A Preposterous Story

Harper's is an old magazine, and I assume one must be a worthy writer to be included in its pages. I really wanted an answer to the question -- excerpted at the excellent Arts & Letters Daily -- that was supposed to be the topic of the essay.

How did a bowdlerized rendering of a marginal psychpathology — trauma theory — come to dominate our culture? 

More and more I hear people (especially women) talking about 'healing' their 'trauma' as a necessary part of everyday life. Most of them strike me as more bored than injured, looking for their 'healing' through activities like wine and yoga. Some of the trauma is supposed to have happened in past lives, even, so it must first be remembered somehow before it can be addressed and healed. Yet they talk very earnestly about the need for this healing for wounds of the psyche barely recalled from childhood or from some time during the Middle Ages. 

Unfortunately the answer to this question was not forthcoming in the essay, which is ridiculous. 

And so we commence our search for the cultural significance of trauma not on the Freudian chaise, but with the nineteenth-century concept of “railway spine.” For it is with the arrival of the train that the phenomenon eventually termed PTSD steams into view.

The essay goes on to theorize that the imposition of 'clock time' on the natural experience of time created a novel sort of alienation and discomfort, one that led to accidents that were traumatic in a new way.

Now clocks were not new in the 19th century. The first mechanical clock was built before the year 1000 by a man who would later become Pope Sylvester II. Church life in the Medieval period was divided into bells, which rang day and night to call people to the appropriate prayers. Wrist watches date to the 1500s, as do clocks accurate to the minute. By 1656, the pendulum clock made them accurate to the second, and gave them the classing grandfather 'tick, tock' sound. 

Steam trains were a new technology at one time yet they were hardly the first mode of transportation in which "[c]rucially, passengers felt powerless, confronted with a technology over which they had no obvious means of control." One has a great deal of control over a steam train compared to a ship, even as a passenger who might pull the emergency stop cord. A shipwreck in a storm is as traumatic as anything it is easy to imagine; it is, in art and literature, often the very image of life-altering trauma.

The author is much more interested in those literary treatments of trauma than in the actual victims of real PTSD, for whom he has little sympathy. Describing the American Marines who came down with it after Fallujah, he sniffs, "Performing 'very well'... is reducing a city to rubble using depleted uranium shells and then incinerating enemy combatants and civilians alike." Likewise of Vietnam war veterans he writes, "That the traumas experienced by Vietnam veterans were as much a function of acts they had perpetrated as they were of those inflicted upon them in part explains why contemporary trauma theorists’ conceptions of the malady, and their attendant therapies, collapse [a] fundamental ethical distinction."

Yet the question we began with still needs an answer. Veterans of Vietnam or Fallujah may well have real trauma -- although often it proves to be traumatic brain injury more than anything else -- but what of the way the culture has turned into a celebration and engagement with wine-and-yoga trauma? He does get there, but only for a moment:

This outbreak of mass hysteria shared with trauma theory the underlying conviction that the recall of trauma could be delayed, even by years and decades, and that its authenticity was guaranteed by its own belatedness. Uncorrupted by interlocution (which would necessarily entail confabulation), the victim retained an absolutely reliable memory of whatever satanism they’d been subjected to—such as the bloody pentagram being inscribed and the naked, chanting figures wearing animal masks forming a circle around them. To collapse the Marxian dialectic of premature revolution: this was history simultaneously as tragedy and farce.

Yet then it is back to real trauma -- the Holocaust, and its Remembrance Days. He returns to the anti-industrial critique again: Hiroshima and the Holocaust required technologies. Yes, and the Battle of Towton required different technologies. The crossbow was banned by the Pope at one time because it was thought so traumatic a weapon. 

The theory that technology and technological change produces trauma leads to a conclusion that the real reason our culture is so focused on trauma is things like Instagram. 

Into the crepuscular realm of social media, for example. If we understand trauma to be a function of technologies that engender in us a sense of profound security underscored by high anxiety, then platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok would seem purpose-built for its manufacture, offering as they do the coziness of Marshall McLuhan’s global village and its inevitable social problems: global gossip, global reviling, and global abuse. A recent article in Slate pointed out that on TikTok, any number of behaviors are now dubbed “trauma responses” by the self-styled “coaches” who post videos on the app telling their followers how to identify the trauma within themselves. Many thousands of people are becoming convinced that perfectly ordinary reactions to such commonplace problems as overbearing bosses or perfidious friends are, in fact, reflex responses seared into their psyches by the white heat of trauma, which suggests to me that this medium is indeed its own message. 

I'm open to the idea that Instagram can be a traumatizing experience -- or any social media that can leave one open to receiving the hate or anger or lust of all of humanity at once. That technology really might be inhumane in that it strips us of our ability to relate to others on a human scale; though again it is not fully novel. It might be why celebrities of an earlier era often fared badly, now available at least potentially to everyone with a cell phone.

Yet I don't think the issue is that people are really more traumatized, so much as they have come to think and talk as if trauma were a ubiquitous experience that is at the center of human life and meaning. They clearly like the idea; maybe because it justifies them focusing on themselves instead of others. That is certainly not novel in human history either.