Chris and the rest of the universe

Shattered Assumptions is a brilliant book by social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman that tackles the difficult issue of trauma of any kind, and the mind's reaction to it, by looking at trauma(ta) as a sort of upheavals in fundamental, underlying assumptions of human life - specifically the three assumptions that (1) the world is benevolent, (2) the world is meaningful, (3) the self is worthy. In RJ-B's opinion, trauma is a deep denial of one or more of these assumptions. Personally, I find it one of the best books ever written on trauma and our understanding thereof, next to Shay's book, from which I cited here.

In his book On Killing, Col. Dave Grossman called interpersonal violence the 'universal human phobia'. Some 30-40% of all people have a phobia of snakes, the most widespread specific phobia. According to Grossman, 95% of people have reactions consistent with phobia of interpersonal violence. We don't understand violence, and we understand its effects even less. Sure, we hear of murders and school shootings - but precisely because they're so rare. Ever considered what a crime rate means? According to the Home Office's report for 2009, there were 2.114m violent crime incidents in 2008/9. 844,000 of these were assaults with no injury, which really is quite a broad spectrum. The risk of becoming a victim of violent crime was around 3.2%, which sounds high, but consider how broad 'violent crime' is. In a country of over 60 million people, there are about 6-700 homicides a year - one for every 92,000 people per annum. Only half of the crime stats above involve injury, so your chance to suffer injury in a crime of violence is about 1.6%. And guess what? The most common injury in violent crime - 34% of all - is... a black eye. Yup. Now this is not to belittle minor injuries or even no injuries at all, as situations can nonetheless be highly traumatising. The point I'm trying to make is this: violence is very alien to us. It's so extremely unnatural, despite the trite bullshit that we're fed on TV about us being a horde of murderous animals, that any act of interpersonal violence is deeply upsetting precisely because it yanks the victim out of his bond of security within human society. At the same time, our very limited experience of trauma and violence means that as a society, we do not learn or naturally adapt to dealing with these issues and help survivors deal with trauma, but need to learn it specifically: it is an entirely acquired skill. It is, in view of this, extremely important to understand the effects that trauma, especially trauma caused by violence of any kind, inflicts upon the human subject. So I'll occasionally post stuff on it here.

The predominant emotional experience of trauma victims is intense fear and anxiety. Their psychological world is one filled with terror. Survivors are dealt a double dose of anxiety, one associated with the realization that one's survival is no longer secure, that their self-preservation can be jeopardized in a wold that is frightening and unsafe. The other is associated with the survival of their conceptual system, which is in a state of upheaval and disintegration. The very assumptions that had provided psychological coherence and stability in a complex world are the very assumptions that are shattered.

(...)

These survivors suffered so much. How, then, can we understand their guilt? Again, these are people crying out for some understanding of their world. The belief in oru own ability to affect outcomes, to make a difference runs very deep. To a considerable extent the guilt experienced was a reflection of the survivor's need to believe that ultimately events are not completely random, that in the face of devastation and destruction people can still make a difference. As Yael Danieli has suggested in her work with concentration camp survivors, guilt is essentially an unconscious attempt to undo the utter helplessness of the victim's situation.

(...)

To be "crazy-human with hope" is not a naive with. It involves an acknowledgement of real possibilities, both bad and good - of disaster in spite of human efforts, of triumph in spite of human limitations. 

For the survivor, the traumatic experience serves as an unexpected source of strength rather than weakness. There is a feeling of personal triumph, of mastery in spite of the extraordinary difficulties and demands of the experience. There is also the sense of possessing a new, special sort of wishom which derives from the most potent type of education - personal experience. Schooled in anxiety and disillusionment, victims are "educated by dread". Once you know that catastrophe dwells next door and can strike anyone at any time, you interpret reality differently.

Trauma survivors no longer move through life unmindful of existence, they can more readily relish the good, for they all too well know the bad. They have made their peace with the inevitable shortcomings of our existence and have a new appreciation of life and a realization of what is really important. The wisdom of maturity, which acknowledges the possibility that catastrophe will disrupt ordinary routine, replaces the ignorance of naivete. And the trauma survivor emerges somewhat sadder, but considerably wiser.

– Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions

Memo.m4a

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Memo.m4a (1.93 MB)

This epic, touching song details the hardships of a family trying to be an inclusive community to several of its members struggling with social difficulties, discrimination and substance abuse in the tough years of the Great Depression.

Or it's just a rather rude song.

I prefer the last explanation. Anyway, here it is.

Next week: a philosophical examination of necrophilia by railway employees, to the tune of My Bonnie Is Over the Ocean.

The social morality of "what's right", what Homer called themis, is the normal adult's cloak of safety. The trauma narrative of every person with PTSD and character damage is a challenge to the rightness of the social order, to the trustworthiness of themis. To hear and believe is to feel unsafe. It is to know the fragility of goodness.

Trauma narratives show us that our own good character is vulnerable to destruction by bad moral luck.

(...)

Trauma narrative confronts the normal adult with the fragility of the body. These stories bring mortality into view. Trauma narratives cause normal adults to imaginatively identify with one or more of the characters in the narrative. The feelings this arouses are almost all unpleasant.

We should not sit in judgment of those who cannot, in the absence of social support, hear the truth of trauma. The reasons to deflect, deny and forget trauma narrative stem from the social construction of normal human life. They cannot be set aside by wishing them away or moralizing.

(...)

We must create our own new models of healing which emphasize communalization of the trauma. (...) We need a modern equivalent of Athenian tragedy. Tragedy brings us to cherish our mortality, to savor and embrace it. Tragedy inclines us to prefer attachment to fragile mortals whom we love, like Odysseus returning from war to his aging wife, Penelope, and to refuse promised immortality.

– from Jonathan Shay MD, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat trauma and the undoing of character

Now with a title like that, I can't help being a bit suspicious. I was raised on a rather solid diet of liberal thinkers, and Isaiah Berlin figured foremost among them. In his brilliant 1958 essay Two concepts of liberty,  he distinguishes between positive and negative concepts of liberty. Negative concepts are about 'freedom from' - freedom from state intervention, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, freedom from threats to one's life &c. Positive concepts are a bit different and rather more dubious. Positive concepts are about 'freedoms to' - the freedom to speak (rather than the freedom from limits on speaking), the freedom of action, and, rather dodgily, 'the freedom to be one's own master'.

Why is that a problem? It is a problem because once you acknowledge that freedom is not freedom from being interfered with but the freedom to become something (aka not-so-liberal perfectionism), you will face the idea that you, yourself, might hold yourself back from that perfection. And that's hugely dangerous. Why? Well, let's take this. You can walk up to everyone and tell them they are unfree, they just don't know it, because their low intellect and slavish submission to their own stupid passions keeps them from even knowing that they're not free. "This dominant self is then variously identified with reason, with my 'higher nature', with the self which calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my 'real', or 'ideal', or 'autonomous' self, or with my self 'at its best'; which is then contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my 'lower' nature, the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my 'empirical' or 'heteronomous' self, swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if it is ever to rise to the full height of its 'real' nature." 

Then, you would gladly step into the place of the enlightener and tell them how to be free: "The perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some men by others in order to raise them to a 'higher' level of freedom have often been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of language is that we recognise that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt."

Grant anyone, including political scientists, the right to define what's good for a person and what is merely the wish of their selfish desires, and you've just opened up a great big playground for every sociopath to bully, coerce and torture everyone for their own good and perfection of their higher selves. In Berlin's metaphor, this is Sarastro's temple - the great big argument used by every dictator to justify the mot inhumane deeds. Because, frankly, once we accept that we can tell persons of sound mind that we know better what's good for them than they do, all bets are off. Game over. Everything is possible. Including wholesale mass murder - this is the ideology that led to 'curative' witch-hunts, to exorcisms for the good for the person, to the mass executions of innocent persons with some real or perceived deviance during various inhumane extreme left-wing and right-wing regimes in the 21st century, to forced hospitalisations, to forced sterilisations and so on, and so forth. The Nazis regarded the mass murder of the mentally handicapped as good for them - as relief from what they in their twisted little minds thought is an unbearably imperfect life. So I'm rather shocked how far to the grey buses carrying thousands of those poor souls to their deaths the BBC and their interviewed political scientists have come.

Of course, they have a defence. Shame is a big thing. You can build a whole society on shame - indeed a lot of the warrior civilisations were built on it, and a shame/honour culture continues to pervade military culture. There is nothing *wrong* with shame. There's a lot wrong with people who have none - we call them sociopaths. But people who just got a kick in the ass in public elections should watch themselves, very, very closely, lest they are maddened by shame and grief and say truly inadvisable things.

The BBC, in a step of utterly no journalistic ethics, was happy to jump on the bandwagon. It swiftly determined that the US sentiment against health insurance is 'against their own good'. Now... I'm not a particularly smart guy. But I've paid my dues and seen my share of the world. One thing I found is that absolute truth is a rare commodity. Normative disciplines are spoiled in that respect, because we have absolute truths all the time. Fine. Political science isn't. 

So it's a bit annoying when a few disaffected political scientists decide they know what's best for mentally competent grown-ups. I mean, hello? Where the heck is that on your degrees? Did you take advanced degrees in knowing-what's-best, too? I've met enough political scientists from undergrads up to senior fellows to have a reasonable sample. Most of them know the limits of their art. All of them know that they do not have preferential access to God's own truth about health care, foreign policy, eminent domain or whatever other areas there are. 

So it's a bit annoying when the BBC spends my tax pounds on building Sarastro's temple. It's a bit upsetting when some people with the intellectual capacity of, say, three-day-old roadkill, decide the result and then put a reasoning up to support it. And it's annoying as all hell that universities let these people grow up thinking like this.

Trust me, when any of us had the temptation to know what's best for the people, we were very quickly told to fuck off. 

Rightly so.

These chaps, too, would have benefited from that.

Added geek cred to those who know why 1290.