Europe: a conjecture

The World Wars were fought long ago.  But it is worth thinking about the fact that many of the folks who fought in World War 1 came back severely traumatized.  We knew nothing about the physiology and psychology of trauma back then, other than that some people went into “shell shock”.  What is obvious now is that there were countless cases of subclinical PTSD, people who did not go into collapse, but who were not well, and were broken by their experiences.  These people raised children, in France and in Germany and elsewhere.

If you were 20 in 1918, and had kids at 21, then they were 21 in 1940.  Traumatized fathers (and mothers, since the war was hard on the home front too) raised kids who were likewise traumatized.  Such fathers do not process emotions correctly.  They fly into rages over the smallest things.  They are often emotionally absent.  The one thing they are not, in most cases, is nurturing.  The collective trauma in Germany–and I mean clinical trauma–was likely a key factor in the rise of Nazism. 

Totalitarianism is a system well suited to people unable to form an independent sense of agency, of personal control.

And post World War 2 everybody emerged from the aftermath, from the bombings the atrocities, the famines, the mass death, with MORE trauma.  Germany did not recover emotionally overnight.  France did not recover emotionally overnight.

And these people had children, and these are the people now running Europe.  Angela Merkel was born in 1954, as was Francois Hollande.  They were born into a world which had recently been filled with smoke, the smell of gunpowder, screams, terror, death and ruin.  Everywhere ruin.

Trauma tends to push people into one of two directions: absolute slavishness and obsessive compliance, or into hypervigilence and continual fear and bouts of rage.

Here is my conjecture (I am not sure how to elevate it to an hypothesis): Europe, as a result of its scars, has become hypovigilent.  They are not scared enough.  They have not retained a healthy sense of boundaries, of national sanctity.  They are complacent.  This is perhaps the root psychology behind what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism.

It is an odd thing: nations go to war, but how do the members of those nations heal their wounds? I am increasingly persuaded that while personal healing is obviously extremely important, there is a meta-level in which nations, or groupings which are culturally uniform enough to be bonded together somehow, also need to process shared grief and shame and rage, and horror.

We are old enough as a species to begin speaking intelligently about these things, to begin acting in healthy and non-compulsive ways.  We do not need to simply watch the Iranians build ballistic missiles with only one possible purpose.  We do not need to pretend that “radical” Islam is always the exception, and pretend that the masses of military aged men that have been allowed in do not present an existential threat to the congenial ways of life the Europeans have evolved after millenia of development.