Материал: Bauman.Zygmunt..modernity and holocaust, polity press 1989

The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram) 16^

certainly they would not be prompted to afflict suffering even to the unknown victims. Out of twenty subjects of this additional experiment, one broke off before the staged disagreement between the two experimenters started, eighteen refused further co-operation at the first sign of disagreement, and the last one opted out just one stage after that. 'It is clear that the disagreement between the authorities completely paralyzed action.¹¹

The meaning of correction is unambiguous: the readiness to act against one's own better judgment, and against the voice of one's conscience, is not just the function of authoritative command, but the result of exposure to a single-minded, unequivocal and monopolistic source of authority. Such readiness is most likely to appear inside an organization which brooks no opposition and tolerates no autonomy, and in which linear hierarchy of subordination knows no exception: an organization in which no two members are equal in power. (Most armies, penitentiary institutions, totalitarian parties and movements, certain sects or boarding schools come close to this ideal type.) Such an organization, however, is likely to be effective on one of the two conditions. It may tightly seal its members from the rest of society, having been granted, or having usurped, an undivided control over most, or all its members' life activities and needs (and thus approximate Goffman's model of total institutions), so that possible influence of competitive sources of authority is cut out. Or it may be just one of the branches of the totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian state, which transforms all its agencies into mirror reflections of each other.

As Milgram put it, it's only when you have ... an authority who ... operates in a free field without countervailing pressures other than the victim's protests that you got the purest response to authority. In real life, of course, you're conflated with a great many countervailing pressures that cancel each other out.¹² What Milgram must have meant by real life' was life inside a democratic society, and outside a total institution: more precisely still, life under conditions of pluralism. A most remarkable conclusion flowing from the full set of Milgram experiments is that pluralism is the best preventive medicine against morally normal people engaging in morally abnormal actions. The Nazis must first have destroyed the vestiges of political pluralism to set off on projects like the Holocaust, in which the expected readiness of ordinary people for immoral and inhuman actions had to be calculated among the necessary - and available - resources. In the USSR the systematic destruction of the real and putative adversaries of the system

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took off in earnest only after the residues of social autonomy, and hence of the political pluralism which reflected it, had been extirpated. Unless pluralism had been eliminated on the global-societal scale, organizations with criminal purposes, which need to secure an unflagging obedience of their members in the perpetration of evidently immoral acts, are burdened with the task of erecting tight artificial barriers isolating the members from the 'softening' influence of diversity of standards and opinions. The voice of individual moral conscience is best heard in the tumult of political and social discord

The social nature of evil

Most conclusions flowing from Milgram's experiments may be seen as variations on one central theme: cruelty correlates with certain patterns of social interaction much more closely than it does with personality features or other individual idiosyncracies of the perpetrators. Cruelty is social in its origin much more than it is characterological. Surely some individuals tend to be cruel if cast in a context which disempowers moral pressures and legitimizes inhumanity.

If any doubts on this count have been left after Milgram, they are likely to evaporate once the findings of another experiment, by Philip Zimbardo,¹³ are given a close look. From that experiment, even the potentially disturbing factor of the authority of a universally revered institution (science), embodied in the person of the experimenter, has been eliminated. In Zimbardo's experiment there was no external, established authority ready to take the responsibility off the subjects' shoulders. All authority which ultimately operated in Zimbardo's ex­perimental context was generated by the subjects themselves. The only thing Zimbardo did was to set the process off by dividing subjects between positions within a codified pattern of interaction.

In Zimbardo's experiment (planned for a fortnight, but stopped after one week for fear of irreparable damage to the body and mind of the subjects) volunteers had been divided at random into prisoners and prison guards. Both sides were given the symbolic trappings of their position. Prisoners, for example, wore tight caps which simulated shaven heads, and gowns which made them appear ridiculous. Their guards were put in uniforms and given dark glasses which hid their eyes from being looked into by the prisoners. No side was allowed to address the other by name; strict impersonality was the rule. There was long list

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of petty regulations invariably humiliating for the prisoners and Stripping them of human dignity. This was the starting point. What followed surpassed and left far behind the designers' ingenuity. The initiative of the guards (randomly selected males of college age, carefully screened against any sign of abnormality) knew no bounds. A genuine 'schismogenetic chain', once hypothesized by Gregory Bateson, was set in motion. The construed superiority of the guards rebounded in the submissiveness of the prisoners, which in its turn tempted the guards into further displays of their powers, which were then duly reflected in more self-humiliation on the part of the prisoners ... The guards forced the prisoners to chant filthy songs, to defecate in buckets which they did not allow them to empty, to clean toilets with bare hands; the more they did it, the more they acted as if they were convinced of the non-human nature of the prisoners, and the less they felt constrained in inventing and administering measures of an ever-more appalling degree of inhumanity.

The sudden transmogrification of likeable and decent American boys into near monsters of the kind allegedly to be found only in places like Auschwitz or Treblinka is horrifying. But it is also baffling. It led some observers to surmise that in most people, if not in all of us, there lives a little SS man waiting to come out (Amitai Etzioni suggested that Milgram discovered the 'latent Eichmann' hidden in ordinary men).¹⁴ John Steiner coined the concept of the sleeper to denote the normally dormant, but sometimes awakened capacity for cruelty.

The sleeper effect refers to the latent personality characteristic of violence-prone individuals such as autocrats, tyrants, or terrorists when the appropriate lock and key relationships became established. The sleeper is then roused from the normative stage of his behaviour pattern and the dormant, violence-prone personality characteristics become activated, in some way, all persons are sleepers inasmuch as they have a violent potential that under specific conditions can be triggered.¹⁵

And yet, clearly and unambiguously, the orgy of cruelty that took Zimbardo and his colleagues by surprise, stemmed from a vicious social arrangement, and not from the viciousness of the participants. Were the subjects of the experiment assigned to the opposite roles, the overall result would not be different. What mattered was the existence of a polarity, and not who was allocated to its respective sides. What did matter was that some people were given a total, exclusive and

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untempered power over some other people. If there is a sleeper in each of us, he may remain asleep forever if such a situation does not occur. And then we would never have heard of the sleeper's existence.

The most poignant point, it seems, is the easiness with which most people slip into the role requiring cruelty or at least moral hlindness - if only the role has been duly fortified and legitimized by superior authority. Because of the breathtaking frequency with which such slipping into role' occurred in all known experiments, the concept of the sleeper seems to be no more than a metaphysical prop. We do not really need it to explain the massive conversion to cruelty. However, the concept does come into its own in reference to those relatively rare cases when individuals found the strength and courage to resist the command of authority and refused to implement it, once they found it contrary to their own convictions. Some ordinary people, normally law-abiding, unassuming, non-rebellious and unadventurous, stood up to those in power and, oblivious to the consequences, gave priority to their own conscience - much like those few, scattered, singly acting people, who defied the omnipotent and unscrupulous power, and risked the ultimate punishment trying to save the victims of the Holocaust. One would search in vain for social, political or religious 'determinants' of their uniqueness. Their moral conscience, dormant in the absence of an occasion for militancy but now aroused, was truly their own personal attribute and possession - unlike immorality, which had to be socially produced.

Their capacity to resist evil was a 'sleeper' through most of their lives. It could have remained asleep forever, and we would not know of it then. But this ignorance would be good news.

7

Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality

I propose now to consider in detail the problem that emerged at the end of the last chapter: the problem of the social nature of evil - or, more precisely, of the social production of immoral behaviour. A few of its aspects (for instance, the mechanisms responsible for the production of moral indifference or, more generally, for the delegitimization of moral precepts) have been dealt with briefly in earlier chapters. Because of its central role in the perpetration of the Holocaust, no analysis of the latter can claim to be complete unless it includes a more thorough investigation of the relation between society and moral behaviour. The need for such an investigation is further reinforced by the fact that the available sociological theories of moral phenomena prove, on closer scrutiny, ill-prepared to offer a satisfactory account of the Holocaust experience. The purpose of this chapter is to spell out certain crucial lessons and conclusions from that experience which a proper sociological theory of morality, free of the present weaknesses, would have to take into account. A more ambitious prospect, toward which this chapter will take only a few preliminary steps, is the construction of a theory of morality capable of accommodating in full the new knowledge generated by the study of the Holocaust. Whatever progress in this direction we can achieve will be a fitting summary of the various analytical themes developed in this book.

In the order of things construed by sociological discourse, the status ot morality is awkward and ambiguous. Little has been done to improve it, as the status of morality is seen as of little consequence for the progress

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of sociological discourse, and so the issues of moral behaviour and moral

choice have been allocated but a marginal position in it and, accordingly,

are paid only marginal attention. Most sociological narratives do without

reference to morality. In this, sociological discourse follows the pattern

of science in general, which in its early years had attained emancipation

from religious and magical thought by designing a language that couid

produce complete narratives without ever deploying such notions as

purpose or will. Science is indeed a language game with a rule forbidding

the use of teleological vocabulary. Not using teleological terms is not a

sufficient condition for a sentence to belong to scientific narrative, but it

certainly is a necessary condition.

In as far as sociology strived to abide by the rules of scientific discourse, morality and related phenomena sat uneasily in the social universe generated, theorized and researched by the dominant sociological narratives. Sociologists therefore focused their attention on the task of dissembling the qualitative distinction of moral phenomena, or accommodating them within a class of phenomena that can be narrated without recourse to teleological language. Between them, the two tasks and the efforts they commanded led to the denial of an independent existential mode of moral norms; if acknowledged at all as a separate factor in social reality, morality has been assigned a secondary and derivative status, which in principle should render it explicable by reference to non-moral phenomena - that is, phenomena fully and unambiguously amenable to non-teleological treatment. Indeed, the very idea of the specifically sociological approach to the study of morality has become synonymical with the strategy of, so to speak, sociological reduction; one which proceeds on the assumption that moral phenomena in their totality can be exhaustively explained in terms of the non-moral institutions which lend them their binding force.