Madame,
That Jon Stewart piece is not only brilliant about sexism, but has
a brilliant dissection of US Middle East “policy.”
How interesting (ironic?) for our discussion that Vanity Fair not
only has the Jenner cover, but also brings us a truly brilliant piece on
connection. Sebastian Unger has written
what is all too rare in American navel-gazing:
a look into some of the prices of our individuality—and our
disconnection. He points out prime
reasons why it is so hard for combat vets to “adjust back” to American society.
“One could say that combat vets are the White Indians of today, and that they miss the war because it was, finally, an experience of human closeness that they can't easily find back home. Not the closeness of family, which is rare enough, but the closeness of community and tribe. The kind of closeness that gets endlessly venerated in Hollywood movies but only actually shows up in contemporary society when something goes wrong-when tornados obliterate towns or planes are flown into skyscrapers. Those events briefly give us a reason to act communally, and most of us do. ‘There is something to be said for using risk to forge social bonds,’ Abramowitz pointed out. ‘Having something to fight for, and fight through, is a good and important thing.’”
How many times have we attained, then lost,
that closeness with our fellow citizens?
Whether it was helping to shore up a levee as waters rose, or knocking on
doors after a terrible ice storm, we remember how good we felt working together
to accomplish something. We weren’t
harping on each other’s differences, or pointing out faults, or retreating back
into our enclaves, but instead were…connecting.
And when it was “over,” we felt a sense of…loss. Unger continues:
“Certainly, the society we have created is hard on us by virtually every metric that we use to measure human happiness. This problem may disproportionately affect people, like soldiers, who are making a radical transition back home.
In America, the more assimilated a person is into contemporary society, the more likely he or she is to develop depression in his or her lifetime. According to a 2004 study in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Mexicans born in the United States are highly assimilated into American culture and have much higher rates of depression than Mexicans born in Mexico. By contrast, Amish communities have an exceedingly low rate of reported depression because, in part, it is theorized, they have completely resisted modernization. They won't even drive cars. ‘The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment promoting decisions that maximize consumption at the long-term cost of well-being,’ one survey of these studies, from the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2012, concluded. ‘In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.’"
“Certainly, the society we have created is hard on us by virtually every metric that we use to measure human happiness. This problem may disproportionately affect people, like soldiers, who are making a radical transition back home.
In America, the more assimilated a person is into contemporary society, the more likely he or she is to develop depression in his or her lifetime. According to a 2004 study in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Mexicans born in the United States are highly assimilated into American culture and have much higher rates of depression than Mexicans born in Mexico. By contrast, Amish communities have an exceedingly low rate of reported depression because, in part, it is theorized, they have completely resisted modernization. They won't even drive cars. ‘The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment promoting decisions that maximize consumption at the long-term cost of well-being,’ one survey of these studies, from the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2012, concluded. ‘In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.’"
And still we don’t want to look at ourselves
and what we’ve become? Still want to
thump our empty chests? Still want to
say how “great” is “American exceptionalism?”
That the individual is the all?
More Unger:
“In the 1970s, American mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with their nine-month-old babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level of contact that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the common practice of making young children sleep by themselves in their own room. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone-a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered ‘well-educated.’ Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to trigger fears that make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them.
Many soldiers will tell you that one of the hardest things about coming home is learning to sleep without the security of a group of heavily armed men around them. In that sense, being in a war zone with your platoon feels safer than being in an American suburb by yourself. I know a vet who felt so threatened at home that he would get up in the middle of the night to build fighting positions out of the living-room furniture. This is a radically different experience from what warriors in other societies go through, such as the Yanomami, of the Orinoco and Amazon Basins, who go to war with their entire age cohort and return to face, together, whatever the psychological consequences may be. As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not.”
“In the 1970s, American mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact with their nine-month-old babies as little as 16 percent of the time, which is a level of contact that traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse. Also unthinkable would be the common practice of making young children sleep by themselves in their own room. In two American studies of middle-class families during the 1980s, 85 percent of young children slept alone-a figure that rose to 95 percent among families considered ‘well-educated.’ Northern European societies, including America, are the only ones in history to make very young children sleep alone in such numbers. The isolation is thought to trigger fears that make many children bond intensely with stuffed animals for reassurance. Only in Northern European societies do children go through the well-known developmental stage of bonding with stuffed animals; elsewhere, children get their sense of safety from the adults sleeping near them.
Many soldiers will tell you that one of the hardest things about coming home is learning to sleep without the security of a group of heavily armed men around them. In that sense, being in a war zone with your platoon feels safer than being in an American suburb by yourself. I know a vet who felt so threatened at home that he would get up in the middle of the night to build fighting positions out of the living-room furniture. This is a radically different experience from what warriors in other societies go through, such as the Yanomami, of the Orinoco and Amazon Basins, who go to war with their entire age cohort and return to face, together, whatever the psychological consequences may be. As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not.”
And instead of realizing the fundamental
importance, and of taking the time for the deep examination to get truly
better, we reach for the illusion of easy.
Unger gets to central portions of our failure:
"'Our whole approach to mental health has been hijacked by pharmaceutical logic,' I was told by Gary Barker, an anthropologist whose group, Promundo, is dedicated to understanding and preventing violence. ‘PTSD is a crisis of connection and disruption, not an illness that you carry within you.’
This individualizing of mental health is not just an American problem, or a veteran problem; it affects everybody. A British anthropologist named Bill West told me that the extreme poverty of the 1930s and the collective trauma of the Blitz served to unify an entire generation of English people. ‘I link the experience of the Blitz to voting in the Labour Party in 1945, and the establishing of the National Health Service and a strong welfare state,’ he said. ‘Those policies were supported well into the 60s by all political parties. That kind of cultural cohesiveness, along with Christianity, was very helpful after the war. It's an open question whether people's problems are located in the individual. If enough people in society are sick, you have to wonder whether it isn't actually society that's sick.’”
Notice that it is anthropologists, and often
foreign ones at that, who have to do our deep thinking and true
self-examining. Not psychologists, or
MDs, or social scientists, not even historians.
And our fighting of wars by the professional class,
with most of the society disconnected from the experience and any effects, is
symptomatic of our disconnection. And
undoubtedly why we pursue violence, in ill-considered fashion, in too many
places, for misty objectives and even mistier reasons.
“According to Shalev, the closer the public is to the actual combat, the better the war will be understood and the less difficulty soldiers will have when they come home. The Israelis are benefiting from what could be called the shared public meaning of a war. Such public meaning-which would often occur in more communal, tribal societies-seems to help soldiers even in a fully modern society such as Israel. It is probably not generated by empty, reflexive phrases-such as "Thank you for your service"-that many Americans feel compelled to offer soldiers and vets. If anything, those comments only serve to underline the enormous chasm between military and civilian society in this country.”
“According to Shalev, the closer the public is to the actual combat, the better the war will be understood and the less difficulty soldiers will have when they come home. The Israelis are benefiting from what could be called the shared public meaning of a war. Such public meaning-which would often occur in more communal, tribal societies-seems to help soldiers even in a fully modern society such as Israel. It is probably not generated by empty, reflexive phrases-such as "Thank you for your service"-that many Americans feel compelled to offer soldiers and vets. If anything, those comments only serve to underline the enormous chasm between military and civilian society in this country.”
There are few REAL community bonding ceremonies
for combat veterans. If there were, we
would know truth—and we could get real healing and re-connection for our combat
vets who often feel so lost:
“Some vets will be angry, some will be proud, and some will be crying so hard they can't speak. But a community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought.
“Some vets will be angry, some will be proud, and some will be crying so hard they can't speak. But a community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought.
It might also begin to re-assemble a society that has been spiritually cannibalizing itself for generations. We keep wondering how to save the vets, but the real question is how to save ourselves. If we do that, the vets will be fine. If we don't, it won't matter anyway.”
Incredibly well said, Mr. Unger.
Readers, I highly recommend the whole article, and it should be one of
the required pieces we begin with to…begin to reconnect.
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