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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   28123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Cf. the hygiene hypothesis. I think there’s a good case to be made that having early exposure to a representative range of evolutionarily relevant stimuli helps individuals to calibrate in multiple domains. If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.

I suspect one reason this might not show up in the data (or be argued for by academics) as much as it should is the confound from heredity. Yes, if you look at modern American kids who are exposed to trauma, you’ll probably find less well-adjusted adults, but that’s because a huge amount of the potential trauma in your critical windows of development comes from your parents and immediate family, and if they’re fucked up, it raises the chances you will be too. I think this helps explain why eg WW2 concentration camp survivors often go on to live happy lives, in seeming contradiction to the modern narrative that even isolated traumatic experiences fuck you up. Maybe also explains why PTSD is a relatively modern phenomenon in warfare, or at least a hell of a lot more common than it used to be. If you'd had a sibling or two die in childhood and friends die in everyday violent altercations, then maybe a battle is less likely to traumatise you.

Of course, there’s also the chronic/acute distinction. If you’re abused by a primary caregiver throughout childhood, that will also lead to long-term miscalibration of your hedonistat, because most humans have historically been reasonably good at looking after their kids.

More on the PTSD subject here, for example. He observes that 1) combat experience was ubiquitous, and 2) it was viewed positively by the broader society. So returning veterans were told they did a great thing, that whatever they were experiencing was normal and also manly, and then were prescribed the socially accepted purification rituals to code-switch back into farming. Compare Scott’s discussion on neurasthenia: humans can probably adapt to the social context for all sorts of mental states.

I think I’ve also seen variants of @Ioper’s point, where increased range and especially industrial artillery made the difference. It seems likely that a constant drip of adrenaline would have dramatic effects on the psyche; the trenches plausibly maintained that stress much more than pre-modern warfare. But we still see PTSD from maneuver warfare, COIN, and other situations that should be as different from WWI as WWI was from the American Revolution. I’m not sure that physical response can explain the whole picture.

I think one more important aspect is the impersonal nature of modern warfare, which ties into the aspect of helplessness.

When you fight someone with a spear, a bow, a musket or a bayonet, you see your opponents die from your violent actions. You have a simple "problem -> action -> no problem" chain.

When the vast majority of your opponents are killed by artillery, aircraft and drones and the vast majority of your own casualties come from either artillery, aircraft and drones or traps, suicide bombers and IEDs the situation is different: you are stuck between invisible death dealers on the opposing side and invisible death dealers on your side, and instead of defeating the enemy yourself in a pitched battle you are waiting for an attack to happen at any moment and calling your death dealers for help eighty percent of the time.

I'm leaning towards the second explanation. WW1 wasn't exactly short of patriotism, so I think we can assume that returning soldiers would be in a relatively similar situation to Romans. The difference is that Romans didn't spend months sitting in damp trenches with constant explosions, with the knowledge that if one hits you, you'll either be ripped apart or buried alive.

Maybe also explains why PTSD is a relatively modern phenomenon in warfare, or at least a hell of a lot more common than it used to be. If you'd had a sibling or two die in childhood and friends die in everyday violent altercations, then maybe a battle is less likely to traumatise you.

As I've understood it, PTSD isn't caused by single traumatic events as much as by prolonged periods of constant high stress, fear of death and feelings of helplessness. Those things really only started to happen during relatively modern warfare.

Pre-modern humans didn't get much "PTSD" because humans are well equipped to handle individual high stress and traumatic events, such as a melee, as long as there it's time limited and there is a feeling of control.

Counterpoint being that the entire life of a subsistence farmer was high stress, fear of death and helplessness. Crop failures, disease, crime, and wars were pretty common. And if the crops are failing in your village, you know you’ll be at minimum very hungry over the winter, and people die around you and probably members of your own family could meet the same fate. Nothing you can do.

A huge difference for modern WEIRDs is that we approach the world from the perspective that life is supposed to be good with the troubles I mentioned (death, disease, starvation, warfare, etc.) seen as outliers and black swan events. And at the same time, the more ancient approach to life was that bad stuff happening is normal, and it’s best to just get on with it. Your fate was your fate. And feelings, while they existed and were acknowledged, weren’t the same focal points that they are today.

I’m personally fairly confident that our modern WEIRD approach to the negative parts of life are creating and driving a lot of mental illnesses, especially in teenagers. We teach, in my view, the exact wrong approach to trauma, and a very inflated view of what can cause trauma. Part of it is just how much we live life on easy mode, which interferes with the development of mental toughness. A terrible experience for a young adult in a modern, western city is likely to be fairly minor compared to the same child in Tudor England. Add in that we tell our young that bad experiences cause trauma and trauma causes permanent mental health problems. And we teach kids to focus on feelings and to set hopes very high.

I agree with much of your post but the initial part isn't very convincing imo. There is a massive difference between being worried about the occasional famine and sitting in a trench that is pounded by artillery. The life of a substinence farmer isn't high stress, it's almost constant low mulling worry.

Is PTSD, especially c-pstd very overdiagnosed today? Absolutely! But it's also a real condition mostly associated with post Napoleonic frontline warfare, that isn't at all comparable to historic environmental or social stressors.

Sort of. If helplessness is going to make an event traumatic, I can easily point to plagues, mothers dying in childbirth, famines, etc as all being particularly traumatic. Imagine being 10-12 and seeing baby’s first be heading in town with dad. Or your mom has a baby and bleeds to death while you watch. Or the Black Death killing a third of your village. And knowing that if you got it, they’d basically shut you in the house and brick you inside entombed in the house. Death in the medieval and renaissance world was common and brutal. Only maybe modern combat comes close, and even then, I suspect that the way normal deaths happen in modern times make combat harder. Death before 65 is a black swan for us.

Helplessness can make an event traumatic and it's a part of what is believed to cause PTSD.

I actually thought of bringing up particularly severe plagues as a possible comparison, with a major difference being things like things like very high levels of noise from explosions, artillery, gunfire, grenades etc, that probably would make severe trauma manifest in different ways.

Surely people were traumatised by the black death and things like plagues resulting from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, but they might not have gotten PTSD specifically because the circumstances surrounding the trauma and stress was very different, even if death levels were the same or worse than frontline combat roles.

Finally, the first major recorded outbreaks of PTSD did not coincide with people having gone soft in a cosy environment unused to adversity, violence and war. It was pre-penicillin, most people were still agrarian or working in industry under terrible conditions, in societies that were violent and regularly at war. What it did coincide with was the advent of modern industrialised warfare.

I'm very much in agreement with this. Kids need stress, and not just of the exam kind.

One of my less pleasant but ultimately pretty beneficial childhood experience was attending a summer Scouts' camp at age 10. I was a member of the detachment but the summer camps weren't mandatory.

Anyway, it was somewhat unpleasant, mostly because the level of discipline demanded was fairly high, and as a very pre-pubertal kid* I didn't even have any machismo motivation that helped later with unpleasant things like bathing in very cold water.

And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves. It was nothing dangerous or backbreaking, especially not for the smallest kids, but novel for bookish nerds.

The food wasn't the greatest usually, as you'd expect when the guy who is overseeing it is usually a teenager, and there's no real refrigeration apart from keeping stuff in a cool stream. We only ate meat once during the whole camp. Really helped with fixing my attitude to food too. I stopped being picky.

I remember I cried halfway through when the parents were visiting, but ultimately stayed.

And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves.

This sounds awesome how much per week do I need to pay for this getaway? $5000...?

Not quite the same as this, but some friends and I spent a week camping in the Smoky Mountains earlier this summer. The costs for food, gas, campsite reservations, firewood, and supplies came to less than $250 per person.

My parents paid cca $80 to have me off their hands for three weeks.

You understand the laboring part was only first five days and then 1/4 of the time ? Each scout patrol would take turns in doing the camp-keeping part.

If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.

I will observe that a number of successful youth development/leadership programs focus on (mostly-)safe, controlled "stressful events". Thinking of things like NOLS, JROTC, and various sporting and scouting-like organizations. It's usually pitched as building confidence, but dropping kids into the wilderness and showing them how to survive (and even thrive) in unpleasant or even hazardous conditions seems, from this angle, to be deliberately aimed to calibrate this hedonistat. I've been through things like this, and while it's not a controlled experiment, it didn't seem like it was Earth-changing at the time, I've come to appreciate those experiences more as I've gotten older.

If I were looking at data to reduce confounding with heredity, that might be a place to start.

It makes sense, and really I think there’s other “thermostats” in our brains. Like I tend to think of maturity as somewhat calibrating a responsibility and time-preference thermostat to near adult levels. There are some adults that for various reasons end up with theirs somewhat lower than the adult level. You’ll find these people not doing things that need to be done, doing things that put themselves or others in bad situations, or mishandling money or property.

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