I Am a Strange Loop (70 page)

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 César Chávez — 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
français
!), and who became world-famous for the hospital that he founded in 1913 in Lambaréné, 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 schoolmates, and this disparity disturbed him greatly. From that day onward, he insisted on dressing just like his poorer schoolmates.

A vivid excerpt from Schweitzer’s autobiographical opus
Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit
portrays the compassion that pervaded his life:

As far as I can peer back into my childhood, I suffered from all the misery that I saw in the world around me. I truly never knew a simple, youthful
joie de vivre,
and I believe that this is the case for many children, even if from the outside they give the appearance of being completely happy and carefree.

In particular, I was tormented by the fact that poor animals had to endure such great pain and need. The sight of an old, limping horse being dragged along by one man while another man beat it with a stick as it was being driven to the Colmar slaughterhouse haunted me for weeks. Even before I entered school, I found it incomprehensible that in my evening prayer I was supposed to pray only for the sake of human beings. And so I secretly spoke the words to a prayer that I had made up myself. It ran this way: “Dear God, protect and bless everything that breathes, keep it from all evil, and let it softly sleep.”

Schweitzer’s compassion for animals was not limited to mammals but extended all the way down the spectrum to such lowly creatures as worms and ants. (I say “all the way down” and “lowly” not to indicate disdain, but only to suggest that Schweitzer, like nearly all humans, must have had a “consciousness cone”, vaguely like mine on page 19. Such a mental hierarchy can just as easily give rise to a sense of concern and responsibility as to a sense of disdain.) He once remarked to a ten-year-old boy who was about to step on an ant, “That’s my personal ant. You’re liable to break its legs!” He would routinely pick up a worm he saw in the middle of a street or an insect flailing in a pond and place it in a field or on a plant so that it could try to survive. Indeed, he commented rather bitterly, “Whenever I help an insect in distress, I do so in an attempt to atone for some of the guilt contracted by humanity for its crimes against animals.”

As is well known, Schweitzer’s simple but profound guiding principle was what he termed “reverence for life”. In the address delivered when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953, Schweitzer declared:

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret… It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to human beings.

The following anecdote, also from
Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit,
is particularly revealing. In the springtime, with Easter approaching, little Albert, seven or eight years old, had been invited by a comrade — a comrade-in-arms, quite literally! — to go on an adventure of killing birds with slingshots that they had just made together. Looking back at this turning point in his life from the perspective of many decades later, Schweitzer recalls:

This was an abhorrent proposal, but I dared not refuse out of fear that he would mock me. Soon we found ourselves standing near a leafless tree whose branches were filled with birds singing out gaily in the morning, without any fear of us. My companion, crouching low like an Indian on a hunt, placed a pebble in the leather pouch of his slingshot and stretched it tightly. Obeying the imperious glance he threw at me, I did the same, while fighting sharp pangs of conscience and at the same time vowing firmly to myself that I would shoot when he did.

Just at that moment, church bells began to ring out, mingling with the song of the birds in the sunshine. These were the early bells that preceded the main bells by half an hour. For me, though, they were a voice from Heaven. I threw my slingshot down, startling the birds so that they flew off to a spot safe from my companion’s slingshot, and I fled home.

Ever since that day, whenever the bells of Holy Week ring out amidst the leafless trees of spring, I have remembered with deep gratitude how on that fateful day they rang into my heart the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” From that day on, I swore that I would liberate myself from the fear of other people. Whenever my inner convictions were at stake, I gave less weight to the opinions of other people than I once had. And I did my best to overcome the fear of being mocked by my peers.

Here we have a classic conflict between peer pressure and one’s own inner voices, or as we usually phrase it (and as Schweitzer himself put it), one’s
conscience.
In this case, fortunately, conscience was the clear winner. And indeed, this was a decision that lasted a lifetime.

Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?

In this region of semantic space there is one further linguistic observation that strikes me as most provocative. That is the fact that in the Romance languages, the words for “conscience” and “consciousness”, which strike us English speakers as very distinct concepts, are one and the same (for example, the French word
conscience
has both meanings, a fact that I learned when, as a teen-ager, I bought a book entitled
Le cerveau et la conscience
). This may merely be a lexical gap or a confusing semantic blur in these languages (the meaning on a literal level is “co-knowledge”), but even if that’s the case, I nonetheless think of it as offering us an insight that might otherwise never occur to us: that the partial internalization of other creatures’ interiority (conscience) is what most clearly marks off creatures who have large souls (much consciousness) from creatures that have small souls, and from yet others that have none or next to none.

I think it’s obvious, or nearly so, that mosquitoes have no conscience and likewise no consciousness, hence nothing meriting the word “soul”. These flying, buzzing, blood-sucking automata are more like miniature heat-seeking missiles than like soulful beings. Can you imagine a mosquito experiencing mercy or pity or friendship? ’Nough said. Next!

What about, say, lions — the very prototype of the notion of carnivore? Lions stalk, pounce on, rip into, and devour giraffes and zebras that are still kicking and braying, and they do so without the slightest mercy or pity, which suggests a complete lack of compassion, and yet they seem to care a great deal about their own young, nuzzling them, nurturing them, protecting them, teaching them. This is quite unmosquito-like behavior! Moreover, I suspect that lions can easily come to care for certain beasts of other species (such as humans). In this sense, a lion can and will internalize certain limited aspects of the interiority of at least
some
other creatures (especially those of a few other lions, most particularly its immediate family), even though it may remain utterly oblivious to and indifferent to those of most other creatures (a quality that sounds depressingly like most humans).

I think it’s also obvious, or nearly so, that most dogs care about other creatures — particularly humans who belong to their inner circle. Indeed, it’s well known that some dogs, displaying incredible magnanimity, will lay down their lives for their owners. I have yet to hear about a lion doing such a thing for any animal of another species, although I suppose some dog-like lion, somewhere or other, may have once fought to the death against another beast in order to save the life of a human companion. It’s a bit too much of a stretch, however, to imagine a lion choosing to be a vegetarian.

And yet a quick Web search shows that the idea of a vegetarian lion is not all that rare (usually in fiction, admittedly, but not always). Indeed, such a lion, a female named “Little Tyke”, was apparently brought up as a pet near Seattle. For four years (so says the Web site), Little Tyke refused all meat offered her until finally her owners gave up trying and accepted her vegetarian ways and her joy at playing with lambs, chickens, and other beasts. Until her dying day, Little Tyke was a vegetarian lion. Will miracles never cease?

In any case, having a conscience — a sense of morality and of caring about doing “the right thing” towards other sentient beings — strikes me as the most natural and hopefully also the most reliable sign of consciousness in a being. Perhaps this simply boils down to how much one puts into practice the Golden Rule.

Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach

I have to admit that I have always intuitively felt there was another and quite different yardstick for measuring consciousness, although a most blurry and controversial one: musical taste. I certainly cannot explain or defend my own musical taste, and I know I would be getting myself into very deep, hot, and murky waters if I were to try, so I won’t even begin. I will, however, have to reveal a little bit of my musical taste in order to talk about Albert Schweitzer and his musical profundity.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a record of the first eight preludes and fugues of Book One of J. S. Bach’s monumental work,
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
as played on the piano by Glenn Gould. This was my first contact with the notion of “fugue”, and it had an electrifying effect on my young mind. For the next several years, every time I went into a record store, I would seek out other parts of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
on piano, for it was a genuine rarity those days (even on harpsichord, but especially on piano, which I preferred). Every time I found a new set of preludes and fugues from either volume, the act of putting the needle down in the grooves of the new record and listening to it for the first time was among the most exciting events in my life.