(subtitle for post: why some archangels get to be the voice of god and some don’t.)
I subscribe to Powell’s Books Daily Review email, which I usually ignore– I’ve been trying to have a more balanced information diet lately, which generally means that I take a small nibble of lots of pieces of news instead of diving in deeply to any single thing. Today’s review was on Phillip Zimbardo’s new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
This is one of those books that has a stupid name but describes something really cool (other relevant example: “goldendoodle” to describe the cross of a golden retriever and a poodle.) My high school psychology teacher had a thing for Zimbardo, he showed up all over the place in our curriculum, and since I had a little bit of a thing for her, Zimbardo has stuck around in my mind. He’s most famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary people were divided up into the roles of guards and prisoners and who took to those roles in a way that became downright frightening. For more information on the Stanford Prison Experiment, you should employ one of the following information-gathering techniques:
- Google “Stanford Prison Experiment“. Look at that, I provided the link for you. All you have to do is click on it. This blog is all about making you feel like you’re saving time as it encourages you to waste even more.
- Read The Lucifer Effect. Probably a good idea to take the jacket cover off and replace it with a cover with a cooler title, like “The DaVinci Code”.
- Watch the My Big Fat Greek Rush Week episode of Veronica Mars.
There are two conflicting ideas of what makes people evil– situationalism (anyone can do anything given the right circumstance) and dispositionism (some people are just evil, dammit.) The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to indicate that situationalism is largely correct, but the book (review) indicates that it’s not that simple (it never is)– even amongst the guards, there were certain guards who were more sadistic than others. It seems like the real cause is a combination of some sort of internal threshold for sadism combined with the situation at hand– there are some heroic people out there who would never torture another human being, but they are few and far between.
The book seems relevant to me in a way that it doesn’t seem to touch on explicitly– the current debate over torturing detainees in guantanamo, particularly amongst the republican presidential candidates. It’s like we get to see the large-scale distribution of people’s internal thresholds for sadism in an intense and yet distant sort of situation. One of the key themes of the book is that people aren’t good at figuring out that an authority figure has made a mistake or lost the moral compass, and so tend to follow directions from them anyway, and I wonder if that’s what we’re seeing here. All it takes is one respected figure with a low sadism threshold, and he can get the vast majority of other people to fall in line behind him.
I think a large part of the problem is that we, as a people, don’t have enough skin in the game when it comes to questions about torture and the death penalty. It’s all too easy to dehumanize someone by labeling them as ‘evil’ and then doing whatever you want to them. So I think it’s time we changed the stakes. I think every citizen should be randomly assigned to a prisoner held in guantanamo or to a convict in the prison system, and in the event that the ‘enemy combatant’ or prisoner is proven to be innocent of whatever he was charged with, everything that happened to him during his confinement is revisited on his assigned citizen. I don’t think we really do justice to these people when we, as a society, say “hey, my bad” and just let them out the door, sometimes with a little bit of money as an apology. I’d like us to make the apology much more personal. And I’d like to believe that if we knew that we or someone we loved could be sent to prison at any time, we would do a much better job of treating prisoners fairly and humanely.
Of course that’s idealistic of me– the practical effect of such a system would be to ensure that no prisoner ever had a chance of being shown to be innocent after the fact, or of ever releasing anyone from guantanamo.
(p.s.- I hope you enjoy the use of capital letters in this post, part of my newfound effort to stop torturing your eyes.)
Labels: philosophy, book reviews
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