1. Leading off with a bit of controversial one, Lexi Pandell examined “How Trauma Became the Word of the Decade” for Vox and came up with some findings that I can only imagine will reap accusations of, well, traumatizing potential readers. Yet it’s hard to disagree that the meaning of the word “trauma”– derived from the Greek for “wound”– has been expanded to the point of near meaninglessness. You might say it has become an ever more precious means of pathologizing negativity — that is, an acceptable way to talk about bad feelings (and core brokenness) in a culture that resists doing so #highanthropology. If so, it’s a laudable purpose in a world full of the walking wounded.
Of interest to us, however, is the way that trauma language morphs often into self-justification language, how we lean on our wounds to, ironically, make us feel better about ourselves. Of course, the Christian imagination leaps to descriptions of Jesus as The Wounded Healer, and the implications that might have in a world of universal trauma, yes, even religious trauma:
“Trauma is one of those words that can mean anything,” says Michael Scheeringa, a medical doctor, professor at Tulane University, and author of the upcoming book The Trouble with Trauma. “I was stuck in traffic: That was traumatic. My football team lost: That was traumatic. That’s the way it’s used in our culture.”
The expansion of the term had an unforeseen side effect, however. “Trauma started to become an easy go-to narrative for mental health challenges,” says Janis Whitlock, a research scientist at Cornell University who studies mental health in adolescents. “The trauma narrative became a very easy one to adopt, even for the people who didn’t have what we would call a lot of trauma,” Whitlock says. “It has currency, so people broker in it.”
“One of my participants talked specifically about how she perceived a hierarchy of trauma,” Whitlock says. “There was a sense of, the worse your trauma is, the more justified your mental health challenges.”
By relying on trauma to understand our modern lives, we’re undercutting the very real impacts of stress and overwhelm. We’re flattening all hardships, conflating the horrific and life-shattering with the merely unpleasant.
Tightening the definition of trauma doesn’t take anything away from terrible personal experiences, the horrors of history, or the difficulty of being alive within our current social structures. It doesn’t limit our capacity for empathy or undercut the need to recover from tragedy, crises, or challenges. It doesn’t ignore the truth of violence and existential horror — though it does recognize that there can be consequences without there necessarily being trauma.
2. Next up, a pair of articles that piggyback on this tendency to flatten the human experience into manageable chunks, usually for the sake of judgment. “I Ditched My Smartwatch and I Don’t Regret It” confessed Lindsay Crouse in the NY Times, taking us on a personal tour of the growing sense that “self-quantification isn’t just aspirational anymore — it’s essential.” Call it the law at work, or call it Exhibit 1001 of incessant measurement producing self-consciousness instead of excellence, slavery instead of freedom. Whatever the case, Crouse describes the ensuing double-bind succinctly. As well as the playfulness often found on the other side:
At first, I loved that smart watch, which I used to get faster at racing marathons. Suddenly, I had metrics on things I didn’t even realize my body did: lactate thresholds, VO₂ max, Heart rate variability. Each evening I had a full report, telling me what this device thought of my performance. Soon I couldn’t stop thinking about the numbers on the watch. I was addicted.
Once you outsource your well-being to a device and convert it into a number, it stops being yours. The data stands in for self-awareness. We let a gadget tell us when and how to move, when we’re tired, when we’re hungry.
With my smart watch, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and check my app to see how I slept — instead of just taking a moment to notice that I was still tired. When I discovered that my watch could measure my stress levels, it was as if I’d started carrying around an expensive psychological pyramid scheme on my wrist. The more I used my watch to monitor my stress, the higher my stress levels rose.
But finally, I stopped counting, stopped tracking. Now sometimes I come back from running in the dreariness of the pandemic and feel great, like the grown-up Peter Pan in “Hook,” out there relearning how to fly. The miles disappear when they’re done. And the only one who knows they happened is me.
3. Before we recorded the upcoming episode of The Mockingcast, I asked my co-hosts to give Wordle a shot. If you’re unfamiliar with the viral game, just Google it and you can thank me later. It’s the latest Internet pleasantry/pastime, albeit one that’s impossible to binge. You might think this is the exact opposite of something to get upset about. Not so, observes Charlie Warzel in his newsletter “The Internet Is Eating Wordle Alive.”
To those who aren’t aboard the Wordle train or who don’t particularly delight in the game, [the phenomenon is a case study in the] cycle of information overload and fandom [that] is not only exhausting, but alienating. People making Wordle their entire personality becomes annoying enough to a person that they make disliking Wordle their entire personality. Those people are naturally loud and provocative online and, thanks to social platforms that reward engagement, their voices are amplified. And so the most provocative and annoyed and the most enthusiastic and supportive Wordle crews find each other seamlessly and proceed to piss each other off.
This might sound a bit dramatic for a word game and … it is! But the low stakes are what I find so interesting about Wordle discourse specifically […]
Wordle’s public reception fascinates and unnerves me because it’s an example of how the internet flattens things — in this case, the stakes of this particular, Twitter-bound discourse. We are conditioned to project strong feelings about things we don’t feel all that strongly about. At the same time, we’re conditioned to interpret other responses to low-stakes content as high stakes, perhaps even threatening. We end up arguing about things we don’t feel that strongly about because we can’t remember that the other side of the argument is subject to many of the same forces […]
It’s this dynamic that gives me pause. Because the attentional spotlight rarely lands on things as inoffensive and low stakes as a five-letter word game. Nothing should be easier to ignore than Wordle and its fans, just as nothing should be easier than enjoying a good game with like-minded people. And yet, here we are. It’s worth asking: Have we built an internet where enjoying an innocent thing with a larger community is, quite simply, impossible?
If we can make something as benign as Wordle into a tool of self-justification and division, then we can make anything into one. That Warzel describes this process in curse- or prison-like terms is no coincidence. Perhaps it is no coincidence either that the Gospel reading in the lectionary this week (Lk 4:21-30) begins with Jesus’s claiming to be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy re: freedom for prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind. PtL. (For the record, RJ and I tied, Sarah opted out.)
4. Social Science Study of the Week: “Science says ‘Zoom fatigue’ is real — and worse when you don’t like your face.”
5. In Humor, the Hard Times brought us “Underdog Really More of a Loser.” Reductress delivered “Housemate Leaves Kitchen Sink Full of Leverage” and the Onion “Man’s Problems Really Don’t Seem So Bad After Therapist Completely Trivializes Them.” But McSweeney’s “A Scathing Review of Your Thirties: The Video Game” hit hardest:
Your Thirties also sorely lacks a progression scheme to develop a compelling character. I found my protagonist boring, incompetent, and downright unlikable. While the world is full of epic threats with great story potential, my character had almost no opportunity to influence them, making me question why they were the protagonist at all. And unlike the exhilarating progression in Your Twenties, my character actually grew weaker and less intelligent as they advanced to later levels!
6. I don’t think one can ever read enough warnings about or excavations of the dangers of self-righteousness. Its allure is simply that ever-present and that insidious. Cue Simon Longstaff writing at ABC Religion & Ethics on “The Tyranny of Righteous Indignation,” which is a timely refresher of the tendency of indignation “to destroy the capacity for virtue.” His words reminded me of the following recently-unearthed quote from Jerome K. Jerome’s book All Roads Lead to Calvary, written in 1919 but no less relevant. Lord have mercy #lowanthropology:
They were to be found at every corner: the reformers who could not reform themselves. The believers in universal brotherhood who hated half the people. The denouncers of tyranny demanding lamp-posts for their opponents. The bloodthirsty preachers of peace. The moralists who had persuaded themselves that every wrong was justified provided one were fighting for the right. The deaf shouters for justice. The excellent intentioned men and women laboring for reforms that could only be hoped for when greed and prejudice had yielded place to reason, and who sought to bring about their ends by appeals to passion and self-interest.
And the insincere, the self-seekers, the self-advertisers! Those who were in the business for even coarser profit! The lime-light lovers who would always say and do the clever, the unexpected thing rather than the useful and the helpful thing: to whom paradox was more than principle.
7. Finally, and on a considerably more hopeful note, a heart-rending story of forgiveness appeared in Plough. Johann Christoph Arnold relayed the testimony of Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was tragically killed by an IRA bomb in Enniskillen, Ireland in 1987, titled “I Bear No Grudge.”
Amazingly, Gordon refused to retaliate, saying that angry words could neither restore his daughter nor bring peace to Belfast. Only hours after the bombing, he told BBC reporters:
“I have lost my daughter, and we shall miss her. But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge … That will not bring her back … Don’t ask me, please, for a purpose … I don’t have an answer. But I know there has to be a plan. If I didn’t think that, I would commit suicide. It’s part of a greater plan … and we shall meet again.”
He knew that the people who took his daughter’s life were anything but remorseful, and he maintained that they should be punished and imprisoned. Even so, he refused to seek revenge. [Gordon continued]:
“Those who have to account for this deed will have to face a judgment of God, which is way beyond my forgiveness … It would be wrong for me to give any impression that gunmen and bombers should be allowed to walk the streets freely. But whether or not they are judged here on earth by a court of law … I do my very best in human terms to show forgiveness. … The last word rests with God.”
Gordon was misunderstood and ridiculed by many because of his stand, but he says that without having made a decision to forgive, he never could have accepted the fact that his daughter was never coming back. Nor could he have found the freedom to move on. Forgiving also had a positive effect that reached beyond his personal life. At least temporarily, his words broke the cycle of killing and revenge: the local Protestant paramilitary leadership felt so convicted by his courage that they did not retaliate.
Amen to that. And amen to this:
Strays:
- Images in the post come from the exquisite and new-to-me Holkham Picture Bible (1330).
- Really quite sad about Meat Loaf dying. Never forget: “if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car / and objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.” Huh.
- Last night’s Same Old Song virtual event was a blast. We’ll have the video recording up next week.
- Not one, not two, but three new episodes of PZ’s Podcast went up this week!
- A hearty thank you to the wonderful folks at Christ Episcopal Church and Christ Presbyterian Church for hosting a marvelous event in Tulsa last weekend!! It’s a lot easier to talk about “the kindness of grace” when you’re in the midst of experiencing it … Such abundance. For those who missed it, the audio files have all been uploaded to Talkingbird! Videos will be rolled out as they’re ready. Photos courtesy of @stellate_photography.
- Finally, we’re taking a brief Sabbath on Monday for routine website maintenance.
