After a period of relative calm, here we are again at the precipice. The coming midterm elections have left many of us fearing yet another national meltdown. The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg sums up these anxieties in the headline “What if Every Moment Since Jan. 6 Was Just the Calm Before the Storm?” The air is charged with toxic bitterness and the existential dread of those who anticipate a deepening erosion of human rights and bedrock civic norms.
Supreme Court decisions aside, it feels like we’ve only had a few moments to enjoy a bit of breathing room as Covid beats a sustained retreat. Yet no one who lived through the pandemic has been left unscathed. For the luckiest, it was two years of social isolation and boredom interspersed with annoying inconveniences. For the less fortunate there was illness, heartbreak, death, and despair. On a societal level, there remains a profound sense of vulnerability to catastrophes — both far and wide — on par with apocalyptic Hollywood blockbusters.
We’re All Exhausted
These destabilizing events are not only experienced individually, but also as a collective wound at a societal level. Sociologists refer to the effects of highly distressing group experiences like a pandemic or political chaos as cultural trauma. In my forthcoming book, Daddy, I question whether cultural trauma — in the form of misogyny and the drafting of psychologically ill-equipped young men to wage war — played a role in my parents murder-suicide. According to Professor of Sociology Ron Eyerman, cultural trauma is experienced as a collective memory that is both shaped and defined in the public sphere. What gives these recollections their malignant potency is the fact that people identify these collective memories with their core sense of self. Take for example the Vietnam veteran who may feel devalued by society for their service in a deeply unpopular war. In that sense, the cultural trauma of the war informs a potential internal sense of shame experienced by the individual.
An intrinsic feature of cultural trauma is the process of change. Trauma necessarily implies a change from one set of circumstances to another. How we interpret these changes — on an individual and collective level — determines whether or not an event is experienced as traumatic. Understanding that our collective conceptualization of change is not static — and has been radically redefined over the past two-hundred years — helps in some ways to explain the queasy state of vertigo we experience when turning on the evening news these days.
According to sociology professor Piotr Sztompka, the process of change has historically been conceptualized in three ways:
Throughout the 19th century, change was defined as progress. The march of technological advancement was believed to lead us to ever-greater levels of modernity. Change was synonymous with optimization, greater ease, and less friction.
Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, change was identified with a state of crisis. Think ecological disaster, political deadlock, and the fight for Civil Rights.
Over the first quarter of the 21st century, change has become associated with the psychological construct of trauma. The changes associated with realities of Covid-19 were no doubt experienced as traumatic. On both the Left and the Right, socio-political change — or anticipated change — now feels akin to some of life’s most distressing events.
Both Political Parties are in Pain
According to Dr. Sztompka, a significant consequence of cultural trauma is something called cultural disorientation. Cultural disorientation is characterized by a “blow to the very central assumptions to the culture in the wake of a great social change… When the socialized, internalized culture that [a person carries] in their heads… clashes with the cultural environment they find themselves in.”
Like many people in their fifties, I am a product of a family who embodied the idea of change as progress. My grandparents went from the Model T to the moon landing — they witnessed a complete transformation of the world. Growing up in the immediate wake of the Boomer generation, my thinking was also shaped by progressive thought. As such, progress was not only defined by the development of technology, it was also a matter of a certain type of social progress — one that’s defined by ever-greater levels of equality for those who had been oppressed by the straight, white male power structure. For those “well-meaning” liberals like myself who believe the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, change today means being trapped in what appears to be a contracting moral universe. We’re feeling traumatized by the sudden change of central cultural assumptions like the peaceful transfer of power and working toward a more just collective good.
The downstream effects of cultural trauma and cultural disorientation is the infliction of a secondary trauma. That means that cultural trauma often begets more cultural trauma — and more cultural disorientation. This is just a collective cousin of the cycle of abuse many families experience. As such, change as defined by progressives results in cultural disorientation for Trump loyalists. “Making America Great Again” means more cultural trauma for Blue America. Like two mirrors reflecting back on one another, our collective traumas collide, fragmenting into a kaleidoscope of cascading shocks and horrors. Where do we go from here?