On American Values

 

by EW Wilder

Despite our protestations otherwise, most Americans have few, if any, "sincerely held beliefs." We have a very weak system of values—really, no "system" at all—and a very fluid, if not utterly arbitrary, moral code. Instead of values, we cleave to a handful of rules or, more commonly, to slogans: "family values," "pro-life." Or we rally behind abstractions like "freedom" or "liberty" without much of a concrete sense of what those things mean in the real world.

Decades of messaging from right-wing media and thinks tanks have associated being against abortion as being "pro life," an idea that, thanks to the same outlets, fails to expand beyond birth, into adulthood, or across the nation's borders. It doesn't strike the average American as a contradiction that being against abortion but in favor of the death penalty is in any way problematic; it would never occur to an American as counter to being "pro life" to support killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza in the name of avenging 1200 Israelis, or, indeed, that it might conflict with a "pro life" stance for the US military to cause the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis for no apparent reason at all.

Americans pride themselves on being "values voters," and our media are happy to use the term, yet getting those same Americans to articulate those values clearly and in detail is next to impossible. We're happy to discuss "the ideological divide," but we're rarely confronted with the notion that an ideology is a coherent system with internal consistency, one applicable across a variety of social and political situations. Note how many of the same Americans who insist upon strict biblical literalism in issues of sexuality happily sport tattoos, wear their hair however they want, eat pork and shellfish and cheeseburgers as well, dress immodestly . . . . When those who dare to identify as leftists point out this hypocrisy, it does not compute; the leftist expects a system where only a rule exists, a principle where there's only a position.

American "values," then, don't exist outside of the individual and the individual's opinions, which, while a fittingly American attitude, makes it hard to thereafter claim divine providence for them. This fact merely makes the American proclaim them more loudly, often accompanied by the threat of extreme violence.

We believe in the divinity of our opinions not because we have much evidence for that, other than a few out-of-context bible passages, but because the opinions are ours, and we believe ourselves to be a Godly people. Because we believe we're Godly, our opinions are sanctified, not the other way around.

This is why people like Donald Trump can so successfully sway so many Americans: he embodies the idea that something is good and right when the individual thinks it or does it and bad and wrong when someone else does it or thinks it, even if it's exactly the same thing. So Joe Biden's justice system (even though, in point of fact, it is independent) prosecuting Donald Trump is bad, but Donald Trump promising to weaponize the justice system against Joe Biden is good.

This is the morality of children who haven't been taught right from wrong, as we used to say at a time when that phrase was associated with actual systems of values, which underscores my point: large numbers of Americans simply don't have a moral/ethical education of any worth.

To suggest a sense of the problem, I'll note how hard it can be to teach Toulmin-style argumentation in my second-semester composition classes. Stephen Toulmin's basic idea is that for every claim we make about the world, we have a warrant that we apply to the data we gather or receive, whether through formal research or sets of informal experiences. The problem is the warrant, the reason we think the claim fits the data.

I often use a very simple exercise in which I look at the price of a gallon of gasoline from, by turns, the perspective of a consumer (a position my students would be familiar with), an economist, and an environmentalist, asking whether or not the price is too high, too low, or just right. Thus one piece of data, the price of a gallon of gas, can lead to three different claims depending on the warrant we apply.

The problem I run into is that many of my students, generally the ones who claim to be conservatives, just don't get it. They either can't move beyond the perspective of a consumer, or, as likely, they simply don't see what the warrant has to do with anything, what weird magic would lead to different claims about a single point of data.

This brief essay is not to call for any sort of "traditional values," another vague term wielded by the authoritarian right. Traditional systems are patriarchal, racist, sexist, and unjust. Rather, it's to say that the American system of governance gives us an opportunity to be explicit and intentional about discussing and implementing systems of values, and we've squandered that opportunity for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power.

So not only do we need deep study of American doctrine—not only the actual text of the US Constitution but what it means and why it was written—but of other political and ethical values systems as well, within contexts in which it is OK to question and critique them in real and practical terms.

Yes, this is "critical thinking," and it may even involve "critical race theory" and other ideas with real weight. And that is exactly the point: if we are to be a nation of laws, or even if we aspire to be a lawful people, we need to understand values and principles, the systems in which they are embedded, and how they are applied in the real world.

America and the Cult of the Gun

 

by Lael Ewy

In the United States, our attitude toward firearms is not governed by reason or by practicality: it is a matter of faith. I do not mean this figuratively; I mean it literally. Guns, as much as the LDS church or transcendentalism, form a distinctively American system of belief.

Each era of American history is demarcated by firearms of choice:

The revolutionary era had its muskets, giving us a founding myth in "the shot heard 'round the world."

The repeating rifle and the Colt revolver we associate with westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, with "how the west was won," with what brought "the law" to "the wild west." The Colt single-action six-gun became known as the "peacemaker"; American transvaluation of values begins early and continues anon.

The early-to-mid 20th century celebrated the .45 caliber automatic, the Tommy gun, the .50 caliber machine gun. Here, the associations are both with lawmen and with gangsters. Notably, the means they used to enforce their wills were the same: the gun justifies and sanctifies the action.

Since the last half of the 20th century to the present, which "side" you are on has been determined by your firearm of choice: M-16 vs. AK-47. This split characterized the Cold War, and, not ironically, came to characterize the militarized police force versus the increasingly up-armed street gangs, with cops wielding army-surplus M-16s against the AK-equipped "thugs" in the War on Drugs. These fights were venerated via cop shows like Miami Vice and through gangsta rap.

The AR-15, the "civilian" version of the army's M-16, now wielded in many mass shootings, is also worn in silhouette as a lapel pin by members of congress, as with an American flag pin and a cross, in order to signal their piety to the cult of the gun. This inter-marrying of an ancient faith and a newer religion is nothing new: witness the pagan rituals in current Christianity. Rather than being a contradiction, this is how religion has always operated throughout time, intermixing signs and symbols to suit the beliefs of the current population. Contradictions in theology or ideology are easily papered over or, as often, simply ignored.

This, then, is what we as Americans believe: guns solve problems. It defines who we are.

The US has written the right to bear arms into the Constitution, after all, not because it makes any sense to do so but because those who wrote the Constitution also genuinely believed this as well. It runs counter to reality, of course, but that only underscores my contention: evidence, proof, is immaterial in matters of faith. We believe it because we believe it.

Many of my other liberal friends have argued in our discussions on social media that the NRA has colluded with right-wing politicians to gerrymander congressional districts, assuring that pro-gun politicians remain in power. I have no reason to believe this is not true. But the existence of the NRA as a political entity is as much an effect of cult of the gun as it is a social phenomenon reinforcing its values and power. It exists in no small part because millions of Americans are its loyal supporters, tithing to fund its operations and accepting without question its "grading" system for politicians. All of those people remain free agents in the voting booth; they vote in a way that aligns with their beliefs. And for as much as polling may indicate that the majority of Americans think this or that gun restriction is a good idea, collectively, we act in a different way.

It's sort of like asking Christians if they think there ought to be restrictions on when churches can ring their bells. Many would agree there should be, but all would also agree that there are times when church bells should ring out strong and clear.

At this point, a reasonable person might be thinking "Yeah, but church bells don't kill people."

But despite—or maybe because of—our public acts of grief when there's a mass shooting, we still believe the basic tenant of the cult of the gun: guns solve problems.

It's not that we believe that guns solve problems that makes our belief a matter of faith; it's how we believe it. The self-same logic that drives the mass shooter drives those entrusted to stop mass shooters: that guns solve problems, that their ethereal noises bring forth in their wielders godlike properties. By the logic of the cult of the gun, by its values and principles, possessing a gun gives its possessor not merely the power over life and death but the right to choose who lives or who dies. It is specifically that right that is enshrined in the 2nd Amendment, that right that gun cultists insist is theirs.

When the NRA's Wayne LaPierre said that "the only thing that stops bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," nobody on the left or the right, no reporter or pundit or pol, called him out for the statement's obvious lack of logic. And that is because this statement, while noted for its extremism, aligns with our cultural values, our true faith. It fits our images of ourselves: the white-hatted gunslinger facing down the black-hatted gunslinger, the revolutionary irregular facing down the redcoat, the bandanna-ed Rambo facing down the entire Vietnamese army, the "good" cop who ruthlessly murders the "bad" criminal.

Scroll through the cable channels, the broadcast channels, the streaming services and see how often these images, or some variation of them, are repeated throughout. They form an entire genre of video games. I am not arguing that these images cause us to believe that guns cause problems, though they may reify the idea. Rather, they proliferate in our media for the same reason believers display crosses on their walls, for the same reason men spent their entire lives building cathedrals, the completion of which they would never see.

Faith systems need not make sense, after all, and humans have often promoted wars, mass murders, even genocide in their honor.

Human sacrifice didn't end with the with the beginning of written history; it merely changed forms, acquired a different set of justifications. The cult of the gun is one of ours.

The Pandemic, Scientism, Democracy, and Deliberation

 by Lael Ewy

Jason Blakely's piece in the August, 2023 issue of Harper's on the discontent with science, or, more accurately, scientism, as revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic makes some important points about the misuses of science, especially of the social sciences. Trusting as settled science the various theories of the manner in which people and cultures believe is incredibly problematic and often harmful.

As someone who worked for seven-and-a-half years in the public mental health field, I have seen this close up: psychiatric diagnoses, which, by necessity are based on a consensus (among psychiatrists) of what constitutes acceptable behaviors, feelings, and thoughts, eventually come to be considered "natural forms" that can be studied and treated "the same as any other illness," and so they get treated generally with medication only. This often elides the real-world problems people seeking help actually have, trapping them in loops of ever-increasing medication instead of helping them into better lives by giving them practical solutions to their issues. Often, people subject to medication-only regimens end up with debilitating side-effects such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, tardive dyskinesia, akathisia, and sexual dysfunction--not to mention the traumas associated with involuntary commitment and discrimination due to the psychiatric labels they carry.

Photo credit Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação

So his basic premise is right: scientism is real, and it does real damage, not only in the mental health field, but in poorly-researched areas such as self-help, lifestyle engineering, and public policy.

Blakely's conclusion that democracy was eroded by the reactions of federal, state, and local governments to the COVID-19 pandemic as these entities "imposed" "top-down" "mandates" based on scientistic reasoning, though, doesn't fly. He mentions in passing that America's distrust of science predates the pandemic, but it's also backed up both by ginned up conspiracy theories of those who actually do want to erode democracy here and abroad and by America's deep tradition of religious fundamentalism.

In response to Blakely's accusation, and to be accurate about what happened during the pandemic, however, and how federal, state, and local governments actually handled it, we have to examine if democracy itself broke down.

I contend it did not. When the COVID-19 pandemic washed over the US, I was teaching at a public high school in the small town of Newton, Kansas. It's true that the state's governor, Laura Kelly, did mandate certain public health measures in order to contain the contagion. But the day-to-day realities of her orders were duly deliberated at the local level, and the manner in which USD 373 reacted to these mandates was decided by the elected officials on the school board--by the people's representatives--just as it should be in a representative government.

Likewise, city and county governments kept functioning much as they had before, only over Zoom instead of in person, deciding how to implement the state's guidelines, and they did so effectively, in ways that led to widespread compliance. This is precisely the way elected officials are supposed to act.

And while many of the choices of the state, county, and local, governments were unpopular, they did not substantially change the political makeup of those bodies at the next election: notably, Governor Kelly kept her post--quite an accomplishment for a Democrat in a conservative state. So while we may not have liked what she decided to do, we didn't dislike it so much that we all voted against her.

Blakely expends a lot of words pointing out that decisions about what defines an "essential worker" were the products of scientistic reasoning instead of political deliberation, as if those decisions weren't also those of duly elected officials, including California's Gavin Newsom, who comes under substantial fire from Blakely for his hypocrisy in attending a large social gathering at a high-end restaurant when the rest of the state was locked down. These actions, though, are merely poor politics, not the breakdown of democracy itself, and, as with Laura Kelly, it didn't seem to have upset Newsom's constituents enough to bounce him out of office--something California is known for, as the political demise of Gray Davis shows. Contrast this with the fate of Boris Johnson, whose hypocrisy during the pandemic did lead, in part, to his political downfall. The fact that these two politicians' recent careers had different outcomes indicates not that scientism reigns supreme but that democracy worked as it should in the terms Blakely sets out: two different groups of people made two different decisions about who they wanted in the executive office, based on their own set of values and principles.

Blakely claims that politicians like Newsom used the pandemic to impose their political and ideological perspectives, but, outside the claims of conspiracy-theorists, there's no indication that liberals have long wanted to make people wear masks or have had a standing agenda to shut down the local coffee shop. (Indeed, the liberals I know love the local coffee shops and found ways to support them even during lockdown.) Blakely completely fails to mention which policies politicians wanted to impose and did, which pandemic policies track with ideological commitments, so it's hard to take that particular charge seriously. We can only assume that his mention of churches being shut down during the pandemic is part of some sort of dark liberal agenda, but, while liberals tend to be more skeptical of organized religion that others, I've never known them to want to shut down churches on the whole: the standard liberal view is that faith as a matter of personal choice. That churches were impacted by lockdowns and certain businesses weren't, again, may have been bad decision-making on the part of elected officials, but there's no indication it was part of a larger, nefarious effort to impose liberal ideas.

And while many of the reactions of governments against the virus were provisional, shifting, imperfect, that was due to the fact that we were still learning about the virus's nature, not because public health measures are bad science, or even scientistic, as Blakely suggests. The science of public health may be imperfect, but it's considerably more solid than those of, say, economics or quantitative policing.

Besides, elected executives have emergency powers for a reason: to deal with genuine existential threats quickly, when the slower deliberations of legislative bodies would not be able to react with due speed. We might not want our elected executives to have these generally limited powers, but history indicates it's better if they do, especially as natural disasters become more common due to climate change. Nobody likes to see the National Guard in their neighborhood, but when a tornado blasts through our community, I'm sure happy they're there. Even Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who rolled back COVID restrictions in his state in a way that led to the deaths of tens of thousands, and whose acts as governor otherwise border on the fascistic, hasn't gone so far as to invoke emergency powers in order to implement his "anti-woke" agenda. He has reserved these for the state's frequent hurricanes and floods, exactly what they were intended for. Indeed, the equally authoritarian Donald Trump did not use the pandemic as an excuse to impose martial law, which would have helped him implement his plan to seize power when he lost the election.

Tellingly, Blakely fails to address the counterfactual, what it would have been like if the various governments had done nothing, allowing individuals and businesses to decide for themselves how to deal with the viral threat. We have a few cases that suggest how bad it could have gotten all over the country. It was only after initial lockdowns that we saw this: notably in the aforementioned Florida and South Dakota. When they loosened restrictions, people died. When New York reacted poorly at first, bodies were stacked in refrigerated trucks. Places where the virus hit hard saw healthcare workers stretched to, and sometimes beyond, their limits. Would it really have made for a healthier democracy to have potentially let millions more die, to have utterly devastated our already stressed healthcare infrastructure? It's easy for Blakely to preach now, after effective vaccines have arrived, but as an "essential worker" in the middle of the worst of it, I went to work every day worried I'd get infected, or, worse yet, that I'd be the vector that led to the death of my elderly mother or my disabled wife.

The world Blakely posits may be more "free," but it would also be considerably more deadly. A precursor exists, sadly, in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, during which the reaction of the Reagan administration was to do nothing, since, they reasoned, it was "just a gay disease," and the bulk of the electorate didn't care. The fact that it wasn't "just a gay disease" and that it would be morally bankrupt to ignore it even it had been seems to have been lost to history in Blakely's view of things. Thousands of people died, and it led to widespread paranoia not just for gay men but for everyone who was sexually active. It was only when the Surgeon General at the time, C. Everett Koop, went rogue and began to address the issue that people started to have some confidence that safe sex was even possible.

The old adage, often attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, that my right to swing my arm ends where the tip of your nose begins is applicable here, but with the complication that the nature of an airborne pathogen exponentially expands the reach of my swing. We're not protecting individual freedoms from governmental mandates in this case but individual rights not to be infected, and possibly killed, because of the selfish choices or the neglect of others. This is an idea that ought to be utterly clear, and in other cases it is: if I pour waste oil into someone else's well, I am clearly liable. But when I pump my viral breath into your airspace, I'm somehow just expressing my freedom?

Had this virus's effects not resembled other ailments such as allergies, colds, and the flu, had it, instead, been, say, a hemorrhagic fever, a supercharged Ebola, few of the conspiracies would have developed and little of the pushback would have happened. Had the ravages of the disease been more visible and clear, perhaps by turning people green or giving them open sores, we would have been clamoring for our elected officials to do something about it, no matter how forceful or dire.

The real victim of the pandemic, I fear, has not been democracy but the very idea of public health itself. The notion that individual health is related to the health of the community has been undermined not just by conspiracy theories but also by those duly elected officials reacting to the pushback Blakely champions by weakening their ability to address public health concerns in a timely manner. Rather than learning about what works and what does not when a democracy is faced with a pandemic, we have decided to disarm against the next, inevitable, viral threat.

It's democracy still functioning, as it should be, but it will lead to disastrous results.

On Woke's Subtle Graces

 by EW Wilder

Writing in the July 2023 edition of Harper's, Ian Buruma makes the following errors:

• He accepts the far rightwing definition of "woke" which, rather than being a blanket term for social justice awareness, more likely has its roots in the need for Black Americans to stay aware of their surroundings in order to avoid trouble (or worse) in the Jim Crow South.

• He conflates Anabaptists' baptism conventions with other Protestant traditions of public confession and implies they are parallel to Catholic confession of sin. The Anabaptist conventions are theologically distinct.

• He argues by analogy that Puritan traditions of "doing the work" equate with contemporary corporate statements on social justice issues.

The latter is at the core of his argument, so let's delve into it.

Arguing by analogy is always fraught, and while it's true that vestiges of Puritanism can be found throughout American secular culture, chances are the corporate statements Buruma excoriates are more public relations stunts than they are any expression of real ideological of even political positions. Rightly, Buruma points out the widespread hypocrisy of these statements, coming as they do from companies—such as Amazon—that have a poor history of giving a rip about their workers. But hypocrisy is a longstanding part of corporate life. If Buruma is scandalized by giant companies saying they support #BLM while simultaneously funneling money to the campaigns of racist politicians, wait until he discovers the falseness of their statements that "employee safety is our highest priority" or that clearly terrible customer policies are being implemented "to better serve you."

The only people who are scandalized or even surprised by the hypocrisies of the boardroom aren't, well, "woke" enough to write comprehensively about the subject.

Later in the essay, Buruma puts scare quotes around "'structural'" racism, as if redlining, Jim Crow laws, and race-based gerrymandering never existed, or, indeed, in the case of the latter, don't continue to plague us.

He ends up noting that Democrats, if they want to win, need to de-emphasize social justice issues in their campaigns, lawmaking, and public statements in favor of economic ones. But this is also hardly profound; it was the basis of Bernie Sanders's campaign strategy, after all, and it was a popular enough stance for establishment Democrats with strong corporate ties to quash the Sanders campaign in 2016. So, at best, Buruma's essay is about a decade too late. At worst, though, it helps feed the rightwing hate machine, which, as Ron DeSantis's politics embody, is actively using "woke" as a wedge issue.

Buruma's stance, though, also elides a very serious problem: a lot of White working and middle class Americans are, quite simply, racists. I'm not sure what Buruma's life has been like, but, as a cis/het/middle-class White guy from the Great Plains, I can attest to the fact that racist attitudes are both common and open in all-White spaces, especially informal ones. Behind the barn, over lunch or coffee, at family gatherings, when White people of my demographic get together, jokes about Black and Brown people are often thrown around like a baseball in a game of catch. It's ugly, but it's true.

And the fact that certain swing voters went for Barack Obama once or even twice does not make them not racist. Obama worked for years on making his personal brand acceptable to the White power base, the white electorate. Putting Joe Biden on the ticket, a man who openly used terms like "clean" and "articulate" to describe Obama, was a strategy to appeal to voters who would themselves use those terms to describe an "acceptable" Black person. Like Bill Cosby before him and Clarence Thomas now, Obama knew how to play the White man's game, and he was rewarded for it. It also helped that the economic collapse of 2008 made a message of "hope" and "change" resonate. That many of these same voters reverted to vote for the clearly racist Donald Trump eight years later just adds evidence to the idea that a deeply racist White middle-America is happy to use a Black man to get what it wants and is happy to return to form when it senses that the Other is getting too "uppity."

Buruma goes on to note that globalization has benefited those he deems, in a distortion of Protestant tradition, "the Elect," and that he is among them. He contends that these so-called Elect benefit from virtue-signaling. I admit that I have no idea who his "Elect" are or how they differ from the people (many of them Jewish) the far right deem "the elite" (or, if you're Donald Trump "the a-leet"). Professors and other academics are supposedly part of this cohort, but, as one of their number, I don't see how globalization has helped or hurt me very much one way or the other. The internationalism Buruma cites—the ability for academics to cross international boundaries to collaborate—seems indistinguishable from jet travel, something theoretically more open to the coal miners who once made close to six figures a year than to underpaid profs. But virtue-signaling and benefiting from global trade are unrelated: just ask Rupert Murdoch. Oil companies seeking new markets, manufacturers looking to outsource, and the largely (and vocally) libertarian tech industry looking for cheaper coders from overseas, not to mention uber-wealthy investors looking for a tax dodge, seem to all have benefited from globalization more than anyone else. Few of these entities have a history of even paying lip service to social justice issues, unlike retailers, whose presence in local communities creates a need to appeal to local populations. Retailers, while globalization has allowed them to offer cheaper products, can't offshore their workforce, and they have been among the first to raise starting wages in the years since the pandemic.

Counter to what Buruma seems to think, so-called "wokeism" actually has benefited me as an instructor at a small college, and in practical terms. I serve a diverse student body, and I have to run classrooms and virtual spaces in which Black, immigrant, and LGBT+ people feel safe alongside the White, cis, het, and native born. Besides, this stuff is real: not only is structural racism still alive and well in our congressional districting, gay and trans kids still get bullied, their lives and bodies continue to be sanctioned against by rightwing state and local governments and school boards, and women's representation and wages still lag in business and tech fields.

As someone who spent seven-and-a-half years working alongside the public mental health system, I have seen how economic inequality can impact lives in a massively negative way. Generational poverty is more often the cause of mental health problems than the result of it. But as most progressives realize, addressing economic inequality alone won't solve all social justice issues. There was, after all, a strong Black middle class even when much of America was segregated, and the sexual orientation of Apple CEO Tim Cook didn't stop eleven gay kids who live in a wealthy suburb of my home town from attempting suicide one recent fall semester due to bullying at school and lack of acceptance at home.

Instead of just ceding the "woke" ground to the rightwing, just as liberals have ceded faith and finance and free speech, the left needs to start doing what it used to do: it needs to start educating the public. The rightwing has spent four decades filling the radio airwaves and cable TV signals with its vitriol and hate, while the left has largely sat on its hands. The left needs to raise consciousness; it needs to be unapologetic about issues of gender and race and sexual orientation as well as about issues of economic inequality. This messaging needs to be accurate and frequent and clear.

Indeed, if there's one thing that Americans admire more than anything else, a quality that surpasses ideology and identity in the American mind, it's confidence. Trump won not because he had anything substantive to say—he still doesn't—but because he spouts his nonsense and lies with utter conviction. This is the lesson that we on the left need to learn: not that we need to be less woke, but that we need to be righteous in our commitment to the cause. 

 

Photo credit: "woke" by Bob Larsen 

Night Moves

 

Some of my earliest memories are of lost sleep, of the circadian disruption of fluorescent lights in a hospital hallway, of the clutching fear of knowing that my chest would soon be cut open, my heart stopped, my blood given over to a lifeless machine. The constancy of the needles and the nurses' cold hands brought me back to where I was: alive and awake, always awake. A few years later, a leg injury put me in traction for weeks, the days punctuated by the taste of cherry Jell-O, not cherry at all but the chemical burn of the fake stuff, the scent of which I burped all night long as I watched the merry-go-round of locally made airplanes whirl away the hours atop the restaurant next door.

In my life after, sleep was disrupted by nightmares of being trapped, of wandering those hospital halls unable to escape, dreams of not breathing, of being breathed for by the machines. It's hard to sleep when the landscape of slumber is full of such terrors.

The news, now, is full of studies on the ways sleeplessness kills: both fast in accidents and slow in chronic health problems: heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, dementia. The irony in my case is that the very invasive surgery that fixed the heart condition I was born with set the sleep cycles that, 45 years later, will potentially wreck my heart.

What cures also kills.

Aside from shift work, there are not many jobs someone who is more awake at 3:00 a.m. than at 3:00 p.m. can successfully pursue. I've managed to manipulate academe to offer up enough flexibility for an afternoon nap, but being assigned an evening class just exacerbates the problem. Getting used to even less sleep is possible, though the TV doctors don't recommend it.

I've stopped talking to my GP about my lack of sleep. She's recommended melatonin, and, from a medical perspective, I'm sure she isn't wrong.

But at this point, my weird sleep cycles are something of an identity: I'm not sure who I'd be without these early morning workouts, without these predawn runs, without seeing the world at 4:00 a.m. in all its stark, dark beauty.

When Frost wrote that he was "acquainted with the night," he was writing what he knew, but he was also writing about an alternative way of knowing. Certainly, we can read that poem as addressing depression, but it's also about the way the night and darkness reorient us toward our inner lives. The darkness reminds us that we have one and that it does more emotional an even intellectual work than we're generally aware of.

The brash, daytime world is for extroverts, and there's part of me that's ready to let them have it. It's full of aggression and bad driving, thoughtlessness and acting for the sake of action. When I hear the coyotes bray in the nature park nearby, I'm slightly frightened, as any human might be, but I'm also sympathetic: yes, brothers, yes. I understand the longing in your keening lamentation.

Against Against Trauma 2

Parul Sehgal makes some points I agree with in her “Critic at Large” column in the January 3/10, 2022 issue of The New Yorker: yes, the trauma explanation of character development in narrative fiction is overdone, and, yes, good writing creates an air of mystery; it’s subtle, complex, and presents individuals whose stories we can believe in. It’s also true that not everyone has the same reaction to trauma: yes, post-traumatic growth is possible (though her assertion that it’s the norm is questionable).

In fact, I am an example of post-traumatic growth.

But along the way, like Will Self in his screed against trauma in Harper’s, and whose name she drops and whose work hers largely replicates, Sehgal manages to be utterly dismissive of the lives and real experiences of actual trauma survivors. Like Self, she goes so far as to question trauma’s legitimacy while complaining about the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth, implying, ironically in true postmodern fashion, that trauma is a modern invention, the product of obscure 19^th century medical musings about train travel (to which again, I react with a visceral “WTF???”) that just happened to have ballooned in the 20^th century, by some historical accident, in order to explain away the experiences of war veterans and survivors of sexual abuse.

Sehgal traipses through the by now expected avenues of Freud and the DSM’s definition of PTSD—which she gets wrong, by the way: the current DSM does not acknowledge traumatic events as etiology but defines PTSD in purely symbolic terms. Sehgal does the de rigueur bashing of Bessel van der Kolk and the standard invocation of Shakespeare, all while studiously avoiding the voices of the traumatized except to expressly dismiss calls for the online collection of their stories.

For traumatized people like me, this comes as no surprise. Sehgal is just yet another prominent and well-regarded person brushing off our experiences or redefining them in ways that suit her purposes. She doesn’t speak for me any more than the DSM committee does or Bessel van der Kolk does or the writers of Ted Lasso do. The fact that trauma is having its day in popular culture right now is no reason to deny its reality; the fact that most of the writing about trauma is bad is no reason to throw the whole concept away.

Indeed, there are whole genres dedicated to unrealistic depictions of romantic relationships and science and war, but their existence does not mean that people never fall in love or do groundbreaking research or engage in combat, still less that those are modern inventions—just read the Greeks! Sure, not every scripted drama should use trauma as character development, just as not every home decorating show shouldn’t feature shiplap; for a while they all did, though, and, the case remains, shiplap is an actual thing.

Amid Sehgal’s calls for more subtlety, she also commits the fallacy at the heart of most explanations of trauma by the untraumatized, vacillating between “Oh, poor baby!” at one moment and “Just get over yourself!” at another. (To her discredit, Sehgal settles on the latter.) The truth is even more subtle and complex than Sehgal seems to be able to understand: you can be both forever changed by trauma and you can grow from it. I have spent 45 years learning from my traumatic experiences, but I also still get triggered. These seemingly paradoxical responses might make for good writing, but they wouldn’t be believed, either by editors at major publications like The New Yorker or by critics like Sehgal.

This paradox is only one of many reasons I’ve spent those 45 years avoiding dealing with “my trauma” (scare quotes Sehgal’s) in my writing; another (maybe more important) one is that trauma doesn’t define me as a person or as an artist. That Sehgal would approve of that is immaterial; her own opinion is invalidated, in my mind, by her dismissive tone and lack of a desire to understand what the lived experiences of trauma are really like.

Imagine, if you will, if an “able-bodied” (scare quotes mine, this time) writer presumed to know everything about the life and experiences of a wheelchair user or, as is the case here, merely dismissed these experiences as a cheap way to develop a character. It wouldn’t work— neither The New Yorker nor Harper’s would never publish it. Yet that is precisely what Sehgal and Self do in their essays on trauma.

We should also make a distinction Sehgal fails to make: legitimate criticism of an overused trope is one thing, but the kinds of trauma stories people share or create for therapeutic purposes are not intended to be great art, and they should not be read that way. That they do not rise to the level of complexity and sophistication she expects is no fault against them, and faulting them on artistic terms is simply cruel to those creating them. They exist solely for the purposes of healing and validation by the individuals who create them and by their peers, not for critics to leverage in lamentation over the way a trauma subplot has hijacked her favorite show on Apple TV .

Here’s my take on it: if you’ve never experienced trauma—and I mean real wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-screaming trauma, not just the a-sad-thing-once-happened-to-me-once trauma—don’t write about it. That’s my advice if you’re a critic, a journalist, a novelist, a poet, a show-runner, a researcher, a therapist.

Just stay the fuck away from it.

If for whatever reason you feel you have to, privilege the voices of actually traumatized people, consult them in a genuine way in the creation of your work. Bring them in. It will be scary, yes, but anything less merely perpetuates the damage.

The Problems with 988

A lot of reporting has been done on the purported boons of the new national 988 mental health crisis line. It promises to reduce the number of 911 calls on those experiencing internal distress, and, it is hoped, thereby reduce the number of people sent to jail inappropriately or traumatized or shot by cops showing up for a crisis instead of more helpful mental health professionals. The idea is that people experiencing extreme states of mind or psychological crises will “get the help they need” instead of criminal records and go on to lead fulfilling, productive lives.

There are numerous problems with this assumption. Let’s start at the point of crisis and go from there.

1. Calling 988 does not guarantee that a mental health professional will show up at your door.

That would only be the case in communities with an available crisis response team (CRT), which, geographically speaking, is a small fraction of the nation at this time (see The Takeaway podcast below), and even then, there’s no guarantee they meet national standards. In communities so served, CRTs may or may not be adequate in number or staffing to meet the needs of every 988 call deemed a true crisis. The trigger is generally “threat to self or others,” as determined by the 988 staff member who takes the call. Ideally, most calls will not result in a crisis being determined, and people will be referred to other services—a representative from NAMI, speaking recently on The Takeaway, estimates that 95% of callers will not be deemed to be in crisis, though it’s unclear where she got this statistic; a federal survey suggests 61% of crisis call outcomes were voluntary/collaborative.

However, if a CRT is not available, cops will show up, just like in the bad old days before 988, and it’s possible they will (re)traumatize you by tackling you, tasing you, handcuffing you, or, determining that you’re a threat to them, shooting you. This is more likely if you’re a person of color.

The way the members of this team treat you may or may not be appropriate for your situation or helpful to you: some CRTs may include, for example, a peer support worker, who is likely to understand what you’re going through, having experienced something similar. However, as someone who used to train peer support workers and support peer-to-peer program implementation, I can say that peer support workers are often dismissed by their co-workers and their opinions or actions overridden by mental health professionals who assume, by virtue of superior education or sane status, to know better. Even if your CRT has a peer support worker, there’s a good chance they won’t be allowed to do their job.

Indeed, crisis response is often an opportunity for coercion in the mental health field, and coercion generally just makes the problem worse. As the Intentional Peer Support model points out, it’s often better to take a non-coercive approach to crisis situations. But in the US, we’re stuck in an action-hero mindset that we must save people with direct action, even if we destroy half of Gotham in the process.

2. Often, people in crisis have been “get[ting] the help they need,” and it hasn’t helped. In fact, the help sometimes foments the crisis.

I read about mental health systems in which CBT, DBT, and other therapies are available, but I live in Kansas, and I don’t see that, except for privately insured people who are good at self-advocacy. What I do see in the public system are infantilizing and insulting psychosocial education groups and possibly helpful supported education and supported employment programs. Above all, though, what I see are psych meds—lots and lots of psych meds—a panoply of psychoactive substances doled out in massive doses and with almost ubiquitous polypharmacy.

These meds, while sometimes helpful, often have low efficacy (sometimes little better than placebo), and often have devastating and sometimes permanent side-effects. Switching meds when one doesn’t work for you is difficult, if not impossible for many: a person for whom I provide informal peer support was threatened by per prescriber with involuntary commitment to a state hospital if she didn’t stop asking for a change in medications, even though the side-effects of the ones she was on made it impossible for her work. (She was literally falling asleep on her feet at her retail job.) And this did not happen to her in the bad old days of Cuckoo’s Nest-level maltreatment. This happened last year, in 2021.

Side effects and few options, then, often lead people to stop taking their meds or to reject treatment to the degree they can; often people quit cold turkey. Or their prescibers actually listen to them but take them off of meds too quickly. Quitting or switching psych meds is always a perilous time, with withdrawal effects sometimes mimicking the very symptoms that got the person the diagnosis to begin with, and with others ranging from nausea and dissociation to “brain zaps,” which can last for weeks or months. In other words, the med merry-go-round can lead directly to, you guessed it, a mental health crisis.

988 advocates are relying on the very system that may have played a part in creating the crisis to fix the crisis. They are also assuming the appropriateness of crisis “care.”

3. Crisis “care” is often the source of trauma or retraumatization.

A few communities have short-term crisis centers. In Kansas, the three major metropolitan centers—Wichita, Topeka, and the Kansas City metro area—have short term crisis centers where people can cool off and get support and services for the 24-48 hours a mental health crisis generally lasts. These centers are much less coercive than traditional residential treatment (aka “psychiatric incarceration” to its critics) and tend to cost less and be preferred by users.

They’re also almost always full.

A handful of communities in the US are served by peer-run respite centers that house people for a week or more, and even fewer have short-to-medium-term residences run on the Soteria model.

Most places in the US have none of these things, which means a trip to the psych ward of the local hospital or to a state psychiatric hospital. In Kansas, you have two options for the latter, Osawatomie or Larned, and, as above, they are mostly full most of the time.

Based on my work in them, there you’ll find a situation little different from the way things were 45 or 50 years ago, only now you’ll stay for a few weeks instead of a few years. But it’s still involuntary commitment: you can’t leave until they say you can, and forced medication, seclusion, and physical restraint are common. And a trip to the state hospital is incredibly disruptive to a person’s life. If you’re single and live alone, as is the case with many who have long-term mental health challenges, during the weeks you’re there, you may lose your job, fall behind on rent and lose your housing, and lose any romantic relationships you may have formed. Your pets may die or be taken away, and if you have kids, they may be taken into the foster care system.

Recall that the peer I described above was threatened with a trip to the state hospital? All this is why. Mental health providers know the problems these facilities create, and they use the fear of them as leverage.

Further, there’s growing evidence that involuntary commitment in residential facilities actually increases suicidality, even when the severity of people’s distress is taken into account.

In other words, a call to 988 may not be preventing a suicide; it may merely be delaying one. And it may make one more likely.

As an alternative to hospitalization, many communities have implemented assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) or assertive community treatment (ACT) programs. But as these Orwellian titles suggest, these schemes merely bring the hospital into the community; they are sentences, not services, as the people involved have no choice but to participate (or the choice is these programs or the state hospital—which isn’t really much of a choice at all). These programs may be less acutely traumatizing, but they are still coercive by nature, and they rely on the “meds first and meds mostly” approach that has been the mainstay of mental health treatment for the past 40 years. The point is to keep you in the community and on your meds—to “stabilize” you and reduce your symptoms—not to foster actual recovery or return you to the driver’s seat of your life’s direction.

I am not saying that 988 is a bad idea; I am saying that it is attached to a set of mental health systems that are fundamentally and philosophically ill-equipped to actually help people (re)gain control over their lives and their life trajectories after a mental health crisis. 988 may appear to solve problems for the worried families and friends of suffering people and to those interested in “cleaning up” the places where people in frequent crisis end up—homeless encampments, shelters, local jails. But it won’t reform the system itself, the very system that has been failing these same suffering people over and over again.