding section, I’ll go out on a limb and make a very crude stab at such a distinction. To do so I will merely cite two ends of a wide spectrum, with yourself and myself, dear reader, presumably falling somewhere in the mid-range (but hopefully closer to the “high” end than to the “low” one).

At the low end, then, I would place uncontrollably violent psychopaths — adults essentially incapable of internalizing other people’s (or animals’) mental states, and who because of this incapacity routinely commit violent acts against other beings. It may simply be these people’s misfortune to have been born this way, but whatever the reason, I class them at the low end of the spectrum. To put it bluntly, these are people who are not as conscious as normal adults are, which is to say, they have smaller souls.

I won’t suggest a numerical huneker count, because that would place us in the domain of the ludicrous. I simply hope that you see my general point and don’t find it an immoral view. It’s not much different, after all, from saying that such people should be kept behind bars, and no one I know considers prisons to be immoral institutions per se (it’s another matter how they are run, of course).

What about the high end of the spectrum? I suspect it will come as no surprise that I would point to individuals whose behavior is essentially the opposite of that of violent psychopaths. This means gentle people such as Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez — extraordinary individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others, and to doing so in nonviolent fashions. Such people, I propose, are more conscious than normal adults are, which is to say, they have greater souls.

Although I seldom attach much weight to the etymologies of words, I was delighted to notice, when preparing a lecture on these ideas a few years ago, that the word “magnanimity”, which for us is essentially a synonym of “generosity”, originally meant, in Latin, “having a great soul” (animus meaning “soul”). It gave me much pleasure to see this familiar word in a new light, thanks to this X-ray. (And then, to my surprise, in preparing this book’s rather fanatical index, I discovered that “Mahatma” — the title of respect usually given to Gandhi — also means “great soul”.) Another appealing etymology is that of “compassion”, which comes from Latin roots meaning “suffering along with”. These hidden messages echoing down the millennia stimulated me to explore this further.

The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer

My personal paragon for great-souledness is the theologian, musician, writer, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, who was born in 1875 in the tiny village of Kaysersberg in Alsace (which was then part of Germany, even though my beloved old French encyclopedia Le Petit Robert 2, dating from exactly one century later, claims him as francais!), and who became world-famous for the hospital that he founded in 1913 in Lambarene, Gabon, and where he worked for over fifty years.

Already at a very young age, Schweitzer identified with others, felt pity and compassion for them, and wanted to spare them pain. Where did this empathic generosity come from? Who can say? For example, on his very first day at school, six-year-old Albert noticed that he had been decked out by his parents in fancier clothes than his