How does the army of a liberal, multicultural and often secular society develop in its soldiers the spiritual resilience to cope with war, to face trauma, death and bereavement, and to fight opponents who have the advantage of a strong and common religious faith?
That’s the question the Pentagon has been grappling with, as it confronts the apparent epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder affecting a fifth of its troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Its response is a new psychological training programme called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, which aims to strengthen the emotional, psychological and, yes, spiritual resilience of each of the 1.1 million soldiers serving in the US Army.
The person in charge of the $125 million programme is Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum, herself an unusually resilient person. Cornum was a flight surgeon on board a Black Hawk helicopter in the first Iraq war. The helicopter was shot down. Cornum was taken prisoner and sexually assaulted in the back of a truck on the way to an Iraqi prison compound. Her capture and assault led to a fierce debate about whether female troops should be deployed in conflict zones.
But she managed to face her ordeal with resilience. She says: ‘Being a POW is the rape of your entire life. When you’re a POW, your captors control everything about your life: when you get up, when you go to sleep, what you eat, if you eat. I realised the only thing I had left that I could control was how I thought. I had absolute control over that, and was not going to let them take that too.’
Cornum turned a situation of vulnerability into an opportunity to exert her courage and agency. She says: ‘There are people who are just naturally resilient, who look at problems as challenges to be overcome. I recognised that I had those skills, and others didn’t. What we have learnt since then is that these resilient thinking skills can be taught.’
The pioneers of the idea of teaching resilience are Martin Seligman and Karen Reivich, two psychologists at Penn University. They have shown that you can teach young people to change how they interpret the negative events that happen to them, so that their own thinking doesn’t make a difficult situation worse. There’s evidence that their classes help adolescents avoid depression, which was enough to convince our government to carry out a pilot study in British schools. But the classes have never been tested for helping soldiers avoid post-traumatic stress disorder. Philip Zimbardo, former president of the American Psychological Association, says: ‘This is unprecedented. It’s the most expensive pilot study in the history of psychology.’
Seligman himself, in his new book Flourish, relates how he suggested to the army’s chief of staff, General George Casey, that they begin with a small pilot programme. ‘Hold on,’ General Casey thundered. ‘I don’t want a pilot study… This is war. I want you to roll this out to the whole army.’
And so, over a million soldiers are now being taught how to change their interpretive style, how to think more optimistically, how to avoid ‘emotional icebergs’. They are also expected to fill in a questionnaire, called a Global Assessment Tool, which rates their fitness in various different domains: everything from positive emotion to flexible thinking to wisdom and temperance to ‘spiritual fitness’. A dashboard for the soul, no less.
This last item, ‘spiritual fitness’, has led to some controversy. The questionnaire asks soldiers to what extent they find meaning in the world, to what extent they consider themselves a ‘spiritual person’, and so on. If they score low in this domain, they are encouraged to undertake some spiritual activities, such as meditation or going to church.
This reflects a lot of research that people with a strong sense of meaning or spirituality cope better with adverse events than those without it. But the army knows it is getting into dangerous territory here. Cornum says: ‘Spiritual training is entirely optional, unlike the other domains. Every time you say the S-P-I-R word you’re going to get sued.’
Sure enough, some atheist soldiers are complaining that the programme is trying to strong-arm them into church. They see the programme as the latest ‘surge’ by evangelical Christianity into the offices and institutions of American government. In fact, Seligman and Reivich are Jewish, and the thinking behind the programme owes more to Greek philosophy than evangelical Christianity.
The idea of controlling your emotions by changing your interpretation of events was taken by cognitive psychologists directly from Stoic philosophy. In fact, the first resilience programme the Army taught, during the second Iraq war, was called ‘Stoic Warrior Resilience’. And the idea of developing your strengths and virtues was inspired by Aristotle. Seligman once described his school of positive psychology as ‘Aristotle with a seven-point scale’. So the programme is really teaching soldiers the same warrior philosophy that the Spartans, Athenians, Macedonians and Romans used in their own Middle Eastern campaigns.
The reason western policy-makers are excited by Seligman’s approach is that he has apparently found a way to turn the lessons of ancient philosophy into an evidence-backed science. That means that high-minded leaders who yearn to go beyond pluralism and moral relativism can ‘roll out’ his programmes while avoiding the charge of moral paternalism. It’s not moral paternalism, Seligman insists. It’s science.
But there are problems to this manoeuvre. First of all, one can object to the programme’s Stoic insistence that suffering is caused by our thoughts, rather than the external situation. The fact that 20 per cent of US soldiers get post-traumatic stress disorder compared with 3 per cent of UK soldiers may be correlated to the fact that US soldiers go on tours that are, on average, more than twice the length of UK troops.
Secondly, there’s a limit to the extent to which one can turn moral philosophy into ‘objective science’. Psychologists and policy-makers are too quick to think they have answered the millennia-old questions of philosophy via a handful of experimental studies. In this instance, there hasn’t even been a pilot study. Not every human experience can be summed up in a seven-point questionnaire. It’s no surprise that soldiers are offended by an automated survey that sums up their life’s meaning in a number.
Finally, the danger of trying to turn moral philosophy into science is that it becomes dogmatic. To take an example, Wellington School, which has made Seligman’s positive psychology part of its curriculum, released a ‘ten-point programme for happiness’ which headmaster Anthony Seldon said sums up ‘what every child and adult needs to follow if they are to make the very most of their lives’. This is scientific fundamentalism.
That’s not to say that Seligman’s positive psychology isn’t performing a valuable service in testing out the therapeutic claims of philosophy and trying to put them onto a firm evidence base. But we cannot expect happiness questionnaires to answer the question of the Good Life once and for all. Surely an important part of the Good Life is debating, disputing, experimenting, and thinking for ourselves, rather than accepting the ‘scientific evidence’ of happiness questionnaires.
Governments can never force their citizens to be free, or happy, or resilient. All you end up with is what the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius called ‘grudging subjection and feigned assent’. You can lead soldiers to the revitalising water of ancient philosophy. But, unless you’re a theocrati c dictator, you can’t make them drink.