Abstract
This chapter shows why it matters that, in order to evaluate soldiers’ resilience and readiness for battle, the US Army transforms religious beliefs into measurable features of a person’s being or identity. Spirituality becomes an issue of who persons are, rather than an issue of their beliefs. The US Army conforms to a tendency in today’s psychological sciences and cultural studies to convert different ways of believing into different ways of feeling or being. The result of this ‘ontological’ turn is to depreciate the debate over the meaning of our beliefs and to valorize differences in personal feelings and experiences that are held to be independent of our beliefs. The chapter offers a critique of these developments.
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Notes
- 1.
See especially the papers by Brown et al. (2013) and Brown (2015) for valuable discussions of the development of the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program and its empirical, methodological, and ethical limitations. Especially useful is Brown’s (2015) analysis of the shortcomings of the preliminary outcome studies published by the Army’s Research Facilitation Team up to that date, based on the Global Assessment Tool (GAT) test scores.
- 2.
Miller et al. (2019) used a standardized procedure for provoking individual personal experiences in experimental settings to study the neurobiology of spirituality. Spirituality-, stressor-, and neutral-relaxing scripts were developed in collaboration with the participating subjects, and these scripts were read by a recorded female voice while the participants were given functional magnetic resonating imaging (fMRI) scans in order to measure brain activation. In preparing the scripts, the contexts in which each of the participants had personally experienced spiritual states, stressful conditions, and neutral-relaxing states were collected, along with the participants’ descriptions of the physiological, subjective, experiential, and cognitive details related to each situation. The researchers reported that, compared with the neutral-relaxing condition, the spirituality condition reduced activity in the left inferior lobe, suggesting that this region may contribute to perceptual processing and self-other representations during spiritual experience. They also reported that, compared with the stress script condition, the spiritual script condition reduced activity in the medial thalamus and caudate brain regions, regions associated with sensory and emotional processing. The authors suggested, on this basis, that there are specific neural correlates for spiritual experiences across different traditions and practices. From my perspective, the interest of experiments such as these lies in the fact that, in conformity with my argument, they reduce spirituality to personal feeling states, regardless of someone’s actual beliefs. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they reduce spirituality to personal feeling states that are then materialized and measured in the form of brain activity of which the individual is necessarily unaware.
- 3.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center was the recipient of a $31 million no-bids contract from the Defense Department for the development of the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. For the origins and critical discussion of positive psychology and its role in the development of the Army’s program, in a large literature, see Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000), Frederickson (2001, 2013), Frederickson and Losada (2005, 2013), Becker and Maracek (2008), Richardson and Guignon (2008), Slife and Richardson (2008), Brown et al. (2013), Brown (2015). See also the special section of the American Psychologist for 2011 for critical comments by Phipps (2011), Krueger (2011), Eidelson et al. (2011), Dyckman (2011), and Quick (2011); for a reply to these comments see Seligman (2011).
- 4.
In his impressive critique of the Comprehensive Fitness Program, Nicholas Brown notes that GAT measures an individual’s fitness as a percentage of a norm. As he observes, this means that the results depend on the results of everyone else in the sample or pool. For the lieutenant who only scored around 10 percent for work engagement, ‘by definition, there will always be 10 percent of respondents who score at or below this percentile on any given measure. Thus, every year, and for every component of the GAT, some percentage—whose value depends only on where the reporting threshold is set—of subjects will be told that they need to improve on that component, regardless of any prior improvements in the absolute level of that component that those subjects, or the Army as a whole, might have made … Thus, the GAT will always “reveal” that large numbers of soldiers are facing “significant challenges”—and hence, are deemed to be in need of further resilience training—by a process that appears to consist of circular reasoning’ (Brown 2015). My thanks to Alan J. Fridlund for alerting me to this article.
- 5.
As we learn from the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program Evaluation, Report # 3, GAT’s source for the measurement of Spiritual Fitness is the Fetzer Institute/National Institute on Aging Working Group’s 1999 Report, ‘Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality for Use in Health Research.’ Although the authors, who include Kenneth Pargament (later involved in preparing the spiritual Fitness component of GAT), recognize a distinction between spirituality and religion, the questions or items pertaining to spirituality in the 1999 Fetzer Report include references to beliefs in God. See also a follow-up report on the Fetzer Institute’s 1999 work on the measurement of religion and spirituality, which provides examples of the item wordings for assessing spiritual experience without worrying about references to God (Idler et al. 2003). The Fetzer Institute’s Report must therefore have been purged of all such references when used as the basis for GAT’s assessment of spirituality. The only sample question from the Fetzer Report published in the CSF Program Evaluation #3 is: ‘My life has lasting meaning.’ No mention is made or source given in the CSF Program’s Evaluation #3 for the reference in GAT in the domain of Emotional Fitness for the character trait of ‘Transcendence.’ As I have noted in my introduction, the questions in GAT are not available to non-registered soldiers or their partners, so I have been unable to examine them.
- 6.
The GAT is not the only tool the Army uses for assessing spiritual fitness. Another tool is a Spiritual Attitude Inventory, mentioned by Hufford et al. (2010, 78–84). See also the Spiritual Fitness Inventory User Guide (SFI), published by the US Army Public Health Command, Technical Guide No. 360, in December 2012. The SFI takes approximately 3–5 minutes to complete. It contains 10 questions using a 10-point scale to measure each item. Items to be measured include Spiritual Practices, Spiritual Beliefs, Self-Awareness, Transcendence, Relationships Outside of Self, and Exceptional Experiences. The total score indicates the individual’s degree of spiritual fitness. A guide to soldiers in interpreting their own results is provided in an Appendix to the inventory, and the results are also used to facilitate discussions of the soldier’s spiritual fitness with a view to enhancing his or her overall resilience. The SFI is more informative than the GAT, because it publishes the actual questions in the inventory and gives examples of the kinds of answers it has in mind. It is notable that it does not shy away from mentioning an individual’s spiritual beliefs in its attempt to evaluate quantitatively the degree to which a person’s spiritual beliefs can be seen to provide support in times of stress, though it does not address the content of those beliefs.
- 7.
In a brief reference to the problem of meaning and intentionality, Schaefer defends his turn to affect by remarking: ‘[R]ather than a rationally ordered system, affect suggests the complexity, clunkiness, inefficiency, and heterogeneity of bodies themselves … Although affect theory’s introduction of biological accounts and deprioritizing of structures of intentionality could be seen as opening doors to hard determinism, affect is better understood as sketching bodies that are much more complex, much fuzzier, and all around less predictable than determinist and adaptationist models can accommodate’ (Schaefer 2015, 149). It is unclear what this last sentence means.
- 8.
In fact, as is well documented, the resilience concept emerged in the 2000s out of earlier research on the resilience of disadvantaged youth: the question of concern was what individual strengths and attributes enabled some exceptional young people to overcome the stresses of poverty and adversity (e.g. see Rutter 1985).
- 9.
One of Chandler’s rare objections to resilience theory in its posthuman guise is that it does not concern itself with the market. In an interesting statement, Chandler observes: ‘In effect, resilience-thinking turns problems of social and economic inequality—which were previously seen as amenable to instrumental policy intervention and to necessitate critical political engagement in the external world—into problems of ethical consumption and behaviour, which require responsive work on the self or government intervention to enable and empower citizens unable to take this responsibility upon themselves’ (Chandler 2014, 159). But the remark hangs: the author does not pursue this topic, nor does he suggest ways to counter the harmful effects of global capitalism.
- 10.
In an important collection, Daniel Zamora and colleagues have documented a shift in Foucault’s later thought from concerns with inequality and economic exploitation to worries about excluded subjects, such as women, prisoners, undocumented immigrants, and similar marginalized figures. The result, Zamora et al. argue, was a retreat from class analysis in favor of an emphasis on identity and individuality. The authors’ insights in this collection help explain the stress on identity politics in the work of critical Foucauldians such as Evans and Reid, even as the latter seek to go beyond Foucault’s ideas about biopower (Zamora and Behrent 2016).
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Leys, R. (2022). Measuring the American Soldier’s Spiritual Fitness for Warfare: How the US Army Converts Different Forms of Belief into Different Ways of Being, and Why This Matters. In: Bourke, J., Schott, R.M. (eds) Resilience. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13367-1_9
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