The Deadliness of an Atomized, Fragmented Society
September 15, 2016 9:39 AM   Subscribe

In his new book, Tribe, uses PTSD rates among American veterans to illustrate how psychologically unhealthy modern American society is due to how distant it is from our evolutionary past: "In Canada and Britain, close to 10 percent of combat soldiers are diagnosed with PTSD. In Israel, a country in which military service is mandatory, the rates are roughly 1 percent. Among American troops, the rates are as high as 25 percent. This is especially remarkable in light of the fact that only 10 percent experience combat... On Junger’s view, life in America is hollow and atomized. Humans, he argues, evolved to live in small groups in which inter-reliance and cooperation were essential. In combat, soldiers function much like our tribal predecessors. They live, eat, sleep, and fight together. When they come home, that sense of solidarity disappears. The civilian world feels alien. It’s 'anti-human,' Junger told me."
posted by bookman117 (34 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
The word "diagnosed" needs to be in bold, italics, underlined, 24-point type there.
posted by Etrigan at 9:43 AM on September 15, 2016 [11 favorites]


"They live, eat, sleep, and fight together. When they come home, that sense of solidarity disappears. The civilian world feels alien. It’s 'anti-human,' Junger told me."
I'll give him that—he's got the Junger thing down pat.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:49 AM on September 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


I think I'm with Etrigan here - there are a lot of factors that have to considered including the rate of diagnosis and how different countries divide up their categories of veterans. For instance Canada claims to have a very low military suicide rate but it has been argued to me that this is because veteran suicides are not counted as part of military health surveys. Cultural factors also play a significant role which is at the heart of Junger's argument - but I would feel safe saying his idea of culture is under-developed. For instance it could also be argued that the US has a confessional culture which would lead to a higher likelihood of people endorsing signs associated with terrible experiences during military deployments. The US, UK, Canada and Israel are superficially similar but much more careful work needs to be done to make sensible comparisons .

I can't even begin to take Junger seriously when he talks about evolution in this regard. There are, of course, large numbers of societies (if not actual people), who continue to live the way he says humans have evolved to. But his weak interpretation ignores history for the large number of societies with large numbers of people who have lived within organic solidarity, or gesellschaft, or other equally 19th century sociological terms that describe scaled up societies with impersonal ties.
posted by Charles_Swan at 9:50 AM on September 15, 2016 [11 favorites]


I listened to an interview and found his theory lacking in evidence but very convincing and compelling none the less.
posted by latkes at 9:54 AM on September 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


The comparison with Israel is a bit off because of the different operational tempos between US soldiers patrolling in Iraq and Afghanistan versus IDF patrolling the West Bank. Palestinian militants lack the means to inflict on IDF soldiers what Iraqi insurgents were able to inflict on US soldiers (and naturally the IDF works hard to keep it that way.) And medical treatment in Israel does not mean a chinook flight to Bagram followed up by 6 hours in a C-130 plane to Rammstein.

Conscription does mean Israeli soldiers return to a society where their experiences are universally understood, but I think Junger overstates the effect of that.
posted by ocschwar at 9:56 AM on September 15, 2016 [12 favorites]


That feels like a weird conclusion to come to when comparing a modern, first world westernized country to other, similar countries. Life in Canada and the UK, in particular, doesn't feel like it's really that different.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:57 AM on September 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


I know people who grew up under communism in Eastern Europe, and as poor and miserable as it often was, it was also, in human terms, very, very rich. Their poverty forced many families to live three generations in one apartment, in ghastly Soviet-era apartment blocks that nevertheless, in the courtyard, had a mixing of many families and many generations, and kids running around and communal child care and all that. That's tribal society right there.

Are those people better off, or worse off? In human terms, they're better off. In modern, economic terms, they're worse off. Ultimately, at the end of the day, what are we living for?
I was going to rant about how the rate of diagnosis of mental health stuff in Israeli society is not something comparable to the United States for more reasons than I can name but after reading that I'm not sure how much of this is even worth dignifying if you know basically anything about what was considered appropriate child-rearing in Soviet countries.
posted by griphus at 10:09 AM on September 15, 2016 [35 favorites]


Seems like a huge factor is the long, multiple deployments that US servicepersons have been required to endure since the War on Evil thing began
posted by thelonius at 10:09 AM on September 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


I'm unable to fathom how Junger concludes that people were "better off" under brutal dictatorships dominated by the terror of the secret police because people mingled in the courtyards. Like, there are factors of human well-being to consider beyond "absolute material wealth" and "availability of collective child-care." Indeed, the idea that the family or neighborhood was stronger under a system that regarded loyalty to units other than the state to be effectively treasonous, that encouraged everyone to spy on and report their neighbors for nonconformity, that had no qualms about breaking up families by sending people off to remote gulags...I'm not sure it's quite as obvious as Junger thinks.
posted by praemunire at 10:14 AM on September 15, 2016 [13 favorites]


I confess I haven’t read the book, but I heard him speak about it. The way he framed it makes me think he just really romanticizes a particular flavor of male bonding. He started by talking about the masculine camaraderie shared by construction workers he observed as a college kid moonlighting among them, then he wrote a book about men who spend months together doing dangerous jobs at sea, which led directly to his work as a journalist embedded with combat units. Class and masculinity were very strong subtext running throughout the whole thing.

I mean, I get that western men are socialized to act like they don’t need other people, so it’s probably nice for some to have an “excuse” to be close to others — almost forced intimacy. But the “just so” story about how human ancestors lived (who knows if it’s true? who knows the biological mechanisms by which “evolution” would mean that we have to also live that way now?), and the fact that diagnosis isn’t the same as incidence, and the very good point Mitrovarr makes about how there’s no way Canada and Britain have cultures that are significantly less isolation-making than the US, make the whole thing pretty unconvincing to me.

Don’t get me wrong: tons of research concludes that close human relationships correlate strongly to human health and happiness. But this particular string of arguments about why and what’s wrong now and what evidence supports that diagnosis, just isn’t compelling to me.
posted by pocketfullofrye at 10:15 AM on September 15, 2016 [14 favorites]


I do find some of this compelling -- I've never been in the armed forces but I am a musician that spends months at a time touring in vans and sleeping on floors and playing shows and really not being more than a couple feet from the same handful of people 24x7. (This is not your tour bus / hotel room type of band, waaaay lower-budget.) Coming home is a really weird adjustment and it always takes me a week or so to start feeling normal in more isolated daily life.

Even getting used to being on my "own" schedule always feels weird and somehow bad to me when I first get home. I can't figure out what to do with myself, and I temporarily lose the ability to like...amuse myself? Having to start thinking in terms of "me" instead of "us" always kind of a hard adjustment for me.

In no way do I think my experience compares to what it must be like for people in the military but I might understand it in a really faint way, I guess.
posted by capnsue at 10:24 AM on September 15, 2016 [7 favorites]


Grain of salt: I recently spoke to the spouse of a vet who stated that her husband has openly admitted that he milks the PTSD diagnosis (which he states he intentionally sought without honestly experiencing the symptoms (in other words, he lied)) for the benefits it provides him in terms of $$$'s.

Be careful with the statistics.

Note, this is not to discount the needs of those who honestly deal with the symptoms of PTSD.
posted by HuronBob at 10:25 AM on September 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


Grain of salt...

I absolutely believe that this happens, but as the spouse of a vet (with a number of vet friends), I would not be at all surprised if very vet who is "faking it" is offset by one (or more) vets who are powering through* PTSD because they don't want to admit "weakness" to themselves or jeopardize their ongoing military career.

I haven't read this guy's book, and my knowledge of PTSD is limited to our friends and various military reintegration/resilience training courses. But my gut tells me that while an evo-psych type explanation like can provide satisfying seeming answers to why humans can experience PTSD, actual steps towards prevention and/or treatment are a lot more complicated.

*not to mention folks who probably have some amount of post-traumatic stress that doesn't rise to the level of "disorder" because they don't suffer from it because they come back to a healthy (for them) environment.
posted by sparklemotion at 10:50 AM on September 15, 2016 [12 favorites]


our evolutionary past

Whoa. Stop right there. NO. Go away with this appeal to a romanticized past. It's fun to read about in Clan of the Cave Bear, but I wouldn't want to live it. Three cheers for modernity! (And fuck romanticizing impoverished dictatorships. Seriously. They're all kinds of no fun to actually live in, communal child care or no.)

I haven't read the book, but I am thinking about factors that might put American soldiers at more risk of PTSD. For one thing, British, Canadian, and Israeli societies all have a much better social safety net. And American soldiers are heavily recruited from poor or lower-middle-class families. Maybe soldiers from the US are more likely to have more adverse childhood events that predispose them to developing PTSD? Are they more likely to be persons of color and/or women, who have to deal with institutionalized racism and sexism on top of combat trauma?

In Israel, if I'm not mistaken, military service is more universal, so there's more of a sense of societal solidarity, maybe?

There's all kinds of angles to look at here, but it's so easy to say "Welp, evolution!" rather than do the hard work - and spend the money - figuring out how to prevent and treat PTSD.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 10:58 AM on September 15, 2016 [14 favorites]


I think the US has a very different relationship with it's military than the UK, Israel and Canada. Even if they're socially similar, I think the experiences of each country's veterans will still feel very different.

Yes, it's a gut reaction. But I feel that the trauma of experiencing something horrible, without the support of your community/nation, with ambivalence about whether you are doing good while a cog of a military force that has the outsized influence of the United States is different. It's akin to overheated glass bakeware. Pulled out of the fire, and placed on the counter, it can heal itself. Placed into the freezer, that same trauma fractures into something much more difficult to fix.

Not that I think he has proven his case. But I don't think it's out of bounds for similar countries to have very different results given small differences in cultural and political institutions.
posted by politikitty at 11:04 AM on September 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


To clarify, while I am open to his conclusions, I am very much against the romanticization of our history. It is good to figure out the mechanisms relationships and culture can play in reducing trauma. It is lazy to say "Therefore 1950s!"

Modernity has unintended consequences. It always will, despite our best intentions. When we find them, we should alleviate them. But always moving forward, rather than discounting the benefits of modernity.
posted by politikitty at 11:09 AM on September 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


Isn't the whole idea that we evolved "for" some specific way of life basically considered to be hooey by people who actually know about evolution and culture?
posted by thelonius at 11:23 AM on September 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


sn't the whole idea that we evolved "for" some specific way of life basically considered to be hooey by people who actually know about evolution and culture?

Yeah.... but.

It's fair to say that we were evolved by forces that caused us to develop traits that may no longer be adaptive. We were pre-civilization as a species a hell of a lot longer than we were post-writing.

It is wrong to say that evolution has a purpose. It's an effect, not a force.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:43 AM on September 15, 2016 [7 favorites]


I listened to an interview and found his theory lacking in evidence but very convincing and compelling none the less.
latkes

MetaFilter: lacking in evidence but very convincing and compelling none the less.
posted by Sangermaine at 11:47 AM on September 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


I do find some of this compelling -- I've never been in the armed forces but I am a musician that spends months at a time touring in vans and sleeping on floors and playing shows and really not being more than a couple feet from the same handful of people 24x7.

And it's possible to believe that people who face life-threatening traumas together wind up sharing uniquely close and profound bonds without believing that it follows that everyone should share similarly close bonds. To the extent that this is what Junger is espousing, then it's just more "war is a force that gives us meaning" bullshit, to the extent that it isn't—and he could not possibly be more vague in that Vox piece, then I really don't know what he's on about.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:50 AM on September 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I think a lot about a story I read in a book about describing the influence of Hitler's reign on the german people. Under the third reich people basically had to join social organizations which organized various charitable and social events. So in addition to your work life you also had to take part in organized social activities. After WWII ended, all of those organizations disappeared. Researchers found that overall people enjoyed being part of those social organizations and missed them, but at the same time weren't motivated to join new organizations if they didn't have to.

"Enjoys being part of social groups but isn't motivated to join" sounds a lot like my situation.
posted by ianhattwick at 11:51 AM on September 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


Gleichschaltung
posted by thelonius at 12:06 PM on September 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


But here's another element of being in the armed forces that no one ever seems to mention. You spend weeks and months in basic and getting training to be one of many. It's not like they pick kid off the street and drop him in Fallujah. There's a loooot of work to get soldiers ready to soldier. In some cases, they start even earlier with ROTC and Junior ROTC. So you have this vast amount of time preparing you to be a soldier.

And then, when your tours are over and your time is up, you go home. To a life you haven't been a part of for years and without any decompression time to relearn how to be a citizen rather than a soldier. And we're surprised that people have difficulties readjusting.
posted by teleri025 at 12:17 PM on September 15, 2016 [6 favorites]


I think the US has a very different relationship with it's military than the UK…

Not sure about the other countries, but Kipling could very well have written Tommy here in the US, where we are great at paying lip service to the troops, but not so great at funding the VA.
posted by TedW at 12:21 PM on September 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


And it says a lot that Tommy was written about Britain in 1890 when it was still a colonial superpower. That's not the UK anymore. It is the US.
posted by politikitty at 12:25 PM on September 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


I am the spouse of a vet who has PTSD and I think Junger oversimplifies things a lot. I do think he has a very valid point about the difficulty of reintegrating into society. Going from the life and death situations that Mr branravenraven did, and the intense comradearie that ensues and then back to a very quiet life where you can't, in the way American culture is at least right now, replicate that is very difficult and I think causes a lot of depression in Veterans.

That being said, I don't think Mr Branravenraven would stop having anxiety attacks at the grocery store, or not be hyper aware of a stick in the middle of the road if our home society was different. I think Junger conflates some of the issues (like depression) with returning from war that often arise with PTSD. I do know that Mr Branravenraven deals better with his PTSD when he knows he is going to an environment that there are other veterans at sometimes. I suspect that is because he feels like people there will not thinks it's strange if he has an anxiety attack around them, and have a low key way of being, so it mitigates the chances of having one in the first place, creating a natural form of exposure therapy. So Junger could have a point here too, that the societal influences of returning soldiers make a huge difference in their readjustmant.

But, I've read interviews he has given, and I think he is really dismissive about the reality of PTSD. It's real. Very real, and I think a lot of those other cultures under diagnose, as they did in the U.S. in the past, hence his observation that the rates of PTSD have gone up among soldiers. There is still a lot of research that needs to be done on how to treat it, and some major fixings of the medical system treating veterans (I'm not even going to open the floodgates on that one. But there are vets who milk the system, as he has pointed out. There are also still crazy wait times at the va and ridiculous beaurocratic runarounds my spouse experiences, and if you want to examine societal factors that lead to depression amongst reintegrating military, that's a big one.).

Good for Junger for highlighting the jarring and often damaging transition from military deployment to civilian life. But I think he overreaches, too.
posted by branravenraven at 12:51 PM on September 15, 2016 [7 favorites]


Also, I want to add that the rates of traumatic brain injuries have greatly increased amongst U.S. military, and they are just starting to look at the conflagration between PTSD and TBI s, and, well, basically, it makes things that much more complicated to understand and treat these days. Which I don't think Junger gives enough research or credit to.
posted by branravenraven at 12:55 PM on September 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


When they come home, that sense of solidarity disappears.

in middle- and lower-middle class white communities, sure. they've been atomized for a while; we consider it "social mobility."
posted by listen, lady at 9:10 PM on September 15, 2016


I'm unable to fathom how Junger concludes that people were "better off" under brutal dictatorships dominated by the terror of the secret police because people mingled in the courtyards.

I think you greatly overestimate the amount of terror and brutality in the Soviet Union of the time period that Junger is talking about.
posted by shala at 12:32 PM on September 16, 2016


I think you greatly overestimate the amount of terror and brutality in the Soviet Union of the time period that Junger is talking about.


I think you underestimate the amount of terror and brutality in the Soviet Union that came with having to have 3 generations in one apartment and having to be silent about domestic abuse in that apartment for lack of any other place to go.
posted by ocschwar at 1:00 PM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't, because I was born and raised in a 3-generations Soviet apartment. What about you?
posted by shala at 1:02 PM on September 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Born and raised in Israel, full of people happy to GTFO of those apartments.
posted by ocschwar at 1:08 PM on September 16, 2016


...is it worth saying something?
posted by Smedleyman at 1:09 PM on September 16, 2016


American culture is absolutely atomized and shallow in ways that seems deeply harmful after living abroad long enough. I could easily imagine that inhibiting healing from PTSD too. Ain't surprising if a PTSD victim took longer to heal if their family members spent long hours at increasingly meaningless work, while maybe expecting the victim to do so too.

There are other reason too though : America's wars benefit nobody but America's upper classes. I'd think PTSD is partially a byproduct of minds trying to learn from mistakes, but if we're talking about America's wars then the mistake is ultimately trusting our society and its leaders.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:45 AM on October 9, 2016


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