The power to refuse our consent
Jerry Coyne’s post on Francis Collins versus Primo Levi on theodicy prompted me to read Survival in Auschwitz again. So I am. I read this passage earlier today, on p 41, in which Levi reports something another prisoner told him:
…precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.
A couple of days ago I read a passage in Lauren Slater’s Inside Skinner’s Box. The book is about various famous experiments in psychology, and it starts with probably the most famous of all, the Milgram experiment. Slater talks to two men who took part in the experiment in the early 60s, one who didn’t fully obey but stopped at 150 volts, and one who went all the way to the end. The latter, when he was debriefed at the end of the experiment, was horrified. “You thought you were really giving shocks, and nothing can take away from you the knowledge of how you acted. There’s no turning back.”
So Slater asks him, “I would guess you think the experiments were essentially unethical, that they caused you harm.”
No, he replies. No. “Not at all. If anything, just the opposite.”
She stares at him.
“The experiments,” he continues, “caused me to reevalute my life. They caused me to confront my own compliance and really struggle with it. I began to see closeted homosexuality, which is just another form of compliance, as a moral issue. I came out. I saw how important it was to develop a strong moral center. I felt my own moral weakness and I was appalled…I saw how pathetically vulnerable I was to authority, so I kept a strict eye on myself and learned to buck expectations.” [p 60]
Those two passages seem to me to be saying essentially the same thing, and a very important thing it is.
I was thinking of those Milgram type experiments just the other day. A TV program brought them to mind. It was a Candid Camera / prank style show where they filmed people who thought they were on a game show. These ‘contestants’ believed they were in control of the voltage administered to strangers if they failed to answer a trivia question. The higher the voltage setting, the more money could be won.
The people receiving the ‘shocks’ were in on the program, and did a credible job portraying increasingly painful electrocution, even begging the duped contestants not to continue playing. Some of the contestants continued increasing the voltage until the actors feigned heart attacks.
I have the impression that ideas that would get a producer a new hot tub would land a professor in a very different type of hot water. I wonder how far the producers will go for money before they find the moral center Slater’s interviewee talked about.
OB,
that “same thing” being what exactly?
That we usually need extreme circumstances to enact some change (for the better – or any change?) in ourselves?
Might be saying more about myself than about these two quotes but that is the first thing I thought of when I read these quotes.
Something along the lines of “Things always have to get worse before they get better”.
The important thing, I take it, is that there is a precious something at our moral centre which needs to be held to despite outside pressures, whether that be the moral centre of prisoners in concentration camps, or the moral centre of the guards who guard them. In either case the precious centre of humanity can give way under pressure, as, in the Milgram experiment, one of the subjects who turned the voltage up to ‘dangerous’ levels recognised a lot of unresolved issues in his own life which made him vulnerable to outside pressure, to the man in the white coat who had authority.
The English title of Primo Levi’s book is unfortunate (though it gets the important part right), since in the original it is If This be [is] a Man, as I recall. And the question is not so much suvival of Auschwitz as survival in Auschwitz (as the English title rightly observes). Survival, that is, as a man, as a human being with a moral centre that will not give way under external pressure, as, to use a word that I know you do not particularly like, Ophelia, a person with dignity.
This is perhaps why religion (and other ideologies too, no doubt) is so harmful, because it encourages conformity, not integrity, and functions best when it regulates and directs the beliefs (if unexplored affirmations can be called beliefs) and actions of people in the mass, instead of encouraging critical self-understanding and beliefs and attitudes based on thought rather than on conformity.
There is another thing in common: the arbitrary prescription of previleges to a selected few. (Needless to say, those abrahamic religions play this trick to perfection.)
This reminds me of the PBS Frontline video “A Class Divided” and I wonder if these experiments (including the Milgram’s),if carefully planned, modified and applied, would be more effective in helping us to understand how fragile we actually are and how easily we can buy into this or that kind of bigotry.
Golly – I thought it was obvious what the thing was. The power to refuse our consent. The power to say no when no is the right thing to say. (At Auschwitz. In Milgram’s lab. At My Lai. At Srebrenica. In Rwanda. In the football stadium in Mogadishu. Not at Little Rock.)
GD – really?! I’m stunned to hear that a tv show could get away with that – you’re certainly right that researchers can no longer get away with it! Do you remember the name of the show?
It’s a different show than the one GD described, but Derren Brown included a Milgram component when selecting participants in his show “The Heist”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w
There are several of these prank shows on now, and I am not certain which one it was. If I had to take a guess I would say ‘Scare Tactics’ on the SciFi channel.
It says something sad about the zeitgeist of America these days when nobody in academia would be allowed to do something in order to gain better understanding of our species, but somebody in Hollywood can easily do it to sell advertising time.
I suppose actually it says more about different ethical standards in different jobs. To put it crisply it says that universities and researchers have some and the entertainment industry doesn’t.
Like a lot of people, I think, I’m very torn about the standards. It was clearly a horrible thing to do to the subjects, but one really wouldn’t wish the experiment undone.
This is a bit at a tangent to the last couple of notes. I’m going back a way. I’ve spent the whole day having a plumber unplug one of my drains, a very draining experience. I haven’t received the bill yet, but I think they get paid more than presidents!
However, I’m sorry, OB, I don’t think the ‘thing’ is as obvious as you suggest. It is not, in my view, simply a refusal of consent. The cases are significantly different.
In the case of the concentration camp inmate, refusal to consent is a matter being. In the case of the guard it is a matter of doing. No doubt being and doing are related, but in the two cases they are, I think, inversely related.
The first is much more difficult than the second, given the conditions in the Nazi concentration camps. In fact, the second would not have been difficult at all, even if refusal to consent may not have been enough to preserve the person as an ethical being. There were a number of men who refused to take part in the killing squads, for example – Einzatsgruppen (task forces) – and the only consequence was that they were transferred. And a lot of them were negatively affected by it, as were many of the ‘punishers’ in Milgram’s experiments, much more seriously affected than the one mentioned by Slater. Doing preceded being in that case.
But being, being before doing, that’s a different thing altogether. It’s a matter of holding onto something that refuses, despite the horrendous conditions around you, to give in to being dehumanised. Actually, Levi points out how bestial many became, and at points includes himself in that number, especially right at the end, if I remember rightly. Some were just drowned by it, not by a refusal to consent, but by age, sickness, hunger, thirst, dirt, fatigue, etc. etc. Refusal of consent – if that is to be the thing that is common to the two cases – involves very different qualities of the persons involved, importantly different, I think.
Well I didn’t mean they were identical – but they seemed to me to be talking about the same core idea. Of course one is a victim and the other is a (fantasy) perp.
There wasn’t any guard – the other guy was a subject in an experiment.
The second was difficult – that was the whole point. If it hadn’t been difficult for them they would have just refused and the whole thing wouldn’t have upset them so horribly. And it wasn’t easy for the reserve battallions and so on, either – there are all kinds of feelings of responsibility to other soldiers, of the duty to do one’s share of a very nasty job that no one wants to do. It’s complicated. From the outside it’s obvious that the right thing is to refuse. But if you’re on the inside you have the problem that your refusal won’t stop anything, it will just mean shifting the work to someone else. It’s not as easy to refuse as it looks from the outside.
Anyway, of course the victims became bestial. What the other prisoner said is impossible. But the idea is related – I think.
All that you say is true. I don’t dispute that. I guess it was the complications that get in the way of an easy identification. Yes, I know that the other case wasn’t a guard. In fact, that case wasn’t so complicated at all, since the man in the experiment knew that he had signed up for a research project. That’s what makes that case so interesting, because it didn’t have all the complications you mention about the situation of guards at concentration camps, say, who had relationships with other men, and a sense of ‘team’ spirit – The Corps, The Corps and The Corps, as the Marines say. But I agree, the ideas are related. It would be interesting to explore just how. Just what is it that contributes to the kind of moral steadiness that refuses to become dehumanised by authority or situation? But you couldn’t repeat research like Milgram’s or Zimbardo’s now. That in itself raises some very serious moral issues.
And Zimbardo’s raised them even at the time. (As did Milgram’s, in fact – but not in such a personal way as Zimbardo’s did.) The woman he was seeing, who had been his graduate student but was then a colleague and about to leave for her first job, at his urging visited the experiment a few days in – and was horrified. It was interesting – because Zimbardo was excited and full of the sense of intellectual discovery, and expected her to be the same way – and what was happening was really interesting – and she felt conflicted and uncertain – she felt girly, weak, out of step, insufficiently professional, etc. But she was horrified anyway and said he had to stop the experiment immediately – she was really angry. He was angry with her at first but then realized she was dead right, and he did stop the experiment. She had simply pointed out what he hadn’t really considered, which was what he was doing to the students who were playing the guards.