growing our souls: Why we need an age of repair
matt birkhold
Soul is the nonmaterial part of us that forms the essence of who we are. I think it’s synonymous with spirit. It's the part of us that isn’t shaped by society, pressure, and the world we live in. It’s who we are underneath the way we’re shaped by society and our experiences. If personality describes how we interact with the world, then soul is what informs our personality. My spirit came out of my mother’s womb deeply curious, deeply feeling, and with a deep sense of moral relativism. When I was a kid, no older than five, my father tried to teach me the difference between right and wrong by asking me why I didn’t steal. “Matt, why don’t you steal?” he asked. “Because I don’t feel compelled to,” I replied (I have no idea where I learned the word compelled at five). He responded angrily, “No. You don’t steal because it’s wrong.” “No,” I replied, “I don’t steal because I don’t feel compelled to.” That was my soul speaking. I don’t remember how my dad responded to my soul but I know it wasn’t good.
When I’ve been in situations where I didn’t let my soul speak, I’ve been scared. The first time anyone asked me if I was a virgin I was in the fourth grade. I had never kissed anyone before and most certainly was. But John Daniels asked me the question. He was the epitome of cool. We were in the same fourth grade class but John seemed otherworldly. He seemed grown. He had a starter jacket, fly sneakers, and had the kind of childhood sophistication that I now understand only comes from having to grow up way too early. When he asked me the question, I felt a wave of pressure arise inside me. “How would John respond if I told the truth?” I thought. “Would I be cool? Would I be a man?” I decided to lie. “I’m not a virgin,” I said. John nodded in approval.
Where did this fear come from? On one hand it’s reasonable to assume that this was a natural fear that all human beings have about being socially accepted. We’re social beings and have a nonmaterial need for community. We need affection. We need to be and feel affirmed. We need to be loved. My knowledge of history tells me that there’s also something deeper happening.
The modern age began when Columbus landed in the West Indies, which began the process of colonization, indigenous genocide, and the transatlantic enslavement of Africans. Colonization and slavery required boats. Boats had to be built by workers. As slavery increased, so did the need for boats, and for workers to produce them. Shipbuilding required metal. Metalwork required mining. These jobs were dangerous and they didn’t pay well. Farming was way safer. If I was a European peasant, there’s no way I would have traded in my daily life of subsistence farming to go build boats or work in a mine. They would have had to force me. And that’s what they did. The European aristocracy began to enclose the land of peasants so that they couldn’t farm for themselves. Because self-reliance was essentially made illegal, European peasants were forced to take jobs in order to survive. To guarantee that enough workers would exist in the future, the aristocracy also outlawed birth control and abortion, both of which had been practiced for centuries by women around the world.
The modern age is built on fear. Its economy forced people from all over the world to give up lives of self-reliance and work as slaves or for a wage. When people refused to work on plantations, they were beaten. When people refused to work in Europe, they were arrested. When women practiced birth control in Europe, they were burned alive. When women refused to give birth on plantations, they were raped. Neither the enslavement or wage labor that made its economy possible were natural. They were born of force and we resisted them. However, when we let our souls speak and resisted too much, we were met with violence. If we betrayed our souls and worked, we could survive.
My sense that at 11 years old it was not okay to be my soul developed from this history. By the time I was born in 1979, successive waves of our ancestors had adapted to an economy and culture that gave us reason to fear starvation and homelessness if we didn’t have access to money.
The history of the modern age is one that puts our material needs for physical security and our nonmaterial needs for emotional and psychic security at odds with each other. Being my soul is way easier when I’m not scared. We need an age of repair so that it’s easier for us to be our souls. An age of repair has to systematically make material and nonmaterial needs equally important. It has to consist of systems that don’t breed fear. These systems have to facilitate a sense of emotional security to the same degree that modern age facilitates emotional insecurity. Under conditions that don’t breed fear and insecurity, we’ll be able to experiment with repairing that damage that’s been done to us, our relationships, and to nature that is a logical consequence of a period of human history that systematically disconnects us from our souls.
