 Malcolm Gladwell loves wading into complex and controversial subjects. In the November 8 New Yorker
he writes an article called Getting Over It, on the subject of
surviving trauma. He uses the success of the protagonist in the 1955
novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit to survive a double trauma, and the failure of the protagonist in the 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods to cope with a very similar trauma, to advance his thesis that in the past half-century there has been
...a shift in perception so
profound that the US Congress could be presented with evidence of the
unexpected strength and resilience of the human spirit and reject it
without a single dissenting vote.
The evidence he refers to is a study in the Psychological Bulletin
of long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse that concluded that, in
the large majority of cases, unless it was extreme, very frequent, or
accompanied by physical abuse or prolonged neglect, the long-term
effect was so small as to be barely statistically significant. The
report was so offensive to so many that Congress was pressured to
repudiate it, and did.
My readers know I don't place much stock in psychology, and that I
prefer explanations for behaviour that are rooted in real science, or
at least Darwinian principles: Actions and behaviours that increase a
species' capability to survive will be selected for, i.e. a propensity
to exhibit such actions and behaviours will become more and more
prevalent in the population.
I've argued before that depression in today's world may be natural. I've also argued that when we are unhappy or grief-stricken we create stories
that provide us with solace, so that our vivid imaginings can become
so real that they become alternatives out of time, even to the point where 'what might
have been' becomes to us a regrettable real possibility in the present. This prevents us from seeing this alternative reality as false, achieving closure, and moving on with our lives.
We are all living our own stories, and there is no way to see them
objectively as real or unreal, true or imaginary. To us, they are
absolutely true. When we suffer trauma, we may put it behind us, wrap
up that chapter in our story, or we may not. When that trauma is
compound -- a physical and sexual and
mental trauma, or one that combines actions (like abuse) and inaction
to address it (like neglect or passive complicity by others), or one
that is chronic or frequent, there is little doubt that it is harder to
get past. In nature, a fight or flight instinct kicks in when danger
threatens. Most animals in nature face death and witness death often in
their lives. They escape, perhaps watching as a mate or community
member or child is eaten by a predator. In any case the event is
traumatic -- adrenaline surges, the body goes into overdrive, some
shocking event occurs or doesn't, and the survivors are left to deal
with the result. If the response of a species were to grieve for years
over the loss, or over a decision error that may have cost a loved one
their life, the species would not survive -- it would be incapacitated.
In a balanced ecosystem, these traumatic events are regular but not
chronic -- most species spend most of their time in the joyous
activities of eating, exploring, mating, playing, sleeping, and sensing
the world around them. Their failure to grieve, at least for long, is
in my opinion due not to their small brains but to the fact that there
is too much joy and wonder in the world to waste much time grieving
over what happened or might have happened. It's Darwinian -- it happens
that way because it works, it optimizes the healthy survival of the
species.
As Jeffrey Masson has shown, animals with larger brains tend to grieve
longer, and return to their grief over a longer period, probably
because they have better memories that are triggered by sensations that
remind the creature of the traumatic event. Elephants weep each time
they return to the site where a loved one lost their life, for their
entire lives. That is natural, but not debilitating. The grief, the
trauma, does not consume them to the point where they are incapacitated
by it. Only humans kill for revenge. Only humans kill large numbers of
their own. Such behaviour is, on the surface, anti-Darwinian -- it
hurts the species rather than helping it to survive and perpetuate it. Misery
is anti-Darwinian -- those that live in physical or emotional misery
tend to withdraw from social activities, fail to defend themselves from
predators, die young from stress-related activities, and, if they're
female, become infertile. This is nature's extreme-stress safety valve.
Such misery is the consequence of over-crowding, too many competing for
too few resources. As Edward Hall explains,
in such circumstances (very rare before the advent of civilization)
adrenaline is used to quickly thin the crowd and restore the balance
with the rest of the ecosystem.
The world we live in today is horrendously overcrowded, insanely out of
balance with the rest of the ecosystem, and our evolved intelligence is
allowing us, at least physically for a short time, to offset all of
nature's attempts to reduce our numbers to sustainable levels. Nature
evolves new diseases that exploit crowded concentrations of one
species, we reply by inventing antibiotics and antiviruses. Nature
drives up our levels of adrenaline to levels that provoke war,
anti-social behaviour, massive depression, and we reply with
technologies that sedate us or cheer us up, that imprison those who can
least suppress their violent urges, and which refocus our adrenaline on
activities that do not kill.
But nature always bats last in this competition of wills. I would argue
that we all live, now, in a state of continuous agitation and constant
anxiety, massive stress that has resulted in us all becoming mentally
ill. Our whole lives are an incessant trauma -- work stress,
competitive stress, stress to have 'enough stuff', stress to be
accepted by others. Our desire to find a way to try to sustain a
society that is so obviously unsustainable, and to deny the damage we
are doing, to ignore the massive misery that prevails in our world, to
believe against overwhelming evidence that we can somehow innovate
ourselves out of the horrendous mess we have created, is evidence of
utter, adrenaline-crazed insanity. We are only happy in those brief
delusional moments when the awareness of the utter horror that
civilization has wrought is temporarily suppressed -- by constant
education of denial of that reality, by drugs, by sexual distraction,
by media that suppress the truth, by hiding the worst atrocities behind
closed doors and walls where we can try to pretend they aren't
happening.
Today, we are all struggling to survive a life-long trauma, and it is
interesting to me that in the last half-century our literature and our
political leaders have become much more pessimistic about our ability
to do so. It is almost as if, by proclaiming that most victims of
post-traumatic stress disorder and childhood sexual abuse cannot
be expected to get over those traumas without enormous help and
intervention from our society, we are saying to ourselves three things:
- We instinctively know the world is a mess, and we need
someone to blame to avoid taking personal responsibility for it: Sexual
predators and abusers and those who commit violent crimes and war
criminals and those who neglect children are convenient scapegoats.
Obviously they are guilty, so why not exaggerate their impact so we can
offload all our personal guilt onto them?
- We feel better about ourselves when we see others in even
worse circumstances than ours, especially when their circumstances
aren't our fault. So let's make these victims of personal crimes super-victims, so we can feel especially sorry for them.
- If there is a process that can help these people overcome
their trauma, their grief, then perhaps it can work to make us all feel
better, make all the mess that weighs so heavily on all our spirits go
away.
This is tricky ground, but I think there is a lot of mass psychopathy
going on here. Alternative explanations welcome, as always.
The photo above aired as the focus of a commercial for
Bush in the last few days of the election campaign. I think it is
brilliant, an absolute coup against all the negative advertising that
dominated the campaign. It was actually taken by the girl's father at a
Bush rally. The girl's mother was one of the victims of 9/11, killed in
the attack on the twin towers. The girl is a survivor of trauma, and
the impulsive hug from Bush on learning of her story is captured in the
photo. It's the only time I have seen Bush without a mask.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
