Originally published in June’s Big Issue magazine, which creates employment for marginalised adults. Please support the mag.
In the aftermath of any man-made horror; Auchwitz, Darfur, Abu Ghraib, xenophobic attacks, we run around wailing, “how could this happen?”. The easy answer is: we let it.
We didn’t do anything when the problem was still just a problem and not a disaster. We tsk-tsked at the headlines about Somali shopkeepers being murdered and then turned to the celeb gossip pages. We washed oil off penguins and sent money to the tsunami victims, but failed to step up when fires ripped through the shacks of Joe Slovo again, leaving hundreds homeless. We threw up our hands in the face of growing poverty and unemployment and economic refugees from rural areas squashing into shacklands near the city desperate for work.
We deftly dodged personal responsibility, exactly the same way the attackers did when they looted shops and set people alight and raised pangas to children.
I’ve always held that people are intrinsically good, but the reality is that people are intrinsically flawed – all of us, down to the last gene. We’re social animals, which makes us conformists at heart, ready to run with the pack, to fall neatly into assigned roles, with a nasty habit of turning rabid when there are no defined rules.
According to theories about the banality of evil, it is sometimes easier to flip a person than a coin. We’re foreigners to ourselves.
A number of psychology studies have looked at why ordinary people do terrible things. Way back in 1971 Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment showed that it only took a few days for a bunch of nice, psychologically well-adjusted college kids to turn psycho prison guards or beat-down prisoners, complete with bags-over-heads and forced sexual re-enactments in an ugly foreshadowing of Abu Ghraib.
Worse, Stanley Milgram’s shock studies indicated that, on average, some 70% of people were willing to shock a stranger apparently to death if an authoritative man in a white lab coat told them to, overruling their protestations.
Studies of gang rapes reveal that young men who would intervene, outraged, to help if they came across a stranger sexually assaulting a woman, readily fall in with the group when it’s their friends doing the raping. Even if they don’t actively participate, generally, they won’t try to stop it and won’t report it after.
Put us in a group or a nasty situation and we become stupid. The needle falls off our moral compass. It all depends on circumstance, a lack of clear guidelines and a shirking of personal responsibility because everyone else is doing it, because someone in a lab coat or a uniform or a pulpit at a community meeting told you it was okay.
There are ways to stay magnetised to moral north in even the worst circumstances. In Germany, the education system puts an emphasis on individuality and questioning authority to prevent the nightmare of a new Nazi regime rising ever again. It ties in with Professor Zimbardo’s counter theory about creating a banality of heroism, putting people on a slippery slope doing small charitable acts that will slide into big good deeds.
And wouldn’t it be great if extraordinary acts of heroism become simply ordinary, the kind of thing we take for granted instead of violence and mayhem and human atrocity?
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June 11th, 2008 @14:35 #
Hey Lauren,
Good post, but need to chirp up with one thing. The 'humans are intrisically bad' discourse, whilst very appealing given the present state of affairs in SA and basically everywhere else, is partially a product of neo-Darwinist discourse (which leads, inevitably, back to the Dawkins thread).
I just want to point out that a lot of seminal social psychology research was very culture-specific, for example the Milgram experiment was performed on educated caucasian males, and as such reflects on their education (which in the west tends to focus to a great extent on conformity) and cultural inheritance.
Strangely, psychological studies on unsavoury aspects of human behaviour, from conformity to aggression, can deliver very different results in traditional Eastern cultures.
What happened in Nazi Germany reflected, to some extent,
that country's Prussian military heritage and centuries worth of conditioning individuals to fit into one of the most massive and effective military bureacracies that has ever existed.
The great existential psychologist Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz and went on to write about the importance of choice and goodness in life. He experienced pure hell (including the death of his family), yet arrived at approximately the opposite conclusion to the one Zimbardo has reached.
June 11th, 2008 @15:34 #
Actually, Sven, the Milgram experiment has been repeated countless times in various countries with men and women from different income groups, education levels and philosophical / religious / geographically aligned backgrounds. The results vary (don't have access to the info in front of me but check out www.stanleymilgram.com) between 30% and 90% obedience, but they're still shocking (as it were) across the board. Interestingly, South Africa in the 80s showed obedience rates of 80% which is definitely a reflection of the culture of the time, so it does make a difference.
I don't want to oversimplify the argument by dividing it between East and West / religionists versus atheists. We all have the capacity to do terrible things in the right terrible circumstances. And, on the flip side, we all have the capacity for great good as well.
And to clarify, I didn't argue that humans are intrinsically bad - but rather that we are intrinsically flawed. There's a vulnerability in the programming but that doesn't mean we can't overcome / resist it.
June 11th, 2008 @15:49 #
May I compliment you both (and other contributors) on the high quality of discourse in recent weeks. It really is a pleasure to come here and gain refreshing and entertaining insight into an almost endless range of topics.
Ben - is it possible to lift some of these threads and place them in a special category under topic titles, so that they are easier to locate for other readers/contributors?
June 11th, 2008 @15:50 #
Yes, I guess putting it the way you did at the end sums it up pretty well.
However I was not saying that this is an atheism vs religion issue, the social psychology argument research tends to focus on collectivist vs. individualistic cultures with the non-modernised east representing the best features of collectivist cultures.
In fact, if anything neo-Darwinism with its selfish genes and religion with its original sin, probably agree on the fundamental notion that humans are inherently and deterministically kak.
I finished my post-graduate courses in social psychology a year ago, so I am sorry I can't quote cultural studies etc (that would mean digging through boxes in overstuffed, dusty cupboards, which is not something I am prepared to face while my abcessed jaw is doing a realistic impression of growing an orange), but suffice to say that a difference of 50% seems like a very significant difference indeed.
I personally don't think you can overemphasise how important cultural conditioning is in the way various human potentialities manifest.
June 11th, 2008 @16:02 #
Oy-yoy-yoy!
Here I go, lowering the tone of this high-falutin' intellectual discussion. But someone's gotta do it.
Whilst I agree with the general sentiments of this piece ie the fact that human beings let evil flourish and shouldn’t, I must point out something which has been troubling me about a lot of this and other contributions to bookchat.
It is quite simply that
1. Whenever mention is made, as here, of atrocities and man-made disasters, seldom if ever is apartheid included amongst the list of disasters
2. Many of the people who now correctly speak out against the faults of the current regime, were simply silent about the atrocities committed by the one before, including whipping up gangs of one “tribe” against another to give the impression of “black on black violence”. This was met by deafening silence from the people who elected the previous government. See no evil, affected by no evil, speak out against no evil
3. If we are told that bad things happen because we let it, can there be some acknowledgement that these include apartheid and that amongst the people so prolifically critical of the current government – for whom let me stress I hold absolutely no brief, but of which I was an opponent, as many of them will tell you, even in the struggle years, though from the left, not the right – were those who either let the evils of apartheid flourish because they were not affected or were too busy enjoying its benefits, or they actually voted for the nats? Come on, the majority of whites elected them – are we now to believe that all whites were actually opposed to the nats? Did they have a phantom electorate?
4. As far as this article is concerned, as one of the young lawyers (really just an articled clerk then) who worked on pass law cases when there were mass forced removals from squatter camps in the bitterest winters, never once did I hear any measure of protest except from black people affected, or those, both black and white, engaged in the struggle. For the most part, there wasn’t even a “tsk-tsk” when fires gutted townships and squatter camps time after time. All the violence in the township, as poor fought poor for the scraps left them by apartheid, didn’t even make the headlines to be glanced at before those who could afford the papers and mags “turned to the celeb gossip pages” And yes, back then, people “washed oil off penguins and sent money to the tsunami victims” but right in South Africa, millions starved and were homeless. Time after time, “poverty and unemployment” – not growing, but endemic under apartheid capitalism, drove people from the misnamed homelands, starvation dumping grounds as lethal as any concentration camp, to the cities and there were those who nodded and agreed when they were driven back under the pass laws and voted once again for the government who did it.
Now everyone get ready and tell me that apartheid can’t be blamed for everything. Yeah, right. This is the constant refrain. Don’t play the apartheid card. It’s become such a great put down that nobody even mentions it and the fact that the township evils, the homelands and the vast poverty of South Africa, whilst perpetuated under the current government, was certainly not of its making.
Sure, I agree that the greedy and corrupt must take responsibility for their own misdeeds and that it would be nice if the current rulers stopped living in luxury and made good on their promises and that we must hold them to that.
I agree that murderers and rapists cannot use social ills as their sole excuse.
All I am asking for is that now and again, even as just part of the litany of evils of the past of humankind (for god’s sake, the Nazis were fifty years ago, the Nats only 14!) do remember to mention apartheid. And do acknowledge that if nothing else, we all now (except those silenced by the Minister of Finance) have the right to at least speak out without being jailed or killed.
Don’t act as if all that is now happening in the townships and squatter camps are today’s problems. They were there for us ie black people – for a long long time. It took a long time for all the ills of the townships to get to where it is. It isn’t a problem of yesterday. And it isn’t going to go away tomorrow. But by all means, speak out, and do something about it, unlike 14 years and more ago when yes, there were a lot of people living lekker and not giving a damn, or even giving a damn to ensure they lived lekker.
Did I say simply, somewhere about ten thousand stresses earlier? See you all on Sat. You can buy me coffee or throw the brickbats in the flesh
June 11th, 2008 @16:13 #
Shereen, we're absolutely on the same page. (and even the same paragraph).
Apartheid wrecked this country, we're going to be dealing with its legacy for many, many, many years to come and it was absolutely instrumental in setting up conditions of desperate poverty and township architecture and the breakdown of the family unit as young men left their communities in droves to work in the cities and specifically the mines, staying in all male communes (a huge factor in the spread of AIDS as well, if you read Jonny Steinberg's Three Letter Plague).
And just like now, unfortunately many people stood by and let it happen.
We all have a responsibility to the present.
I think our biggest downfall as humans is the convenience factor, or rather the inconvenience factor. How much easier it is to get on with our normal lives than get involved.
June 11th, 2008 @16:17 #
Sven, go read Zimbardo's Lucifer Effect. You'll like it. It's ALL about culture, whether a culture of tribal rivalries propagated by colonial bullshit in Rwanda or crazy army culture where no-one is willing to take responsibility and dodgy CIA people with no name tags encouraged soldiers to do "whatever it takes" to "soften up" detainees for interrogation in Abu Ghraib. It's a set of circumstances that allows good people to turn bad.
And collectivist cultures have had their own atrocities. Cambodia. China. Japan. North Korea.
June 11th, 2008 @16:37 #
The Dutch have a great word for this phenomenon: "gemakzucht". A lethal blend of apathy, laziness and the desire for convenience.
What people won't do, don't do, or don't dare to do will ultimately prove more dangerous than what they do do. (No pun intended.)
June 11th, 2008 @16:42 #
That's a fantastic word, Richard. (and insane with mix of envy / desire to see your supercool cellters for Novel Idea)
June 11th, 2008 @17:22 #
Glad to hear it, but I have no idea why Michelle thinks I sent them.
June 11th, 2008 @17:30 #
I'm going to go drown myself in a sea of relativism.
June 11th, 2008 @17:35 #
(But before I do, Western influences were instrumental in creating the conditions for atrocities in every country you mentioned. Not that the west has a monopoly on atrocities, it's not that black and white, and as far as I know Ghengis Khan committed genocide purely on his own initiative. Anyhow I see your Lucifer Effect and raise you Man's Search for Meaning. See you on the other side.)
June 11th, 2008 @18:11 #
Shereen,
I second Lauren's comments on Apartheid and SA. I arrived back here from Switzerland the other day and was struck by two things:
A) the sense of space, light (even though its winter) and beauty of this country
B) the terrible hardship all over the place, contrasted by people cruising along, oblivious, in the latest prosthetic phalluses on wheels
Unfortunately I am not at all sure what to do when the socio-economic structure of a nation becomes so incredibly skewed by political processes, other than use the media to send people pro-social messages, stop this South African fixation with violence and deal with troublesome delusions of South African supremacy, not to mention a cultural predeliction for metaphorical auto-anilingus.