Glenden BrownWho is to blame?
This post is part three in my series on good and evil.
In The Lucifer Effect Philip Zimbardo explores the way in which situational factors play a role in individual behaviors.Â
Zimbardo sums up his argument:
“Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors” even in good people.
The point of course is simple - I am responsible for my behavior but I may not have done what I did were I not in the situation I was in. The people who created the situation bear responsibility for creating that situation. The people who had system level influence are responsible for creating the system that created the situation.
As with Abu Ghraib, the higher ups are usually excused from being responsible. Almost immediately they began blaming a few bad apples. It’s a way of creating a barrier between themselves and their actions and the reasonably foreseeable outcomes of those actions. As with Abu Ghraib, there’s more than enough blame to go around.
Where the question of blame grows complex is the question of the evil of inaction. Lots of people knew what was going on in that prison. They saw the photos, they heard the stories. And they did nothing.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment, Christina Maslach, a PhD in Psychology and close friend of Dr. Zimbardo’s, arrived at the site, was horrified by what she saw and denounced it in strongest terms. It was her denunciation of the experiment that convinced Zimbardo to end it more than a week early. Maslach was an outsider to the experiment, though, she came in with fresh eyes. She did not like what she saw and she said so.
The Lucifer Effect provides a pretty convincing argument against the ranking military officers in Iraq and the administration officials who set the policy that created Abu Ghraib. Bush Administration rhetoric about terrorists and the threat they posed created the mindset that all the Iraqis in Abu Ghraib were dangerous. Rumsfeld created policies that approved of torture. Administration lawyers created legal myths that allowed the Administration to argue what they were doing was legal and right.
The military leadership in Iraq failed spectacularly at maintaining basic military discipline, at providing mission specific training, at actually managing the prisons they opened. They then thrust people into a circumstance in which they could not win and in which there was no realistic hope of success. CIA operatives in Iraq worked in Abu Ghraib, committed murders there and then, using the cloaks of anonymity and deception, got away with them. By contrast to CIA activities, what the soldiers did was child’s play. An interrogater at Abu Ghraib, now retired, has been quoted publicly as saying that maybe 2% of the people at Abu Ghraib were either insurgents or had some links to terror groups. The abject failure of torture, abuse and cruelty used by the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay has been well documented. The bad system created by the Bushistas not only became a prime example of administrative evil, but it was a downright ineffective one. Traditional police interview techniques - used in every American city - would have produced far more useful information than all the torture, with the added benefit of not being morally repugnant and destroying the US’s reputation worldwide, creating more sympathy for both insurgents in Iraq and terrorists worldwide, and might actually have ad the effect of making the world safer. So ineffective are the methods employed in this ill-conceived endless war on terror, that any useful information any of the prisoners might have had at the time they were arrested was outdated by the time someone finally got around to interrogating them.
The saddest truth of Abu Ghraib, of the evil done in our names, was the utter uselessness of it. And the mismanagement that resulted in that uselessness started at the top.
The cold comfort of being right from the start - that Iraq was a horrifically bad idea and saying so to anyone and everyone who would listen (somewhere around this house I still have Orrin Hatch’s letter telling me the Iraq war was necessary to fight the war on terror) - just isn’t enough. Bush and his syncophants and cronies wanted a war and since they couldn’t find their asses with a map, let alone actual terrorists, they decided to go to Iraq and create some terrorists.
That, more than anything, is the sick twisted irony of Abu Ghraib. An insane policy created insane circumstances guaranteed to make the people in the situation at least a little crazy for the time they were in it. And in that insane situation, American soldiers have no bearings, no moral reality to guide them. Separated from family, friends, church, they exists in a neverending now in which actions taken yesterday are gone, actions taken today have no consequences. The real world is a place of yesterday, today and tomorrow but the insane world of Iraq, of prison, or torture, is a world of the neverending now. Actions have no consequences, identities are often hidden, fluid, false, constructed, temporary. The Chip Frederick who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib was in a very real way not the Chip Frederick who was a loving husband, loyal friend, good son in Virginia.
There is blame enough to go around and the tragedy is that those whose actions and decisions created the place in which Chip Frederick became a torturer will probably get off completely free, though they should serve at least as much jail time. And that is what makes me angry.
March 30th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Glen,
As you know, I have landed firmly on the side of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior. Evolutionary being the operative word.
Our species manufactures euphemisms by nature…civilization being the great resulting trope, and religion, the father of them all.
It is my belief that the rise of Freudian/Jungian behavioral psychology remains today a soft science with no more validity than religion.
We humans are so good at coming up with stories that seem to validate the way we are. Some such stories blossom into full fledged institutionalized thinking wherever power and money can be accumulated.
Case in point; jealousy.
How many millions of dollars have been collected by shrinks selling the myth that jealousy is somehow a learned emotion when the fact is, jealousy has a predominate reproductive advantage in the ancestral environment.
Jealousy evolved over the thousands of years of human evolution prior to our awareness that sex led to babies. Call it an accident, mutation or whatever you want.
Men who didn’t jealously guard there women, extincted themselves by raising other mens’ children. IOW, “nice guys finish last.” THERE’S your hard science!
Why are humans the ONLY mammalian species in which the female has concealed ovulation? No western educated person would dare suggest THAT little fact has no bearing on the behavior of the sexes…
…and yet, this FACT is never mentioned in the texts as a basis for any study related to gender studies and certainly not in the training for marriage counseling is it? (I should note here that my Mother is professor of and practitioner of marriage and family counseling) Is it irrelevant? Are you kidding? It is so damn relevant, it renders traditional gender studies about as relevant as rain dancing is to predict weather.
“An insane policy created insane circumstance????” NO NO NO. A perfectly sane and predictable (however uncivilized) behavior resulted from an entirely controlled circumstance.
The Standford and Milgram experiments demonstrate this. Hello? What policy was required to get Ivy Leaguers to hurt helpless innocent victims?
What is civilization really? I respectfully submit, it is and ideal, a trope, a euphemism.
During NO TIME throughout our history have humans demonstrated ANY progress WHATSOEVER in terms of how we treat one another.
From the Crusades and Mountain Meadows to The Holocaust, Viet Nam, Rwanda, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Darfur and on and on and on, where are the signs of human behavioral improvement?
If any of this psychobabble were true, why has it led to ZERO measurable progress?
And what of Republican sex scandals? Do you really think any amount of scientific research or behavioral therapy would change anything?
If anyone really took behavioral science seriously, we would see some sort of scientific explanation for the correlation between conservative politics and sexual deviance. But no one wants to do THAT study because is it politically incorrect, and it would prove the uncivilized truth.
Sad truth; civilized behavior happens when it is convenient. When everyone is fed, housed, at least distantly related, of similar skin tone and feeling relatively safe.
If Freudian psychology and its exotic spin-offs provided any value whatsoever, would we not expect to see divorce rates drop?
If any of this shit were true, would we not by the year 2008 have figured away to rehabilitate prisoners and politicians?
Get real.
Read The Moral Animal…and get back to me.
March 30th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Who says human female ovulation is concealed? The behaviors surrounding it can be well pointed out. Temperature being the primary one, probably what being “hot” is all about. Some guys, can smell it. Not to mention know the differences in female vaginal secretions upon ovulation. Tacky finger means be careful, unless having a child is what you want.
Geneticists are defining all manner of behavior as inherent, not learned, you could then be born a criminal, jealous, and any other number of behaviors. Scientists are attempting to show that there is a genetic explanation for all of human behavior. There is a gene for nannying behavior, and of course one for the drive to control others for their “own good”. No doubt there is a gene for males raising others kids. In this nature is the victor, there are no losers, someone must raise the child for species survival.
All this precludes choice, and it will be quite a study between the environmental behaviorists and geneticists as the data and study brings more of what may be the truth to the fore.
Reps are no different than Dems with regard to their sex scandals, let us quote the odious one, kissinger, who claims that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” to explain the powerfuls penchant for breaking all standing sexual mores of their societies.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:16 am
Therefore any call for utilizing the techniques developed in our labs as educational tools to help enlighten the upper level of these administrations, is not altogether without rationality or cause. Pop indicated in another comment, ‘they knew people would die’, and I would only add that while true, they really had little idea what that would mean (I’m being generous here).. Bottom-line was often thier only consideration. Had waterboarding or fleeing smart bombs been part of thier upbringing, thier approach to problem-solving may have been very different. Is it possible that such pampering and privilige as we are accustomed to is the very remove from sensitivity to the pain we so easily bestow from a distance?
March 31st, 2008 at 1:01 am
Cliff said:
I think that nails it! The really sad truth is that most of America has no excuse for being uncivilized. When Hitler took over, there were reports that inflation was so bad, people had to take wheelbarrows full of money to get some food. Even if that is a false story, there is no doubt things were much worse then they have been here for a long time. What happened? What is our reason for throwing civility out the window?
March 31st, 2008 at 7:21 am
Glenn Pop,
Are you questioning the concealed ovulation thing or not?
If you have trouble confirming this FACT let me know. HINT: Zoology.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:38 am
It isn’t concealed, you just don’t have a clue when its going on.
It is rather ridiculous. Ask a few women that live together, for extended periods of time, they can even ovulate at the same time in a group.
Comment on the ways of knowing. If what you call it is concealment, then it is very poorly concealed. Need only buy a thermometer, and now you can buy the laser type that you shine on someones forehead, that would be a fun party favor. If a person has the means of discovery, it is by definition not concealed…to them.
Call it evolution, men can know, and can either via technology or biofeedback figure this out.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:51 am
Anonymous/Glenn
“Concealed ovulation” is a zoological term relevant in the context of reproductive, patterns and behavior. It is also relevant to the family structure.
Perhaps you can describe with more authority what happens when a female dog or goat ovulates and how the males of those species respond and why?
Thermometers is cheating.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:59 pm
I assure you both: Niether the dog nor the ovule were the perps!
March 31st, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Wow! I have nothing to add to the discussion re: concealed ovulation, and I’m not going near the “tacky finger”, but I will say that I think any winner-takes-all analysis of evolution misunderstands natural selection. We keep imagining this caveman who beats out other competitors to the cavewoman and gets his sperm in there first.
It’s not about any individual super-man who might have extraordinary reproductive success. It’s about what traits ensure the survival of the tribe. Tribes that favor or allow cooperation, altruism, might for lots of complex reasons out-compete tribes that don’t.
Take the tendency of all peoples to have celibates and homosexuals among them, and often to afford them special status. This would be counter-intuitive, if you are only looking at the reproductive success of the individual. Obviously, a celibate isn’t passing on his genes to anybody. But in his tribe, he is contributing to a high adult-to-child ratio that is going to contribute to the survival and later reproductive success of his nieces and nephews, which amounts to the same thing.
March 31st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Cheating? You are slightly misinformed. As humans we left the simple zoological description of the complexities surrounding our species mating. The activities of dogs and goats isn’t relevant, or are you using colloquial Utah terminology?
The phermones and behaviors, body mimicry included, are signs these animals you suggested use. In dogs’ oestrous is about every 6 months, I haven’t checked on goats lately, but there is research that says females can be artificially induced to all have oestrous at the same time. Go figure, much like women in co-habitating groups.
In regard to women a whole industry has been devoted to body mimicry whether women are aware of it or not. It’s called makeup.
Looking at the issue from a human male perspective, as tool users, as we are as animals described, using a tool to aid in any activity would foot our bill. Thermometers are not necessary, and a man with his finger and a good pair of eyes can know quite accurately if a woman is ovulating. Since sex in humans is a random event, the recreational act itself can be used as a pretense to determines a females state. In an intelligent discerning male.
The concealment of ovulation amongst modern man is a product of choice, and wilful ignorance, not any subterfuge of a woman. she cannot help but give up the signs that her biological prerogative is at play to a discerning male in this day and age. Bottom line, we do not breed in any particular pattern, and we have the means to determine fertility in females, like other animals, but with overtly differing means.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:11 pm
AD - I’ve been reading a lot lately that suggests that especially among primates collaborative and cooperative communities actually do a better job of surviving and passing on their genes. It’s exactly as you said - the primary survival concern is the familial line, the community. In the book Our Inner Ape, the author discusses the ways in which various primates (that includes humans) have an altruism dividend - literally by caring for one another we earn caring in return which means we all do better.
It’s an interesting take on evolution - rather than an endless war for survival, the means of survival becomes a kind of lateral approach that reduces conflict for everyone.