Circumstance

"They sure as hell won't ever get fuckin' circumstance." -- Vietnam Vet to Aileen Wuornos in Monster.

If anyone understands circumstance it is Vietnam veterans and prostitutes. We all like to think that we would act honorably and make the "right" decisions under any circumstance. Of course we think this; our culture tells us that consistency of character is proof of character. That, and if we didn't believe that our narrative of self was stable - past, present and future - we would live in a world of chaos, anarchy, and failed human relationships.

But we forget that the "self" relies on society's rules and norms for its stability. Society tells us what is right, what is noble, what to be and what to do. When society deserts us - as in the case of the Vietnam veteran, left alone in a world of moral chaos and violence - stability of character crumbles.

I quote an anonymous veteran in Jonathan Shay's Achilles In Vietnam (which everyone should read):

Well, at first, I mean when i just come there, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I couldn't believe Americans could do things like that to another human being...but then I became that. We went through villages and killed everything, I mean everything, and that was all right with me. (p.31)

Contrast this with another veteran's circumstance:

I was just lucky, that's all. There were never, never any civilians up where I was.... We did some horrible, horrible things to NVA--but they were soldiers.... Killing babies, young girls, I would have killed an American I seen raping a nine-year-old girl without giving it a moment's thought. But where we were in the A Shau, there just weren't any [civilians]. (p. 31)

Two soldiers, most likely from similar backgrounds and certainly from the same society, have completely different outlooks on violence in combat due entirely to their circumstance. Shay calls the "luck" referred to by the second veteran as "moral luck".

In Western culture we are taught that self-respect and the esteem of others is dependent on "firmness of character". Shay writes:

Many popular melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. A permanent challenge of working with those injured by combat trauma is facing the painful awareness that in all likelihood one's own character would not have stood firm. Merely allowing ourselves to hear the combat veteran's story threatens our culturally defined sense of self-respect. We have powerful motives not to listen to the veteran's story, or to deny its truth. (pp. 31-32)

I could engage Shay's text endlessly, but I want to point to the meaning this has for psychology: Our brain was developed to adapt to circumstance, and our brain/body's interaction with circumstance is the reality of the nature/nurture debate. I object to the word "environment" after adolescence, because while it is an adequate term for the group of circumstances in which we are raised (and therefore come to define as "normal", no matter how fucked up), it is not an appropriate term for the situations and stresses that we face as adults. Veteran A was technically in the same "environment" as Veteran B. But the circumstances he faced were completely different.

Circumstance is not only "what is actually going on". It is our interpretation of it. We must process what is going on in terms of our life narrative and societal expectations. Well now, I suppose environment could be seen as one step further than circumstance...see my little diagram-wanna-be below. But either way, circumstance involves not just what happens to us, but how we fit that into our global (moral) understanding of life. The reason Vietnam was so horrible for the vets was that it obliterated their sense of the world. Thus the hyper-vulnerability to combat PTSD. When you're no longer tied to right and wrong (society) the only person you care about is yourself and maybe one combat buddy. Your social world shrinks with the reliability of the world around you. Which was true for the vets just before the "berserk" state. (Seriously, read the book.)

And while I'm on the topic, I must add that there IS no nature/nurture debate. It is ALWAYS both. You can argue how much is one vs. the other, but that's kind of like arguing whether a guy crashes his car because he's drunk or because the telephone pole was in front of him. Silly.

Gene activation/Protein production<-- --> Biology (structure of the brain) <-- --> Cognition <-- --> Circumstance <-- --> Environment (?)

Combat PTSD seems to (and I would bet it will be proven in the next five years) change the brain (hopefully semi-) permanently. Whether this is a chemical or structural change has yet to be seen. But either way: cognitive appraisal of the circumstance the environment has presented changes the biology of the person, which will inevitably affect the protein production, which affects which genes are dormant/active.

In other words, circumstance is integral not only to the "self" and the consistency of that self in terms of societal expectations, but also to the entire organism. We physically adapt to our world.

Psychology focuses far too much on what happens inside the body, acting as though the "environment" is objective. Cognitive psychology tries to fix this by worrying about how we "see" things. But it also plays into our culture's notion that the environment is there and someone of good character will interpret that environment properly. For example: depression is improper interpretation.

The bio-psychologists focus on depression IN the brain. Cog-psychologists focus on depression as a product OF the brain. As per usual, both are right and both are wrong...but neither is aware of culture's role in telling us what our character should make of the circumstance. What we should be is as important to us as what is. The anthropologists only focus on this cultural role in our world-view...but I'll save a rant on anthropology for another day.

So what have we learned today kids? We are lucky to be good people.