Adding moral insult to moral injury

Frontispiece by John Payne, from The Mirrour Which Flatters Not. Dedicated to their Maiesties of Great Britaine, by Le Sieur de la Serre, Historiographer of France. Enriched with faire Figures (1639), a collection of poems by Jean Puget de La Serre, translated into English by Thomas Carey, via The Memory Cathedral.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Moral Injury", New York Times, February 17 2015:

I have no idea what those unfortunate veterans were getting up to in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it must have been pretty awful, because a pervasive feature of PTSD is the feeling of guilt. Our decadent culture offers the morally tainted sufferers a "thank you for your service" and therapy, but what we should really be giving them is a moral reckoning (merciful, of course), rigorous philosophical autobiography, and nuanced judgment.

Oh, that Brooksian ruling-class "we"!

You know who could really use a rigorous philosophical autobiography? The people who eagerly sent our soldiers and sailors and marines into moral harm's way, and the journalistic cheerleading squad that whooped them forward, including, obviously, Mr. David Brooks. The veterans are already hurting like hell, they don't need any further chastening (that includes, if any Brooks fans in the White House need to know, drone operators thousands of miles away from where the bombs drop). Also, they were "obeying orders" as the saying goes.

Where are the autobiographies of those who gave the orders? Not exactly rigorous. Brooks himself, of course, was telling us just a year ago, as it happens, about how periodical essayists should not be wallowing in their personal experience and devoting their time to self-analysis like the "liberal" Michel de Montaigne but look outwards to inflict their judgments on others, like the fictional conservative Dr. Johnson he invented for the piece, being as usual too lazy to determine the real Johnson's views.

I just saw something fascinating, on the subject of drone pilots suffering from PTSD, from Robbie Gonzalez at io9 and referencing an article of October 2013 by Michael Powell for GQ:

(Chillingly, to mitigate these effects, researchers have proposed creating a Siri-like user interface, a virtual copilot that anthropomorphizes the drone and lets crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.)

Physical distance, you see, doesn't insulate people from the guilt of murder, but hierarchical distance does: if you can imagine that somebody else is killing your victims for you, you don't feel so bad. That's why the officers are calmer than the grunts and the Secretary of Defense is infinitely calmer than the officers. Who, me? I'm just firing paper snowflakes around the office and angling for more attention from the president.

PTSD sufferers really don't need to suffer any more than they're already suffering; they need to suffer less. They need the therapy that our defense establishment seems to have so much trouble providing for them. It's those people who don't feel any guilt that need to take a "rigorous" look in the mirror, the deciderers and the elected bloviators and Keyboard Kommandos, at a still further remove from immediate responsibility, who urged them on to supervise more and ever more killing, and still in some cases are, Senators Graham and McCain. (Brooksy really loves him that word "rigorous" some, I don't know why, a magic charm perhaps against perceiving his own astounding moral and intellectual flabbiness and refusal to practice any kind of self-criticism at all.)

Update: Driftglass worries eloquently about Brooks's apparent suffering from Post-Iraq Memory Pandemic (PIMP). Thank him for his service!