[Dialogue] What Torture Does to Torturers

[Harry Wainwright]

Colleagues, a sofering question. Peace, Harry 
  _____  




Published on Monday, December 19, 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor
<http://www.csmonitor.com> 

What Torture Does to Torturers 

by Rushworth M. Kidder 

Last week, President Bush agreed to legislation banning cruel, inhumane, and
degrading treatment of prisoners in US custody. His U-turn ended months of
debate about the ethics of torture. Now come revelations that the White
House approved eavesdropping on American citizens inside the United States
without court-ordered warrants. 

These two information-gathering methods are markedly different: One inflicts
pain while the other invades privacy. But each has credible national
security arguments in its favor. Each raises profound human rights
objections. And each threatens to compromise the nation's moral authority
abroad. 

But there's another issue, largely unexplored, that speaks to a deeper
concern: the effect of such activity on the perpetrators. What is the impact
on those we ask to carry out those actions? 

Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments at Yale in the 1960s shed
light here. He recruited individuals to test (so they were told) the role of
punishment to promote learning. They were asked to follow an experimenter's
orders and administer increasingly powerful electric shocks - up to 450
volts - whenever a "learner" gave the wrong answer. 

Unknown to those giving the shocks, the experiment was a fake. The
experimenter in a gray lab coat was a plant. The learner was an actor
mimicking anguish. No shocks were ever sent. The point was to see how long
the recruits would persist (though Mr. Milgram didn't use these words) in
torturing their victim in obedience to authority. The sobering answer: a
very long time. 

One of Milgram's recruits, William Menold, had just been discharged from
combat duty in the US Army. Growing increasingly concerned for the learner
he was zapping, he complained to the experimenter, who told him to carry on
and that he would accept full responsibility. Mr. Menold recalls that he
then "completely lost it, my reasoning power," and became fully obedient.
Milgram's biographer, Thomas Blass, notes that Menold "described himself as
an 'emotional wreck' and a 'basket case' during the experiment and after he
left the lab, realizing 'that somebody could get me to do that stuff.'" 

Would Menold have been so emotionally battered if the experiment had
involved wiretaps rather than shocks? Hardly. But the two activities are on
the same scale, if at different ends. If anywhere along that scale our
nation makes citizens "do that stuff" to others, are we dehumanizing those
who do it? In taking advantage of undefended victims, are we degrading our
own personal integrity? 

Those aren't idle questions. Personal integrity isn't achieved through
inoculation. It's a process. Rooted in core ethical values, it shapes
itself, decision by decision, across a lifetime. It depends on consistency,
continuity, and repetition. Each lapse makes the next one easier. 

If that's true for individuals, it's also true for organizations and
nations. When an individual merges unthinkingly "into an organizational
structure," warned Milgram, "a new creature replaces autonomous man,
unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane
inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority." 

Government agencies, especially those defending the nation through espionage
and military action, depend on personal integrity. Yet they create these
"sanctions of authority." They can even require unethical actions. When they
do, however, they risk creating in the perpetrators either an anguished
guilt or an amoral numbness. A convicted Watergate-related figure, Egil
"Bud" Krogh, recalls what it was like to sacrifice conscience for what he
saw as President Nixon's unquestionable authority. Whenever you do something
like that, he says poignantly, "a little bit of your soul slips through your
fingers." 

That's not what democracy is about. None of us wants our public servants
turned into pliant emotional wrecks. And none of us wants the nation cast in
the role of the gray-coated Grand Experimenter, calmly overriding individual
ethics in the name of collective expediency. With the torture debate over
for now, it's time to begin the conversation on the broader differences
between moral and immoral authority. 

Rushworth M. Kidder is president of the Institute for Global Ethics
<http://www.globalethics.org>  in Camden, Maine, and the author of "Moral
Courage
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060591544/commondreams-20/ref=nosim
> ." 

C 2005 Christian Science Monitor

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