VIII Preface

that simple and intellectually comforting way I naively imagined sufficient. I realized that the Holocaust was not only sinister and horrifying, but also an event not at all easy to comprehend in habitual, ordinary' terms. This event had been written down in its own code which had to be broken first to make understanding possible.

I wanted historians and social scientists and psychologists to make sense of it and explain it to me. I explored library shelves that I had never inspected before, and I found these shelves tightly packed, overflowing with meticulous historical studies and profound theological tracts. There were a few sociological studies as well skilfully researched and poignantly written. The evidence amassed by the historians was overwhelming in volume and content. Their analyses were cogent and profound. They showed beyond reasonable doubt that the Holocaust was a window, rather than a picture on the wall. Looking through that window, one can catch a rare glimpse of many things otherwise invisible. And the things one can see are of the utmost importance not just for the perpetrators, victims and witnesses of the crime, but for all those who are alive today and hope to be alive tomorrow. What I saw through this window I did not find at all pleasing. The more depressing the view, however, the more I was convinced that if one refused to look through the window, it would be at one's peril.

And yet I had not looked through that window before, and in not looking I did not differ from my fellow sociologists. Like most of my colleagues, I assumed that the Holocaust was, at best, something to be illuminated by us social scientists, but certainly not something that can illuminate the objects of our current concerns. I believed (by default rather than by deliberation) that the Holocaust was an interruption in the normal flow of history, a cancerous growth on the body of civilized society, a momentary madness among sanity. Thus I could paint for the use of my students a picture of normal, healthy, sane society, leaving the story of the Holocaust to the professional pathologists.

My complacency, and that of my fellow sociologists, was greatly helped 'though not excused) by certain ways in which the memory of the Holocaust had been appropriated and deployed. It had been all-too-often sedimented in the public mind as a tragedy that occurred to the Jews and the Jews alone, and hence, as far as all the others were concerned, called for regret, commiseration, perhaps apology, but not much more than that. Time and again it had been narrated by Jews and non-Jews alike as a collective (and sole) property of the Jews, as something to he left to, or jealously guarded by, those who escaped the

Preface ix

shooting and the gassing, and by the descendants of the shot and the gassed. In the end both views the 'outside' and the 'inside' complemented each other. Some self-appointed spokesmen for the dead went as far as warning against thieves who collude to steal the Holocaust from the Jews, christianize' it, or just dissolve us uniquely Jewish character in the misery of an indistinct humanity'. The Jewish state tried to employ the tragic memories as the certificate of its political legitimacy, a sale-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and above all as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit. Each for reasons of its own, such views contributed to the entrenchment of the Holocaust in public consciousness as an exclusively Jewish affair, of little significance to anyone else (including the Jews themselves as human beings) obliged to live in modern times and be members of modern society. Just how much and how perilously the significance of the Holocaust had been reduced to that of a private trauma and grievance of one nation was brought to me recently in a flash, by a learned and thoughtful friend of mine. I complained to him that 1 had not found in sociology much evidence of universally important conclusions drawn from the Holocaust experience. Is it not amazing,' my friend replied, 'considering how many Jewish sociologists there are?

One read of the Holocaust on anniversaries, commemorated in front of mostly Jewish audiences and reported as events in the life of Jewish communities. Universities have launched special courses on the history of the Holocaust, which, however, were taught separately from courses in general history. The Holocaust has been defined by many as a specialist topic in Jewish history. It has attracted its own specialists, the professionals who kept meeting and lecturing to each other at specialist conferences and symposia. However, their impressively productive and crucially important work seldom finds it way back to the mainstream of scholarly discipline and cultural life in general - much like most other specialized interests in our world of specialists and specializations

When it does find that way at all, more often than not it is allowed on the public stage in a sanitized and hence ultimately demobilizing and comforting form. Pleasantly resonant with public mythology, it can shake the public out of its indifference to human tragedy, but hardly out of its complacency - like the American soap-opera dubbed Holocaust, which showed well-bred and well-behaved doctors and their families (just like your Brooklyn neighbours), upright, dignified and morally unscathed, marched to the gas chambers by the revolting Nazi degenerates aided by uncouth and blood-thirsty Slav peasants, David G.

6

The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram)

Not yet fully recovered from the shattering truth of the Holocaust Dwight Macdonald warned in 1945, we must now fear the person who' obeys the law more than the one who breaks it.

The Holocaust had dwarfed all remembered'and inherited images of evil. With that, it inverted all established explanations of evil deeds It suddenly transpired that the most horrifying evil in human-memory did not result from the dissipation of order, but from an impeccable faultless and unchallengeable rule of order. It was not the work of an obstreperous and uncontrollable mob, but of men in uniforms obedient and disciplined, following the rules and meticulous about the spirit and the letter of their briefing. It became known very soon that these men whenever they took their unforms off, were in no way evil They behaved much like all of us. They had wives they loved, children they cosseted, fnends they helped and comforted in case of distress It seemed unbelievable that once in uniform the same people shot, gassed or presided over the shooting and gassing of thousands of other people including women who were someone's beloved wives and babies who' were someone's cosse.ed children. It also was terrifying How could ordinary people like you and me do it? Surely in some way let it be a smal way, a tiny way, they must have been special, different, unlike us? Surely they must have escaped the ennobling, humanizing impact of our enlightened, civilized society? Or, alternatively, they must have been spoiled, corrupted, subjected to some vicious or unhappy combination of educational factors which resulted in a faulty, diseased personality'

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Proving these suppositions wrong would have been resented not only because it would tear apart the illusion of personal security which the life in a civilized society promises. It would also have been resented for a much more pregnant reason; because it exposed the irredeemable inconclusiveness of every morally righteous self-image, and any clear conscience. From now on, all consciences were to be clean until further notice only.

The most frightening news brought about the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that 'this' could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it. Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist from Yale University, bore the brunt of this terror when he recklessly undertook an empirical test of suppositions based on emotional urge and determined to remain oblivious to the evidence; more recklessly still, he published the results in 1974. Milgram's findings were indeed unambiguous: yes, we could do it and we still may, if conditions are right.

It was not easy to live with such findings. No wonder learned opinion came down on Milgram's research in full force. Milgram's techniques were put under the microscope, pulled apart, proclaimed faulty and even disgraceful, and reproved. At any price and by any means, respectable and less respectable, the academic world tried to discredit and disown the findings which promised terror where complacency and peace of mind should better be. Few episodes in scientific history disclose more fully the reality of the allegedly value-free search for knowledge and disinterested motives of scientific curiosity. 'I'm convinced' said Milgram in reply to his critics, 'that much of the criticism, whether people know it or not, stems from the results of the experiment. If everyone had broken off at slight shock or moderate shock, ' (that is, before the following of the experimenter's orders began to mean bringing pain and suffering to the putative victims) this would be a very reassuring finding and who would protest?¹ Milgram was right, of course. And he still is. Years have passed since his original experiment, yet his findings, which ought to have led to a thorough revision of our views on the mechanisms of human behaviour, remain quoted in most sociological courses as an amusing, but not exceedingly illuminating, curiosity - without affecting the main body of sociological reasoning. If one cannot beat the findings, one can still marginalize them.

Old habits of thought die hard. Shortly after the war a group of scholars headed by Adorno published The Authoritarian Personality, a book destined to become a pattern for research and theorizing for years

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to come. What was particularly important about the book were not its specific propositions - virtually all were subsequently questioned and disproved - but its location of the problem, and the research strategy derived from it. This latter contribution of Adorno and his associates, immune to empirical testing while comfortingly resonant with subconscious wishes of the learned public, proved to be much more resilient. As the title of the book suggested, the authors sought the explanation of Nazi rule and ensuing atrocities in the presence of a special type of individual; personalities inclined to obedience towards the stronger, and to the unscrupulous, often cruel, high-handedness towards the weak. The triumph of the Nazis must have been an outcome of an unusual accumulation of such personalities. Why this occurred, the authors neither explained nor wished to explain. They carefully eschewed the exploration of all supra- or extra-individual factors that could produce authoritarian personalities; nor did they care about the possibility that such factors may induce authoritarian behaviour in people otherwise devoid of authoritarian personality. To Adorno and his colleagues, Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis. As one of the members of the group admitted several years later, The Authoritarian Personality emphasized purely personality determinants of potential fascism and ethnocentrism and discounted contemporary social influences.'² The fashion in which Adorno and his team articulated the problem was important not so much because of the way in which the blame was apportioned, but because of the bluntness with which all the rest of mankind was absolved. Adorno's vision divided the world into born proto-Nazis and their victims. The dark and dismal knowledge that many gentle people may turn cruel if given a chance was suppressed. The suspicion that even the victims may lose a good deal of their humanity on the road to perdition, was banned - the tacit prohibition which stretched to the extremes of absurdity in the American television portrayal of the Holocaust.

It was such academic tradition and this public opinion, both deeply entrenched, heavily fortified and mutually reinforcing, that Milgram's research challenged. A particular disquiet and rage were caused by his hypothesis that cruelty is not committed by cruel individuals, but by ordinary men and women trying to acquit themselves well of their ordinary duties; and his findings, that while cruelty correlates but poorly with the personal characteristics of its perpetrators, it correlates very strongly indeed with the relationship of authority and subordination,

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with our normal, daily encountered, structure of power and obedience. The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault, may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behaviour that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders.⁵ It may be true that some individuals are prompted into cruelty by their own, unforced, thoroughly personal inclinations. Most certainly, however, personal traits do not stop them from committing cruelty when the context of interaction in which they find themselves prompts them to be cruel.

Let us remember that the only case in which traditionally, following Le Bon, we used to admit this (that is, the perpetration of indecent things by otherwise decent people) to be possible, was a situation in which normal, civilized, rational patterns of human interaction have been broken; a crowd, brought together by hatred or panic; a casual encounter of strangers, each pulled out of his ordinary context and suspended for a time in a social void; a tightly packed town square, where shouts of panic replace command and stampede instead of authority decides the direction. We used to believe that the unthinkable may only happen when people stop thinking: when the lid of rationality is taken off the cauldron of pre-sociai and uncivilized human passions. Milgram's findings also turn upside-down that much older image of the world, according to which humanity was fully on the side of the rational order, while inhumanity was fully confined to its occasional breakdowns.

In a nutshell, Milgram suggested and proved that inhumanity is a matter of social relationships. As the latter are rationalized and technically perfected, so is the capacity and the efficiency of the social production of inhumanity.

It may seem trivial. It is not. Before Milgram's experiments, few people, professionals and lay alike, anticipated what Milgram was about to discover. Virtually all ordinary middle-class males, and all competent and respected members of the psychological profession, whom Milgram asked what the results of the experiments are likely to be, were confident that 100 per cent of the subjects would refuse to co-operate as the cruelty of actions they were commanded to perform grew, and would at some fairly low point break off. In fact the proportion of people who did withdraw their consent went down in appropriate circumstances, to as little as 30 per cent. The intensity of alleged electric shocks they were prepared to apply was up to three times higher than what the learned experts, in unison with the lay public, were able to imagine.

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Inhumanity as a function of social distance

Perhaps the most striking among Milgram's findings is the inverse ratio of readiness to cruelty and proximity to its victim. It is difficult to harm a person we touch. It is somewhat easier to afflict pain upon a person we only see at a distance. It is still easier in the case of a person we only hear. It is quite easy to be cruel towards a person we neither see nor hear.

If harming a person involves direct bodily contact, the perpetrator is denied the comfort of unnoticing the causal link between his action and the victim's suffering. The causal link is bare and obvious, and so is the responsibility for pain. When the subjects of Milgram's experiments were told to force the victims' hands on to the plate through which the electric shock was allegedly administered, only 30 per cent continued to fulfil the command till the end of the experiment. When, instead of grasping the victim's hand they were asked only to manipulate the levers of the control desk, the proportion of the obedient went up to 40 per cent. When the victims were hidden behind a wall, so that only their anguished screams were audible, the number of subjects ready to see it to the end' jumped to 62.5 per cent. Switching off the sounds did not push the percentage much further - only to 65 per cent. It seems we feel mostly through the eyes. The greater was the physical and psychical distance from the victim, the easier it was to be cruel. Milgram's conclus­ion is simple and convincing:

Any force or event that is placed between the subject and the consequences of shocking the victim, will lead to a reduction of strain on the participant and thus lessen disobedience. In modern society others often stand between us and the final destructive act to which we contribute.⁴

Indeed, mediating the action, splitting the action between stages delineated and set apart by the hierarchy of authority, and cutting the action across through functional specialization is one of the most salient and proudly advertised achievements of our rational society. 'I he meaning of Milgram's discovery is that, immanently and irretrievably, the process of rationalization facilitates behaviour that is inhuman and cruel in its consequences, if not in its intentions. The more rational is the organization of action, the easier it is to cause suffering - and remain at peace with oneself.

The reason why separation from the victim makes cruelty easier seems psychologically obvious: the perpetrator is spared the agony of

156 'I'hc lit hies of Obedience (Reading Milgram)

witnessing the outcome of his deeds. He may even mislead himself into believing that nothing really disastrous has happened, and thus placate the pangs of conscience. But this is not the only explanation. Again, reasons are not just psychical. Like everything which truly explains human conduct, they are social.

Placing the victim in another room not only takes him farther away from the subject, it also draws the subject and the experimenter relatively closer. There is incipient group function between the experimenter and the subject, from which the victim is excluded. In the remote condition, the victim is truly an outsider, who stands alone, physically and psychologically.⁵

Loneliness of the victim is not just a matter of his physical separation. It is a function of the togetherness of his tormentors, and his exclusion from this togetherness. Physical closeness and continuous co-operation (even over a relatively short time - no subject was experimented with for longer than one hour) tends to result in a group feeling, complete with the mutual obligations and solidarity it normally brings about. This group feeling is produced by joint action, particularly by the complementarity of individual actions - when the result is evidently achieved by shared effort. In Milgram's experiments, action united the subject with the experimenter, and simultaneously separated both of them from the victim. On no occasion was the victim granted the role of an actor, an agent, a subject. Instead, he was held permanently on the receiving end. Unambiguously, he was made into an object; and as the objects of action go, it does not matter much whether they are human or inanimate. Thus loneliness of the victim and the togetherness of his tormentors conditioned and validated each other.

The effect of physical and purely psychical distance is, therefore, farther enhanced by the collective nature of damaging action. One may guess that even if obvious gains in the economy and efficiency of action brought by its rational organization and management are left out of account, the sheer fact that the oppressor is a member of a group must be assigned a tremendous role in facilitating the committing of cruel acts. It may be that a considerable part of bureaucratically callous and insensitive efficiency could be ascribed to factors other than the rational design of division of labour or chain of command: to the skilful, and not necessarily deliberate or planned, deployment of natural group-formative tendency of co-operative action, a tendency always coupled with boundary-drawing and exclusion of outsiders. Through its authority

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over recruitment of its members and over designation of its objects, bureaucratic organization is able to control the outcome of such a tendency, and assure that it leads to an ever-more profound and unbridgeable chasm between the actors (i.e. members of the organization) and the objects of action. This makes so much easier the transformation of the actors into the persecutors, and the objects into the victims.

Complicity after ones own act

Everyone who once inadvertently stepped into a bog knows only too well that getting oneself out of the trouble was difficult mostly because every effort to get out resulted in one's sinking deeper into the mire. One can even define the swamp as a kind of ingenious system so constructed that however the objects immersed into it move, their movements always add to the 'sucking power' of the system.

Sequential actions seems to possess the same quality. The degree to which the actor finds himself bound to perpetuate the action, and opting-out difficult, tends to grow with every stage. First steps are easy and require little, if any, moral torments. The steps to follow are increasingly daunting. Finally, taking them feels unbearable. Yet the cost of withdrawal has also grown by that time. Thus the urge to break off is weak when the obstacles to withdrawal are also weak or non-existent. When the urge intensifies, the obstacles it encounters are at every stage strong enough to balance it. When the actor is overwhelmed with the desire to back out, it is normally too late for him to do so. Milgram listed sequential action among the main 'binding factors' (i.e. factors locking the subject in his situation). It is tempting to ascribe the strength of this particular binding factor to the determining impact of the subject's own past actions.

Sabini and Silver have offered a brilliant and convincing description of its mechanism.

Subjects enter the experiment recognizing some commitments to cooperate with the experimenter; after all, they have agreed to participate, taken his money, and probably to some degree endorse the aims of the advancement of science. (Milgram's subjects were told that they would participate in a study meant to discover ways of making learning more efficient.) When the learner makes his first error, subjects are asked to shock him. The shock level is 15 volts. A 15-volt shock is entirely harmless, imperceptible. There is

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no moral issue here. Of course the next shock is more powerful, but only slightly so. Indeed every shock is only slightly more powerful than the last. The quality of the subject's action changes from something entirely blameless to something unconscionable, but by degrees. Where exactly should the subject stop? At what point is the divide between these two kinds of action crossed? How is the subject to know? It is easy to see that there must be a line; it is not so easy to see where that line ought to be.

The most important factor in the process, however, seems to be the following:

if the subject decides that giving the next shock is not permissible, then, since it is (in every case) only slightly more intense than the last one, what was the justification for administering the last shock he just gave? To deny the propriety of the step he is about to take is to undercut the propriety of the step he just took, and this undercuts the subject's own moral position. The subject is trapped by his gradual commitment to the experiment.⁶

In the course of a sequential action, the actor becomes a slave of his own past actions. This hold seems much stronger than other binding factors. It can certainly outlast the factors which at the start of the sequence seemed much more important and played a truly decisive role. In particular, the unwillingness to re-evaluate (and condemn) one's own past conduct will still remain a powerful, and ever more powerful, stimulus to plod on, long after the original commitment to the cause' had all but petered out. Smooth and imperceptible passages between the steps lure the actor into a trap; the trap is the impossibility of quitting without revising and rejecting the evaluation of one's own deeds as right or at least innocent. The trap is, in other words, a paradox: one cannot get clean without blackening oneself. To hide filth, one must forever draggle in the mud.

This paradox might be a moving factor behind the well-known phenomenon of accomplices' solidarity. Nothing binds people to each other stronger than shared responsibility for an act that they admit is criminal. Commonsensically, we explain this kind of solidarity by the natural wish to escape punishment; the game theorists' analyses of the famous prisoner's dilemma' also teach us that (providing no one confuses the stakes) to assume that the rest of the team will remain solidary is the most rational decision any member may make. We may

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wonder, however, to what extent the accomplices' solidarity is brought about and reinforced by the fact that only the members of the team which originally engaged in the sequential action are likely to conspire to defuse the paradox, and by common consent offer some credibility to the belief in the legitimacy of past action in spite of the growing evidence to the contrary. I suggest, therefore, that another 'binding factor' named by Milgram, situational obligations, is, to a large extent, a derivative of the first, the paradox of sequential action.