> I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous? I agree. I think that a society with high infant mortality would (will?) look

> I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous? I agree. I think that a society with high infant mortality would (will?) look traumatised (to the extent of seeming alien) to those of us raised with very safe childhoods. As evidence I would offer "Death without Weeping" by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who spent years working in shanty towns in the 1960s and wrote a book. http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Scheper-huges.pdf http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne... > WW1 was in some ways unique in that the West had experienced a long period of peace. There were colonial occupations and thousands of troops dying overseas, mostly of disease, but not in Europe itself. Yes, also some of the comments to the blog post point out that the experience in WW I was new with prolonged periods of exposure to sudden dangers that emphasized the helplessness of the soldiers (descriptions of artillery bombardments often mention this helplessness). Others have mentioned the effects of concussive injuries and the huge scale of the war thanks to modern logistics. The US civil war (50 years previously) had some of the technological elements and scale of WWI but I don't think anyone in Europe was prepared for what was to come.