>I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare – it was viewed not generally a necessary evil in these societies, but a posi

>I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare – it was viewed not generally a necessary evil in these societies, but a positive good – which may have meant there was less sense that what had taken place was trauma at all. If that is the case, the emergence of PTSD would speak to improvement in our society: we have become more averse to violence and do it less, and as a consequence, feel it more. This seems to be the heart of his argument as to why this might be. When we look at the artwork that decorated public buildings in the ancient world (I'm specifically thinking of Egypt and Assyria) we see a lot of torture, warfare, abasement of enemies, etc. I'm trying to imagine going to my local public buildings and seeing scenes of, say, North Koreans being flayed alive carved in stone on the walls. It does seem like we view violence in a different way than they did in the ancient millennia.