Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
not being a “Good German” →
Milgram’s experiment and My Lai
Update:
In , Randy Fertel left a comment here in which he wrote: “I was a friend of Ron Ridenhour before his death in New Orleans in .
With the Nation Institute, I co-sponsor the Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-Telling.
All of this I offer as my bona fides when I say that it is not true, it is an urban legend that Ron Ridenhour participated in the Milgram experiment or its recreation at Princeton.”
Pessimists about human nature who want their suspicions confirmed in a laboratory setting can, and often do, cite Stanley Milgram’s investigation into the weakness of conscience in the face of authority:
His subjects were American college students.
The subjects were told that they were taking part in a study of learning.
One student posed as the learner (but was really an actor working for Milgram), while the real student subject was given a button to push and was told that he was to push it whenever the “learner” made a mistake.
The subject was told that by pushing the button he would give the learner an electric shock.
Participants were led to believe that the experimenter, by moving different switches could increase the level of the electric shock that would be delivered to the “learner” when the subject pressed the button.
The learner was strapped to a chair in the next room and acted as if he was being shocked when the subject pressed the button.
There were 30 switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts.
At 75 volts the learner grunted, at 120 he began to protest, and 150 he demanded to be released from the experiment.
At 285 volts the learner began to scream and shriek.
And this screaming and shrieking continued up the to maximum level of 450 volts with the switch that was marked “Danger — Severe shock — 450 volts.”
Milgram found that of his 40 subjects, 26 continued all the way up to the last shock level on the generator.
Sometimes they hesitated, but the experimenter just firmly told them to continue, and most of them did, even though the “learner” was screaming in agony.
This was at Yale.
Not believing the results of Milgram’s study, another psychology professor, David Rosenhan repeated the experiment at Princeton.
There 80% of his subjects were fully obedient.
Naturally in the book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, which I reviewed briefly , this study is discussed.
But added is a detail I’d never heard before: In David Rosenhan’s attempt at Princeton to replicate Milgram’s experiment, there was one student who not only was in the minority of students who refused to ratchet up the dial to 450 volts — this student wasn’t even willing to give the first shock.
That student was Ronald Ridenhour.
Ridenhour had come up earlier in the book during a discussion of the My Lai massacre, because Ridenhour was the one who blew the whistle.
He wasn’t there at the massacre, but he knew soldiers who had been and who had told him about what had gone on.
He conducted interviews and spent months, independently, investigating what had happened, and then reported his detailed findings to the US government, which began its own investigation.
He said later:
[C]ontrary to the vision that the military has of Charlie Company, that they were poorly disciplined, I think that what occurred at My Lai shows that they were highly disciplined, that they, in fact carried out orders that were against their grain, and that they, many of them, felt were wrong.
They carried out those orders anyway, most of them.
And that shows to me that they were disciplined rather than ill disciplined.
The ill-disciplined theory comes about with part of the bogus notion that this was an aberration, something that just sort of occurred spontaneously.
It didn’t occur spontaneously, it was part of a military operation, it was a plan.
And they followed their orders.
Should they have fought and not followed their orders?
Well, there were probably ten or twelve there that refused to participate and, yeah, they shouldn’t have followed those orders.
He later concluded that there were “only an extraordinary few people who had the presence of mind and the strength of their own character that would see them through.”
The extraordinary few somehow did withstand it.
But we shouldn’t — our society shouldn’t be structured, so that only the extraordinary few can conduct themselves in a moral fashion.
Milgram’s experiment, in its Platonic form, stripped down to its essence and then rebuilt from the particulars at hand, rises like dust devils here and there all the time, without the benefit of self-consciously conceptual artists.
Any one of us may be called on stage at any time to play a part, and so it pays to rehearse ahead of time.
Jenny Diski takes a skeptical look at the value of Milgram’s famous experiment in the latest London Review of Books.
Was Milgram’s shock machine, and the paperback hand-wringing about conscience and obedience that followed, just the reality TV of its day?
We sucked in the awful tales of human beings and their fathomless vileness like babies on a truth tit.
It’s funny that the postwar children have come to be regarded as a formlessly liberal generation when, as I recall, one of the main projects was to confront the dark side of humankind in order to learn how it might be neutralised.
We might well have been guilty of thinking too shallowly, of gulping our facts and developing a taste for the bitter; but happy-go-lucky, laissez-faire and carefree is not how I remember it.
After the Holocaust, man’s capacity for cruelty no longer seemed to be something to do with the remote past and its lack of indoor lavatory facilities or comprehensive schools, but was what our own parents were capable of doing.
And if our own parents, then with the added blast of the newly discovered structure of the double helix that wove our parents into our every cell, why not us?
It didn’t seem possible (surely, no one thinks of themselves as being rotten?), but the banality of evil, or at any rate the quotidian nature of mercilessness, was there in front of our eyes, and the postwar generation of social scientists were intent on devising ways to prove it.
We marched against nuclear weapons not just because of their moral poverty, but also because the more we found out about what humanity was capable of, the less we could be deceived by the notion that safety lay in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.
It seemed like a good idea to know the awful truth about ourselves, although nowadays I’m not sure that just knowing helps much.
We were, if ever there was one, the generation which believed that to know thyself was to be in a position to change.
We must have botched the first task, because we’ve certainly bungled the second.
I suspect, however, that we failed to notice a missing term in the proposition.
Between knowing ourselves and change, lay the chasm of how change might come about.
An ill-digested Freudianism suggested that only awareness was necessary for the great catharsis.
Bring the dark out into the light, show what is hidden, and all will be well.
You have to become aware of what you (that is, we) are like and then, somehow, you (that is, we) will be different.
Thinking of this kind was the problem with the obedience experiment.
Milgram set out with the echoes of Nuremberg and the almost contemporary Eichmann trial in his mind: perhaps it wasn’t just Germans who did what they were told.
But having discovered that Americans, too, valued obedience to authority, that indeed we are all inclined to do what we are told, there was as ever no automatic bridge between knowing and changing.
We must learn from this, Milgram said; we all said.
But no one said how we were supposed to learn from it.
It seemed it should have been obvious.
Plainly, it wasn’t. In spite of the atrocities by American soldiers in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, the British in Northern Ireland, this very year, politicians and public alike in the US and the UK declared themselves baffled, disbelieving and amazed that American and British soldiers could torture and humiliate Iraqi prisoners.
They meant, usually, American and British soldiers.
Not even the elementary lesson Milgram had to teach has been absorbed.
It is still thought that bad guys do bad things and good guys (that’s us) don’t do bad things.
That’s how you tell the difference.
Then it turned out, quite recently, that telling the difference was a very big problem.
For politicians (criminally self-interested or criminally sincere) to declare our natural goodness and their natural badness is one thing, but that anyone believes there is an inherently moral distinction which can be defined geographically or racially means people just haven’t been paying attention to what — of which the Milgram study was little more than a reiteration and foreshadowing — made hideously clear.
Tell people to go to war, and mostly they will.
Tell them to piss on prisoners, and mostly they will.
Tell them to cover up lies, and mostly they will.
Authority is government, the media, the business sector, the priestly men and women in white coats or mitres.
We are trained up in the structure of the family, in school, in work.
Most people do what they are told.
Apparently, a majority of people in this country did not want to join the US in making war on Iraq.
This country joined the US in its catastrophic adventure nevertheless.
The dissenters marched and argued and put posters up in their windows, but … Great passions were aroused, and yet … For the past eighteen months, the Independent newspaper has been producing astonishing front pages to make you weep, still … It all happened, and goes on.
It could be inertia, or a sense of helplessness, or it could be that our fear of the consequences of disobedience holds sway over our judgment.
It looks as if in every generation there is moral panic and a perception (or hallucination of the horror to come) of the next generation as having lost its predisposition to be obedient.
Civilisation depends on most of us doing what we are told most of the time.
Real civilisation, however, depends on Milgram’s 35 per cent who eventually get round to thinking for themselves.
But that, too, is a lazy, sentimental attitude.
The 65/35 per cent split between the compliant and the resistant is just another version of good and bad, and leaves us essentially ignorant and free to declare our particular righteousness.
Bush can take Milgram’s division to signify Americans and Terrorists; bin Laden can use it to denounce the evil West to the Followers of Allah; Hitler to set Germans against Jews; Zionists to divide Jews from Palestinians.
And Milgram is no help at all.
If I wait to finish it before writing a review, I’ll pen one of those unreadable monster blockquote-dumps that goes on forever.
So I’ll try something different: I’ll break up my reading and write up my thoughts along the way.
Vetlesen is trying to reconcile sociological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of human evildoing, particularly those prompted by attempts to wrestle with the Holocaust and other examples of large-scale massacre: things like Hannah Arendt’s examinations of totalitarianism and “the banality of evil,” and the Milgram experiment.
He compares the conclusions of various thinkers in these disciplines, and examines their predictions in light of subsequent examples of collective evil, for instance the massacres in the former Yugoslavia.
He starts by offering a “commonsensical and minimalist” definition of evil: to “intentionally inflict pain and suffering on another human being, against her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm to her.”
This makes me defensive, partially because it seems too simple, and partially, I think, because it reminds me of the definitions of torture that the fine legal minds in the White House had so much fun drilling loopholes through.
But at least so far, Vetlesen’s definition plays very little role in his book, so I’ll leave it at that.
There is a school of thought in reaction to the Holocaust that sees its perpetrators — the people who actually did the day-to-day mechanics of murdering millions of people, not the ideologues in the newsreels — as having been swept along against their own inclinations by an overwhelming force that only extraordinary personalities were able to resist.
Arendt showed Eichmann to be not a conventionally wicked sadist delighting in evil, but a thoughtless careerist oblivious to the results of his actions.
Milgram showed that ordinary people would do awful things to innocent strangers if someone in a position of authority gave the word.
While reading Evil and Human Agency on public transit I have — twice now! — been interrupted by the person in the seat next to me who, reading over my shoulder, could not help but discuss it with me.
This is pretty remarkable, since for one thing it violates social taboos about talking to strangers on public transit and about interrupting people who are reading, and for another, I didn’t have any idea this was a topic that many people care about.
Anyway, one of these people had absorbed the school of thought I described above, and repeated it back to me in a way that really demonstrated how defeatist and excusing it can be if it is absorbed uncritically and superficially: looking at the perpetrators of the Holocaust and shrugging, saying “it could happen to anyone, human nature being what it is; they didn’t know any better, with the morality of their society gone all topsy-turvy like that.”
Arendt tried to head off this sort of sloppy thinking, insisting (and showing) that those who participated in administrative massacre had real choices, made them, and bear real guilt for the choices they made.
She also insists (and shows) that other choices were possible, and that other people could have (and did) evaluate their situations and make conscientious choices, even in the topsy-turvy morality of Nazi Germany.
But Vetlesen, though respectful of Arendt’s contributions to the study of collective and individual evil, thinks that her portrait of Eichmann is partially “naïve: in suggesting that he was ‘merely thoughtless’, she in fact adopts the very self-presentation he cultivated.… [T]his is a blindness in Arendt caused by her privileging the role of intellectual capacities over — morally crucial — emotional ones.”
Vetlesen is referring not only to Eichmann in Jerusalem but also to other writings of Arendt in which she puts thinking at the center of morality (see The Picket Line, ).
Indeed, in her view, conscience is a by-product of thinking, where “thinking” is an honest and curious inner dialog of the sort that would make Socrates proud.
Vetlesen doesn’t buy it.
Conscience and moral perception, he believes, has much more to do with empathy, and Eichmann’s problem was not that he was “thoughtless” but that he “was insensitive.”
Vetlesen also critically examines Milgram’s interpretation of his famous experiment.
Milgram believed that his subjects, in the presence of an authority figure, stepped into a corresponding role and something called the “agentic state, the state in which the agent finds himself once responsibility has been shifted away by his consent to the superior’s right to command” which leads one “to restrict one’s sense of responsibility to the purely technical aspects of one’s action” as opposed to their effects or ends.
The first objection to this “agentic state” is that it is illusory, and the way it is described often seems to grant it an undeserved reality.
When you enter the agentic state, you don’t really shift away your responsibility, you only agree to conspire with the authority figure to act as if you have done so.
This doesn’t excuse anything, and Vetlesen suggests that this conspiracy of dishonesty not only helps people to commit evil but is itself a sort of evil:
Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to become an instrument in the realization of ends posited by others.
He summarizes Arendt’s own view: “superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss.”
If people are selfishly tempted to enter the “agentic state”, then their evil actions when in such a state are the sort of garden variety “sins” that come from being willing to harm other people in pursuit of selfish aims.
This in contrast to the usual interpretation of Milgram’s experiment: that people are willing to act against their own inclinations and interests to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, in certain contexts of authoritarian role-play.
Vetlesen extends this objection by considering what Milgram never allows himself to consider: that his subjects may have had genuine sadistic impulses — that in subjecting their victims to pain, they were not being somehow coerced by their situation to do things they would ordinarily not want to do, but that they were being allowed by their situation to do things they were ordinarily inhibited from doing.
He quotes Ernest Becker, who took a second look at Freud’s take on mob violence:
…[M]an brings his motives in with him when he identifies with power figures.
He is suggestible and submissive because he is waiting for the magical helper.
He gives in to the magic transformation of the group because he wants relief of conflict and guilt.
He follows the leader’s initiatory act because he needs priority magic so that he can delight in holy aggression.
He moves in to kill the sacrificial scapegoat with the wave of the crowd, not because he is carried along by the wave, but because he likes the psychological barter of another life for his own: “You die, not me.”
The motives and the needs are in men and not in situations or surroundings.
And this is where I’ve stopped for , not quite at the half-way mark.
Several years after composing this entry, I read H.L. Mencken’s Damn: A book of Calumny and found that he had anticipated this attack on Milgram before Milgram was around to attack:
The numskull runs amuck in a crowd, not because he has been inoculated with new rascality by the mysterious crowd influence, but because his habitual rascality now has its only chance to function safely.
In other words, the numskull is vicious, but a poltroon.
He refrains from all attempts at lynching a cappella, not because it takes suggestion to make him desire to lynch, but because it takes the protection of a crowd to make him brave enough to try it.
…
In other words, the particular swinishness of a crowd is permanently resident in the majority of its members — in all those members, that is, who are naturally ignorant and vicious — perhaps 95 per cent.
All studies of mob psychology are defective in that they underestimate this viciousness.
They are poisoned by the prevailing delusion that the lower orders of men are angels.
This is nonsense.
The lower orders of men are incurable rascals, either individually or collectively.
Decency, self-restraint, the sense of justice, courage — these virtues belong only to a small minority of men.
This minority never runs amuck.
Its most distinguishing character, in truth, is its resistance to all running amuck.
The third-rate man, though he may wear the false whiskers of a first-rate man, may always be detected by his inability to keep his head in the face of an appeal to his emotions.
A whoop strips off his disguise.
Some bits and pieces from here and there…
They’re still trying to refine the Milgram Experiment after all these years, and they’re still teasing new insights out of it, including this unsurprising nugget: “the author interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped [administering the shocks as they were told to] generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable.”
The question is not “why do you obey” but “why do you support” says Arthur Silber at Once Upon a Time….
He’s trying to untangle the tangled concepts of obedience and support when it comes to adults and political matters.
He quotes Hannah Arendt on this topic as writing:
In our context, all that matters is the insight that no man, however
strong, can ever accomplish anything, good or bad, without the help of
others. What you have here is the notion of an equality which accounts
for a “leader” who is never more than primus inter
pares, the first among his peers. Those who seem to obey him
actually support him and his enterprise; without such “obedience” he
would be helpless, whereas in the nursery or under conditions of
slavery — the two spheres in which the notion of obedience made sense
and from which it was then transposed into political matters — it is the
child or the slave who becomes helpless if he refuses to “cooperate.”
Even in a strictly bureaucratic organization, with its fixed hierarchical
order, it would make much more sense to look upon the functioning of the
“cogs” and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise
than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors. If I obey the laws of
the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly
obvious in the case of revolutionaries and rebels who disobey because
they have withdrawn this tacit consent.
In these terms, the nonparticipators in public life under a dictatorship
are those who have refused their support by shunning those places of
“responsibility” where such support, under the name of obedience, is
required. And we have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to
any of these forms of government if enough people would act
“irresponsibly” and refuse support, even without active resistance and
rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one
of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance — for instance
the power that is potential in civil disobedience — which are
being discovered in our century. The reason, however, that we can hold
these new criminals, who never committed a crime out of their own
initiative, nevertheless responsible for what they did is that there is
no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters. The only
domain where the word could possibly apply to adults who are not slaves
is the domain of religion, in which people say that they obey
the word or the command of God because the relationship between God and
man can rightly be seen in terms similar to the relation between adult
and child.
Hence the question addressed to those who participated and obeyed orders
should never be, “Why did you obey?” but “Why did you support?”
This change of words is no semantic irrelevancy for those who know the
strange and powerful influence mere “words” have over the minds of men
who, first of all, are speaking animals. Much would be gained if we
could eliminate this pernicious word “obedience” from our vocabulary of
moral and political thought. If we think these matters through, we might
regain some measure of self-confidence and even pride, that is, regain
what former times called the dignity or the honor of man: not perhaps
of mankind but of the status of being human.
Philip Brewer at Wise Bread puts it all together in a blog post that summarizes what he’s been trying to get across with his many writings on simplified, deliberate, meaningful, abundant living.
If you don’t find something fantastic there, I’ll be surprised.
Francois Tremblay writes about a society based on love at Check Your Premises.
It’s hard to summarize, so I’ll just invite you to take a look.
Though the title sounds like it ought to be on the cover of some flimsy tract over a kitschy painting of lions and lambs frolicking with children in tunics, the contents are thought-provoking.
The show has audio from some of the experiments themselves (hear the “victim” scream as he pretends to get shocked!) but also interviews from some of the experiment’s subjects — many years after the fact — describing what was going through their minds as they unwittingly participated in one of social psychology’s landmark experiments.
Interesting stuff.
Davi Barker has written an interesting series of articles on “Authoritarian Sociopathy” summarizing some of the work done to extend the findings of the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments:
Authoritarian Sociopathy — if you invent a role that incentivizes evil many people will willingly adjust to the role and become evil; if you internalize “obedience to authority” as a core personality trait you will become capable of murder and tolerant of abuse
Power and Deception — people placed into positions of authority are less troubled by their own unethical behavior
Power and Compassion — powerful people become less able to sympathize with the suffering of other people
Power and Hypocrisy — powerful people develop a double-standard of judging ethical lapses in which they give themselves a pass but judge others harshly for the same behavior — but there’s a catch, and it just might work in our favor
Gray received the notice that his doctorate in philosophy had been awarded in the same batch of mail that contained his draft notice.
He served in Africa and Europe in counter-intelligence: working to root out and interrogate spies and saboteurs and prisoners and the like as the Allies moved in on Axis-controlled territory.
He wrote his book years afterwards, using letters he wrote at the time and a
journal he kept during the war to refresh his memory of what it was like to
be a soldier in war time. His book tries to explore what war means to people,
what its attractions are, how different people cope with its stresses in
different ways, how the impulse to make war relates to other human drives,
and his vision for how a great nation might become greater by renouncing war
entirely.
A book like this almost can’t help but be thought-provoking, and it was, but I
still thought it was a little too abstract and ethereal for my tastes. His
most interesting observations come from the battlefield, but his conclusions
seem to float way above it.
Here are some excerpts that I thought were noteworthy.
First, from his forward to the edition:
To the usual judgment [the My Lai massacre] seems far more of an atrocity than the actions of the pilots who bomb such hamlets from the sky or of the artillery men who lob in shells from a great distance.
The reason given is that the infantrymen are brutalized by their deeds.
Yet brutalization is hardly the worst that can happen to a man, for it can be healed in time and in circumstances of peaceful living.
But the man who kills from a distance and without consciousness of the consequences of his deeds feels no need to answer to anyone or to himself.
His is an unconscious depravity that can increase imperceptibly in civilian life.
Dissociated from his deeds he can become far more monstrous than the infantry soldier or lower-echelon officer who occasionally goes beserk under battle strain.
The “terrifyingly normal” men, who are ever in the vast majority, are those who make our age a monstrous one.
From a section on “political guilt”:
[W]hen the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came, many an American soldier felt shocked and ashamed.
The combat soldier knew better than did Americans at home what those bombs meant in suffering and injustice.
The man of conscience wherever he was realized intuitively that the vast majority of the Japanese in both cities were no more, if no less, guilty of the war than were his own parents, sisters, or brothers.
In his shame, he may have said to himself, as some of us did: “The next atomic bomb, dropped in anger, will probably fall on my own country and we will have deserved it.” Such a conviction will hardly relieve him of the heavy sense of wrong that his nation committed and the responsibility for which he must now in some measure share.
All the arguments used in justification — the shortening of the war by many months and the thousands of American lives presumably saved — cannot alter the fact that his government was the first to use on undefended cities, without any warning, a monstrous new weapon of annihilation.
Worst of all about such deeds is that millions accepted and felt relief.
Hearing this near-exultation in the enemy’s annihilation, one can only
conclude that political guilt has another source than the freedom of the
individual to affect group action. It lies in the degree of his
identification with the goals and the means of realizing them that his nation
adopts. The person who inwardly approves an immoral action of his government
or military unit testifies to his own probable decision had he possessed the
freedom and opportunity of the actors. Freedom is possible, therefore, not
only in the power to do or prevent, but also in inner assent and consent to
action by others. With a relative criterion like this it is, of course,
impossible to be exact in estimating even one’s own guilt. Yet the jubilation
in evil deeds allows little room for doubt that inner consent is often
forthcoming. So do thousands of people increase their political guilt in
wartime beyond the range of their direct action.
