Like everyone, I was born without a soul.  That I never developed one is a generational pathology.  In the 1980’s, much of America was pretty well-off.  Afluence brought comfort, so we were denied truly character-building experiences in childhood.  Those of us who were smart enough to make it through high school and college without failing a class never ran into obstacles when it would have mattered.  So, we ended up without a soul.  My sense of what “soul” means may be controversial, but I don’t care.  This is the soul as Gothic cathedral: beautiful because it raises itself up against constraints.

This is not, per se, a racial pathology, although by far the majority of people who suffer from it are white.  We grew up in the suburbs, boring.  The Arcade Fire made an album to cheer us up, which worked for a while.

It’s hard to live without a soul.  A major virtue of Pankaj Mishra’s The Age of Anger is that is recognizes this.  A failure of the book (aside from its constant and I think against the author’s conscience red-baiting)  is that it doesn’t acknowledge how many more people are truly soulless now than a century (or even a decade) ago.

Mishra highlights something basic about modernity, which is that we gave up our gods in favor of the state but the state hasn’t delivered.  Imagine the kind of drive the idea of an Italian nation must have aroused in the carborari: a new Rome, a state to which one could belong and which would be not only recognized but dominant on the world stage.  Obviously it didn’t work out that way, in the 19th century or now.  No wonder they gas-bombed Ethiopians; nationalism is a delusional psychosis.  People who suffer from it ought to be locked up in wards.

Mihra says we’re now living through the bitter harvest of these broken promises.  They told us the truth would make us free, which is true, but it turns out that being free doesn’t satisfy our ego demands.  Enlightenment and nationhood only force us to confront the sourced of our oppression without any religious or imperial veils.  We still don’t have the power to overthrow them.

I think that’s right, but I think it’s wrong to read what’s happened over the last couple years as a continuation of these trends.  In fact, it’s an intensification.  Sayyid Qutb (to take one of Mishra’s examples) was looking at modernity from the other side of the window; it was something he aspired to, as the dozens of pages of Milestones devoted to “the right use of technology” surely show.  We, on the other hand, are on the other side of modernization and can’t delude ourselves that technology is going to fix our problems.  Apple promises to give us a soul, but we know that’s not going to happen.

The soulless masses are vulnerable in the same sense that the clay that makes the golem is vulnerable.  We’re eager to be manipulated.  In the nineties, for instance – when this generation of automata came of age – you could watch Homer Simpson on TV.  A lot of (fucking stupid) people have said that Homer Simpson is a figure for how white men are the last people you can racially/sexually stereotype.  They think that Homer Simpson is a slur against white men.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Homer Simpson is the representation that white men wanted to see back then and, as the election of Trump shows, still want to see.  They want to see someone as dumb and boring as they are succeed.  They want to believe that an empty white skin can achieve whatever it wants.

Meanwhile, a lot of us don’t have souls but do have consciences.  Some of us even have taste.  What are we supposed to do?