True “Soul”

“We are told, in tones of punitive hysteria, either that our culture is doomed—this being the Spenglerian model of rational apocalypse—or that it can be resuscitated only through a violent transfusion of those energies, of those styles of feeling, most representative of ‘third-world’ peoples. Theirs is true ‘soul,’ theirs the beauty of blackness and eros. This neoprimitivism (or penitential masochism) has roots in the core of the Western crisis and needs to be understood both psychologically and sociologically” (George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, p. 62).