Responsibility

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• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780522862263
• eBook ISBN: 9780522862287
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of responsibility permeates social life. While it has many meanings, they often centre around questions of practical and moral accountability, culpability and liability. One can learn a great deal about a social formation by looking at the way the meanings of responsibility are deployed within it, the way they vary from one social space to another, and the way they are often at the centre of a political struggle over how we define and apportion blame. The essays in this book do more than examine such processes. Each in its own way also invites the readerto push existing assumptions about what individual, political, ecological and corporate responsibility entails.

Part I

The Subject of Responsibility

1

Obedience to Authority and Its Discontents

John Cash

With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation into performing harsh acts.

Milgram, Obedience to Authority

As indicated in the epigraph above, Stanley Milgram’s famous, and somewhat infamous, social psychology experiments concerning ‘obedience to authority’ reveal a sad and sorry human tendency. Milgram’s research, conducted in the United States in the early 1960s, revealed that most people would obey an authority figure when instructed to administer severe electric shocks as punishment for a failure to learn—up to the 450-volt level on the imposing shock generator they were required to operate. Indeed, Milgram was initially appalled, if also fascinated, by the frequency with which his subjects would obey the order to apparently inflict ever-increasing levels of electric shock to the ‘learners’ they were instructed to ‘teach’. The capacity to resist authority by taking personal responsibility for one’s actions and their effects was far more compromised than he had anticipated. This brute fact of routine obedience is the way the Milgram study is usually reported. What this obscures is the recurrent attempts by many of the research subjects to reclaim responsibility as the experiment’s awful scenario unfolded. By revisiting the Milgram studies, this essay aims to catch and reflect upon the drama of subjectivities in process as they negotiate responsibility, in often partial, fragile and still-born, but sometimes resolute, ways; always under the shadow of the chilling, often deadening, call to obey.

Initially, Milgram’s research was conceived as a comparative study that had as its ultimate aim an analysis of the German character. In contrast with some other Western societies in which a democratic ethos was deeply embedded, German ‘obedience to authority’, so demonically enacted in the Holocaust, remained a continuing concern that warranted close attention. However, these comparative ambitions collapsed as the research in the United States, which was anticipated to reveal a widespread capacity to resist authority, actually revealed something far more disturbing. In addressing this shocking revelation—the willingness of most people to obey authority, even in extreme conditions—notions of taking and shifting responsibility and being and feeling responsible, or not, shadow, as counter-terms, the notion of obedience to authority that Milgram’s study foregrounds.1

Responsibility is a term that carries two related, but not mutually entailed, connotations. The first of these is self-regarding and concerns the preservation, protection or advancement of the self; caring for and taking responsibility for the self. The second is other-regarding and concerns acting responsibly in relation to others, especially those whose circumstances place them in need of the care and concern that flows from empathy, and an understanding, usually implicit, of the shared vulnerability of human beings as both human animals and psychological and social subjects. Although we normally link these two connotations as if part and parcel of the one conceptualisation of responsibility, in fact they have diverged from each other under the conditions of late modernity. Contemporary democratic societies and the neo-liberal economics which they promote, and on which they rely, presume that citizens are sovereign individualists who rationally calculate their own best interests and act accordingly. Anyone who fails that test of acting responsibly in one’s own interests becomes a problem who must be disciplined by the agencies of the welfare state, itself now in decline. Hence we find ourselves in a situation where being responsible for oneself is the sole mode of responsibility that is fully valorised by the state and its agencies, by business enterprises and by public institutions. Feeling empathy and taking responsibility for the plight of others is in decline as the new individualism takes hold. Richard Sennett has highlighted a similar divergence when noting that the culture of the new capitalism promotes shallow relationships involving ‘no long term’.2 Detachment from others and adherence to an instrumental logic on behalf of the self become the guiding virtues.

In parallel, the preferred, if rather schizoid, self-understanding of the modern democracies involves a presumption that democratic modes of socialisation within the modern family and the broader society produce rational citizens who adhere to egalitarian principles and have cultivated a capacity to think and act independently. This notion became highly salient in the United States in the period following the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in World War II and in the ensuing Cold War with the Soviet Union and the threat of communism. If obedience to authority was the hallmark characteristic of totalitarian regimes in both Germany and the Soviet Union, a strong individualism was to be expected in those societies that valued freedom and equality, especially the United States of America. Or so it was presumed.

It was this framing cultural assumption about the virtues of democratic societies that led Stanley Milgram to expect that his social psychology experiments on obedience to authority, conducted at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, would find a standard distribution of instances and degrees of obedience as against disobedience, rather than a clustering of responses at the obedience end of the distribution. The taking of personal responsibility would be evident in a good proportion of the individuals subjected to his ingenious experiment. He was soon to learn otherwise. Writing to Henry Riecken at the National Science Foundation, the funding body supporting his research, Milgram noted:

In a naïve moment some time ago, I once wondered whether in all of the United States a vicious government could find enough moral imbeciles to meet the personnel requirements of a national system of death camps, of the sort that were maintained in Germany. I am now beginning to think that a full complement could be recruited in New Haven.3

Milgram had quickly learned that most subjects of his experiment obeyed instructions to administer increasingly higher-voltage electric shocks, up to the highest register of 450 volts. This is the aspect of his research that has entered the public imagination. It is well captured in the title of a recent intellectual biography The Man Who Shocked The World. The shock lay in the fact that Milgram had experimentally demonstrated the ‘banality of evil’ as a disturbing yet common feature of humanity.4 It is for this reason that Milgram’s mentor, Gordon W Allport, termed the obedience-to-authority research ‘the Eichman Experiment’.5

Unlike Solomon Asch’s experiments with conformity, measured merely by agreement or disagreement about the length of a line, Milgram conceived an experimental design that was dramatic and non-trivial. As he explained in an interview from 1980:

One of the criticisms that had been made of [Asch’s] experiments is that they lack a surface significance, because, after all, an experiment with people making judgements of lines has a manifestly trivial content. So the question I asked myself is: how can this be made a more humanly significant experiment?

It seemed to me that if, instead of having a group exerting pressure on the judgements about lines, the group could somehow induce something more significant from the person, then that might be a step in giving greater face significance to the behaviour6

The experimental mise-en-scène that Milgram developed consists of a laboratory setting, with a large and complex shock generator mounted on the table in front of which the true subject of the experiment is to sit. The characters in this scene are a scientist or ‘experimenter’ dressed in a lab coat, a ‘teacher’, who is the actual and singular subject of the experiment, and a ‘learner’, who is actually a confederate of the experimenter but is regarded by the teacher as another subject of the experiment. This illusion was achieved by a contrived drawing of lots to decide who would be teacher and who would be learner. Thereafter, the true subject of the experiment was given a sample shock of 45 volts—‘it’s only fair’—and instructed on how to proceed with the teaching and to administer ever-increasing shocks with each new mistake by the ‘learner’. Of course, as the ‘learner’ was actually a confederate of the experimenter, the learner did not receive any real electric shocks. It was all pretence, a very convincing act, as the anxiety experienced by most learners attests.

Alan Elms, who was Milgram’s research assistant, recalls the initial amazement at what he and Milgram were observing:

It was only when those first participants arrived at Linsly-Chittenden Hall that Milgram and I, as we watched from behind the big two-way mirrors in the Social Interaction Lab, began to realize that something truly unusual was going on—something quite different from the usual low-key social psychology experiment. Before that summer ended I watched approximately 100 participants, run one at a time, as they moved higher and higher up the sequence of switches on the shock generator…Milgram and I were astonished at both the intense emotional involvement displayed by most participants and their high levels of obedience to the experimenter’s commands.7

There can be no doubt that this was shocking and confounded most people’s expectations about human behaviour in such circumstances. To underline this—to reveal the gap between cultural expectations and actual behaviour—Milgram described the experimental scenario to a few groups at Yale and then asked them to estimate what proportion of subjects would proceed to administering the strongest shock of 450 volts. A group of Yale College seniors estimated that 1.2 per cent of the ‘teachers’ would go to the 450-volt mark. In fact, approximately two-thirds of the subjects administered 450 volts to the apparently hapless learner sitting, sometimes screaming and sometimes deadly silent, in the adjacent room.8 That these final-year undergraduate students were so radically mistaken highlighted the vast gap between cherished illusions and observed behaviour. Moreover, it wasn’t only undergraduates who shared these illusions. Every group Milgram spoke to was similarly mistaken in their estimates. Most mistaken of all was a group of apparent experts: the medically trained psychiatric residents at Yale-New Haven Hospital. They were ‘wrong by a factor of 500’, a fact Milgram, the social psychologist, took delicious delight in contemplating and reporting.9 Of course, had those psychiatric residents relied on their knowledge of the psychoanalytic tradition, starting from Freud’s own work on group psychology and the analysis of the ego they would not have been so surprised by Milgram’s findings. However, they would also have looked more closely at the resistances as well as the observances of obedience to authority. As I will argue below, it is in this tension between obeying authority as against taking personal responsibility and acting responsibly towards others that the fuller significance of the ‘obedience to authority’ study lies, even when the attempt to reclaim responsibility falters or fails.

The Passionate Struggle Between Obedience and Responsibility

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud developed his account of conformity to a shared ideal or ideology and the accompanying submission to authority principally through deploying the concepts of identification and regression. He recognised that situational factors can produce a dramatic undoing of an already established psychic structure. This drama is presented as a battle in which a capacity for responsibility and autonomy is threatened by a tendency, in certain settings, to identify with a dominant or domineering leader or ideology. This amounts to an invasion of the mind snatchers, we might say. Through a displacement of an already instituted psychic structure the individual’s super-ego (or ego-ideal) and ego are shunted aside and forcefully replaced, through identification, by psychic attributes of other individuals or institutions. The net effect is a marked reorganisation of psychic qualities and tendencies in the contemporary moment and a radical diminution in capacities for individual responsibility. This is the moment of a group mentality and submission to au...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Obedience to Authority and Its Discontents
• More Irresponsibility for Everyone?!
• Responsibility, Noel Pearson and Indigenous Disadvantage in Australia
• Responsibility for ‘Doing Justice’
• Responsibility for Providing Human Security
• Part II
• Who Is Watching? Context, Blame and Responsibility
• Between Soldier and Bystander: Negotiating Peacekeeper Responsibility in the Rwandan Genocide
• Responsibility in the Lebanese Transnational Family
• Facebook and the Other: Administering to and Caring for the Dead Online
• Responsible Judgement: Forced Marriage, Culture and Feminist Responsibility
• Part III
• Taking Political Responsibility for Climate Change
• Rethinking ‘Remoteness’: The Space-Time of Corporate Causation
• The Toolondo Fishman: Humananimals and Forms of Response-ability
• Beyond Control or Compassion: Towards an Ontology of Responsibilities
• References
• Author Biographies
• Index