Anxious Experts: Disaster Response and Spiritual Care from 9/11 to the Climate Crisis

By Joshua Moses

In this age of near-perpetual disaster, from the Coronavirus epidemic and mass incarceration to hurricanes and earthquakes, spiritual care has become an essential component of the disaster-response toolkit. In Experts in the Age of Anxiety, Joshua Moses chronicles the rise of disaster-related spiritual expertise in the years following the attacks of 9/11. What emerges are approaches to trauma that encompass everything from meditation and acupuncture to trauma therapy and restorative justice. In this way, the ascent of spiritual expertise in response to post-9/11 disasters represents an extension of historical tensions between secular health practice and proponents of religious and spiritual care.

The book also provides a lens through which to understand the historical dimensions of disaster-related trauma, its treatment, and the ways that therapeutic and spiritual practices imply politics. By studying the intersection of mental health and spirituality in the context of disaster, we gain essential insight into apocalyptic and dystopic beliefs that are prevalent today throughout the United States—and beyond. We learn not only about the role of particular forms of expertise in defining meaning but also the consequences this concept of meaning may have for how we imagine our relations to other humans and nonhumans, the climate crisis—and ultimately the kind of future we might imagine.

This variety of therapeutic and spiritual practices, now deployed in the face of disaster, will be tested as humanity faces growing threats from the climate crisis and other cascading disasters. But it is not at all clear whether the particular kinds of knowledge we have managed to patch together will provide the resources we require to instill the capacities to face the repercussions of future disasters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298437

Book preview

Cover Page for Anxious Experts

Anxious Experts

Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster

Kim Fortun and Scott Gabriel Knowles, Series Editors

Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster explores how environmental, technological, and health risks are created, managed, and analyzed in different contexts. Global in scope and drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines, volumes in the series examine the ways that planning, science, and technology are implicated in disasters. The series also engages public policy formation—including analysis of science, technology, and environmental policy as well as welfare, conflict resolution, and economic policy developments where relevant.

Anxious Experts

Disaster Response and Spiritual Care from 9/11 to the Climate Crisis

Joshua Moses

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Moses, Joshua, author.

Title: Anxious experts : disaster response and spiritual care from 9/11 to the climate crisis / Joshua Moses.

Other titles: Critical studies in risk and disaster.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Series: Critical studies in risk and disaster | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021031891 | ISBN 9780812253825 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812225136 (paperback) | ISBN 9780812298437 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Disaster relief—Psychological aspects. | Crisis management—Religious aspects. | Disasters—Psychological aspects. | Disasters—Religious aspects. | Mental health counseling—Religious aspects. | Disaster victims--Mental health services. | Expertise—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC HV553 .M6696 2022 | DDC 363.34/8±dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031891

For Amber Huntley, Talya Mae Huntley Moses, Lita Moses, Daniel Moses, and for the memory of my father, Stanley Moses.

What will you forsake?

I’ll forsake everything but the tree. The pilgrims call it the tree of life.

—Alice Notley (In the Pines)

. . . no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become.

—Toni Morrison (The Dead of September 11)

Contents

Introduction. There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad

1. A Patchwork of Disaster Expertise: A Brief Genealogy

Interlude. Talking to the Dead

2. Bureaucratic Spirituality and Disaster Response: From Anxious Individuals to Anxious Organizations

Interlude. The Wisdom of the Body

3. Mechanics of the Spirit

Interlude. God Speaks Through Me

4. From Neuro-Spirituality to Global Transformation of Trauma

Conclusion. The Ends of Anxiety

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

There’s Something Going On, and It’s Bad

To add your own disorder to disaster

Makes more of it.

—Wallace Stevens (2015:326)

In September 2001, I embarked on my doctoral studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. About a week after the semester began, as I was exiting the F subway stop on Houston Street and Second Avenue, I was nearly hit by a minivan racing downtown at top speed, sirens wailing. I stopped at the corner, cursing the driver. It was then that I noticed dark smoke rising from downtown. Several people were gazing up intently. What building is that? I asked with mild interest. The Trade Center, the man next to me responded. Minutes, maybe seconds later, with a flash and ground-shaking boom, the second tower burst into flames. I stood on that corner for what seemed like an hour, but may have been only fifteen minutes, reluctant to leave the small group of people that had formed. We gazed dumbfounded—until a wild-eyed man covered in ash, like a grim messenger, made his way toward us. He maniacally said that he had seen people flinging themselves from the burning buildings. They were falling to the ground in flames.

Something had gone wrong. Very wrong. I made my way to my friend Marc’s apartment in the West Village. Luckily, he was home, and we went to a nearby café, where we ate apple pie and whipped cream—in retrospect, an appropriate choice for a day that has come to simultaneously represent both U.S. vulnerability and fortitude.¹ In dazed silence, we watched the television coverage with the other anxious-faced customers. That day, I was forced to confront a new understanding, one that expanded the very possibilities for what could be real in the world I inhabited.

I do not remember much of what happened later that day, or the day after. I am not even quite sure where I slept that night. I do remember that there was a sense that the world had shifted in ways that I felt unprepared to navigate. Like a legerdemain, the world had played a trick and swiped away the narrative I had previously inhabited. Two days after the towers collapsed, I found myself ill-equipped, wearing sandals just blocks from Ground Zero, as I volunteered with the Red Cross, handing out masks and water bottles to rescue workers and other officials. The site was mayhem—gray and unrecognizable. At that point, the officials had not established control of the area, and as long as you looked like you knew what you were doing, you could walk down to the smoking pit and catch a glimpse of the smoldering heap of what had once been one of the tallest buildings in the world, wade through the miasma (which later was found to cause cancer in many rescue workers), feel the heat of the flames, and, with an odd sense of knowing that you were part of history, envision what you might say to your grandchildren when they came to interview you about where you were on 9/11.

It was one of those moments when crises of the self and history collide, where what was taken to be real shimmers, flickers, and transforms, becoming bodily felt (for those of us lucky enough to avoid a direct hit). Twisted stomachs, tightened chests, and racing minds create an unusual sense of awareness. Such feelings are a kind of prolepsis that indicates how anxiety operates—where time and events seem to threaten the coherence of the self and where awareness (and awareness of awareness) flutters and buzzes. Anxiety can be experienced as a slow-motion, filmic, out-of-body sensation, where one can see oneself from afar, amid a swirl of events, a minor actor in an ungovernable world—a vertiginous self.

Disaster, as the epigraph by poet Wallace Stevens suggests, occurs on different scales, from the psyche to the entire planet. These scales are not unconnected. One of the tasks of disaster spiritual care and mental health response is to limit the reverberations. But the world being what it is and humans being who we are, such a task inevitably meets with obstacles—and one’s own disorder may become the disorder of the world and the world’s disorder may become one’s own. A hazard not only for disaster experts but for anyone possessing a body and mind.

I am keenly aware that the 9/11 attacks were not among the worst tragedies to befall humankind. They pale in comparison to the horrors of colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and white supremacy, whose lasting legacies we are still grappling with, as well as other disasters around the world that are increasing in frequency and intensity. Yet, it was the most dramatic experience of my life. It is not every day that one walks to school on a late-summer day only to watch as two towering columns of steel are vaporized, along with the people inside them, followed by a near-military occupation of Lower Manhattan and subsequent invasions of two countries, resulting in a violence that persists now, twenty years after the attack.

While it is often difficult to date the beginning of a long-term research project on spirituality, expertise, and disaster response—where the actual interest began, where the questions came from, how circumstance led to circumstance, leading to a more defined path—I trace the origins of this book to that now-infamous day. After all, without the attacks, I might now be in India, studying local participation in politics in the nascent state of Uttarakhand—my original graduate school project. Instead, like those with whom I have worked, forces in New York City, caught in the shifting patterns of history, moved me along beyond my control. A chance encounter that led to a research job working with the New York State Office of Mental Health provided me with entry into the research that would become this book. But as I went deeper into the topic, the questions surrounding disaster spiritual expertise increasingly became my own.

Disasters make apparent many things that are otherwise only intimations in our daily lives; they reveal where psyches, communities, economies, and physical infrastructures have frayed or been worn down and decimated in ways that are often concealed in the day-to-day (Barrios 2016). Disasters also clarify how implicit ideas of selfhood have critical practical consequences, not only for healing fractured spirits and psyches but also for imagining and enacting forms of communality. They illuminate connections and disconnections in striking and sometimes painfully jarring ways. As Brecht (1965:30–31; quoted in Hewitt 1983) hauntingly observed, We only dimly realise how dependent we are in every way in all our decisions. There’s some sort of link-up between it all, we feel, but we don’t know what. That’s why most people take the price of bread, the lack of work, the declaration of war as if it were phenomena of nature: earthquake or floods. Phenomena such as these seem at first only to affect certain sections of humanity, or to affect the individual in certain sectors of his habits. It’s only much later that normal everyday life turns out to have become abnormal in a way that affects us all.

Normal everyday life. The steadying intricacies of worlds we take for granted. How we expect planes, more or less, to run on time and seasons to follow predictable patterns. When the creeping recognition that the dependable quotidian may be no more than tenuous human fantasy finally becomes real, we have come to inhabit anxiety as a way of life—or anxiety has come to inhabit us. Anxiety creates entire social worlds, and is not simply an individual psychological state of unease. From our individual psychological experiences to the explosion of experts and organizations meant to quell this anxiety, we live in a world where anxiety provides a primary hue of experience—of a world limned with the sense that something else is about to happen.

The attacks of 9/11 opened a passage into a New Age of Anxiety, a period characterized by a deep and disruptive sense of uncertainty about a way of life and its future—the onset of which intensified preexisting dynamics in how expert knowledge was forming around disaster religious and spiritual care. The disruption has increasingly become characterized by a sense in which the safety associated with progress and the progress associated with safety (for particular kinds of people in the United States) appears increasingly battered. The ability to imagine a world where things continued in familiar ways (let alone continued to improve) became, like houses built on the edge of an Alaskan sea cliff, less tenable. I argue that this anxiety acts as a constitutive force, creating new kinds of expertise and ways of acting in the world, new sets of relationships and organizations. September 11 was a pivotal moment, catalyzing an existential unease already prevalent, even though some of us had only partially acknowledged it.

There is a common American techno-optimist line of thinking in response to the unknown. Science and technology, like a prince in a fairy tale, will rescue us from the uncertainties we face. We are just around the corner from a striking new discovery that will make everything okay. Those in charge, those with expertise, will figure it out. Experts (engineers, biologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists) have their steady hands on the tiller. Disasters can—or should—be addressed through state policy. But as Grewal (2017:43–44) writes, If the much vaunted superiority of the Western liberal welfare state was, in some part, based on its claim to provide security to its populations and its ability to enact humanitarian rescue, the Katrina images signaled that the US state could not or would not fulfill this task. In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and in the face of mounting threats of the climate crisis, it has become harder and harder to imagine that things will simply be figured out, and faith in certain progress—or the belief that things will continue on in predictable ways—acts as a form of theological-magical thinking in itself.

While a world at any time is raveling and unraveling—and for many marginalized peoples, the world has long been riven with spectacular, quotidian forms of violence and dispossession that render illegible many of the navigational capacities associated with living—we (in the United States at least) are in an intensified period of disruption, one with a persuasive cultural narrative of collapse. Currently, the United States is anxious about almost every dimension of its life, from its founding principles to the tenability of its previously taken-for-granted daily-ness, anxious about its own ability to persist (Lear 2007)—and in some cases, wondering about its own value. For many, myself included, 9/11 marked an entry into a world where an old order began its dissolution—of both the sense of American dominance and the sense that the world was ordered in ways that were predictable.

September 11—and subsequent disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina—were products and intensifiers of a culture of calamity (Rozario 2007), where large-scale disaster has become an increasingly prominent component of American life. The historical moment that began this work continues to tell us something important about our understandings of the murky terrain of spirituality, trauma, and anxiety more generally—and may even gesture toward possibilities for a different kind of politics of the self, an uncertain sustaining communality. By this, I mean that the moment was not just a moment. It continues to echo into the twenty-first century and may have set the stage for the seemingly permanent Age of Anxiety many of us find ourselves in. At the very least, the moment provides insight into a turning point in U.S. history, which has significance for this seemingly interminable unsettling planetary time.

In this book, I look at the ways individuals and institutions embody contradictions surrounding mental health and spiritual care—as well as their views on disaster-related distress—as they craft professional identities and create new forms of knowledge and credentialing following disasters. I worked with mental health professionals and people from religious backgrounds involved in disaster response—from clergy and chaplains to social workers, psychiatrists, and first responders. These individuals inhabited and embodied a long history of ideas and practices of how people understand and respond to distress. Ideas from previous eras, sometimes supporting practices antithetical to their original intent, have forged novel ecological niches for the application of expert knowledge today. Those I worked with, some knowingly and others less so, drew on an array of scientific and religious tropes to support their claims to expertise. In particular, they emphasized their claims to be experts in meaning. That is, spirituality was often framed as the universal human need for meaning, and disaster spiritual caregivers as experts in helping to provide meaning for those who had lost their way.

At the heart of what I argue in this book is that a politics of the self plays out in real time in stark ways during and after disasters. By politics of the self, I mean the ways our very ideas of what comprises a self, which we take for granted as the underpinning of our identities, are tightly interwoven with histories, politics, and structural conditions (Taylor 2007; Williams 1989). What we take to be our intimate feelings and psychic and spiritual experiences have histories and are inevitably political. I argue that by studying this intersection of mental health and religion in the context of the New Age of Anxiety, we learn something critical about a world-ending structure of feeling that continues to echo throughout the United States and beyond.² We learn something about the role of particular forms of expertise in defining meaning and the consequences this meaning may have for how we imagine contemporary politics of the self and our relations to the larger world.

However, this focus on meaning is only one possibility for imagining how people might live within and against the psychic fragmentation of disasters. In other words, such an expertise implies a politics that seems natural, where meaning is construed as the inevitable basis of spirituality and disaster-related mental health. This book provides some insight into how psyches, selves, therapies, and spirits are part of histories and thus can be transformed, as well as insight into how we might imagine new languages, tool kits, diagnostics, and anti-manuals for futures where humans and nonhumans can thrive (Ray 2020; Myers 2020). What I learned during this time has become increasingly relevant for this current moment of upheaval. We need to understand these different forms, and formations, of expert knowledge—and possible alternatives to them—to aid us in grappling with the urgency of the climate crisis and other global threats, which demand new ways of understanding our place in the world.

Disaster Care Before and After 9/11

The literal meaning of the word disaster is ill-starred, a clear reference to how human fates are tied to the otherworldly (Knowles 2013). In my fieldwork, disaster was typically used in its conventional meaning: a large-scale catastrophe with a discrete beginning and end, conforming to specific criteria of response and recovery.³ As Horowitz (2020:3) writes, disasters are less discrete events than they are contingent processes. Their causes and consequences stretch across much longer periods of time and space than we commonly imagine. Seeing disasters in history, and as history, demonstrates that the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility.

Clergy and religious organizations have served in disaster response throughout U.S. history, and religion has long been a crucial framing device of disasters.⁴ However, religious groups only recently gained a formal role in disaster relief. The American Red Cross was given a charter in 1905 by Congress to respond to disasters by providing shelter during famines, fires, and other catastrophes, but it was designed as a neutral organization, remaining independent of religious groups and politics. Before the mid-1990s, there was no specific faith-based organization mandated with providing spiritual care in disaster settings.

This changed after several airplane crashes in the 1980s and 1990s led to congressional hearings over the responses of the National Transportation Safety Board and the Red Cross. Chaplains from several accrediting organizations were called upon to create the Spiritual Care Aviation Incident Response (SAIR) team, marking the novel formation of a dedicated spiritual response to disaster (Sutton, Graham, and Massey 2006). The SAIR team, however, was designed solely to respond to airline and transportation disasters. The original policy indicated that families had disapproved of the way airlines had handled the remains of victims and of perceived insensitivities toward families of survivors. It did not explicitly mandate religious and spiritual care, though many of the clergy I interviewed claimed that this legislation did, in fact, provide them with a legal and moral mandate.

Mental health professionals have been responding to disasters in ways that parallel spiritual responses. Military psychiatry and psychology have long served as training grounds and laboratories for theories of stress and trauma (Shepherd 2003). However, despite the long history of military psychiatry, a unified field of disaster mental health has only recently emerged (Halpern and Tramontin 2007). As with its religious and spiritual counterpart, the field of disaster mental health comprises several different, sometimes competitive, forms of expertise.⁵ Organizing (sometimes) antagonistic experts under one roof results in inevitable chafing. September 11 provided the impetus for the interprofessional collaboration that was amplified by funds from the Homeland Security Act. These funds helped to create graduate programs and professional training in disaster mental health, consolidating this emerging expertise (Halpern and Tramontin 2007; Goldmann and Galea 2014).

But what happened after 9/11 does not have a clear precedent in the history of disaster response. Not only were the events of 9/11 beyond the reach of everyday language, writes Seeley (2008:12), but their psychological consequences also defied classification in the specialized categories of the mental health professions. If the supposed experts on distress were inadequate, who then could be trusted? Who might have answers? The religious community was poised to seize the cultural moment and assert their historical claims to jurisdiction. And following 9/11—and later, Katrina—faith leaders intensified their efforts to systematically combine secular modern psychological techniques with religion and spirituality. The key difference in the way things were conducted pre- and post-9/11 lies at the level of organization and attempts at bureaucratic codification and systemizing. Previously, one could always have gone to a church for counseling following a disaster, and many organizations had chaplains associated with them, including the Red Cross and fire and police departments. But few trainings that dealt specifically with the needs of clergy working in disaster settings were available.

After 9/11, clergy created disaster-response modalities and organizational structures to support interfaith work. Following the attacks, the SAIR team was mobilized, and chaplains from around the country arrived in New York City to oversee the provision of spiritual care. The SAIR team screened more than five hundred chaplains between September and December 2001, after which the regional Red Cross office took over. Many of those involved with the original SAIR team have since become local and national figures in disaster religious and spiritual care, authoring books, heading organizations and departments, and providing training for clergy around the United States and beyond. A great deal of attention was paid to the mental health of firefighters and rescue workers, resulting in the Fire Department of the City of New York opening up a counseling department to respond to the mental health needs of their employees.⁶ As one of the commissioners of the fire department told me, While they have often relied on chaplains, 9/11 showed the need for integrating chaplains and mental health and took away some of the stigma associated with firefighters using mental health services.

However, these new relationships were idiosyncratic and not easily tracked by government and social service agencies. Many faith leaders had training in psychotherapy and degrees in psychology, social work, or pastoral counseling (an expertise combining psychology, social work, and practical theology). But there was no identifiable professional body nor an identifiable disaster spiritual care codified expertise. Ministers tended to know the individuals in their community who needed special care and could reach out to them during a disaster or could send community members to visit them when in the hospital.

For at least several years following 9/11, government agencies and religious nongovernmental organizations tried to trace this burgeoning field of disaster religious and spiritual care. For example, in 2007, New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS), one of the organizations involved in preparing religious