Gazing at One’s Navel, Politically : Searching for the inner self should be a private matter. In public life, it’s more important to get the job done.

Did Franklin D. Roosevelt have a soul? Did Teddy Roosevelt have a soul? How about Harry Truman? Dwight D. Eisenhower? In a bygone era, Americans used to say of such a personal question: Who cares? Today soul is on everyone’s mind; we worry about its care and feeding and take its temperature like a sick child’s. Appeal to the soul now sells everything from books to fruit juice and has become the arbiter of success or failure. Forget what you’ve accomplished in life; is your soul in good shape? And now it has entered politics: Candidates campaign on an agenda of virtue, their failures characterized as journeys into the abyss.

Frankly, this entreaty to the spiritual by our leaders gives me the willies. Mere mortals now appear in public wearing their relationship with the Ultimate on their sleeves. More than an appeal to organized religion, here is the leader following his or her “bliss” (in Joseph Campbell’s famous term), campaigning as Man (or Woman) Alone, broadcasting what should be confidential and trivializing it to boot. It’s the ultimate invasion of privacy, both for them and for me. What a burden it is to watch the President fight with Congress and wonder about how his “inner being” is handling it. Until now, we’ve only asked our leaders to hand over their tax returns, relationships with family members and attitudes about sexual harassment. Now we’re demanding they expose the psyche too.

And what is the soul anyway, that we’re willing to merchandise it so freely? Depends on whom you ask, and when. Soul is, after all, indefinable, implying both the minimum essence of life and the most exalted human purpose.

Which brings up the basic point: The search for private purpose in human life--isolating, self-centered, non-negotiating and draining away both energy and time--is often the opposite of the political impulse. Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” popularized the wanderer, the searcher, the affectless dreamer escaping from the cosmopolitan competitive fray to the privacy of “true self.” Buddha sat for years under a tree before he was able to go back into practical existence. Even Arthur, in search of the Holy Grail, is unfit for leadership until suffering a series of defeats by demons large and small. The soul is traditionally seen as a tool to be developed, a muscle to be flexed, but limp and impotent and basically untrustworthy in its natural state. Once tested and enlarged, however, watch out. The soul becomes dogmatic, a dictator on the throne.

Politics is the art of the possible, the very opposite of the soul’s desire. But does the soul have a place in politics? Does it belong in the public arena at all? Certainly we seek people of conscience in government, and leadership forged in fire has an undeniable allure. But as the recent employee strike in South Africa attests, even Nelson Mandela, whose soul quotient is undebatable, is not immune from the necessity of reconciling with his opponents.

In the American pantheon, soul is usually left alone, and no wonder. We have an innate sense of privacy, a respect for individual difference. We know what can be shared with a neighbor and what, under basic rules of civility, must not be revealed. The psyche is not a refrigerator, peeked into out of curiosity or vague hunger. It is the storehouse of dignity and self-respect. The present penchant for stripping the soul of its protective clothing exposes the hypocrite and fool lurking in each of us. Toying with the indefinable for tawdry commercial purpose is cruel and dangerous.

While spirituality is not always the same as religion, Americans are skeptical of manipulation when it comes to both. We regard with a healthy cynicism the broad cross-section of revivalists, psychologists and propagandists (Sinclair Lewis’ “Elmer Gantry” is still the archetype) who meddle in matters of conscience and belief. We often reject candidates who are too cerebral (Adlai Stevenson), thinking them incapable of taking a stand. We like our leaders action-oriented and are often willing to forgive distasteful behavior in those who can get the job done.

Have we changed? The current debate about soul in public life comes at a time of political stalemate amid fierce social divisions. The soul that is tortured is the nation’s, which longs to move ahead. Talk about virtue and soul may be helpful in the privacy of our own homes. But in the world of commerce and politics, the true virtue is getting the job done.