Over the past few years, as we have been debating torture and its place in America's intelligence policy, the words of Abraham Lincoln keep rolling through my mind:
"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery," Lincoln said in 1865, "I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
I just replace "slavery" with "torture."
Echoing Lincoln, I confess a strong impulse to see waterboarding tried out personally on a few people arguing for it. For me, the urge to give torture's advocates a taste of their own medicine is a fleeting, shameful notion. But history says the question of "How far would I go?" has been all too real. And the answer is frightening.
In his landmark book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen argued that the grotesque atrocities of the Holocaust could not have been accomplished without the broad and even enthusiastic support of millions of average citizens who made the deaths of millions of others possible.
Goldhagen wrote,
"The German perpetrators of the Holocaust treated Jews in all the brutal and lethal ways that they did because, by and large, they believed that what they were doing was right and necessary."
It's tempting to think that we would emerge as the exception to the rule if put to the test at Abu Ghraib prison or the Hotel Rwanda or next door to Anne Frank's family. I myself would like to think that I could be the good apple in the bad barrel.
Yet the work of such scholars as Philip Zimbardo does not bear out my naïve hope. Zimbardo is the creator of the now-notorious Stanford Prison Experiment in which students rapidly devolved into brutal guards in a mock prison scenario. Placed in a situation of uneven distribution of power, most of those in control impose their will to do harm. In a recent book, The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo wrote:
"Dehumanization is like a cortical cataract that clouds one's thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see those others as enemies deserving of torment, torture and annihilation."
Still, we stand justified in asking our leaders to hold America to a higher standard -- to probe the decisions and decision-makers who led us to that darkened cell with its waterboards and bug boxes. But as we examine our leaders, each of us must hold ourselves to account as well. And as we do, recall it was also Lincoln who said,
"I hate slavery because it deprives the republican example of its just influence in the world -enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites -causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity."
Neither has a place in a civilized America.
shorter version of this blog aired as a Commentary on Vermont Public Radio on Friday May 1.
Follow Kenneth C. Davis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kennethcdavis
"Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
My point remains that even as we ask for an investigation, as individuals we must always ask if we would be the "willing torturers."
Thanks again for reading and commenting.
We are taught that we can do as we please.. all we need is money and power.
We cheat on income taxes, we speed on the highways, we cheat on our wives and we are never punished.
If you want a real experiment... you need to allow the participant the ability to draw blood by cutting off fingers and toes... skinning the people... actually seeing the damage they are doing.
Hearing folks scream doesn't cut it... it is flawed... we hear people scream all the time on tv.
The study was flawed big time... unless you allow the people to actually cause major phyical damage that they can see this type of study is useless.
peace
kevin
It seems to me that the idea of dehumanizing others is at the core of this whole issue. Can there be a thing more opposed to our country's democratic ideals? Dehumanization is fundamentally undemocratic.