In a recent, typically heart-on-my-sleeve column I found myself writing that watching the grotesque entertainment of Oprah Winfrey's interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had been a "soul-bruising" experience.
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I knew that the horror of it had done something harmful to the soul. Yet, in my restless creative pursuit of the avoidance of the cliché, I felt that to call the experience "soul-destroying" would be clichéd.
And inaccurate, too, for although we always describe our desperately dispiriting experiences as being "soul destroying" in fact the soul is somehow never quite destroyed.
That is partly because the soul is in one sense as tough as old boots but also because whatever it is made of is somehow indestructible.
And yet it does bruise easily. And so for example Prime Minister Scott Morrison is always saying things, revealing of his inner emptiness, that are soul-bruising. Characteristically deep purple bruises were raised by Morrison's inane need to channel his wife in order for him to find something to say about the Brittany Higgins imbroglio, then by his insistence that the March 4 Justice protesters be grateful they are not living somewhere where governments meet protests with bullets.
Morrison's bucolic deputy prime minister, too, (his name escapes me for the moment) bruised the soul (and as well gave my soul a kind of "cork" like the painful ones suffered by footballers when an important muscle is biffed) with his recent climate change non-thought that "I'm certainly not worried about what might happen in 30 years' time."
Where does our dear nation, our democracy, find these bruisers, these disappointers?
The soul is particularly on my mind and cropping up here again in my often soulful journalism because my sense of Harry and Meghan and Scomo being soul bruisers coincides with the online popping-up of a bright new essay about the soul. It is What Is The Soul If Not A Better Version Of Ourselves?
For Aeon magazine John Cottingham, a UK emeritus professor of philosophy offers in just 1200 wisdom-packed words his non-religious suggestion of what the soul may be.
"What is the point of gaining the whole world if you lose your soul?" he asks, echoing the Bible's famous asking of that same question.
"Today, far fewer people are likely to catch the scriptural echoes of this question," the professor fancies, "but the question retains its urgency."
"We might not quite know what we mean by the soul any more, but intuitively we grasp what is meant by the loss in question - the kind of moral disorientation and collapse where what is true and good slips from sight ..."
"But what is the soul?" the professor asks, going on to suggest that "to say we have a soul is partly to say that we humans, despite all our flaws, are fundamentally oriented towards the good. We yearn to rise above the waste and futility that can so easily drag us down.
"The concept of the soul might not be part of the language of science; but we immediately recognise and respond to what is meant in poetry, novels and ordinary speech, when the term 'soul' is used in that it alerts us to certain powerful and transformative experiences that give meaning to our lives. Such experiences include the joy that arises from loving another human being, or the exaltation when we surrender to the beauty of a great artistic or musical work, or ... where we feel at one with the natural world around us."
Yes, and it follows from the way our souls know truth and goodness when they see them that they also recognise, in horror, untruth and badness when they, our discerning souls, see them.
As proof of my thesis that evil nastiness in human political behaviour cannot destroy the soul I offer the way in which decent peoples' souls were, miraculously, not smashed to death's smithereens even by the Tampa affair.
In August 2001, the Howard government refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 433 rescued refugees to enter Australian waters. John Howard's unchristian, amoral heartlessness in this, then his wicked political exploitation of it (to win a federal election) by using it to appeal to the very worst in Australians' xenophobically bonkers natures, endangered every decent Australian's decent soul.
But with much intensive care and then some years of quiet convalescence, the soul is back on its feet although still vulnerable to bruising ordeals like a prime minister's inanities, like Oprah Winfrey's indulgence of a pair of privileged narcissists.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist.