If we have souls, we should be worried about them. Memory of the soul lives in the modern moment only through language, the tenuous fate of dying ideas. We still use phrases like “selling your soul,” accuse people of being “soulless,” or might even speak of a performance as “soulful.” Other than such phrases, the soul is a dead idea. It functions rhetorically, often as a flourish by humanists to damn the target of their critiques. In his massively popular New Republic article from 2014, “Ivy League Schools are Overrated: Sends Your Kids Elsewhere” (a perfect example of upper-middle-class click-bait), the writer William Deresiewicz claimed that the Ivy Leagues were bad for students' selves and souls. In a well-crafted rebuttal, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker replied:
Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn't taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we've never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it.
Pinker is right, of course. Do you really want a school assessing whether you or your child are on your way to becoming a “unique soul,” to use Deresiewicz's words?
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