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9780195134919

Landscapes of the Soul The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life

by
  • ISBN13:

    9780195134919

  • ISBN10:

    0195134915

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2001-06-21
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
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Summary

Do you believe in God? Nine out of ten Americans unhesitatingly answer yes. But for Douglas Porpora, the real questions begin where pollsters leave off. What, he asks, does religious belief actually mean in our lives? Does it shape our identities and our actions? Or, despite our professions of faith, are we morally adrift? Landscapes of the Soul paints a disturbing picture of American spiritual life. In his search for answers to his questions, Porpora interviewed clerks and executives, Jews, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, and even followers of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. He asked them about God, and about what they saw as their own place in the universe. What he found was a widespread inability to articulate any grand meaning of life. We lack heroes to inspire us. We lack a sense of calling, of transcendent purpose in our existence. Many of us seem incapable of caring deeply about the suffering of others. Our society is permeated with moral indifference. Yes, we are a believing people, but God is often a distant abstraction and rarely an emotional presence in our lives. Only such an emotional connection, Porpora argues, can be the basis of a genuine moral vision. Our emotional estrangement from God and the sacred keeps us from caring about social justice, keeps us from wanting to change the world, keeps us enclosed in our own private worlds. Landscapes of the Soul is a passionate call to broaden our spiritual and moral horizons, to raise our eyes to the greater reality that unites us all.

Author Biography


Douglas V. Porpora is chair of the Department of Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology at Drexel University. He is an active member of NETWORK, a national social justice lobby, and is the author of How Holocausts Happen: The United States in Central America. He lives with his wife in Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1(24)
The Caterpillar's Question
25(32)
The Further Geography of the Soul
57(38)
The Emotional Detachment from the Sacred
95(36)
The Meaning of Life
131(36)
Heroes
167(34)
Callings, Journeys, and Quests
201(36)
Resources of the Self
237(36)
Communities of Discourse
273(24)
The Human Vocation
297(14)
Appendix A Theory 311(2)
Appendix B Tables 313(4)
Notes 317(18)
References 335(12)
Index 347

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Excerpts


Chapter One

The Caterpillar's Question

To many, it is not given to hear of the Self. Many, though they hear of it,

do not understand it. Wonderful is he who speaks of it.

Intelligent is he who learns of it.

Blessed is he who, taught by a good teacher, is able to understand it.

-- The Upanishads

Social Space

When she tumbles down the rabbit hole, one of the first characters Alice meets is the Caterpillar. Reclining dreamily on a mushroom, the Caterpillar stops smoking opium long enough to ask a disconcerting question: "Who are you ?"

    To her surprise, this is a question Alice finds she cannot answer. Part of the problem, surely, is that by the time Alice meets the Caterpillar, she is no longer quite the same person she was when she began her day. At the time of their encounter, Alice has shrunk to roughly the same size as the Caterpillar. A more fundamental problem, however, is that Alice and the Caterpillar do not share the same social space, the arena of personal connections and relationships. It is through social space that we first begin to identify who we are.

    I once posed the Caterpillar's question to Aaron, a thirteen-year-old boy about to make his bar mitzvah. "Who are you?" I asked. Although Aaron knew I was asking a philosophical question, he mischievously replied, "I'm your nephew."

    Aaron's was not the answer I was seeking, but it was nevertheless a perfect sociological response to my question. After our names, we first identify who we are by locating ourselves within a network of social relations. My nephew had not just identified himself to me; as I only had one nephew at the time, he had identified himself uniquely.

    Uniqueness is integral to identity. To speak of our identities is to speak of who each of us uniquely is. Two things are said to be identical if one cannot be distinguished from the other. Identity is thus linked to differentiation. We are uniquely who we are because in ordinary life, (1) we cannot differentiate our own self from ourself, and because (2) there are always ways of differentiating our own self individually from everyone else's self. Only I am myself.

    Already, we begin to see why the postmodernist denial of ontological identity is incoherent. The ability to distinguish ourselves from each other is necessary for social life to go on. Socially, our unique identities are the objects to which unique experiences, thoughts, and actions are attached. Socially, we need to distinguish whether it is Uncle Harry or Aunt Sue who enjoys fishing, hates the Democrats, or believes in UFOs. Experiences, thoughts, and actions all need to be assigned to specific somebodies. There are no disembodied experiences, no free-floating thoughts, no actions without actors. For us even to conceptualize experiences, thoughts, and actions, they all must belong to somebody in particular--to Uncle Harry or to Aunt Sue or to whomever. Experiences, thoughts, and actions that are all unique in space and time must be matched with equally unique identities. Thus we need to distinguish one unique identity from another.

    Our identities are the objects of our own self-consciousness. We humans are said to possess self-consciousness, our most distinctive trait. Self-consciousness is the ability to make our own selves the object of our consciousness. Implicit in the very concept of self-consciousness is a self or identity we are self-conscious of. Thus, again, for us to make sense of our lives, we need a concept of our own unique, personal identities.

    This conceptual need is recognized even by Hinduism, according to which our socially distinct identities are an illusion. Upon enlightenment, Hinduism tells us, one recognizes one's true self, the Atman, which is distinct from the ordinary self of social life. Thus, there is, according to Hinduism, a level of consciousness at which I am not the self I think I am. I must distinguish my true self from my illusory, social self. According to Hinduism, my true self, the Atman, is at one with everyone else's true self. Thus, in Hinduism, there is no distinction between my true self and yours. Our true selves are all equally a manifestation of the one, "no-self" self of the universe, what the Upanishads call Brahman or Om. Consequently, with Hindu enlightenment, we realize that our true selves are not distinct but, rather, all one.

    Hindu enlightenment, however, is a transcendental experience that leaves ordinary life behind. Outside that experience, we remain caught in the web of distinct identities. Within some Buddhist traditions, it is partly because ordinary social life requires our having unique identities that the search for enlightenment is primarily an older person's pursuit, undertaken only after one is able to retire from social demands.

    The implicit uniqueness of our identities is signified by our names. Our names are the very first way we identify ourselves. They are the first piece of information offered in introductions, and we are liable to suffer embarrassment if we forget the name of someone we should know. To forget someone's name is an offense against identity. It raises the possibility that the nameless one is an identity we do not consider significant.

    Between our first and last names, our identities are often if not always uniquely fixed. I doubt there is anyone else in the world who has ever lived who has the same first and last name as I. (I have never quite understood what possessed my parents to affix a Scottish first name to an Italian last name.)

    Many full names of course are not unique. Presumably, there are other Jim Joneses besides the notorious one associated with the suicide cult in Guyana. Nevertheless, within the social circles that matter--the local ones within which we operate--our names are generally unique and, therefore, suitable enough to fix our identities. That is why, of course, to protect my subjects' identities, all their names have been altered. The only exceptions are my nephew, who wanted to see his name in print, and a biblical critic we will later meet in the capacity of an expert witness.

    There are some cultures that deliberately name their children after those who have gone before. In some tribal societies, children are named after a deceased ancestor or mythic hero. The point of such nominal identity is to indicate that the contemporary bearer of the name is the embodiment of the forebear's identity. In this way, the forebear is in some sense thought to live on in a new incarnation.

    Something of this sensibility survives even in our own culture. Sometimes children are given the exact names of a parent (usually the father) to establish a historical continuity of lineage. Through the children and grandchildren, who are usually distinguished by the appellations junior and the third , a transhistorical connection is affirmed.

    Among the people I interviewed, three were Sannyasins, disciples of the Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. They had joined thousands of others at Rajneesh Purim, the Bhagwan's extensive compound in Colorado. This was a place that stirred considerable controversy in the eighties, enough to become the subject of a 60 Minutes broadcast. Speaking with these people, I had difficulty understanding what all the furor was about, why the Bhagwan himself had become a target of government harassment. It is true that in the 60 Minutes segment, the movement's spokesperson revealed herself to be alarmingly anti-Semitic. The three people I spoke with were not. They all assured me that such anti-Semitism is not characteristic of the movement as a whole and was specifically not characteristic of the Bhagwan, who died in 1990. As far as I can gather, the Bhagwan's message is an innocuous, eclectic variant of Hinduism.

    One of the Sannyasins I interviewed, Prem Prakash, was a retired schoolteacher and a former Protestant minister. Twice divorced, he now lives alone. The other two, Veet Raj and Anand Naveeno, are a younger, married couple who run a small business. Veet Raj is an African American man, formerly from Jamaica. Anand Naveeno came to Rajneesh Purim from Germany, where she joined the movement.

    None of the Sanskrit names that these Sannyasins now go by is original. When one becomes a Sannyasin, one is initiated into a new identity that breaks with the past. This is signified by a new name, which is accompanied by a poem. The poem elaborates on the meaning of the name. The meaning of the names is significant. Anand means bliss, Prem means pure love, and Veet means beyond.

    According to an American Sufi healer I spoke with, "When a spiritual teacher gives you a name, it is because he sees something in you or something you should aspire to be." Something similar transpires with certain Catholic religious and, more generally, with all Catholics when at confirmation they take on the name of a saint, a role model they are meant to emulate.

    Even at birth some people are given the names of virtues: Hope, Prudence, Faith, and Charity. In expressing such qualities, names extend beyond social space. They reach out into moral space and, as in the case of Emmanuel or "God with us," into metaphysical space as well. If Emmanuel means God with us, the implication is that there is a God, a God who is both able and willing to be with us.

    Names carry other freight as well. They are usually gendered. Hope, Charity, and Faith, for example, are all usually associated with women. Emmanuel is a name normally reserved for males, perhaps reflecting a metaphysical assumption that God is a he. Likewise, names vary by social class and by ethnicity. They also vary by generation. In my age cohort, for example, there are few women with the names Bertha, Hazel, or Sadie. To me, those names have always conjured images of older women.

    What is in a name? Much, actually. That is why today so much of our politics is preoccupied by what we are to call each other. "Colored," "Black," "Afro-American," or "African American," each designation conveys something different. Each connotes a distinct identity. The so-called politics of identity has consequently become one of our most contested political battlefields.

    Among some peoples, the connection between a name and the identity which it denotes is thought to be so close that one's true name is kept secret. To know someone's "true name" is to have magical power over him or her.

    Even for us, a magical power may reside in our true names. When I ask Catholic Sister Marge O'Hara who she is, her voice fills with emotion.

    "I am ... Patricia Margaret. When I say I am Patricia Margaret ... that feels ... I am ... It's funny. I have a really good friend, who calls me Patricia Margaret with a way that ..."

    "Is that your real name?"

    "Yeah, that's my baptismal name, Patricia Margaret. I've been called Marge my entire life. But when she called me Patricia Margaret when everyone else was calling me Marge, it was like ... When she calls me Patricia Margaret, she calls me from, like, a place of unconditional love. I could never understand her love for me. I didn't teach her. I didn't do anything for her. I didn't prove anything. She just ... loved me. And the way she says, `Patricia Margaret,' I've grown to feel that that is ... me ... loved. You know? And I'm Patricia Margaret."

    For all the meaning that names can bear, they are but our entry points to social space, the first dots on the map. To identify more fully who we are, that map needs to be filled in. Presumably it would not have done the Caterpillar much good if Alice had merely identified herself as "Alice." Presumably, the Caterpillar would then have asked, "And who is Alice?"

    We speak of locating or placing ourselves within a network of social relations. The words location and place invoke a spatial metaphor. That spatial metaphor is reinforced by the way anthropologists and sociologists often depict social networks. We draw maps. Traditionally, the first thing an anthropologist in the field would do is draw a kinship diagram. Sociologists draw sociograms. Kinship diagrams and sociograms both consist of points and lines. The points represent people; the lines represent relationships. In kinship diagrams, the relationships depicted are either marriages or genealogical ties. The relationships depicted by a sociogram can be almost anything: who talks to whom, who is a friend of whom, and so forth. It was by socio-graphically depicting who had sex with whom that a sociologist at the Centers for Disease Control was able to identify the "patient zero" of the AIDS epidemic.

    The points and lines of social connection are laid out in a space. Such social spaces even have their own topographies. In sociograms, there are peaks and valleys, places where the lines of connection are dense and places where they are sparse. Cliques are mountains of connectivity, separated by valleys of isolation.

    To capture our location in social space fully, many such maps need to be overlaid. We have one place in a genealogy, another place in a friendship network. We have still another location in a job structure, something often represented graphically as an organization chart. We also have a nationality in a field of nationalities, a religion in a field of religions, a race in a field of races. We have a marital status, a gender, and a sexual orientation. We occupy positions or roles in a whole assortment of different organizations. We have class positions in a hierarchy of classes and various statuses in social hierarchies of status. Who we are in social space is our placement simultaneously within all these relationships. In social space, we are the unique intersection of all our social positions.

    The various social positions we occupy are not all equally essential to who we are. To some social roles we bring a previously established identity and take that identity away with us when we leave the role. Our demographic characteristics are generally more essential to our identities. They are what sociologists sometimes refer to as "master statuses," statuses so constitutive of our social identities that they overshadow the other social positions we occupy only contingently. Our gender, our race, our sexual orientation are all essential in this way. We would be fundamentally different people if we differed in any of these master statuses. We would not be who we are now.

    The significance of these master statuses is not entirely up to us. These master statuses were already significant to the society into which we were born and which imposed their significance on us at birth. They determine how we will be raised, some of what we will value, and for which other social positions we will or will not be eligible. Ordinarily, by the time we reach adulthood, these master statuses are so deeply inscribed in us as to set the definitive parameters of our identities.

    By the time we reach an age at which we can critically reflect on who we are, we are already somebody we did not choose to be. We begin self-reflection on an identity that has been pre-given to us. When we first look at our identities, we find an identity already there. This is the experience that the German existential philosopher, Martin Heidegger, refers to as "thrownness." When we first examine ourselves in the world, we discover ourselves already having been "thrown" into the world, ready-made.

    We can certainly change our original characteristics, even some of our fundamental characteristics. The point, however, is that when we emerge in the world as self-conscious beings, we do not arrive without predicates. From the very beginning and thereafter, our social selves at their very core are not disembodied, transcendental egos. Instead, our egos are, among other things, fundamentally gendered, raced, and sexually oriented.

    At issue in the politics of identity is the fact that our selves enter the world not just with demographic predicates but with demographic predicates that carry different moral and metaphysical values. To be a man is not just to be a man but in some societies a warrior or "breadwinner" as well. Manhood has certain metaphysical meanings attached to it, which vary from society to society. With those meanings come moral rights and privileges, duties and obligations. Social space is itself embedded in a moral space and a metaphysical space.

    Some people begin life with identities already negatively valued. Negative values are attached to identities with the "wrong" skin color, the "wrong" sexual orientation, the "wrong" social class, and a host of other "wrong" identity markers. The underlying point of the politics of identity is not just to open the social space so as to include these identities equally but to change the negative values that are attached to them at the start.

    The problem is that social space is already itself incipiently a moral and metaphysical order. The relationships that make up social space are themselves made up of moral norms and meanings. There is something it metaphysically means to be a mother. By virtue of that metaphysical meaning, there are moral norms governing what good motherhood entails. The same is true of every social position and role we occupy.

    Thus, to challenge social space is at once to challenge the moral and metaphysical order as well. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that even those oppressed by the current social arrangement may offer some resistance. What the oppressed are being urged to surrender is not just their chains but their place in a cosmic order, an order in which they themselves may be both morally and metaphysically invested. To many, that is to surrender the cosmos and yield to chaos.

    This is poignantly illustrated by Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The Remains of the Day . One need not be a Marxist to find the British class system deeply troubling. That some people should live their lives as servants to others seems demeaning, particularly to us in America. The household staffs of the British aristocracy are seemingly oppressed.

    Oppressive or not, in its heyday, the British class system was a cosmic chain of being, in which even servants had a deeply meaningful place. In the novel (unlike the movie version), the story of The Remains of the Day is told from the butler Stevens's point of view. It unfolds as his moving and sophisticated philosophical treatise on what it means to be "a great butler."

    To us today in America the very phrase "a great butler" may seem an oxymoron, a grandiose triviality. Ishiguro's accomplishment is that we close his book with a different attitude entirely. We have learned that to be a butler is to possess a calling and a profession, one that comes with colleagues and professional disputes, with professional journals and ideals. It is with these ideals that the book is concerned.

    Despite Anthony Hopkins's sensitive performance, we might come away from the film thinking of Stevens as a person so repressed, so caught up in a petty social role that he renounces the love of his colleague, Miss Kenton, and insists on remaining at his station in the dining room even as, in the servants' quarters above, his father lies dying.

    To attribute Stevens's behavior to personality flaw is to do him an injustice and to miss the entire point of the book. Stevens's behavior stems from his commitment to his station. To remain at one's station despite all adversity is, according to Stevens, the essence of greatness. "`Dignity,'" he says, "has to do crucially with a butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits," not to abandon that being even when one's "betters" egregiously let down their side.

    Stevens's commitment to his calling is not unthinking. Behind it, there lies a substantive moral vision, a deep moral purpose. It is not his betters that Stevens ultimately serves but, through them, human betterment. We learn that like all truly great butlers, early in his career, Stevens was at pains to attach himself to a "great household." Stevens dismisses those in his profession who equate the greatness of a household with such superficialities as lineage or titles. For Stevens, the greatness of a household inheres in its moral stature. By moral stature, Stevens is not referring to the conduct of the household in its private affairs. Instead, a great household is one in which the members are publicly involved in "the progress of humanity." By serving great employers in that endeavor, a great butler makes his own small contribution to that cause as well.

    In Lord Darlington's household, the fate of Europe seems to hang in the balance--who knows what damage may ensue from even one disgruntled guest? To ensure the smooth running of the backroom politics underway, Stevens's efforts in their own small way approach the heroic. It is for this reason that Stevens seems almost committed to celibacy, and it is for this reason as well that in the urgency of the moment, Stevens remains at his station, allowing the father he idolizes to die without him.

    In the end, there is in Stevens's selfless behavior a nobility of purpose even a Marxist might honor. The tragedy of the novel is that the cause Stevens serves is a misbegotten one. In the end, he has to admit the truth about his employer, that as Darlington's critics had maintained, he was just a political amateur in over his head, that his lordship's misguided efforts served only to abet the cause of Hitler. At the remains of the day, Stevens's own lifelong selflessness has left nothing but the waste of what might have been.

    The larger tragedy perhaps is that it is not until the end of his life that Stevens ever rises to a critical reflection on the social order itself. It is not until then that Stevens ever scrutinizes the dehumanizing constraints imposed on someone in his station. By that time, Stevens inhabits his station so completely that it is still only within the parameters of that identity that he can go on to absorb his new insight.

    Whatever might have made Stevens change his ways earlier in life, it certainly could not have been a simple, socialist appeal to self-interest. For Stevens, the social order as a whole and the particular social being he had come to inhabit would have held too much moral meaning for that to have worked. Stevens did not so much inhabit a particular "professional being" as become a particular professional being.

    Stevens had no social identity apart from that of being a butler. Being a butler is as essential to Stevens's identity as his race and gender. To renounce the butler's role would be to renounce his social self.

    In addition to our unchosen demographic characteristics, there are thus other social positions we can adopt that will be every bit as essential to who we socially are. Marriage and parenthood come immediately to mind, but as in the case of Stevens, a profession can confer essential social being as well. To be a teacher, physician, or lawyer, for example, is not just to fill a role but to adopt a moral career that grows into an identity.

    To fault Stevens therefore raises an interesting philosophical difficulty. If we are to fault Stevens, we must fault him for remaining who he was. Throughout his life, Stevens remains true to the moral purpose of his calling, even heroically so. Yet, in the face of what Lord Darlington was up to, Stevens himself comes to recognize a higher ethical demand that transcends the obligations of any one profession, any one social position. It is an ethical demand Stevens encounters in the persons of Miss Kenton and in Darlington's nephew, Mr. Cardinal. It is a universal ethical demand that addresses Stevens not as a butler but as a human being.

    Who is the self addressed by this universal ethic if it is not some specific, social identity? If Stevens is to be faulted for remaining himself in the face of this higher ethical demand, who is the self that might have chosen to become someone new, a self that would endure across such a transmigration from one incarnation to another? Evidently we are confronting here a self above the social self, a self independent of our social position. With that more fundamental self, we leave social space behind.

(Continues...)

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