Herd or Hero, Body or ‘Soul’

Along the high street where I live, there is an advertisement on the side of one of the bus shelters. It features a woman, heavy-set and pictured from behind. The text reads Get Your and then On Board, placed so that the woman’s ample posterior lies between Your and On. 

Get Your Ass On Board? 

Get Your Butt On Board? 

The small print reads Get Your Bum On Board. 

Bum. Gentler than Ass and Butt. The kind of word that we use with children.  

Nothing sinister, then. 

Unless we recall those Corona emojis that festooned our recent incarceration. Or those cutesy feet stuck to pavements, prising us apart. Or those cartoon syringes directing the masses to their mandated ‘vaccine.’

The state-corporate nexus likes to address us as children who have yet to arrive at reason. Their message is pure steel notwithstanding.   

Get Your Bum On Board drips with their disdain, reducing us to our most culturally denigrated body part which is to be hauled about on command as a slab of meat.

The advertisement is for GoNorthEast – a regional bus company administered by The Go-Ahead Group, which runs transport links across the UK and Europe. 

But do not imagine that it is a promotion of bus travel. 

Relatively few people now take the bus – like all aspects of metropolitan life, it is an ailing practice unlikely to be bolstered by artwork pinned to its infrastructure. 

Moreover, whatever corporate conglomerate intersects with Go-Ahead, the negative-interest-rate-debt portfolio in which the fortunes of its shareholders are no doubt comfortably hedged makes the number of people who board a GoNorthEast bus of very little consequence. 

Advertisements are no longer really about products or services that we might buy. The powers that be do not care much whether we buy anything, as evidenced by our waning ability to do so. 

Advertisements are about selling us ideas, prodding us towards a new world.

In this new world, our bodies are odious, consigned to the ‘meatspace,’ castigated as cumbersome and degraded. 

Advertising space between the halves of televised football matches is crammed now with depictions of erectile dysfunction, male leakage, and the taboo of ‘pooing’ at work. 

The audience for live football matches is surely weighted in favour of men in the prime of life, potentially virile and purposeful, with energy and aptitude to bring to bear on the world – the relentless humiliation of this toxic-masculine cohort by the half-time ‘commercial’ break is no coincidence. 

In our new world, physical aptitude is headed off at every turn, recast as finite and shameful, destined for hiding itself to nurse its bloody wounds and filthy orifices… 

…or for shaping itself, at machines lined up in cavernous gyms where the endgame of strength and virility plays itself out to banging tunes and little effect, staging the remarkable separation of muscle from manpower, making sculpted and scripted males of what ought to be apt grown men.  

Alongside these body-bots the rest of us slump about, accused at every turn of being ill or infectious or incubators of disease, of consuming too much and producing too many. A burden. Ballast. With breath that should be held. And a bum that should be hauled. And a footprint too heavy for this earth. 

Why do we put up with it? Why do we take the abuse? 

For the same old reason. For the chance of getting onside with our abuser, of winning their approval, of joining them in their contempt for us. 

The GoNorthEast advertisement opens the usual safety valve, which prevents the pressure of incessant abuse from blowing up. 

Get Your Bum On Board is degrading, humiliating, reductive – but not completely so. For, it implies, lazily and without much conviction, that you may be not just your bum, that as you lug your bum about the place you might be other than it, possibly even better than it.   

By the very act of submitting to the abuse of your body, of conceding that it is inert and unwieldy, of undertaking to heave it contemptuously here and there, you avail yourself of the careless implication that you are not identical with it, that you are somehow greater than it. 

Your body is dead meat. But if you join the campaign that regards it as such, then you might just be admitted to the club without it, an unbodied you comprised only of you and their loathing for bodied you. 

This is the pact that we enter into when we get our bum on board.

I am deplorable, therefore I am something more. 

It is not a new pact, though its current iteration is particularly vicious.

And the new world that it prods us to is not so very new either. 

Almost four hundred years ago, in a little garret room in northern Europe, Descartes sat snugly by his stove, wrapped in his woollen gown, savouring the smell of his hot coffee. 

As he nestled in corporeal comfort, Descartes meditated that the sensory consolations crowding round him might be, all of them, delusions. 

The empirical experiences to which our body gives us access – the sight and sound and smell of the world – are not to be trusted.   

Then came payback.

Reject the smell of brewing coffee as delusion and you are left with the thought of the smell of brewing coffee – by definition not a delusion. Reject the scratch of a woollen gown as delusion, and you are left with the thought of the scratch of a woollen gown – by definition not a delusion. 

Descartes was captivated by the tautologous certainty of his non-delusional thoughts, though they lacked the fulsomeness, the intensity, the lived assuredness of their empirical counterparts.

When the aroma of coffee fills your nostrils and you reach for the handle of the pot to pour its contents and take a first long morning draught of its bitter stimulation – there is no doubt that it all exists.

Only by those jaded of realities, only by those too little involved in life, might the coffee be suspected of non-existence. 

Descartes knew this. He wrote up his meditations in Latin rather than his usual French, not expecting that they would be of interest to any but the disenchanted elite, for whom life was half parlour game already.   

But Descartes’ meditations took hold. And became so influential that their conclusion, Cogito Ergo Sum, is sometimes the only Latin that we know. 

Why have we been so convinced by Descartes’ doubt? Why so persuaded by his distrust of our bodies? 

For the same old reason. For the chance of being reborn as more than our bodies. For the chance of a new kind of soul.  

When Descartes rejected the smell of his coffee, he was left with more than the thought of the smell of his coffee. He was left also, or so he concluded at least, with the location of that thought, its container.

Cogito Ergo Sum. I am thinking, therefore I am. 

With nothing more than scorn for the lived experiences of our body, Descartes secured our modern soul – notional receptacle of husks of lived experiences, theoretical site of theoretical forms. 

If Descartes is known as the father of modern science, now we may see why. For this is precisely the business, of the life sciences at least: describing, elaborating, and manipulating an entirely abstract construct – ‘life’ – insofar as it is the terrain of an ever-shifting constellation of the theoretical constructions of research enterprises, and insofar as it delivers a sacred core – a real me, my true self, I.

We should be clear: this is not science as ongoing hypotheses and their discussion, not science as trial and error, not science as practiced judgment from human experience. 

This is science as subjugation of human experience, science as remote from the human world, science as purely academic enterprise whose clinical models are wheeled forth with boisterous eclat.

Not science, but, as Covid taught us to call it, ‘The Science.’

As with so many hitherto hidden fundaments of our world, Covid revealed it all. 

In March 2020, The Science launched an attack on empirical experience, unprecedented in its intensity, distancing us from others, from the world – with the chimera of ‘asymptomatic disease,’ even from ourselves. 

Nothing that was real, nothing that our eyes and ears could have told us, was to be trusted. Only unrealities – theoretical models devised in laboratories – were deemed true. 

And what those models told us, directly and through every available channel, was what Descartes posited almost four hundred years before: that our bodies are not fit for us, that our bodies are our enemy. 

During Covid, The Science officially re-advertised our bodies as actually diseased or potentially diseased, and instructed us to mortify them with stunning severity – to mask them, distance them, obscure them in PPE, test them, isolate them, inject them, and boost them. 

It was so dramatic. So draconian. And yet, had The Science not long been telling us that our bodies are our enemy – sites not of health and aptitude but of illness and decrepitude? 

Long before Covid, had not the wondrous capabilities of our bodies been under relentless attack, by a growing fervour for cutting them open, for removing or exchanging their parts, for altering their biochemical make-up – with such purely abstract justification, such merely theoretical advantage, that iatrogenic disease became at least one of the commonest causes of death in post-industrial societies of the West?

Covid did nothing new. It only did the old things more brazenly.

And now, all bets are off. 

Poolside during a swim class, a mother confides casually that she has had her breasts amputated at the age of thirty-seven, not because they were found to be diseased but because genetic screening determined that they might become so. 

Despite the sepsis that ensued from her body’s rejection of the replacement breasts, this woman awaits further surgery to remove her ovaries, which have also been pronounced as likely to become cancerous. 

The Science has at last laid its cards on the table and, from inside the Trojan Horse of highly promoted spectacular feats, pursues a campaign of disdain for the human body to tortuous effect.

Why do we put up with it? Why do we take the abuse?

For the same old reason. For the chance of getting onside with our abuser. Of being reborn in their contempt for us. 

Two tropes came to the fore during Covid and have gained momentum since.

The first is that of ‘immunity,’ an achievement increasingly advertised as synthetic, requiring to be injected into us again and again, the smear campaign against natural immunity having taken such hold that it is now commonly accepted that our bodies are unable to defend us. 

The theme of ‘auto-immunity’ is an elaboration, castigating our bodies as not only unable to defend us but as actually out to get us. Our own worst enemy. 

Then, counterpoint to ‘immunity’ is the trope of ‘identity,’ which is everything that our immunity is not, which rescues us from a body bent on self-destruction – the real me, my true core, I. 

The great iterations of dualism that have shaped human communities for millennia have been reduced to this: disgust at our bodies as a default to our souls.

And all choreographed by the church of The Science, which undertakes to boost our bodies so that they do not give up on us, keeping us on life support just long enough to realise who we are.

We are grateful to The Science for releasing our souls from their body cage, by devising theories of them complete with neat descriptors – Hysteric, Phobic, Introvert, Pansexual, Autistic…

The designators are inventive enough, but they owe their force of truth to nothing deeper than the false flattery that that loathsome piece of dead flesh, which is hauled and mauled as on a butcher’s block, simply cannot be who I am. 

The gender debate has brought this false flattery to fruition. It seemed an indulgent accompaniment to the supposedly existential threat of Covid. In retrospect, it was a necessary accompaniment. 

Covid pummeled us with the traitorous weakness of our bodies. And simultaneously reassured us that we are so little to be identified with our bodies that we can actually be in the wrong body. 

The rainbow was the inflection point of this move, leading us on from saccharine clapping for our NHS heroes to righteous trumpeting of our hero within.  

As doctors and nurses were shown to labour with bodies too sordid for the world, our newly-minted souls lay claim to empty streets, suffered to go forth and multiply with impunity – and so they have, quasi-scientific descriptions of our identities proliferating at such pace and with such merely theoretical application that yesterday’s pronoun is today’s deadname.  

Our modern soul: a piece of theory, purchased dearly with the same old pact.

I am despicable. Therefore I am something more. 

The second I – my identity – comprised only of the distance purchased from the first I – my body – by the vitriol of contempt. 

It is the most anaemic metaphysics in history. But also the most inhuman. With the most catastrophic effect. 

In donating our bodies to The Science so as to win our identity souls, we have relinquished everything that our bodies used to know. 

The way to stand, the way to sit, the way to walk, the way to sleep, the way to eat, the way to breathe…the most basic arts of the body, which were ritualized so successfully by vernacular ways of life that their acquisition was mostly effortless and often joyous, which constituted traditions and communities, which wove into the rhythm of days and months and years…

…the most basic arts of the body have been forgotten, in our manufactured trust that The Science knows better how we should stand and how we should walk, and how we should breathe…  

…and that The Science will repay our trust with the most enticing piece of knowledge of them all: who I am.   

The effect of our misplaced trust in The Science is the defining tragedy of our age, as our bodies atrophy under their administration by a regime of disdain. 

We are overweight. Our posture is bad. Our backs ache. Our jaws are tight. Our digestion is poor. We sweat too much. Our breath smells. Our skin is pallid. Our hair is limp. 

Through our learned contempt for them, our bodies have become contemptible, the inapt mounds of flesh that they are advertised by The Science to be.  

And so we feel surer every day that we cannot be just our bodies. That we simply must be better than our bodies. 

And we listen more and more willingly to the injunction that we go forth without our bodies. Of course we do. Our bodies are more and more burdensome, and the litany of their abuse rings truer every day. 

We submit to the remote. We commit to staying safe. Because we believe, desperately and with growing fervour, that I am not my body. 

Other advertisements during the halftimes of televised football – for everything from electric cars to fried chicken – are in the style of computer games, with artificially generated humans conducting themselves like Marvel superheroes. 

Your body is vile. Your virtual avatar is smooth, clean, apt, and triumphant.

And entirely reprogrammable. 

There’s the rub. And surely the greatest irony of our times. 

Almost four hundred years ago, Descartes mused that his body might play tricks on him. That his body might be the plaything of a conspirator against him. 

From this suspicion arose Descartes’ delight in his abstract thoughts and in the mind in which they occur. 

He wrote: 

I will suppose that some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses but as falsely believing that I have all these things. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, that is, resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree. 

But look at what has happened since: 

Captivated by the pact that Descartes made, enticed by his dismissal of our bodies as vulnerable to deception, we have arrived at maximum vulnerability to the most profound deceptions. 

Our identity, for which we have sacrificed our bodies and the realities to which they give us access because of its tantalizing promise of certain truth, is such a merely theoretical construct that it is subject to endless reengineering and constant updating, in accordance with whatever corporate descriptor is in vogue or whatever biomedical product is newest to market. 

And it is subject too to cancellation, at the click of a button – much easier and more clinical than locking down bodies. 

Descartes got it upside-down. Bodies are obstinate, unwieldy, wayward, and implicitly resistant. It is souls, modern souls, that are the playthings of those who conspire against us. 

The woman in the bus shelter advertisement does have a face, for all that she is pictured from behind. 

It is the face of a dog, which looks out at us from over her shoulder – she has carried it on board. 

Their language is explicit. We are animals. Brutes. 

Meanwhile, the woman’s human head, or some woman’s human head, is pasted to the side of the GoNorthEast buses that pull up to the shelter. She wears an expression of panto surprise, and is accompanied by the text: Period Gush? Have No Fear. 

With the last arts of the body relinquished, our degradation is trumpeted by billboards cruising around our city. 

Why do we put up with it? Why do we take the abuse?

For the same old reason. For the chance of joining them in their contempt for us.

Other GoNorthEast buses advertise the opportunity of coming to work for the company. A Hero Drives This Bus, the text reads. Are You Up To It? 

Underneath is an incongruous image. Two uniformed men, posed as in a scene from Top Gun, complete with aviator glasses and air force badges. Unlike any bus driver anyone ever saw in the North East of England. 

The choice is clear, as clear as the broadside of a bus. 

Be one of the herd or one of the heroes.

Animal or angel.

Body or ‘soul.’    

Sinéad Murphy’s new book, ASD: Autistic Society Disorder, offers an account of autism as a condition of fallout from the body-or-soul pact that defines the societies in which autism is on the rise.