PTSD: Your Brain on Moral Relativism

Posttraumatic stress disorder, according to the VA, is “a mental health problem that some people develop after experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event, like combat, a natural disaster, a car accident, or sexual assault.” NIMH describes it as a fight-or-flight that doesn’t go away.

About 5 million people are diagnosed with PTSD in the US each year. If you are reading this, you probably know somebody with it. And if you are close with them, you’ve seen the pains and struggles PTSD causes.

But why does it happen? Why do some people get it and not others?

And why am I talking about it, anyway?

This is, admittedly, not the sort of thing I write about often. However, as something that my wife and I have wrestled with and have spent years working through together, it's actually a topic near and dear to my heart.

Hence my excitement when I heard it being discussed recently on the Rubin Report.

The Rubin Report, one of the shows I regularly enjoy for its open political and social commentary, recently hosted Dr. Jordan Peterson. Dr. Peterson, who has more recently come under the limelight for his outspoken views on free speech, is a renown clinical psychologist. So while the interview was primarily on the topic of free speech (the whole thing was very good and I’d recommend you watch it on Rubin's YT channel), the part I found most intriguing was his brief explanation of PTSD.

In his research on the subject, Dr. Peterson has found that PTSD is, at its core, an inability to separate good from evil.

Now, this I found particularly interesting because Dr. Peterson is (in as far as I’ve gathered) an atheist. And while I know some would claim otherwise, it is very difficult (many philosophers would argue impossible) to have a strict, robust categorization of good and evil in a naturalistic worldview.

But that, as it turns out, is something that we desperately need. And people who do not have a philosophy that allows them to functionally divide things into clear buckets of good and evil are more likely to develop PTSD and are less likely to recover from it.

Let me offer a few examples…

A man from a well-adjusted home joins the military. His first time in combat, he kills someone in a particular gruesome way. And, to his horror, he loves it. But how could he, the morally outstanding person that he is, possibly find such pleasure in the suffering of someone else? Something inside him breaks.
A young woman rejects a man in college. The man bullies and intimidates her. She is a bit naïve, and something of a humanist. Her worldview isn’t structured to accept that a routine, run-of-the-mill human being could respond to something so simple with such spite and malice. So, something inside her breaks.
A boy is physically abused by his father. His mother is aware, but does nothing. Because the abuse is coming from those meant to protect him, because these evil activities are coming from those who are inherently the highest good in his eyes, his mind doesn’t know how to process it. Something inside him breaks.

You see, as humans, we need to be able to point to something and say THAT is evil. It’s a psychological necessity. And so we need a philosophical framework that supports it.

Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of where our culture has moved. We live in a day of moral relativism, where the greatest evil is to call something else evil. Objective truth has been replaced with personal opinion. Feelings matter more than facts.

This is where Christianity has something to offer that our world desperately needs.

To a society that says there are many truths, Jesus says “I am the truth.” To a society that says there are many ways, Jesus says “I am the way.” To a society that says to do whatever makes you happy in life, Jesus says “I am the life.”

Now, you can get there other ways. I’m not saying that Christianity is the only worldview with a robust moral framework. I’m also not saying that the fact that it meets a human need makes it true.

But if the shoe fits…

"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" - Isaiah 5:20