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Mental Health Break

by Patrick Appel

A beautiful, melancholy tale of life and death told through yarn:

When It’s Not PTSD

by Jessie Roberts

Lynne Jones questions the spread of the diagnosis, which entered the DSM-III in 1980. She recalls that, while working as a psychatrist in Sarejevo during the Bosnian War, “what immediately struck all of us living under siege at that time was the irrelevance of describing anything as ‘post-traumatic’”:

One researcher found that almost 94 per cent of displaced Bosnian children living in collective centres met the criteria for PTSD. But he wondered if some of those symptoms might be adaptive in the midst of continuing conflict. The children had been repeatedly shelled during the two-month research period. The hyper-vigilance that made a child startle at a sudden sound might actually keep them alert enough to take cover.

Jones went on to run a mental health clinic in Gorazde, Bosnia in 1996. She remembers that “most of the problems people brought to the clinic simply did not fit [the PTSD] pattern of symptoms”:

The most common problem among the ex-soldiers was chest pain. Bojan arrived at the clinic short of breath and trembling with anxiety. A short chubby man, slightly balding, he sat down and talked without stopping. The problem had begun during the war. After the funeral of a close friend, who had died in fighting, Bojan had collapsed with chest pain. Everyone thought he was having a heart attack. He had been sent to Sarajevo and put in intensive care with chest monitors and blood tests. After a few days, they told him it was his ‘nerves’ and sent him back to his unit in Gorazde. He was angry at doctors who had mishandled his problem and terrified of dying of a heart attack like his father. But he did not have nightmares or tend to relive painful memories from the war. He enjoyed his six-year-old child, his wife, his work; and whatever he had, it was not PTSD.

Some of my colleagues at home argued that the PTSD construct should be adjusted to include all post-conflict reactions, in both adults and children. But the point of a diagnosis is to distinguish problems that require different approaches. What is gained by extending the frame to include different symptom patterns, when all they have in common is exposure to the same supposed triggering event? A patient who has a persistent cough and is diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis requires a quite different treatment from a chronic smoker with a cough. If no distinction is made, one may end up giving the psychological equivalent of cough mixture: the ubiquitous, undefined ‘counselling’.

A Poem For Sunday

by Alice Quinn

From “The Colored Soldiers” by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

If the muse were mine to tempt it

And my feeble voice were strong,

If my tongue were trained to measures,

I would sing a stirring song.

I would sing a song heroic

Of those noble sons of Ham,

Of the gallant colored soldiers

Who fought for Uncle Sam!

In the early days you scorned them,

And with many a flip and flout

Said, “These battles are the white man’s,

And the whites will fight them out.”

Up the hills you fought and faltered,

In the vales you strove and bled,

While your ears still heard the thunder

Of the foes’ advancing tread.

Then distress fell on the nation,

And the flag was drooping low;

Should the dust pollute your banner?

No! the nation shouted, No!

So when War, in savage triumph,

Spread abroad his funeral pall—

Then you called the colored soldiers,

And they answered to your call.

And like hounds unleashed and eager

For the life blood of the prey,

Sprung they forth and bore them bravely

In the thickest of the fray.

And where’er the fight was hottest,

Where the bullets fastest fell,

There they pressed unblanched and fearless

At the very mouth of hell.

(From War Poems, selected and edited by John Hollander © by John Hollander 1999. Used by permission of Everyman Library. Photo of the men from Company E, 4th United States Colored Infantry, circa 1864, from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

A Debate Over A Troublesome Book, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A biology professor writes:

While the scientific reviews of Nicholas Wade’s new book have been almost uniformly negative, your treatment of the matter seems to have missed the major point of both Wade’s book and the damning criticisms. What Wade gets wrong is not that there are genetic differences among human populations, and that you can tell where a person (or his ancestors) are from by looking at these differences (on this point he is simply correct: the geographic division of humanity into genetically diagnosable groups is not a “social construction,” but a fact of nature). Rather, Wade’s major and unsupported claim is that differences between contemporary human societies are genetic and have evolved extraordinarily quickly.

Here, for example is Jerry Coyne on the book. Allen Orr, in the New York Review of Books, has a very similar view of Wade’s book. Both Coyne and Orr are geneticists, experts in the study of species and their origins (they coauthored a book on the subject 10 years ago). While the fact of geographically-based genetic subdivision (which is what biologists mean by “race”) may drive some to apoplexy, its not news to a geneticist. It’s Wade’s “second part” that doesn’t hold up to critical analysis, and this is what knowledgeable scientific reviews have pointed out.

�Wade’s application of genetics to the differences between societies is indeed the most troubling and evidence-starved part of his book. I didn’t miss it; I highlighted Coyne’s and Orr’s reviews last week. And I fully accept “the geographic division of humanity into genetically diagnosable groups.” But what’s the utility of calling those genetic divisions “race”? Having two definitions for race, one biological and one societal, is liable to make individuals think the socially constructed racial categories are exactly the same as the biological ones and lead individuals to incorrectly justify social hierarchies using biology.

The graphic at the top of this post, from Jennifer Raff’s review of Wade’s book shows the “United States census classifications of race or color, 1890-1990.” A highlight from Raff’s takedown of A Troublesome Inheritance:

Human biological variation is real and important. I’ve studied it my entire professional career. We can see this variation most easily in physical traits and allele frequency differences between populations at extreme ends of a geographic continuum. Nobody is denying that. Let me repeat this: no one is denying that humans vary physically and genetically. All anthropologists and geneticists recognize that human differences exist. But Wade, and others who agree with him, have decided that certain patterns of variation—those which happen to support their predefined notions of what “races” must be—are more important than others.

Wade’s perspective fits with a larger pattern seen throughout history and around the world. Folk notions of what constitutes a race and how many races exist are extremely variable and culturally specific. For example, the Bible claims that all peoples of the world are descended from Noah’s three sons, mirroring the popular concept of three racial divisions (Caucasians, Africans, and Asians). On the other hand, the five-part division of races seems most “logical” to Wade. Anticipating confusion on this point he claims: “Those who assert that human races don’t exist like to point to the many, mutually inconsistent classification schemes that have recognized anywhere from 3 to 60 races. But the lack of agreement doesn’t mean that races don’t exist, only that it is a matter of judgment as to how to define them” (p. 92).

A matter of judgment. So, rather than being defined by empirical criteria, as Wade had asserted so confidently earlier in the book, it really is just a subjective judgment call. The differences between groups are so subtle and gradual that no objective lines can be drawn, so Wade draws his own on the basis of his own preconceptions.

A reader adds:

It should be mentioned that there are some reputable scientists who defend something like Wade’s conception of broad races, while being much more careful than he is to point out that these are not really discrete groups, that the number of them and boundaries between them are somewhat arbitrary.

You may have seen the recent comments by Jerry Coyne, Steven Pinker and Alan Orr—none of whom is much bothered by Wade’s assertions of race-as-reality, though they’ve all rubbished his grand, gene-based account of human history. Personally, I have yet to see any of these guys fully justify the notion of fixed, coarse racial categories vs. the much more fluid and contextual idea of populations, which exist at various levels of scale and whose definition depends entirely on what you’re interested in learning.

There is a big cultural and, some would say, ideological split between this subset of evolutionary biologists who’ve denounced the “race as social construct” idea as a “myth,” and the majority of anthropologists, who continue to hold that position.

Another reader takes issue with Charles Mills’ speech on the social construction of race:

My gripe with this clip is that it attempts to illustrate the social construction of race by still preserving fairly recent forms of “racial” categorization as its model: i.e. “whiteness” and “blackness.” Mills then goes on to take these categories, which emerged slowly between four hundred and two-hundred and fifty years ago, and transpose them onto the medieval period.

Neither Medieval Europe nor any portion of Sub-Saharan Africa during Medieval days utilized these markers “white” and “black” as social divisions. A more useful alternative universe might imagine a social order in which completely different categorization schemes emerged. For instance, we know that through the early 1700s Europeans were more likely to classify Africans by their “tribal” origins (I’ll leave aside the problematic ways in which the encounter with Europeans actually served to construct these tribal boundaries as they came to be known). As such, where slave traders captured their labor force was a more prominent marker than that labor force’s “blackness.” “Blackness” emerges as a primary marker only after several generations of intermarriage in the Americas among slaves.

So we’re better served, I would argue, imagining a system that eschewed Blackness and Whiteness as the primary dividing line altogether, and imagine a world where, say, the Iberian Moors, with the help of darker skinned Africans from both East and Sub-Saharan Africa succeeded in displacing the authority of Europeans. In such a system, there may have been a hierarchy that placed Iberian Moors at the top of the social order (perhaps because of language skills that enabled them to serve in clerical positions in dominance of fellow Europeans). And then a “racial” scheme that divided the world according to gradations of skin (or hair, or a combination of features) that privileged something akin to a mocha over various gradations of lighter and darker skin (i.e., the darker or the lighter you were, the lower your status). Or perhaps one in which blonder and redder hair became the marker for subjugation.

The point (which I don’t think Mills did a great job of emphasizing), is that there was nothing inevitable about skin color even being a social marker. For much of human history, it doesn’t appear to have been so.

Another reader adds some context on epigenetics:

Jonathan Marks is quoted as writing:

“the ways in which DNA can be modified in direct response to the environment, and those DNA modifications can be stably transmitted…”

He should clarify what he means by “stably transmitted.” In fact, epigenetic modifications are very rarely felt beyond perhaps third generation. Jerry Coyne wrote, about 3 years ago, a great commentary on how epigenetics is being hyped.

And final reader theorizes about why Wade largely ignores culture:

Apparently Wade has it in his head that culture = easy to change through an implicit logic that if it’s not hard-coded it must be infinitely and immediately mutable. Which is sheer nonsense, of course, but betrays the unscientific bias in his thinking. There’s actually no reason at all to presume that it should be easy to transfer an institution from one society to another given actual institutional behaviors usually depend on a whole accumulation of wider behaviors.

The idea that cultural institutions, which have changed radically over the centuries in those regions, are hard-coded in genes is just kooky. And it’s dangerously self-excusing and deceptive to ascribe inability to easily, in a facile fashion, transfer institutions to genetics. All this is a pity as there is a lot of learning to come from the real – but subtle – influence of genetics in framing human action. That learning is deeply distorted by primitive and fuzzy-minded thinking.

Most of all, though it’s really disappointing to see a science writer for the Times betray the fact he really has a poor grasp of science.

Previous Dish coverage of Wade’s book here.

Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer Gay?

by Matthew Sitman

Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a new biography of the German theologian and pastor killed by the Nazis and a hero to many conservative evangelicals in America, has reviewers asking the question. I can’t say if he meant for this to be a wink and a nod or not, but Timothy Larsen begins by noting Bonhoeffer’s rather fastidious attention to what he wore:

You could illustrate almost every momentous turning point in his life with sartorial commentary. When he takes a pastoral internship in Spain, he bombards the senior minister with written inquiries regarding the proper formal wear for dinner parties. The poor, overworked man eventually remarked sarcastically that the new intern should bring his preaching robe.

Bonhoeffer was thrilled by the writings of Barth, but his confidence in the brilliant theologian was shaken when he first met him and observed that he lacked dress sense. When Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s student and close friend, arrived at his underground seminary, Bonhoeffer was identified as “the sporty dresser.” He even arranged to get his favorite brown suit delivered to him in prison.

About that “close friend”:

Marsh makes a convincing case that Bonhoeffer harbored feelings for Bethge that extended beyond friendship. Those feelings were unrequited, and Bonhoeffer probably did not consciously acknowledge them. Still, Marsh notes, he was possessive and smothering in his attention. He created a joint bank account and sent Christmas cards signed, “Dietrich and Eberhard.”

This turns into a major, recurring theme in Strange Glory. It fascinated me at first, but I grew tired of Marsh directing the camera angle of every scene so as to rather heavy-handedly keep it in view. Particularly regrettable is his decision to describe this relationship using words from Emily Dickinson—”The heart wants what the heart wants”—given the association between the quotation and Woody Allen’s use of it to justify unsavory behavior.

Bonhoeffer, by contrast, was so sexually innocent that I would not assume Athanasius himself surpassed him in this regard. Any such possible desires for Bethge appear sublimated and regulated. Even Bonhoeffer’s physical relationship with his fiancée, Maria—whom Marsh says Bonhoeffer was “smitten” by—comprised only a solitary occasion when, as a prisoner, he kissed her on the cheek in the presence of the public prosecutor. In a late prison letter, Bonhoeffer observed that he had lived a full life even though he would die a virgin.

In a review of the book we flagged last month, John Stackhouse Jr. picked up on the theme as well, remarking, “Marsh defends the chastity of the two men, but one wonders if Marsh might usefully have hinted less and ruminated more.” Meanwhile, after reading Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison – which partly consists of the correspondence between Bonhoeffer and Bethge – Wesley Hill argued last month that the relationship between desire and friendship can be complicated:

What struck me in reading [the Bonhoeffer-Bethge letters], perhaps in contrast to Marsh and Stackhouse’s views, was how unwieldy our categories are—either “homosexual” or “just friends”—when it comes to classifying a relationship as profound as Bonhoeffer and Bethge’s was.

Years after their exchange of letters, and after Bonhoeffer’s death, Bethge fielded a question from a member of an audience who had gathered to hear him speak about his old friend. Surely, the questioner said, “it must [have been] a homosexual partnership” that existed between you and Bonhoeffer—after all, what else could Bonhoeffer’s impassioned letters have signaled? Bethge responded by saying, no, he and Bonhoeffer were “quite normal.” But perhaps an even better response would have been to query that idea of “normal.” Better, perhaps, for Bethge to have explored whether friendship and erotic love might be (in the words of Rowan Williams) “different forms of one passion—the passion for life-giving interconnection.” Pursuing this line of thought might not give us a “celibate gay” Bonhoeffer, but it also might not yield a “just-friends-with-no-hint-of-eros” Bonhoeffer.

Previous Dish on Bonhoeffer here, here and here.

The Humanity Of Evil

by Jessie Roberts

In his book The Master of Confessions, Thierry Cruvellier details his experience as witness to the war crime trial of Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch, the Khmer Rouge leader who oversaw the torture and killing of at least 12,000 people from 1975 to 1979. Philip Gourevitch talked to Cruvellier about the psychology of mass murder:

[Y]ou say that what Duch’s trial revealed to you was … his humanity. You write, “Duch is not a psycho or a monster and that’s the problem.” Why, or for whom, is that a problem?

The humanity of individuals who become mass murderers like Duch is a repulsive notion to many people. I can assure you that the predominant reaction, regardless of social and educational background, is to say that they are not one of us. In fact, many people do not even understand how someone can go and defend them in court. … Refusing Duch as one of us may give us peace of mind. It keeps us in the safe belief that if, God forbid, we happened to face extraordinary historical circumstances we would behave like heroes. But it doesn’t help us better understand how mass crimes develop and succeed through mass participation.

At the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Duch’s victims are presented as victims, which they certainly were. But eighty per cent of them were themselves Khmer Rouge, and if they instead had been asked to be perpetrators the overwhelming majority would have obeyed. To accept that Duch tells us something about ourselves doesn’t mean we accept his crimes, and it doesn’t mean we risk showing him sympathy. It makes us think in more realistic terms about how mass murder operates and how it relies on people like us.

(Image of Duch in November 2009, on the first day of closing statements during his trial, courtesy of Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.)

Why Atheists Need Philosophy

by Matthew Sitman

In the wake of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s rather dismissive comments about philosophy’s usefulness, Rebecca Goldstein defends its enduring value – especially for the non-religious:

Philosophy is important because it’s unavoidable if you want to live a coherent life. To live such a life is to use standards to justify your beliefs and actions; it’s to try to bring as much internal consistency into your various beliefs as possible; it’s to consider which of our seemingly intuitive views about the nature of the world and our place within it are compatible with what science has to tell us, which are incompatible, and which are absolutely necessary.

Now whether one likes it or not, such coherence-making thinking involves one in issues of philosophy. Secularists, in particular, who want to counter the false claim that without God to ground morality there can only be nihilism, should be particularly interested in moral philosophy, since that’s where they’ll find the counter-arguments.

Goldstein goes on to clarify how she views philosophy’s relationship to science:

I think there’s often a misunderstanding about the nature of philosophy. Some seem to think philosophy to be in competition with science in the project of describing reality—in other words, ontology. But that’s not really the proper job of philosophy at all. It can’t, and shouldn’t, compete with science in this domain.

And how does one know this? From good philosophical arguments, that’s how. Science, even in making out its case for ontological superiority, has to rely on philosophy in order to make it coherently. It has to step outside of itself and offer a clear criterion for what makes some description scientific and others not, and offer a defense that its methodology actually gets us closer to knowing reality. It relies on philosophy to render its own claims coherent.

More generally, if you want to know what the role of philosophy is you should think of it more in terms of maximizing our overall coherence—including our internal moral coherence—than in terms of describing reality, as science does.

Also responding to deGrasse Tyson, M. Anthony Mills elaborates on how philosophy and science differ:

[T]he division of labor is not that philosophy is speculative while physics is not; rather, each discipline looks for different kinds of answers. Modern physics can ask speculative questions such as, “When did the universe begin?” or more practical questions such as, “How can we infer the existence of a planet by observing gravitational effects?” In either case, the answers depend on empirical and experimental evidence.

Modern philosophy, by contrast, asks questions such as, “What does it mean to accept the truth of a scientific theory?” Crucially, philosophical answers rely on different forms of evidence: not observations, but sound reasoning. A philosophy of science isn’t a theory alongside scientific theories, but a framework for evaluating such theories.

DeGrasse Tyson is right that such questions are not usually germane to the working scientist. But that doesn’t render them superfluous or counterproductive. Scientific progress not only requires the day-to-day work of “practitioners,” but also those who see the proverbial forest. Revolutionary thinkers break out of accepted paradigms and question received wisdom; they engage in precisely the kind “question-asking” for which deGrasse Tyson would banish philosophy.

Church Sign Of The Day

by Matthew Sitman

Meet the Anglican priest from Australia behind the above sign – just one of his many efforts:

In an age of digital everything, Father Rod serves up his thoughts via an old-style church announcement board, with movable letters — the sort of sign that appeals to your inner guilt as you drive through rural Alabama. And then he lets the internet take over.

Bower’s messages have gone viral on social media. That might be because having a man of the cloth on their side energizes [Australian PM Tony] Abbott’s embattled critics, less than a year after Australians voted him into office. And it might be because of the wit and heft the messages wield in under 50 characters — a length that makes Twitter seem wordy.

When Father Rod speaks, people listen. His parish now has more than 10,000 followers on Facebook and its billboards are seen by hundreds of thousands more via social media. Not bad for a local church.

(Photo from the Anglican Parish of Gosford)

An Artistic Habit

by Jessie Roberts

Whitney Burkhalter sheds light on the medieval artistic tradition called Nonnenarbeiten, or Nuns’ Works:

There is a large body of frankly weird artwork made by medieval nuns, almost all personal devotional drawings or paintings of broken and bloody Jesus, flaming hearts, and the like. To modern eyes, they do look childlike. They’re often disturbing. Something you might have going for you that medieval scholars don’t is that right now you’re probably thinking, Doesn’t all medieval art look childlike and disturbing? Entire websites (and entire scholarly careers) are devoted to bizarre details from medieval manuscripts. It’s called marginalia, which basically means doodles, and it ranges from the bizarre (rocket cats?) to the offensive (for example, nuns picking penises off a penis tree.) … While we don’t really know why some nuns made art like Nonnenarbeiten, there are a lot of theories…. Jeffrey Hamburger is a professor at Harvard who writes beautifully about the conditions medieval nuns lived in, which is called enclosure, and how enclosure may have influenced their artwork. Theories on why Nonnenarbeiten look so strange, even against the background of generally strange medieval art, usually revolve around issues of access and agency acting on the nuns externally, such as their lack of formal artistic training or dialogue with the outside world. Not much consideration is given to what the nuns were thinking or how much of their isolation was self-imposed. For example, a convent in Wienhausen painted their own choir rather than allow men to enter their sanctuary. Hamburger argues that the Nonnenarbeiten style indicates a conscious choice on the part of the nuns to express their devotion in an unconventional yet deeply personal artistic vocabulary. Their art isn’t crude, it’s emotional; it’s not naïve, it’s intentional.

(Image: Liber Divinorum Operum by Hildegard von Bingen via Wikimedia Commons)

Mental Health Break

by Chris Bodenner

A hypnotic soundscape:

STOPCYCLE from ducroz on Vimeo.