M Y V I E W S ::
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Tomtech in his must-read series “This Week in Fascism,” asked us to “find some ways to determine who is in league with the fascists.”
Recently, I howled while reading Meteor Blades‘ imagined fate for that nadir of nepotism, Jonah Goldberg — chained “to the floor in front of his computer for a 36-hour stretch, letting him squirm in his own feces and urine while listening to Bush say ‘moooooolahs’ and ‘nukular’ repeatedly at 100 decibels.”
“But none of my friends,” Meteor Blades continued, “would turn their idle dreams of torture into reality no matter what the provocation. …
I hope so. But I’m not at all sure. Malcolm Gladwell has successfully questioned assumptions we make about instant impressions and reflexive reactions. There are more assumptions for us to challenge: How we will react over a period of time to special sets of stimuli.
::: more below :::
A British reality TV show and a famous psychology experiment may tell us something more about ourselves and how we will react and operate in certain environments.
It’s sure that there’s a proclivity for the use of torture among many — from the doughboys like Goldberg and Rush Limbaugh to the do’em-boys like Donald Rumsfeld, Charles Graner, Alberto Gonzales and George Bush.
However, it’s not just the overquoted cartoon character Pogo who said the enemy is us. So too, perhaps, has Philip Zimbardo, a distinguished (now emeritus) professor of psychology — in whose challenging class I was lucky enough to sit (enthralled by his mind, his knowledge, and the fearsome difficulty of the material and the tests, infamous for their ability to cut down the grade averages of the best and brightest).
Zimbardo asks: “What happens when you put good people in an evil place?”
I don’t think we can assume we know how we, or others we know, would behave. Here’s why I think we can’t make safe assumptions:
From The Guardian‘s review of British Channel 4’s reality show, “Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook”:
I’d been skeptical about — and disgusted by — what I’d read about the program. As The Guardian‘s reviewer, Mark Lawson, says, “It sounded like a nightmare of bad-taste television.”
But, how could any produced reality show in any way replicate — beyond the torture, humiliations, blinding, and witnessing the beating deaths of other detainees — the fear of not knowing one’s fate?
This 2005 reality show is as unreal as Zimbardo‘s 1971 experiment:
But even the unreal can become real:
The Bush administration might object that taking part in any television gameshow would have the same effect but, when one contestant develops hypothermia and another starts to vomit, it’s clear that this has ceased to be pretence.
Zimbardo found the same phenomenon in his 1971 experiment:
How language affects behavior:
Language is used to obscure. “[E]xtraordinary rendition. That’s a euphemism,” points out Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times, and quoted by Armando in a prologue to Meteor Blades’ diary:
Zimbardo used language too in his 1971 experiment:
Why This Reality Show Matters
Astonishingly — and convincingly — The Guardian defends the reality show:
Using statements from Donald Rumsfeld, information from released detainees and FBI memos uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act in America, the programme gives the clearest impression yet of what it might be like to live in a Rumsfeld jumpsuit. …
(Note: Ted Rall argues we already do have a lot of government papers in his important Feb. 27 column, “Full faith and credit of the U.S. government.”)
Again, our focus: “It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people.”
“You could put virtually anybody in it and you’re going to get this kind of evil behavior,” he continued.
“The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That’s the dispositional analysis.
“The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that’s the wrong analysis. It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people.
“Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that ‘little shop of horrors.”
From A Talk with Philip Zimbardo, Edge, January 19, 2005
The title of the Edge interview with Zimbardo?
You Can’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel
But, we maybe are different. And Zimbardo tells us why, and I think we can take some comfort in this:
We will resist. Or become “team players.”
Because just as — we saw above — the unreal can become real, so too can unimaginable behavior become ordinary:
“That’s one way that evil is created as blind obedience to authority.
“But more often than not, somebody doesn’t have to tell you to do something. You’re just in a setting where you look around and everyone else is doing it. Say you’re a guard and you don’t want to harm the prisoners–because at some level you know they’re just college students–but the two other guards on your shift are doing terrible things. They provide social models for you to follow if you are going to be a team player.”
::: AGAIN, EXTENDING OUR FOCAL LENGTHS :::
How long will you resist? What will it take to break you? When will you become “one of them”? Or have you already?
You Can’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel
These words from Gareth Peirce [PHOTO], in a rare interview recently with Amy Goodman, are specifically for us:
What I see it [unlimited detention and extraordinary rendition] as, is an experiment, an experiment by America to see what interrogative methodology it could use and obtain results in disregard completely of the fact that this Well, consciously, in fact, knowing that it was using prohibited methods.
An experiment to see what you could get (disregarding the fact that experience tells us it must be nonsense what you get from coercive interrogation), but also an experiment in testing reaction internationally and nationally.
Will there be protest? Have we gone too far?
All emphases mine.
me for saying I am the luckiest man since Lou Gehrig, to have Susan reporting on this site.
You amaze me. </gush>
Thank you so much. If people have time, I hope they read Zimbardo’s full interview and, most particularly, the in-depth interview of Gareth Peirce about Guantanamo, rendition, and more. Both are linked above. (If Peirce’s name rings a bell, it’s because she was portrayed by Emma Thompson in the film, “In the Name of the Father,” as she defended men wrongly held by the UK for crimes in Ireland. She’s famous for denying interviews, so it was a great compliment to Amy Goodman that she got to speak with her at length, and in her home in London.)
It already has and it scares me to death. I never imagined in my lifetime I would see the unimaginable happen to our great country. I weep for all we have lost and what else we may continue to loose.
I am in awe of the writing I experience here and at Kos. I am not an educated person in the formal sense of higher learning. My Mom was a librarian though and instilled the necessity of reading. I am learning so much from people like you. Thank you.
is education.
Abe Lincoln did alright by reading a lot.
Wonderful piece Susan. Now if we can just get the public to understand “It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people,” we’d have a leg up, eh.
Goddam right and the more people who realize that war is not a john wayne movie but Apocalypse Now the better.
Thanks for a great summation on how behavior does devolve.
Personally I think that if they had to ignore the Geneva Conventions to do what they are doing, they know damned well it’s too far.
They are doing it because they want to, not to test out any theory of how much they can gain from it.
They have proven that “They.are.not.human!”
Several years ago it was on PBS. It was a fascinating show and intensely interesting. If I’m remembering correctly, the college students involved were randomly selected to be either prisoners or guards, and it was an amazingly short time before the guards were abusing their power and the prisoners. As mentioned, they ended the experiment after six days instead of continuing for the planned two weeks because the situation was having a horrendous effect on all the kids–guards and prisoners alike.
Thank you so much for posting this. That my country, the country I always thought of as the Good Guys, is engaged in practices like this is constantly troubling to me–it’s like a low level hum in the back of my brain that never stops. And it is quite obvious that we are ruining not only the tortured but also the torturers.
“..ruining not only the tortured but the torturers.” That is what to a great extent haunts me about this whole horrendous mess.
Living through vietnam vets coming home and what they went through here and in their minds is what makes me have so many flashbacks of many of those broken men and woman. How many millions of lives were impacted-not just the the soldiers coming home.
War brutalizes everyone who lives through it but when we start betraying our country’s ideals it will only lead to these men and woman coming home and causing much devastation to their families/friends. These will be people with broken minds and spirits-whether they realize it at first or not and this will be effecting the entire country.
too many times. Yes – unimaginable behavior can become normal and generally in times of war or power consolidation.
Presumption – civilized time frames(yeah right)!
Do we start with the Romans, or the English Crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition, or Slavery anywhere in the world……all the way through the German death camps and now Iraq and Afghanistan?
Too many atrocities – too little space to list them all.
Take one 18 year old kid, train for 18 weeks in the art of destruction, send to foreign land. Take one 18 year old kid, beat his father, push his mother and sister around, destroy his house and put him in prison.
Repeat 150,000 times. Place all the kids in a defined area and give them the power of god at the end of a barrel. Let them each stand next to their best friend in the world as that friend is blown into pieces.
And you actually wonder what causes otherwise sane individuals to engage in torture? Torture is the least of it.
It has been quite a few years now that I have been disgusted with the “But it’s not a bad child, it’s just bad behavior” excuse that became so popular in the last couple of decades. The seperation of behavior from self. We are barrels within the barrels after all. At what point does our behavior become What We Are?
We have a whole generation of kids becoming adults whose bad behavior was excused, over and over again, ad nauseum, who think that they can do bad things and still be a “good person”.
Thanks for the diary. I have bookmarked, to read links as time allows.
to your diaries point: yes.
but more: what is ordinary and what unimaginable. I have no trouble, sadly, imagining man’s cruelty toward all things, especially man.
it is chimpanzees vs. bonobos and we are the chimpanzees. war and cruelty stretch back very far in our past indeed.
the defense of torture is regression, but it’s not unimaginable and already ordinary… we were working on making it not ordinary, about making a new standard, and I think we have still made that standard and these actions of today will in time be measured against that standard. There is no putting the learning back in the bottle and pretending we don’t know the this and that of torture, we do, and we know them well. Ultimately this is a local and temporary regression, but there is little comfort in that… it may delay us for centuries.
That not everyone in these experiments loses their humanity. There were a few who refused to apply the lethal shocks, and a few who refused to apply even milder ones.
Slavery was nearly a universal phenomenon, and considered part of “nature” for centuries. Strong arguments could have been (and I believe, in fact, were) made that it was impossible for one human being not to desire to subjugate another if the opportunity availed itself. Nevertheless, as far back as we have writing, we have people expressing opposition to the idea.
The wrong conclusion has been drawn from these experiments. The conclusion relieves individuals from their moral responsibility when a greater power pressures them to abandon their humanity.
What we should be doing is focusing on those who REFUSED to become animals, and studying them like hell to understand how we can all become more human.
And we should steadfastly refuse the creeping amorality that seeks to excuse any wrong as being an involuntary response to unfortunate circumstances.
From Abu Ghraib to Martha Stewart, nothing people actually do is their fault any longer. There is always someone else to blame – as if blame were a binary thing, as if only one party at any given time can hold responsibility for any act.
Individual responsibility used to form the heart of the sense of civic virtue that supported our republic. Today, it is all about individual rights and no responsibilities.
it would be useful to study those that resist the ‘banality of evil’ to see what they characterizes them, if anything.
But it also useful to study policies that tend to encourage bad behavior, uncharacteristic brutality, and so forth. Both are important.
you are right.
But it seems to me it is a hell of a lot easier to get a grant (or a book advance) to study why people misbehave than to get one to study why people don’t. And the danger I see with the environmental-norms stuff is that people use it to excuse transgressive behavior, or to assign sole responsibility to those who give the orders, not those who follow them.
I know that when I and others tried to say that both the people giving the torture orders and the soldiers carrying them out were culpable and should be held accountable, we were attacked as vociferously by people on the left as on the right. And I know that the standard defense (read: excuse) given by the supportive small-town communities of the torturers were that they were being “scapegoated”, as if they hadn’t actually committed the things they had.
As someone whose parents were a Holocaust survivor and a WWII vet, I was taught that “just following orders” was no excuse. As someone who served in the Israeli army, I feel culpability for participation in a system of repression and atrocity, even if I personally didn’t participate in them. As an American, I feel culpability for the obscenities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, even though I certainly have nothing to do with them and oppose the war and this administration with every fiber of my being.
We should be talking about personal responsibility more, not less.
WHILE, at the same time, we work on avoiding circumstances that stress our moral compass to the breaking point.
That is why I am now a pacifist. I believe that war itself, the circumstance of institutionalized violent conflict, regardless of the justice of the cause, carries within it an inherent atrocity that is not justified by the ends.
I still believe individuals have free will, however, no matter what. We each have a choice. If we fail to live up to our standards (and I know I have in my life), that is all the more reason to learn how those who exceed them, do so, so that we may learn to be better humans.
Hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see too much literature exploring what about the positive exceptions can be learned, internalized and emulated.
you are pushing the free will issue pretty hard. But I don’t mind.
We must act as though we have free will even if settling the issue is a classic impasse.
I don’t tell people what to write, but I’d love to hear sometime about your experiences in the Israeli army.
In any case, you are bringing up excellent points.
I tend to resist what I call binary thinking, the “either-or” polarization that infects our culture to such a degree these days.
On the one hand, my life’s work is to create an environment designed to encourage socially constructive behavior, and conducive to learning how societies work and how to resolve problems non-violently. And my main structural objection to dailykos has been the lack of design consciousness that affords socially constructive behavior. So, I am certainly a big fan of the critical influence of environmental factors on behavior.
On the other hand, I am a Jeffersonian small-r republican, and believe that individuals, working collectively, have a social and civic responsibility, that our individual and collective actions are at least as determinative as our environment.
Finally, as a humanist optimist, I believe that the latter, personal decision, can overcome the former, circumstance.
However, as a humanist, I also believe in social responsibility, as a liberal I believe in the constructive role government can play. As a civil libertarian, I place a high premium on individual rights, but at the same time I share conservative’s concern for an abandonment of personal responsibility and unyielding standards of conduct.
I’m afraid I don’t fit any of the simplistic caricatures that have been thrown at me over the years. Nor to I believe most people do, even my most ardent political foes.
Life is complicated, and we are a culture of simple answers.
about the lack of “design consciousness” on kos that inhibits socially constructive behavior. Can you comment more on that?
I have been thinking that there needs to be a list of 5 to 10 additional diaries that are “action items.” Maybe half are federal/national level and half are state/local level. And a second recommend button to raise them to that level.
The lack of design consciousness is in large part due to two factors. The first is the limitations of the technology which are further constrained when you start out as “oh, I’m going to write about my thoughts and let you comment” and then you get to the level of “huh, other people have interesting things, how can I make their voices more prominent” and then you get to “I have a friggin’ community on my hands that I’d like to see become a political force but I’m not sure how to do that since the community out-evolved the structure that supports it.”
Anyway…
The design flaws of kos have more to do with the social dynamics that certain designs inhibit or promote.
I don’t want to turn this into a discussion on booman about what’s wrong with dailykos, but I have made some general observations about the scalability of community that bear repeating.
In a very small village, traffic flow is determined largely by courtesy – people wave one another ahead, there are minimal opportunities for collision, and you can see intersecting traffic from a mile away. Everyone knows everyone, and there is a sense of community responsibility that generally suffices to keep things moving.
As the community grows, a traffic cop at the sole intersection becomes helpful. It doesn’t take an army, things are manageable. If your neighbor’s teenager takes the curve a bit fast, you can be sure Officer Neighbor will be by to have a little talk with.
As things expand, it may, in the most extreme circumstances, be necessary to actually show someone to the town limits and tell them to go find another place to harass.
As the village becomes a town, more traffic cops are hired. Now, you need people patrolling the streets, too, because not everyone knows everyone any more. Troublemakers head to the other side of town, where they don’t know anyone, and drive over someone’s lawn.
At a certain point, these solutions don’t work any more. You need traffic lights. Yes, it is a pain to have to wait at an intersection when you are the only car there, but it is a small price to pay to keep things moving smoothly and safely.
In a large city, however, traffic lights are not enough. The traffic flow needs to be coordinated, the lights need to be times and adjusted. The system needs to be responsive to the ebb-and-flow of traffic, but human beings can’t do it manually. That is why we have automated systems.
Traffic flow analysis is as much an art as a science.
So, as you can see, there are many pitfalls along the way to a large-scale, sustainable, healthy community.
Manual, top-down administration simply doesn’t scale.
Volunteer peer-moderation only functions at a certain scale as well.
In order to sustain a large-scale, dynamic online community, you need conscious, scaleable design.
The problem at dailykos is that Markos figures he can do anything and everything, and has nothing useful to learn from anybody else. He built a very top-down benign dictatorship. Of course, when things grew wildly, rather than acknowledge the problems and solicit and accept help, he simply neglects the system. What automated affordances dailykos has are either default Scoop settings that he doesn’t understand, or amateurish, bungling attempts to impose order. The way the rating system can be gamed there by a tiny handful of bullies who can ban someone by troll-rate-bombing is a good example. But there are much more fundamental problems.
Design doesn’t solve anything, and culture is also something that the administrator has a great deal of influence over. That is why I am here now – booman seems very responsive and concerned about the community’s welfare, while Markos treats the community as an unpleasant necessity in order to gain him publicity.
Over time, I think you will see increasing divergence in design and functionality of this site, as its needs change. There is no reason a community ten times the size of dailykos can’t function healthily and constructively.
When an architect builds a public park, he or she must plan ahead for varying crowd-sizes and unanticipated uses. If they make a large, wind-blown place where the benches are narrow and made of stone, so they freeze in the winter, and the lights are easy to shatter, the place will decay, be a locus of crime and vandalism, and not serve the public. If they make an inviting, dynamic space, shady in the summer and warm in the winter, with ample benches, well-lit and safe without dark corners, etc., the space will be a sucess.
Community environments need to be consciously designed with an understanding that every action a participant takes, every click they make, every menu they navigate through, every interaction they have with another participant, either contributes or detracts from the community experience.
That is design consciousness.
if you don’t go and get yourself banned from this site, I look forward to you discussing some of the dynamics of community growth.
I’m a novice at this, but I do know one thing:
The community is more important than any single voice within it. And I plan on continuing to ask for feedback and suggestions and to implement what makes sense.
Somehow, I posted a reply to the diary, rather than to this comment as I intended.
If we U.S. citizens accept responsibility for what the U.S. is doing, it is a revelatory admission and propels us to do something about it, besides bemoan it (which is far too easy and alienates us more ridiculously from the crimes than if we were the actual criminals).
i keep reading, i keep learning. thanks susan. i followed you,booman,msoc over here from kos.
i hope, but am not confident, that this site stays free from the navel gazing that hits dkos all too often…..my diary disappeared after x mins/i find cursing offensive/ you dont agree with me i’ll troll you……etc etc
but I don’t think you meant that kind of naval gazing. Welcome to the site.
weirded me that you front paged navel gazing just after i’d decried it. but you’re right, i didn’t mean that kind.
in fact, carry on naval gazing 🙂
sorry !!
good luck with the site
Man, for a bit there I thought we were launching ships, not blogs! :):)
A couple of anecdotes.
The first involves another test, in which a subject were placed in an environment in which s/he believed everyone else was also a test subject.
Simple graphics were printed on cards and questions were asked such as “which arrow is longer” or “which object can be divided into two triangles.” Everyone else gave the same wrong answer to the question. The test subject would give the correct (obvious) answer… for the first six or so rounds. At a certain point, however, the test subject gave in and went with the group consensus.
Granted, there was no moral component to the actual behavior required of the test subjects. On the other hand, you could argue that the lack of a moral component could possibly have made it easier for the test subject to stand up for what their eyes were telling them.
The second is anecdotal evidence, but… My friend’s aunt lived in Spain under Franco and when Franco died, Tia didn’t understand why there was much rejoicing. Her family had managed to live a quiet lower-middle class existence and avoid politics altogether. As far as she and her family were concerned, life was fine.
So, not only do you have the problem that people caught up in the horrors are changed by their experiences, you have those who are unwilling or unwilling to see what’s happening around them so long as it doesn’t affect them.
Finally, an even more depressing anecdote, from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. He relayed several stories about people who had stood up to mob behavior in, for example Bosnia/Herzcovina. There was the Muslim man with a cow who gave milk to the Christian family with the baby. His neighbors shot his cow. And there was the Christian woman who protected the Muslim family.
We feel like we should be inspired by this, correct? People who are willing to stand up and do the right thing?
Except, from the perspective of those people, they were doubly shunned. They were shunned while the mob behavior took place as traitors. And they were shunned after peace had been restored because they served as a reminder that the destructive (evil) behavior that others engaged in wasn’t beyond their control. The fact that one person among many was able to hold on to their moral compass meant that that it was even more necessary to deny that person afterward because they became symbolic of everyone else’s immorality. And because they were known members of the community before, during, and after, they couldn’t be easily dismissed as superhuman saints.
Depressing, no?
War Is a Force is definitely worth a read, though, even if you do sometimes feel as if he’s drawing moral conclusions that every kindergartener should be able to reach.
Sadly, however, the stories Hedges relates proves that not everyone can.
Is to ask questions, and ask the right questions.
I think it is almost always a mistake to jump into the solutions, and assume we understand the problem.
Ironically, it all comes down to democracy and trusting the people, in the end. I am a democratic republican in the Jeffersonian sense, and I believe that the people, in aggregate, properly informed, make the best choices. It has been clear to me from the outset that Markos is more of a Madisonian, a well-meaning benign elitist, who deeply distrusts the grass-roots ability to self-govern. (And I have great admiration for Madison, I just don’t share his disdain for the unruly mobs). Just look at the site – no transparency, no accountability, no dialog with the administration, no openness, not a single one of the attributes he supposedly advocates in politics is manifest in the way he runs his community. That says a lot, IMO.
It is not surprising that Kos’s first choice was Clark, while I backed Dean. (Again, I like Clark, and think he has a role to play in American politics, but he is fundamentally a general. A kind and thoughtful general, but someone who is used to giving orders, not surrendering control.)
Dean is a true rarity on the Left – someone who actually, sincerely believes in small-r republicanism and democracy. We haven’t had such a personally modest and communally generous leader since Truman. One interesting thing I noticed right off the bat is how many fewer times he used the word “I” in his speeches than anyone else in the field.
That doesn’t mean he will be president, or that he must be, to make the greatest difference in this country. The fact that he is now head of the DNC is far more revolutionary than any pundit I have read seems to realize. The entire spectrum of the true Left, from Chomsky to Kerry, is currently dominated, IMO, by noblesse-oblige elitists (don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a liberal elitist over an authoritarian conservative any day of the week). Dean comes from a very different tradition.
The movement he was smart enough to get in front of (and that is the sequence of events, it was never Dean’s movement, it was a movement that chose Dean) emerged more from the open-source, heterachical, altruistic ethos of our increasingly networked world than it did from the top-down hierarchical industrial age that so influences the rest of American politics.
Anyway, the thing is to ask the questions, and provide the mechanisms and affordances so that people can discuss them constructively and collectively grok the answers.
In my opinion.
It was a response to booman’s comment about the site design, sorry.