Today I’d like to share with you an example of the importance of getting the words right. The language we use is immensely consequential in not just how we think about real-world issues, but also how we handle those issues as a society: how much money is allocated, what kind of care people receive, and other important effects.

Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., exposes the faulty language we use surrounding trauma, and then he makes a fascinating argument for a change in the language—with a corresponding change in people’s decisions and actions.

(Note that this blog post is a brief synopsis of and commentary on a long and complicated expostulation. I encourage you to read The Body Keeps the Score to understand and appreciate Dr. van der Kolk’s full evidence and argument.)

Dr. van der Kolk argues that, over the past century or so, there has been a cover-up surrounding the scientifically demonstrated fact that abused children experience detrimental psychological effects. Moreover, he explains, these detrimental psychological effects are not random; there is what he calls a “consistent profile,” which he describes in detail. Not all abused children exhibit the same symptoms (just as, for example, people can experience different symptoms despite being infected by the same virus). However, such children have commonalities such as trouble regulating emotions, trouble concentrating, trouble getting along with others, sleep disturbances, unexplained pain, and doing things like rocking and cutting to relieve tension.

But, Dr. van der Kolk laments, there is no established diagnosis for this consistent profile. Instead, children are being given multiple diagnoses that describe symptoms, not the underlying cause. For instance, many children are being labeled as having “oppositional defiant disorder” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder.” As a result, children who desperately need care that addresses trauma are instead receiving care that addresses bad behavior. Such care, since it does not focus on the core problem, does not come close to resolving the core problem.

How did we get ourselves into this predicament of language? Why has there been a cover-up surrounding childhood trauma? Dr. van der Kolk takes us back to the time of Sigmund Freud:

“In 1896 Freud boldly claimed that ‘the ultimate cause of hysteria is always the seduction of the child by an adult.’ Then, faced with his own evidence of an epidemic of abuse in the best families of Vienna—one, he noted, that would implicate his own father—he quickly began to retreat. Psychoanalysis shifted to an emphasis on unconscious wishes and fantasies, though Freud occasionally kept acknowledging the reality of sexual abuse.”

It’s a hard topic. It’s not a great issue to talk about, politically speaking. What would you rather give a public speech on, child abuse or unconscious wishes?

But Dr. van der Kolk gives the reader hope with his historical analysis of another kind of trauma, today known as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. When governments came to realize that fighting in WWI caused “shell shock,” they worked to hide this fact. Publicizing shell shock would cost money (soldiers experiencing it would need treatment and disability pay) and destabilize the war effort (governments wanted to encourage men to enlist, not emphasize war’s dangers). So WWI veterans were not treated for shell shock. Neither were WWII veterans. The politics during the Vietnam War era, however, were different; and a new diagnosis, PTSD, entered the books and the lexicon. Along with this new language to describe a medical condition came new awareness, treatments, and funding.

There was another huge benefit of the language change. As it turned out, veterans were not the only ones who had this medical condition:

“The adoption of the PTSD diagnosis by the DSM III in 1980 led to extensive scientific studies and to the development of effective treatments, which turned out to be relevant not only to combat veterans but also to victims of a range of traumatic events, including rape, assault, and motor vehicle accidents.”

Dr. van der Kolk argues that we are overdue for a language change in the realm of child abuse. He proposes the term Developmental Trauma Disorder. I am not a doctor and cannot comment on his suggestion with authority. However, I can comment with authority that I have read over and over about falsehoods told for political purposes. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of the fake news. If there is a problem and a solution, let’s name the problem in plain language and implement the solution. Covering up the problem and addressing symptoms never works over the long term. The doctor says it best:

“You would not want to have your appendix removed when you are suffering from a kidney stone, and you would not want to have somebody labeled as ‘oppositional’ when, in fact, his behavior is rooted in an attempt to protect himself against real danger.”

Do you fight for truth in language . . . despite the risk that someone will label you as “oppositional”?

In addition to having a delightful plot, The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt, being a historical novel, has delightful references to the era in question: the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century. And being a specific kind of historical novel—a Western—it contains all the traditional elements of that genre.

If you enjoy reading about gunfights and duels, forlorn towns in the wilderness, panning for gold, covered wagons, the gain and loss of huge piles of precious metals, horses, bears, tough guys, and whores—this book is for you.

But this book is also for you if you enjoy a hearty side of quirk with your traditional fare. deWitt displays real brilliance in creating interesting and unique characters whom you’re not sure whether to love or hate.

One of my favorite bits of quirk in the novel is the recurrence of scenes in which different characters get extraordinary joy from brushing their teeth with the different flavors of tooth powder newly available in local general stores. Tooth brushing was, at one time, a novel thing. Perhaps people of the future will roll their eyes at the thought of people in the past getting so much joy from their primitive phone apps; who knows?

By the way, it looks like the promised motion picture was released in theaters last October and on disc and streaming last month. Have you seen it? What did you think? Looks like it got pretty good reviews. Has anyone seen the movie and read the book? What similarities or differences did you notice? (I read the film description and noticed one difference: the brothers’ birth order.)

What do Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College (known as the “This Is Water” speech) have in common?

Both of these famous philosophies, according to Matthew B. Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head, are faulty—and for the same reason.

It’s a bold claim. Crawford attempts to topple two towering figures of Western culture and thought in one fell swoop! So let’s back up a sec and analyze what Kant’s and Wallace’s philosophies, in these instances, are. Then we can delve into why Crawford thinks they are wrong.

Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Freedom

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher famous for a philosophy called the categorical imperative. He states that morality exists beyond the realm of the everyday world, and can be derived through reason alone. The moral law, he says, is categorically (“unconditionally”) imperative (“crucial and essential”).

Crawford points out that Kant held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world:

“Kant builds a high wall between the empirical world and the purely intellectual, where we discover a priori moral laws. Reasons to act must come only from the latter if we are to be free, and the will is to remain pure, ‘unconditioned’ by anything external to it. . . . To be rational is, for Kant, precisely not to be situated in the world.”

David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” Commencement Speech

As those who know me well know, I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). Infinite Jest was well worth the struggle to read. I have also enjoyed and marveled at the brilliance of many of his other works, fictional and nonfictional. However, I was distinctly unimpressed by his work—for the only time ever—when encountering, ten years ago, the commencement speech he delivered on May 21, 2005: and for the same reasons Crawford cites.

Even ten years later—and I remember it very well: it was exactly ten years ago, give or take a few months, when my boss (at the time) printed the speech and gave it to me, as a benefactory gesture, an offering* of moral guidance from mentor to mentee, and which I duly read, but did not duly (oops) compliment, nor, however, criticize, because, after all, who criticizes David Foster Wallace?!!

But I seem to have gotten off track. As I was saying, even ten years later, I distinctly remember the bit in the speech about the annoyance of grocery shopping. Wallace opines that if you are engaged in one of the many frustrating activities of modern life—such as grocery shopping, after a long day at work, in an ugly and crowded supermarket, when all you want to do is go home and rest, but everything is annoying and taking too long, etc.—that you should remember that you can always control what you are thinking.

Here’s what Crawford has to say about this:

“Wallace’s core suggestion in the speech is that ‘you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.’ . . . His solution is thus emblematic of the problem we are addressing in this book: we have an uncertain grasp of the world as something with a reality of its own.”

In other words, Wallace, in this speech, held a mind thinking rationally, in an ideal state, in far higher esteem than a mind grappling with the way things are in the messy, real world.

Matthew B. Crawford’s Praise of the World Beyond Your Head

I believe in the power of the mind, thinking rationally; but I also concur with Crawford that thinking in an idealized bubble is not enough. There’s a real world to contend with out there! If the deep, rational thinkers aren’t up for working to make a difference . . . whom does that leave?

Crawford titled his book The World Beyond Your Head. His thesis is that we should work to apply our minds to real things, in the real world, despite the many powers that be and cultural conceptions guiding us in less grounded—and more illusory—directions. This quote of his is buried in a footnote, but it’s one of my favorites in the whole book:

“Wisdom is impossible without biography.”

The mind is not an empty shopping cart, hovering in an imaginary space. It has a history. It has been filled and emptied a bit, filled a lot more and emptied a bit more. It has traveled the aisles again and again and again. It has been knocked around quite a lot, but it keeps going. It keeps moving. It keeps engaging. And the more it moves and engages, the fuller it becomes.

With what real-world activities will you fill your cart today, this week, next year?

*I thought I'd throw a footnote in here, just for good measure. (RIP DFW.)

Despite the immense and unprecedented power of Google, there are some things it just can’t do. It can overwhelm one with information on a vast variety of topics, and yet it remains eerily silent on others.

The Internet can only tell us what we, collectively, already know. And we know much more about the present than we do about the past. When it comes to the past, all we can do is peep back into whatever scant historical documents and bits of evidence exist, make educated guesses, and imagine. Perhaps computaz don’t really rule over so much, after all.

When reading historical and anthropological books like Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston, I often feel a yearning to know more. What exactly did Cudjo/Kossula’s African village look like? Did it look anything like this photo of mud huts in Ghana? Barracoon doesn’t give as many details as I crave. And I know from experience that, no matter how many university libraries one visits, how many obscure texts one reads, and how many answers one delights in finding, there will always remain unanswered questions.

Do you, like me, feel the urge to know more when reading this passage?

“Dey got de women soldiers too and dey run wid de big knife and make noise. Dey ketch people and dey saw de neck lak dis wid de knife den dey twist de head so and it come off de neck. Oh Lor’, Lor’! . . . No man kin be so strong lak de woman soldiers from de Dahomey.”

Whoa, women warriors? Please tell me more. How did they train? What kinds of weapons did they use? What did they wear while fighting? Were most women from Dahomey trained as warriors, or just a select few of them? Were they anything like the Amazons, as described in Greek mythology? Were they anything like Katniss, from The Hunger Games? I’m sure I could learn a lot from Google about women warriors, were I to do a search. I’m sure I could learn even more, were I to scour through library stacks. And yet, I’m also sure that many mysteries would remain.

What secrets of the past would you uncover, if you could?

The author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston could not find a publisher for her book Barracoon that did not want her to make extensive changes to the manuscript (as I mentioned in my last blog post), and so her book was not released until 50+ years after her death, 80+ years after it was written.

The cause of the disagreement between Hurston and the publisher was that Hurston had written the story of Cudjo/Kossula in dialect. That is, she had transcribed his words as he spoke them (as an anthropologist concerned with preserving the speaker’s voice), instead of “translating” his words to “proper” English (as an author concerned with reaching a wide audience). The former style is more accurate; the latter style is easier to read.

I remember reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time—as a former high school English teacher, I have read it many times—and experiencing confusion and frustration when encountering Mark Twain’s rendering of the character Jim’s speech. I must have been halfway through the book before it finally dawned on me that chile meant “child” pronounced without the “d” sound. I kept reading it as “chili” (meat and beans in a bowl) or “chili” (a hot pepper) or “Chile” (the country) . . . none of which, needless to say, made any sense.

When I read Barracoon, I had no trouble with Hurston’s rendering of Cudjo/Kossula’s speech. I very much enjoyed reading the story in dialect, and I concur with her instincts to tell his story that way.* Then again, I am an experienced reader with two degrees in English. I wonder how well I would have been able to follow the story had I read it in my teens, or not pursued English degrees.

I am curious what you think about the following passage. Here Cudjo/Kossula describes his life as a 19-year-old, just before his town was raided and he was captured:

“I stand round de place where de chief talk wid de wise men. I hope dey see Cudjo and think he a grown man. Maybe dey call me to de council. De fathers doan never call me but I likee very much to be dere and lissen when dey talk. . . . I likee go in de market place too and see de pretty gals wid de gold bracelets on de arm from de hand to de elbow. Oh, dey look very fine to Cudjo when dey walkee dey sling de arm so and de bracelet ring. I lak hear dat—it sound so pretty.”

How easy or difficult did you think that passage was to read? What do you think about books that make extensive use of dialect?

*In full disclosure, I made a similar decision when writing my unpublished novel The Water-Creatures . . . and may well face the same consequences as Hurston . . . if not worse.