Milgram’s Experiment and the War on Terror

Many politicians and citizens have raised an uproar decrying the comparison between our use of tactics, such as profiling against a group of people, and against detainees who have not been proved to be guilty of terrorism, and those used by the state of Germany prior to the rise of the Nationalist Party. Invariably, the catchphrase ‘patriotism’ and ‘national security’ get thrown into the argument, and what I believe is the real shape of the situation becomes distorted. Indeed the very mention of the Nationalist Party, because of its overuse as an icon of ultimate evil, sends people flying off the handle in indignation, without any analysis of what the central issues really were that allowed a situation in which otherwise normal sane people did evil things. Or failed to prevent them. And this blanket gag order certainly makes an analysis of our current situation almost impossible. Taboo subjects cannot be explored.

Well, I’m exploring them anyway. I’ve known quite a few German people in my life. I’ve visited Germany. My husband has visited Germany. Everyone I met was very hospitable, nice and about as more or less normal as anyone I encounter here. Though everything was insanely punctual.

This is not to say that the people who did do terrible things or the people who knew about it and did nothing are absolved of their crimes. No. Their actions were inexcusable. But after looking at the Milgram experiment, and frankly, reviewing incidents that cannot be swept under the rug such as the torture at Abu Ghraib, it is somewhat more difficult to look at the individuals involved in the original ‘Axis of Evil’ and say we are different. It makes me wonder how many of us have the potential to become the same kind of monster in similar conditions. This experiment scared the crap out of me.

I think that this topic of comparison has become taboo because we are afraid. We don’t want to see our own potential for such evil acts, so we place a firm barrier there and say, ‘this could never happen here’. But in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram proved definitively for the next twenty years with repeated experiments that it could absolutely happen anywhere in the world with any group of people.

The Milgram experiment consisted of a triad of players: the teacher-subject, the learner-actor, and the authority figure-researcher. The subject was told to have the learner repeat pairs of words. Every time the learner got one wrong, the ‘teacher’ subject was to administer an electric shock. The shocks got progressively stronger until there was a final voltage that would render the learner unconscious. They would begin screaming and pounding on the wall and then finally stop responding if the teacher did administer the final shocks. If the teacher hesitated or asked to stop, they were given verbal prompts to continue four times by the researcher who told them that they must go on, that it was very important. If the teacher protested more than four times, or if they refused to go on, they were released. The learner was an actor. There were no electric shocks in reality. But as far as the subject-teacher knew, they were real.

And consistently in all variations of this experiment in different populations, do you know how many of the subjects continued to the final shocks? Between 61 and 66%. Over half. Over half of people inflicted progressive, painful, and dangerous shocks to someone, rendering them ‘unconscious’ or ‘dead’, since in a few of the scenarios the actor stated they had a ‘heart condition’, simply because they were ordered to do so. These were not enemy soldiers or Nazis. They were not skinheads, they were not white power advocates, or sociopaths. They were school teachers, doctors, lawyers, grocery store clerks, truck drivers, friends, next-door neighbors. They were you and me. That’s a terrifying realization. One that has somehow been lost in the current jingoistic move toward our own brand of nationalism. And I use the term nationalism not as an epithet or a curse word, but as the definition of what we are doing, rallying behind an image of what our leaders decide the US stands for. That’s what nationalism means.

Nationalism has its uses. It can make people proud of who they are. It can make us build a nation with amazing things like roads, sewage systems, as the Romans did, purely on the steam of national pride. The dangerous part of nationalism, however, is that it can be used by the greedy, by the power hungry with some other political agenda, to sharpen the borders between what is and is not American, creating an Other where there was none before. Does it look familiar? It should and if it doesn’t, it is because we are mired in denial.

We are so horrified by the revelations of Milgrams experiment and what it says about the human race, that we forget to be analytical. Some of us declare disgust with humanity, without the most critical question. Why was Milgrams experiment recreated so consistently, and why does it happen in history so often with the same results? Why do we fail to learn from this particular mistake? Because we are primates. Every primate species in the world reacts to an authority structure in a similar way. We do not question authority, whether by force of arms, or by persuasion and influence, except in direct challenge, and this is the exception rather than the rule. The majority of times we are faced with a dilemma to do something wrong which is sanctioned or encouraged by authority, we will do it even when we have an idea that authority is wrong. Because on some level, we are fighting hundreds of thousands of years of programming as a primate species. Does that make humanity evil? No. We are what we are. Does it excuse appalling acts of torture and cruelty? No. But it does explain it. And as we look for answers as to whether we can overcome this programming, they are there.

There was a baboon troop that was documented some years back to have a structure different from every other baboon troop studied. Most of their alpha males had been killed off by some kind of disease, or poaching. In any case, only the gentler males were left. These males became the authority structure, though they chose not to exercise authority except when absolutely necessary. They stood up and fought only if another more aggressive male tried to come in and take over the troop, then the whole troop banded together to ‘discourage’ the intruder from being aggressive. The result was that the aggressive males often stayed in the troop and changed their behavior to become less aggressive and more laid back, because they apparently seemed happier there. In fact, the longevity of these baboon compared to others was marked. They were living longer too.

The amazing thing about humanity is our ability to evolve, to learn from our mistakes, to become different, like these baboons. Milgram’s experiment will rear its ugly head in history again. And maybe we’ll fail another hundred times when faced with the choice between our own internal compass, and an errant authority. But someday we won’t. And that will happen more and more. Why do I believe this? Because many of the past subjects of Milgram’s experiment wrote him later on, despite the emotional distress they felt after a review of the experiment, to tell him that they were glad they had been shown about themselves what the experiment revealed. Many wrote to tell him that they were becoming conscientious objectors when it came to the Vietnam War, because of what they had learned. Whether you agree or disagree about the wisdom of the Vietnam War, the point is that they decided for themselves rather than relied on an authority to make that moral decision for them.

I also know that this slow advance toward individual thought is still happening. If we take the world as it is now, and the world as it was during the Roman Empire, though we make jokes about being the new Roman Empire just short of orgies and vomitoriums, there are profound differences. We collectively agree that slavery is wrong. The proportion of nations who agree that all people should have basic civil rights is the majority. However well or poorly this is executed, the fact that this is even attempted on such a global scale is light years from where we were during the Dark Ages, the Crusades, and the Inquisition.

But progress grinds to a halt if we aren’t allowed to discuss certain issues for fear of offending, if we can’t even have a conversation about history without being branded unpatriotic or accused of disparaging veterans. Veterans are respected with good reason. They are people who act on an urge to be part of something bigger than themselves. This is never a bad thing. It is however a good trait that has been used by unscrupulous people in authority, who then veil their own agendas by forbidding conversation about the history that follows. But the fact remains, and most veterans I have spoken with agree, that the first step to learning from our mistakes, is to admit, collectively with collective responsibility that we’ve made them. Many veterans I’ve encountered, being also honest self-evaluating people, like Milgram’s conscientious objectors, welcome the chance to air their own thoughts instead of keeping them locked behind a wall of silence.

Unknown American History

It is amazing to me the things that I don’t know as an American, that I feel I should. This has never been brought home to me more than recently. Two events were recently brought to my attention that I never knew, and that I’m fairly certain were never in any of the history books I ever read in school, even on days when I wasn’t daydreaming, doodling, or staring at the crush-of-the-day…

One event was brought up at a party by a Vietnamese-American friend who recently moved to Ireland. She regaled us with things she saw on a recent trip to one of the Irish cities in which they had constructed a commemorative monument to the Native American tribes who sent life-saving shipments of supplies overseas during the potato famine.

Huh? Let me repeat that. One or a few Native American tribes, the Choctaw in particular, saved up what is estimated at $710, what was then a small fortune, despite their own troubles, and sent it to the struggling Irish nation. I know that many of the Irish know of this event since a monument was constructed to the Choctaw. But I wonder how many American Irish, especially those who are third or fourth generation here know about that contribution to their forbears. Or how many Americans in general know of this. I certainly didn’t. The only thing I remember learning about Indians in school was events like the Trail of Tears and other battles, told in general terms. There was seldom anything personal, cultural, or definitively positive taught. Knowing things like this change everything, or should. What a tremendous act of generosity and humanity, that has been completely lost on most of us. They never did it for attention, and probably knew that such an act would never reach the consciousness of most Americans considering the political climate of the time toward them from the American government and settlers. That makes it all the more remarkable.

In addition to this, I learned that the Ottoman Empire under Islamic (yes Muslim) Sultan Abdulmecid offered 10,000 pounds of aid to the Irish. Ten thousand pounds. That is a staggering amount of money for the time. But the Queen asked the sultan to reduce it to 1,000 pounds so as not to give more than the British Crown, which was giving 1,000 pounds themselves. He agreed but sent three ships of food to Ireland in addition, secretly in defiance of the Crown. The Crown found out and tried to block the ships, but they successfully landed in Drogheda Harbor. What happened to the food after that I don’t know. But they sent it. This is something I also, as a citizen of a major world power, hadn’t known about a major world event. The sultan sent the ships in secret, against the wishes of a major ally, so it was unlikely to be motivated by political gain, but more in the interests of real humanitarian concerns.

The second event, I learned about this weekend, at an event hosted by a new non-for-profit organization beginning within the Vietnamese community in Colorado, called the Big Heart Organization. Their mission is to pull together the many organizations within the Vietnamese community to serve on any issue of concern, whether heart disease, smoking cessation, emergency preparedness, refugee aid, etc. At my table was a leader of one of the Hmong clans. I never knew much about the Hmong culture. Only that they came from the hilly regions around Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. I knew that they had their own language, and they were clan-based. I knew that they sometimes used methods of healing such as coining, rubbing heated coins along chi points of the spine to alleviate certain symptoms of illness. I also knew, from past anthropology studies, that this practice had been painfully misinterpreted by some social workers as signs of domestic violence, since it could occasionally cause bruising.

What I never knew, that I think every American should know, was the reason so many Hmong came here, and the meaning of some of the jewelry worn. During the Vietnam War, the Hmong clans were the ones who provided passage to our soldiers through Cambodia and other hostile areas, when no one else would. They assisted the U.S. in extremely dangerous situations, because they believed in the cause our soldiers were fighting for. And when the war was over, and our soldiers left, the Hmong remained to face the wrath of the governments who disagreed with the U.S. Because even though most Americans, and even many soldiers didn’t realize or or even know of the aid that was given to them, or at least from whom, the governments and despots in the countries these allies lived in, did. The Hmong were captured, tortured, expelled from their homes, murdered for political revenge. So they fled, to China, here, other surrounding countries. In China, they have been persecuted as another minority that the Han want to assimilate. So they have been forbidden from speaking their language and practicing their culture. When they were imprisoned, they were forced to wear heavy collars to differentiate them as prisoners separate from the Chinese. And the silver torque that they often wear commemorates the freedom they won from this imprisonment, as they practice their culture in a new land, openly or in secret. As a Jew, remembering the practices of the marranos of Spain, following the Inquisition, who would close up all of their windows and doors, go into their basements and light two candles on a Friday night without knowing why they did such things, I well understood the symbolism.

As for their flight to and reception by the U.S., I think most Americans don’t, certainly I didn’t, appreciate them as more than just one more group of immigrants in ongoing waves of immigrants. I have no problem with immigration or folks coming over. I am a third generation Ashkenazic Jew…married to an Ojibway. It would be the height of hypocrisy for me to have a problem with any other group of people coming here for any reason. I am the child of immigrants, and even a hundred years from now, my people will still be immigrants in a land that wasn’t mine, if you want to get nit-picky about the definition of immigrant. We’ll go from new-comers to old-comers…But the point is that the current climate in the U.S. has become fairly hostile toward immigrants, presenting them as clingers-on and nuisances to give charity to and to be tolerated, or who ‘drag America down’ (I have actually seen that nasty comment). But very few people make the realization that many of the people we view in this manner have already paid their dues as Americans, personally, and we never know it, let alone acknowledge their contribution in any way.

This is what makes history as taught in schools frustrating to me. We see the sanitized, general version of things, many events which are summarized to the point of uselessness. I’m not just making excuses for my lackadaisical approach to my high school history studies, though I am the first to admit that I wasn’t a good history student. But what I want to know when I learn history are these little tidbits and how they changed us, as a nation, as a world. And I think kids today do too. It is these stories which transform our general characterizations of different ethnicities we encounter into real people and connected members of the human race.