The brutality of current events makes one wonder whether we have lost our soul
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket with the Psyche spacecraft onboard is launched from Launch Complex 39A on Oct. 13, 2023, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Credit: AP/Aubrey Gemignani
NASA quietly launched a probe into deep space Friday — as quietly as one can launch a probe that costs about $850 million and will take six years to reach its target.
The unmanned spacecraft is bound for an asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, one rich in metals and, more importantly, thought to be very much like the unreachable core of our own planet. As such, it offers scientists a special opportunity to learn something about how planets like Earth are formed.
The target asteroid is called 16 Psyche, named by the Italian astronomer who discovered it in 1852.
So it's an old name, but its mission fits our times. Psyche, you see, was the Greek goddess of the soul. This is a probe to the soul. And we all need that now.
I say that amid the hell visited upon Israel last week, and the devastation being wrought now in Gaza, and the depredations still being inflicted by Russia on Ukraine, and the rash of violent coups in Africa, and the dictatorial straitjackets being tightened in numerous countries, and the political prisoners languishing in too many squalid prisons, and the inexplicable brutality humans wreak upon one another and upon our natural order.
It's enough to make one wonder whether we have lost our soul.
It's certainly enough to make one wonder about the very concept of soul.
Some say humans share a collective soul, the soul of humanity, what Gandhi called "the soul of the people." But then you look at slaughtered babies and children and bullet-ridden elders and violated women and you wonder whether this is possible, whether we all really could share a common soul. That level of commonality, if it does exist, would surely make impossible the cruelty and barbarism some humans employ against one another.
The soul is generally taken to be immortal, the thing that will outlive our bodies. A textbook definition would point to our emotional and intellectual energy. So what does it say about the nature of our collective soul that we engage in a brand of politics that encourages hate and suspicion of others, that leads us to assume the worst about others and expect them to assume the worst about us? What does it say about our emotional and intellectual energy when this enervating war doesn't allow us to see neighbors or even newcomers for the individuals they are but rather as exemplars of groups to which we would assign them?
There's not much divinity in this kind of soul.
This past week brought the passing of a different sort of soul. Rudolph Isley, a singer who knew how to make harmony, wrote with his brothers lyrics still apropos for our era, as in "Fight the Powers":
Time is truly wastin'
There's no guarantee
Smile's in the makin'
You gotta fight the powers that be
Got so many forces
Stayin' on the scene
Givin' up all around me
Faces full a' pain
With poignant grace, Isley also sang, "I got to get myself together/cause if I don't do it soon/old age, old age is gonna catch me now … "
Soul, in other words, has an expiration date by which you've got to find it. It's in the story of Psyche herself.
Starting life as a human, it was only after the gods beset her with a gantlet of trials and great tribulations that she found true love and became an immortal god. As our spacecraft flies across the heavens in search of its soul, there might be hope for us humans, too — that after enduring our own pain and ordeals, and working hard to overcome them, we also might find a happy ending. Immortal or not.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
