PTSD and the fallacy of the universal man
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From the great historian David Hackett Fischer’s 1970 book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought:
The fallacy of the universal man falsely assumes that people are intellectually and psychologically the same in all times, places, and circumstances. It is an error which has ruined the designs of innumerable utopians, revolutionaries, schematizers, prophets, preachers, psychiatrists, mystics, cranks, and social scientists of [every] shape and hue. Every unitary solution, without exception, which has ever been proposed as a panacea for the hopes and misfortunes of mankind, has been fatally flawed by this fundamental fallacy.
People, in various places and times, have not merely thought different things. They have thought them differently. It is probable that their most fundamental cerebral processes have changed through time. Their deepest emotional drives and desires may themselves have been transformed. Significant elements of continuity cannot be understood without a sense of the discontinuities, too.
Fischer supplies examples from the Enlightenment—a period particularly prone to this error, bent as the philosophes were on discovering the universally applicable laws of everything—as well as, more specifically, the twentieth century historiography of American slavery. Fischer credits the spread of the fallacy of the universal man to
two hopeful tendencies in the modern world. The first is a powerful reaction against the fatal fallacy of racism. The repudiation of this bloody error by most historians, and many others, is surely cause for rejoicing. But some have overreacted and insufficiently allowed for the existence of cultural differences among men.
The fruits of this fallacy, fifty years on from Fischer’s book, are manifest in popular understandings—or misunderstandings—of history. I find a great deal of my effort in the classroom, semester after semester, goes into making students understand that people in the past weren’t just like them, modern people in funny clothes. They react with blank incomprehension to ancient or medieval people and well-rehearsed outrage to more recent subjects.
Or, in the best possible scenario, genuine curiosity and openness to the strange. I have had many veterans in my classes over the years, and they are always interested in my background as a military historian. One question that comes up repeatedly is the history of PTSD, previously known as combat fatigue, previously known as shell-shock, and before that?
I recall a conversation I had with a student almost a decade ago. The subject was George Washington. In my lecture that day I had given a thumbnail character sketch of Washington, mentioning specifically his lifelong project of total self-control, particularly with regard to his explosive temper. This student, a combat camera veteran of Iraq, asked me after class if Washington’s temper could have been PTSD-related, as one of the vast constellation of potential PTSD symptoms is uncontrollable rage. A good question.
My answer, in short, was that I didn’t think so. Washington’s effort to control his temper was lifelong, rather than resulting from his war experiences, and, on a broader historical level, there’s just not that much evidence for PTSD in that period.
Here we butt up against that vast cultural gulf yawning between us and Washington. Per Alexander Rose, writing about the men who fought at Bunker Hill in his excellent book Men of War:
[T]here was no inkling of combat stress, shell shock, or what would later be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), since eighteenth-century soldiers lacked much of what we might term psychiatric self-awareness. . . . [T]roops simply did not understand what happened to them in war in the same way as those born in later centuries. . . .
Much of what we can gather from their diaries and letters, British and American alike, is an uncomplaining acceptance of death, hardship, and scarcity—not surprising given their routine experiences of cold, hunger, pain, sickness, and cruelty even during peacetime. Jarring to today’s sensibilities is the soldiers’ propensity to list in the most matter-of-fact way the whereabouts and number of their wounds while remaining silent as to the suffering that accompanied them. The pension applications that they submitted many decades later accordingly restrict themselves to citing, say, an elbow or knee that has been “troublesome” since the battle or a shoulder injury that has prevented them from working. There is never a hint of self-pity.
Rose goes on in his book to contrast this generation of American soldiers with those of the Civil War and World War II. These are conflicts in which you do get incidents of what is clearly PTSD, and, notably, conflicts fought by generations divided from Washington by the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements on the one hand and the late-Victorian and Progressive eras of domesticity, government nurture, and the closing of the frontier on the other. Cultural changes.
To return to George Washington, here’s the twenty-two year old Washington writing to his brother after his first battle, the ambush that started the French and Indian War:
I fortunately escaped without a wound, tho’ the right Wing where I stood was exposed to & received all the Enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed & the rest wounded. I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.
Being shot at in a wilderness ambush is, for Washington, “charming.” Compare the twenty-five year old Winston Churchill, for whom “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Not only are there people who can tolerate war as another of the dangers they’ve already faced in life, there are people who enjoy it.
Perhaps Washington and Churchill are just putting up a front here, trying to look tough because of some kind of expectation of manliness? That’s a common enough spin and, strictly speaking, possible. But look at the game you’ve already begun to play with the sources, and look at how much of yourself you’re infusing into them.
A simpler answer—and I think the correct one—is that Washington and Churchill saw, experienced, and understood the world utterly differently from us, with utterly different results. Our categories, theories, and pathologies do not adequately explain them or, worse, distort them.
The solution is to try to get outside ourselves, reach across that gulf, and understand them on their own terms—from the inside, as I’ve mentioned here before. Or, to put it in the succinct expression of LP Hartley, a shopworn but dependable quotation with which I begin every class I teach:
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
For most of the students with whom I’ve had the Washington-PTSD conversation, I can see that this makes sense to them. The lightbulb comes on—visibly, if not literally. A mystery has been solved for them and new ones beckon. They suddenly grasp not only Washington but something of themselves, thanks to the perspective history can offer. It’s why I enjoy these conversations and have benefited from them so much myself.
But there’s a negative alternative, which is embracing the fallacy of the universal man—all people everywhere are the same. The result, if you operate long enough and stubbornly enough under the assumptions of the fallacy, is that you see anyone who differs substantially from you as either deluded or wicked. And most people today assume the latter.
Hence the hunt for the ulterior motive behind everything. The Greeks excluded women from the Olympics because they were bad, not because of their religious customs. The Romans fought their enemies because they were greedy and mean, not because of an ever-shifting pragmatic policy of alliance and defense. And medieval Christians couldn’t have been sincere about all that Church stuff; it had to be about something else—power, wealth, sex, the control of women, whatever. Fischer describes this approach as “the furtive fallacy,” a hermeneutic of suspicion whose results, well…
Look around.
