PTSD, Moral Injury, as a Consequence of Consciousness
Without a sense of self, can we experience moral injury from trauma?
Where was PTSD in the Iliad?
Nobody went back to their tents and suffered from the type of trauma that kept them from living well beyond the battle.
They often wailed at the loss of their friends and had ceremonies to honor them. Achilles’ rage at the death of his cousin Patroclus fueled his return to the battlefield. But none of these emotional reactions were centered on themselves nor located within their minds. Their descriptions of any stress was located in their guts or their hearts, or even their chests, related to their breathing. There were expressions of loss and not a lingering disorder related to trauma happening to them or trauma based on things they had done which shocked them.
In modern times, it’s seen as a necessary consequence of battle to have some shift in mentality. If you don’t come back from a combat deployment with some form of PTSD, then did you even see action? It’s almost a badge of honor.
I remember having instructors and seniors during my year and a half of training to be a sailor and then a Combat Corpsman, who would joke about PTSD as if we needed to be careful around them, lest we trigger an episode of rage. Those were the guys everyone looked up to. It was as if you needed some disorder to prove you’ve seen some shit.
So what shifted? What changed?
It wasn’t that battle today is more intense. Quite the opposite. Battle has become more remote with projectiles as compared to the face-to-face slashing our ancestors experienced. I think what shifted is our consciousness.
Now when I say “consciousness”, it is in a very strict definition as outlined by Julian Jaynes. It’s not simply perception or the ability to learn or feel pain. Any animal and many of our cells on their own can do that. Consciousness for this discussion is very specifically the space between environmental stimulus and behavior where we can observe ourselves as an “I”. It is the “I” which we imagine is deciding how to react to the stimulus in the environment.
Non-conscious creatures simply react to the environment and have no ability to intervene or observe the process between the stimulus and their behavior, whereas conscious humans can. Now, not every reaction to the environment is a conscious decision, and in fact, most are not. But there are some which are, and those few make the difference. We can even abstract by imagining stimulus and resulting behavior, telling stories about how we would react in any given situation.
And I think that this is where the ability to have PTSD, specifically moral injury, comes in.
When I say PTSD, it’s not the change in behavior that comes from being in high stress situations. I’ve experienced this after spending several months in a combat zone. It’s also worth noting that this behavior is only a disorder outside of a combat zone.
If you’re not watching your back in a combat zone, you have a problem. That is a behavior fully adapted to the environment in which you are in. This shift in behavior we also see with animals. Anyone who has seen an abused animal can see that. Even wild animals react to perceived threats like this.
I remember Dr. Jordan Peterson talking about PTSD and the worst cases being not what happened to you, but a reaction to what you did. This is what moral injury refers to.
People who commit acts of violence, no matter how justified they may have been, are more prone to the crippling types of PTSD which keep them from functioning in a non-combat zone. It completely shakes up their sense of self. They “see” themselves doing something that does not match their concept of self and feel out of control. The map of the world they created is destroyed. They no longer know who they are and how they fit in.
This type of traumatic experience is only possible for human beings who first have a sense of self. Having a story about who you are and the world you live in is a prerequisite for this type of break. If we had no expectations of self, then we would not be surprised, shocked, or traumatized watching ourselves do the unthinkable.
But what makes us think that the humans in stories like the Iliad aren’t conscious in the way I described? Were they that different from us?
In Jaynes’ book on the development of consciousness, he surveys the language used in the Iliad as an example of an ancient mindset and how different they were as compared to modern humans. There is a complete lack of introspection on the part of the characters. Anything close to a mind space where self-reflection occurs is thought to be later additions to the story written by people with a different mindset.
The heroes of the Iliad, when faced with a decision, are always visited by a god who makes the decision for them. They don’t imagine the outcomes of different decisions, talk them out with friends and family, and then move forward using a rationalization they abstracted through conversation or thought.
Inspired by Jayne’s theory, author Brian J. McVeigh does a statistical analysis of language used for our modern version of introspection in the Bible. Looking at the books of the Bible in chronological order as written, the amount of words used for introspection increases as time moves forward. The Old Testament is like the Iliad with its lack of introspection by the characters, while the New Testament is full of introspection.
Todd Gibson has researched this same pattern in literature from Ancient Tibet (Buddhism and Bicamerality, 2021) which also occurs in Chinese literature.
This pattern occurs across the world among different cultures all around 2,000 years ago. It’s even evident when comparing the Iliad to Homer’s later work, The Odyssey. Yes, these poems were likely told and retold and later written down and adjusted by several different people throughout time. However, there is a shift in language used with respect to introspection when laid out in its likely chronological order.
Marcel Kuijsten points out that Helen Keller wrote about the literal creation of her sense of self through learning language. It helps us to understand the link between the ability to learn a sense of self and introspection through the learning of language.
“Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world…I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus…I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it…My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith…Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another…When I learned the meaning of ’I’ and ‘me’ and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me.” — Helen Keller
A modern version of this story occurs in the award winning move Arrival, released in 2017
In Arrival, the gift of visiting aliens is language that sees the world without time. When our protagonist learns the language, she sees the world without time. She had no way to conceive of a world without a sense of time until she acquired the language to do so. Her language changed her ability to understand herself and the world.
The idea that language has shaped humanity and thus our world is nothing new. Multiple examples of the change in how we use language and how that use changes our mentality and then our world point to our ability to learn different mentalities which shape our levels of consciousness.
It’s as if consciousness is a tool we can use for good or bad. A tool that comes with massive responsibilities and potential negative consequences for the world and our own internal mind spaces. Having a sense of self allows us to see our own potential but also our own failures.
I wish I could remember who it was that I heard discussing time they spent with a small tribe of people in Sub-Saharan Africa. After getting to know the people in the tribe there, they invited some of the tribe’s members to visit America. The members couldn’t understand why they would want to visit a place “where people kill themselves.”
Consciousness is something that is neither evolved, nor static. It is learned and variable.