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.

Late Thoughts on 9/11

Since I’m not at the computer much on weekends, I don’t post unless I set it up ahead of time. And most of the time, I’m way too disorganized for that. So though the 10 year remembrance of 9/11 was yesterday, I’m posting today, because it was very much on my mind.

I worked in Tower Two about four years before 9/11 happened. It was a part time position, annotating social science articles for the National Development and Research Institute, Inc., on the 15th floor. I think it was the 15th floor. I don’t completely remember, it was almost fifteen years ago now. I didn’t spend much time there. I annotated the articles and brought them in twice a week, and talked with my manager, J.B. O’Kane. The job gave me something social science-related that I could put on a graduate school application. And J.B. O’Kane wrote me a recommendation.

A year later, I received a scholarship to attend Arizona State University’s medical anthropology program, based on, among other things, those recommendations. It is quite possible that if I hadn’t gotten into school as I did, I may still have been working there, part or full-time when 9/11 happened.

When 9/11 happened, I had graduated with a masters in medical anthropology, and had been working for a year at the Maricopa County health department as an epidemiologist. I got a call as I was getting up to go to work. My director said, “Oh my God, you have to come in! Are you coming in soon? Something terrible has happened. We need everyone to come in. Someone just flew planes into the World Trade Center.” At that time, everyone watching knew that this was not an accident. It was an intentionally caused disaster. Health departments in most places had been training for bioterrorism response. So were activated when this happened, because no one knew yet how coordinated this attack was, or when, if, or where the next attack would happen. We spent the next few weeks doing enhanced syndromic surveillance of the hospitals and medical offices to identify any rise in any kind of symptoms. That’s the short answer for what syndromic surveillance is, monitoring flu-like illness, GI illness etc to see if we can identify a rise in symptoms before an epidemic occurs.

And I thought about J.B. O’Kane in those days and weeks. I wouldn’t have been doing that surveillance, that job at that time if it hadn’t been for him. Whether I still would have been at the WTC is impossible to determine, but his recommendation was partly responsible for my grad school opportunity and the job opportunity in public health that followed. In the days and weeks afterward, I did multiple and complex internet searches through every engine I could find. Nothing turned up for either NDRI, or J.B. O’Kane personally. And I couldn’t look them up by address anymore. In the years that followed, I still did searches occasionally, wondering if being on one of the lower floors could have saved at least some of them.

Most of my college friends still live in New York. And they told me that at the train stations, they would start marking the tires of cars with cut marks, because chalk washes off in the east coast rain. After a couple weeks of cut marks, they knew that the owner of a car wasn’t coming back to pick it up. And I sometimes find myself wondering if my supervisor’s car was one of those.

Sometimes people say, “Oh did you know someone who was killed?” I say, “I don’t know,” thinking about him. But I do know that if you lived in the tri-state area, then you either knew someone, or you knew someone who knew someone. Hundreds of people were killed. And years later, there are people still turning up who have COPD, or emphysema, or respiratory distress otherwise incurable, as young as thirty years old because if they weren’t first responders, they worked nearby, or lived nearby, or were on the street and handed out water, trying to help nearby.

And those deaths weren’t the only ones that day. America died, at least the America that we all grew up with or were taught existed. Maybe it never did. No one will really know for decades, until historians have a long view, and ‘secure documents’ are unsecured because the people who kept the secrets die of old age. Maybe the terrorists knew what would happen if they committed such an act, while someone like George W. Bush was in office. Maybe they predicted that he would pursue a course of expediency to rid his administration of inconvenient tyrants, instead of actually investigating the party responsible for the 9/11 massacre. Maybe they anticipated that some fundamentalist factions within the U.S. would, like Herman Goering, use the blanket of ‘national security’ as carte blanche to chip away at the personal freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights. It is a terrible irony that while our dedicated men and women in service were diverted to protect our freedom, our freedoms were being eaten away from the inside out.

Perhaps the terrorists knew that the most efficient way to destroy us would be to erase trust, that elimination of trusting your neighbor was the quickest way to choke a real democracy. Instillation of fear of the ‘other’ allows fertile ground for lies, for groups with their own agenda to present a solution of safety and ‘security’ that was never possible, and has never existed. That is, after all, the definition of terrorism, using fear to tear apart. We gave them our fear, as demanded, acted against our neighbor because of it, let it change the way we thought and lived and experienced the world. And this ‘solution’ for security, like all other such solutions in history was merely a policy of thinly veiled institutional bigotry based on creed or ethnicity, or even the perception of ethnicity or religion, something the U.S. was supposed to be against.

That day, and every day since, when a hate crime is committed against a middle eastern person or Muslim person in the U.S., or someone even perceived to be, the terrorists have won. Every day that someone is detained without formal accusation or trial, every day someone is violated by the Patriot Act, the terrorists have won. Every day that we bankrupt ourselves further to fight amoeboid and ever-shifting ‘wars on terror’ on multiple fronts, instead of putting our money into educating the next generation of leaders in public schools and colleges now, the terrorists have won. Every day that one of our own populations dies of a preventable disease or starves for want of the tax money we have squandered on fear-based measures of ‘security’, the terrorists have won.

There is no denying that there is a threat. But it is simply not possible to eliminate all risk. Life is risk. What we do know is that because of these policies and decisions, people of the lower income brackets suffer and die from lack of health care, people lose their health because they lose their homes and the ability to put food on the table, and methods of interrogation that were once ruled as torture, by us, are now being used and rationalized, by us. Our democracy has changed, and our society is transforming into the terrorists’ vision of us.

I remember that when I was growing up, I was a bitchy teenager. But underneath it all, I think that there was an optimism I would never have admitted to anyone who asked, that I lived in a time and in a country that really made almost anything possible. Our generation was painfully self-absorbed, and you could hear it in the music of the 80s especially. But, I am still glued to that music like a shipwrecked person to a floating chunk of flotsam because it also contained a hope for the possibilities of the future, a deep-rooted belief in the legacy that we were inheriting, of a country that had gotten something right. It really was a land of freedom and opportunity and good intentions from most of the people most of the time. We had our flaws, for sure, but we were working on them. And ultimately, I think that we believed that things would be okay.

I no longer believe that, I am sorry to say. I don’t know if average citizens like me will be mobilized to turn things around, and create enough perspective to get us headed the right way again. I don’t even know what we could do. I just know that the America now is not the same America I grew up with. Maybe I’m naive. I know I am. But I think that loss of freedom, and even the loss of optimism and hope is one of the more profound casualties of 9/11. So when I mourn the deaths, it’s not just for the people dead, but for the people hurt, and for the casualties in our way of life that seem to keep coming. I mourn my failure as a person during these years to do anything as a citizen to change the train wreck course we seem to be on.

But as a child of the 80s, I guess I still hope, and still search. The music is still playing, so there’s still time to change things and learn from our mistakes. An idea is too powerful a thing to ever go away. We see that with negative ideas all the time, why not positive ones? As long as the idea of America and the idea of democracy the way that Thomas Jefferson envisioned it is still remembered, I think that we still have a chance to recover.

Taliban and Spaceships

I love how little kids think. Driving to camp today, my daughter heard a news clip about the Taliban. All news clips about these jerks are sobering. But it is nice to see such things through non-cynical first grader eyes. She asked who they were. Once again, as in previous politically-inspired conversations, I was forced to slow down, take all the million dollar words out and distill the situation into something a first grader (albeit very smart) would understand. So I explained “that they are a group of people who want to tell other people in their countries how to live and dress, and what to think, ( not like your parents do, kiddo), and they hurt people who don’t do what they say. So a lot of people are unhappy and don’t want to be ruled by them.”

She thought about that for a minute, and said, “Well why don’t they go somewhere else, away from the Taliban?” (Since we often tell her that if someone is bothering her to walk away and go play with someone else.) So I explained that when it is somewhere you live, it is not always that easy. Not everyone has money to go somewhere else. It takes money to move. Also, the Taliban are in a lot of different places, and we don’t always know where they are. To which she asked, “Well, why don’t we give them ships so they can get away from them in space? Are the Taliban in outer space?”

At this point, I bent double over the steering wheel, but explained that we really only have one spaceship that can carry people and it just went on its last mission, the Space Shuttle, and it only carries a few astronauts. So from there, the conversation took a left turn into why we don’t have more space ships, and money for the Space Program. And that conversation ended with our arrival at camp, an explanation of thermodynamics, and why popsicle sticks wouldn’t work for space ship material. After the physics reasons, she added that people would get fat from eating all those popsicles to build the ship.

Well, we didn’t solve any world problems today. But despite the normally depressing topic, I was really glad, as I always am of talking with my daughter. I don’t make light of the horrific plight of folks who are trapped in oppressive situations like those facing coup by the Taliban. On the contrary, my daughter’s innocent yet innovative suggestions remind me that I can have those conversations, and how lucky she and I both are to not be in such a situation. Nor is this meant as a blanket statement about freedoms in the U.S. Really, I just wanted to remember that moment when my day got a little brighter thinking about solving problems with popsicle-stick space ships. That’ll never get old.

Arab Revolution in Bahrain

First, I want to comment that the journalist and blogger Angry Arabiya wins the prize this week for having the world’s biggest brass cahones, in my opinion. This amazing young woman is currently being interrogated by the Bahraini police, and tweeting about it when she gets the chance. Holy crap! And her heinous crimes for which she is being interrogated are the police having bogus photos of her at an ‘unauthorized gathering’, having family who voiced their opinion about the regime and refused to apologize for it, and her having a sign protesting torture. What a monster…  Kind of puts getting pulled over for a speeding ticket here in the US into perspective. Her dad has revealed that he has been tortured since he was detained, and she still doesn’t know where her husband and brother are. My thoughts and wishes go out to her, and I hope that she is not harmed.

All across the Middle East right now are people who are fighting for their freedom and for the basic rights that most European and North American continent countries have had for decades. I read about some support and comments coming from the US, but I am a bit surprised that I do not hear more, since it is so similar to the struggles that brought us to the Revolutionary War. And then I read about the fear of Arabs in blogs and comments on articles and remember that people have *temporarily* (one hopes) gone bonkers about Islam and anyone perceived as Middle Eastern.

If these revolutions had happened before 911, what would American people’s responses have been? Comedians like Dean Obidallah, Ahmed Ahmed, Maz Jobrani, and Aron Kader have talked about how the day before 911, they were average US citizens with diverse backgrounds like everyone else in the US. On 911, they became Arab. These guys say everything a lot funnier than that. But it’s funny because it’s true, and because if we don’t laugh at our ridiculousness, the remaining people with common sense might lose their minds and stick forks in their own eyes in exasperation.

I’ve known a lot of ‘Middle Easterners’ and a few Muslim folks in my life so far. I think the first experience I had with Islam was our next door neighbors in my apartment complex in Arizona.  I don’t remember what nation they were from, but she wore a hijab. The only reason I remember that is because I was curious. But what I remember most about them is that they were a young couple who liked to barbecue. We liked to barbecue too and so we had weekly potlucks, sometimes daily… It never would have occurred to me to be afraid of them or view them as possible terrorists or extremists then…and it doesn’t now either. I missed them when they moved away, they were cool.

I’ve been guilty of briefly taking note of someone wearing a hijab or burka in the past because while I didn’t know what it was called, I was just plain curious. It was different than what I usually saw. However, the more I talked with this couple and with other folks, the more I found that we really weren’t different. As a Jewish person, I actually found, especially from chatting at work with a Muslim co-worker, that we had a lot on things in common. In fact, this co-worker kind of became like a surrogate Jewish-Muslim mom. When my boyfriend at the time visited, and he wasn’t Jewish, and when I ate our director’s delicious pork mole, she responded with, “Are you trying to kill your parents?”

This anti-Muslim mania has seeped into the airlines to the most notable degree. Anything goes if you tack ‘national security’ to the end of the sentence. I acknowledge that there are wackos who want to blow people out of the sky, but like my husband and I were discussing, I’m way more afraid of the home-grown entitled bell-tower crazies whose lives didn’t go the way they planned, than I am of entire populations of regular citizens who happen to wear more clothing than me, and call God by ‘one o’ them dang furrin names’.  And as far as the searches, ‘random’, my ass. My husband is Native American, and I am Semitic looking. Especially when he grows a beard, two somewhat dark people of unknown ethnicity equal one searchable ‘threat’, in profiler’s eyes, because unless we’re traveling with a really White midwesterner, we get searched with frequency. And if you have anything that could be interpreted as Islamic, forget it, show up to the airport three hours early, not two. I had a great conversation with a couple of ladies on Twitter. One of them @muslimasoasis expressed people’s confused reactions to her because she is very Caucasian-looking, yet she is a hijabi, and @ayakhalil did a really enlightening sociaological experiment when flying. She noted people’s reactions to her as she normally is with her hijab, and then noted their reactions when she covered it up. Poof, like magic, the flocks of stand-offish were markedly more chatty. Her blogpost is really worth a read at http://sweeteaya.blogspot.com/  Scroll down to the entry Flying Hijabless. No, there’s no racial or religious discrimination in profiling…cough…’national security’.

The countries struggling right now with defining themselves and finding a government solution that works for the majority of its peoples are ancient and their histories and their cultures complex. They are not primitives or ‘noble savages’ or any other such nonsense that we seem to attribute to people we don’t understand, whether or not they have iPads and Netflix. I may not always agree with some Islamic perspectives from the Koran as interpreted by individual people now, but I don’t always agree much with my own Torah either or the people who talk about it. My own opinion is my own, that they were and are very useful documents and paradigms that were set firmly when they were written, in a particular historical context not separable from those paradigms. They got people where they needed to go at the time, and still do.

As for my own ideology, I don’t set much store by what some random person thinks a book did or didn’t say. I’m watching what’s going on in these nations with the fervent hope that the people who are fighting their own autocratic regimes right now, often far scarier to do than the thought of outside invasion, will continue to fight until the world knows the truth they are trying to tell about what is going on there, and until they get the freedoms they are fighting for, right to assemble, right to criticize stupid selfish politicians, right to drive! Viva la revolutions, wherever they are occurring, Bahrain, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and all the others!