According to Wikipedia, moral injury is “an injury to an individual’s moral conscience and values resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression on the part of themselves or others.” For instance, in the military a soldier might witness another soldier kill a citizen in a fit of frustration and anger. He may or may not have been able to stop the atrocity, but regardless, he carries away a moral injury. So it is with all of us.
Moral injury is traumatic, and just as trauma leaves a wake of more trauma behind it among family and community, so too does moral injury. And, like trauma, moral injury can be carried, epigenetically, from one generation to the next. Secondary trauma, too, leads to maladaptive “escapes” like addiction. Likewise, the awareness that we inherit a moral injury often gives rise to resentment.
White privilege, for instance, has left a wake of moral injury that encourages addictive behaviors and resentment. The morally injured reactively deny responsibility and blame others, and thereby justify anger instead. That is why so many privileged whites feel anger when asked to apologize for atrocities committed by other whites in other generations.
The economic, political and social systems in which we live, unfortunately, both cause trauma and enable us to avoid healing. The economics of “more is better” enables most of us to indulge in all manner of Big Dopamine distractions to escape the trauma of moral injury we have inherited.
In America the values set forth in our founding documents (freedom, equality, justice) are encoded in legal decisions. Our government, for all its faults, does try to set an example for American greatness when it protects the right of citizens to express their unique differences in nonviolent ways.
Of course, if we were not so full of anger, if we could heal the moral injury we carry, we might exorcise a great deal of the trauma that we have both experienced personally and inherited epigenetically.
We must learn to turn our sense of moral injury into moral agency. Like forgiveness, if we can’t accept the truth of what has happened we remain slaves to it. Once we can forgive we are free to move toward the values pointed at by the founding documents.
The entire experiment of freedom proves that freedom of speech, diversity, inclusion, though perhaps offensive to some, is not ruinous to the nation. In fact, diversity is good for the economy because it offers new “groups” for marketers to aim at.
Finally, all of us, as human beings, bear responsibility for the devastation we have caused to all the other beings on our planet.