We have become what we have comdemned others of for too long. We can do the things we
despised our enemies for doing and we can no longer deny it because we have done them.
Someone once said it is hard to do what is right when tricked by fate and circumstances, but
the measure of human nature is really our capacity to do what is right and resist what is
wrong. I think we very often do what is convenient and easy and it is less a trick of fate
and circumstance that causes us to do these terrible things which are wrong and immoral - by
most definitions of morality - and we are just looking for an excuse. 9/11 was that excuse.
Excerpted from Chapter 6, "The Power of the Situation" - Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror - by Neil J. Kressel - Westview Press - 2001
Killers by Accident
John Sabini and Maury Silver, Social Psychologists"[I]f a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town." So suggested Professor Stanley Milgram, not on the basis of armchair cynicism or hostility toward American culture, but as the considered verdict of one of the best designed and most influential research programs in the history of American psychology. Milgram's obedience studies dramatically reshaped the way many social scientists thought about Nazism, genocide, and the human capacity to commit mass atrocities. His book, Obedience to Authority, has been translated into German, French, Japanese, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Indonesian, and Serbo-Croatian. His experiments were the subject of a 1976 television drama, The Tenth Level, starring William Shatner. After Milgram's research in the early 1960s, few psychologists would confidently assert that monstrous acts required monstrous actors. Many found themselves agreeing with Adolf Eichmann when he protested, "I am not the monster I am made out to be. I am the victim of a fallacy." More generally, Milgram dealt a severe blow to the notion that humans behave in ways consistent with their character and personal morality. So powerful were his conclusions that a South African court accepted "obedience to authority" as one extenuating factor in a trial where thirteen defendants were accused of committing murder as part of a mob; nine were saved from the death penalty.
There was nothing startling about Milgram's finding that typical Connecticut residents were ready to obey without question the orders of an authority which they perceived as legitimate. What was unexpected was the potency of this impulse to obey, leading people to override moral restraints, personal feelings, and any sense of justice to inflict potentially lethal shocks on a totally innocent, unobjectionable person.
Milgram's obedience studies and related research by other social psychologists have formed the core of an influential psychological approach to the origin of mass atrocities. In his book, Milgram cites C. P. Snow's comment that "When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." Milgram clearly had the Holocaust in mind. Although he acknowledged some differences between his experimental design and the Nazi environment, he believed that the situations were alike in their essential features. He wrote that "[t]he Nazi extermination of European Jews is the most extreme instance of abhorrent immoral acts carried out by thousands of people in the name of obedience." In the years since Milgram's research, "obedience to authority" has been invoked frequently as an explanation of why people have participated in mass atrocities in Argentina, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and My Lai.
This approach makes several claims. First, obedience rather than personal aggression lies at the heart of most organized human destructiveness. Second, without obedience, the hateful ideas of individuals could never be transformed into large-scale policies. Third, although personality, social class, and individual background may influence slightly the likelihood of obedience, the impulse to obey is extremely widespread, cutting across era, sex, culture, nationality, educational level, religious affiliation, and personality type. Fourth, people obey because they enter an "agentic state" in which they relinquish personal responsibility to an authority whom they perceive as legitimate; thus, the likelihood of obedience depends far more on the relationship to the authority figure than on the nature of the command. Fifth, people who obey evil commands do so mainly because they are overwhelmed by the situations in which they find themselves, and not because they lack character or appropriate morality.
Back in 1913, the behaviorist psychologist John B. Watson aroused much controversy with his famous contention:
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select; doctor, lawyer, artist, merchantchief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."
The "obedience" model of human destructiveness seems to suggest an even more malleable humanity, never more than a few steps from the most sinister of deeds. It would not take America's leading psychologists years to shape a thief, or a murderer. The typical person, even the typical psychologist, might already be a potential murderer, ready to spring into action if the wrong circumstances happened along.
The moral consequences of this position are troubling. If Serbian rapists, Hutu machete-wielders, and Nazi death camp commandants differ from average citizens in Western democracies principally by virtue of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, by what right can the rest of us condemn them? And if by carrying out orders dutifully, they merely acted on a fundamental human tendency, can anything but amoral pragmatism justify their punishment?
This "situationist" or "killer-by-accident" approach initially flies in the face of intuition. Though this explanation is uniquely popular with perpetrators of atrocities, most people cannot imagine that the murder of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda did not require large numbers of hateful, immoral killers. The idea that the killers simply obeyed orders out of a mindless sense of duty seems implausible. Similarly, most people find it difficult to believe that the Bosnian Serbs who raped Muslim women were "just following orders."
Proponents of the "situationist" approach argue, however, that the counterintuitive nature of the theory is explainable. Dozens of studies conducted during the past three decades suggest that people generally underestimate the importance of circumstances, and overestimate the significance of personal dispositions, in attempting to explain why people do things. This bias, "the fundamental attribution error," leads people to infer automatically that a person does good things because he or she has desirable traits and bad things because he or she has undesirable ones, even if circumstances exert a powerful pressure to act one way or another. Thus, the preference for attributing participation in atrocities to an evil, hateful, or even obedient nature is entirely consistent with the way human beings typically explain events. As a result, people may be predisposed by their cognitive makeup to endorse such personality-based explanations even when there is little evidence to support them.
The "obedience to authority" interpretation of mass atrocities squares well with the "banality of evil" argument crafted by Hannah Arendt in her book on the Eichmann trial. In fact, her portrayal of Eichmann as a relatively-free-from-hatred, order obeying, everyday Hans fits so neatly with the Milgram perspective that many psychologists have been a bit too eager to accept Arendt's credentials as the definitive historian of Nazi motivation. They have also relied too much on the case of Adolf Eichmann, who is cited as proof of historical relevance whenever the obedience studies are mentioned. The Milgram studies can be, and have been, used to explain every situation where orders to kill were issued and obeyed. During the Spring of 1992 and at various times throughout the war in Bosnia, some Bosnian Serb commanders issued orders to terrorize and rape civilians. Captured perpetrators have explained that they were "just following orders," a position accepted by many commentators. Similarly, imprisoned Hutu from the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambe militias in Rwanda have pleaded that they had little choice but to obey the orders of their superiors to kill Tutsi and moderate Hutu. The murderers in Cambodia, Argentina, and East Timor all acted in a manner consistent with orders given by authorities whom they could reasonably judge legitimate. Lieutenant Calley used the "obedience to authority" defense during the trials concerning the My Lai massacre, and a large portion of the American public judged his defense appropriate. Even the Muslim extremists who either bombed or planned to bomb New York City buildings could have cited obedience to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman's orders, although they have not done so.
(end)
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Today is Friday March 12, 2010
Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)
While I don't use a standard blog (weblog software) mostly because I've been doing this too long - having been there with Ike when the precursor to the Internet, Arpanet got started and every step of the way since, I can't get into all the many fads over the years (now it is social networking), but I have been an observer and participant in events which shape the world since my time with NSA and with Army Security and as a voice security cryptologist in the White House for the President, and the War Room at the Pentagon for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two wars. You could say this site is one of the better kept secrets [grin] on the InterNUT. You are invited back as often as you would like to see what I and others, I trust, may be saying.
For many I have met, social networking and blogs are popular because those who are enthrawed are, many of them, social misfits, but don't be deluded. The net today CAN be a huge waste of time unless you are smart enough to be discrimating about what you choose to believe as the truth (in science, a theory better than those which came before it). Much of the InterNUT is agenda driven and simply psycho babel for the otherwise lonely and delusional who invent their own reality. Take it all with many grains of salt. Read books, NOT blogs - Check credentials before you accept someone's views as informed. Separate the real from the fantasy, the customary world of us naked apes. Our species will eventually go extinct - as we should. There is nothing special about us BUT the greatest accomplishment you can ever have is (1) love and to (2) enjoy the journey. As for the truth, you will always find it unblemished and as true as I believe it to be when you read what is here. And if you don't agree, say so, but keep it sincere and as honest as you dare to be - and as honest as I always strive to be.
-- Hank Roth