Moral Injury?

Can a nation suffer moral injury? I recently read an editorial with this title. James Childs, the author of the editorial, teaches at Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capitol University in Columbus, Ohio. Apparently, he’s familiar with the field of moral injury as applied to combat veterans. The Defense Department describes moral injury as an extreme and unprecedented life experience that transgresses deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.

A combat veteran of the second Iraqi war illustrates a sense of moral injury: “Moral injury describes my disillusionment, the erosion of my sense of place in the world. The spiritual and emotional foundations of the world disappeared and made it impossible for me to sleep the sleep of the just … I have a feeling of intense betrayal, and the betrayer and the betrayed are the same person, my very self… What I lost in the Iraq war was a world that makes moral sense.”

Childs cautiously believes a sense of moral injury can be applicable to a nation. First, one can argue that our nation does have a set of common core values that embodies our communal spirit. He wonders whether the words of Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, describe our discontent:

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold….
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

He then quotes Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who suggests three reasons for concluding things are falling apart: “One is a belief that the traditional elites whom the public has long trusted to lead them lack the will and the capacity to act in their nation’s best interest. The second is a series of economic developments that have fallen with particular severity on those Americans with less than a college education. The third is a shift in values and norms of behavior that have liberated many but that threaten others and are at war with deeply held convictions of many. Chasm-like differences in values separate people with shared economic interests.”

Second, Childs points out that even in a democracy an elite is responsible for governing. He believes that we entrust our government to put into effect the ideals and values that represent the nation’s communal spirit. And here he makes an important point: as individual citizens we are not guilty when the governing elite violate our ideals, but we share in that guilt as a community. When our ruling elite no longer enacts our communal spirit, we have indeed lost our center. Childs counts, as examples of leader betrayals, the Vietnam war, Watergate, the second Iraq war, and the events that led to the Great Recession. He believes in all these cases the governing ruling elite betrayed the nation’s trust due to their complicity and dishonesty.

Because Childs believes because we are responsible for our support of our government “we can as a national community feel a deep sense of shame for being part of something that is not us; we can lose our soul…. Shame is a deep sense of having lost or losing the spiritual core of those symbols that define our national identity and in which we take both pride and refuge.” Childs realizes that not all will share his view, but he thinks this describes our current condition.

Almost like Luther nailing a list to a door, Childs lists his charges:

• We now have an administration that has de facto given racists a legitimate voice in our public life.
• The draconian approach we have taken to immigration (not just the issue of border control) belies both the ideal of welcoming inscribed on the Statute of Liberty but also the biblical demand to welcome the stranger. Moreover, our view on immigration is at least tainted by racist impulses.
• Much of the rhetoric and actions of the governing minority are based on fear. We fear those who are culturally diverse will adversely change our American way.
• Although the most powerful nation on earth, we fear we are being treated unfairly so we retreat into national security rather than exercise leadership for a more just and freer world.
• The aspiration of creating a more just and freer world may no longer exist because of our president’s moves to become to be closer to leaders who represent the opposite and move further away from friends who have shared many of our traditional values.

How can we be a beacon of hope for others who suffer oppression and privation if we operate based on fear and self-preservation? How can we inspire trust, when truth and falsehood have become almost indistinguishable?

Comment
Childs’ editorial put a chill into me because the thought of a nation suffering moral injury never entered my mind. However, I sense that many in this country may border on or are suffering moral injury. Little do I doubt that many possess a sense of betrayal. Perhaps anger and a sense of not belonging are the consequences of moral injury. Perhaps moral injury resides equally in two distinct segments of the population. Or perhaps moral injury dominates more one side than the other.

Yet, as Childs does point out, one cannot suffer moral injury unless one possesses a moral core that can be susceptible to injury. Thus, if this nation does have a sense of moral injury it must be related to a communal spirit. A communal spirit expressed in laws, institutions, symbols and myths inherent to our culture. If so, this communal spirit probably needs to be long-standing and deep. It seems to me that it cannot be relatively new or superficial. Believing that the ruling or governing minority has betrayed one’s individual values or priorities in a collective sense seems not enough to produce moral injury. The values and priorities betrayed must be inherent in the nation’s communal spirit.

Yet if a significant portion of this country is sensing moral injury in this way, how does healing occur? Would the actions taken to help soldiers suffering moral injury work for a nation? Childs’ answer in part calls for the restructuring of the public discussion so that it is based hope, not fear. Further, as a Christian he suggests a need to recognize the notion of neighborly love and the equality of all persons.

This seems like an appropriate healing response. But it would take multiple leaders authentically enacting rather continually a public dialogue of hope, not fear, and having the courage to articulate publicly the importance of believing in and treating all persons as having equal dignity. To me, this is not right around the corner, unfortunately.