Obedience to Autbority

...Opposite the core myth, at the opposite pole of authority, is the myth of the margins—the myth of "world brotherhood" and the "international proletariat," of Rousseau's General Will, of (in the sixties) the "authentic black," or of the Revolutionary Man...

...The problem results from failings in our intellectual and social discourse on the problem of authority...

...But there is no discussion in the book that supports such an assumption—and it is certainly not inferable from the data...

...Therein lies the gap: the need for a theory of authority and authoritarianism that explains the 1960s...

...The Authoritarian Personality, which heads every bibliography on the subject (perhaps in part because of the alphabetical positioning of Adorno's name), is about Hitler's Germany, not Stalinist Russia...

...The more informed our understanding of the philosophical questions underlying the problem, the less apt we would be, I think, to be surprised by what happened—and the more apt we would be to understand what happened...

...I grant that tempers have calmed somewhat since 1969—but the intellectual and social currents that produced the ongoing apotheosis of radical leaders remains strong in the American intellectual idiom...

...So could those who obeyed...

...Now Milgram certainly deserves great praise for the ingenuity of his experimental design, but the proper question to ask is whether people should have been surprised by his results...

...Here is Milgram's description of the "learner's- response: "At 75 volts, the 'learner' grunts...

...Far from shedding light on the problem, Milgram's simple authority-versus-morality analysis merely serves as the latest installment in a long series of tracts on authority which reinforce the myth that authoritarianism is a phenomenon restricted to the political Right, and to traditional forms of authority...

...It is interesting to consider how Milgram's experiments would have come out if they had been conducted in 1968, rather than in the early sixties...

...The problem of authority has become acute in modern times with the ongoing decline of all traditional sources of structure and values—family, church, and local community.* As Robert Nisbet noted twenty years ago in his classic The Quest for Community, the decline of traditional associative communities and authorities, perhaps the most important theme in the history of the West, has been marked with a commensurate increase of power in the central state...

...Before he began, Milgram asked his subjects how much electricity they themselves would be willing to take...

...But then something happens...

...Perhaps the most important consequence of taking the interviewee's answers at face value is to surrender control of the answers (and therefore, frequently, of the study) to the philosophical and social idiom, which may have entirely determined the answers...

...But at a deeper level, it results from the assumption that social science, "value-free," and severed from philosophy, can contribute anything important to man's understanding of himself...

...Conservative," after all, is now the routine description of Kremlin leaders today—and it is that fact, I believe, more than any other, that guarantees Solzhenitsyn his audience among Western intellectuals...

...These three assumptions suffuse the simple (false) dichotomy between authority and morality that underlies both Milgram's analysis and our intellectual idiom (which spawned his analysis...

...The difficulty is that the idea of consent implies, at some point, abdication: it suggests that at some point the person yields his intellectual and moral autonomy to another (the authority...

...But repeatedly throughout the book, he notes the strong moral relationship binding the subject to the experimenter—a personal relationship, based on a promise to participate and cooperate, which would have to be broken by insult, as the experiment would be ruined by premature termination...

...Where did the "inner moral qualities" come from...

...and none went above 150...

...NOTES For an excellent general discussion of this problem, and its relation to understanding scientific revolutions, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1962, 1970...

...This dichotomy—between authority and what he calls "inner moral qualities"—is the essential tension...

...Put another way, the subjects change from active moral agents to passive agents, yielding responsibility to external authority...

...By 1969, the names of Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and George Jackson ranked with George Washington as the great moral leaders and heroes of American history...

...the extreme tension felt by many of those who obeyed suggests many were torn by conflicting moral obligations: if those who went to the limit really abdicated and became "passive," as Milgram's simple abdication theory argues, they would have had no cause to feel tension...

...This reluctance to use the word "authority" and especially "authoritarian" to describe revolutionary movements and governments is particularly noticeable in that primer of authoritarianism, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, FrenkelBrunswik, Levinson and Sanford, New York: W. W. Norton, 1969...

...At 285 volts his response can only be described as an agonized scream...

...Several said they would take no shock at all...

...The results, quite simply, freaked out a lot of people, including many of Mil-gram's reviewers...

...Simple as pie...

...will] defy authority in the face of a clear moral imperative...

...I' Some writers, notably Irving Kristol and Robert Nisbet, make the same distinction in terms of authority versus power...

...The tragic and dangerous irony in this view of the problem, which is held by the dominant intellectual and moral leaders of our age, is its origin in a world view that is itself (covertly) authoritarian...

...The remainder defied the authority at varying points along the scale, beginning at 150...

...In view of the agonies man has endured both in the past and today to secure self-understanding, one must find the assumption that the interviewee understands his own motives (i.e...

...Those who obeyed, of course, also gave moral reasons...

...To understand our reluctance to use the word "authority" to describe radical movements, it is first important to understand one fundamental distinction—between authority and coercion.f That distinction goes to the question of consent: power is the result of both authority and coercion, but the power of authority is earned (consented to), while the power of coercion is imposed...

...Simplicity is the goal: isolate the variables, so you can tell cause from effect...

...Indeed, the experimental situation itself is one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of the book, and several reviewers have accused Milgram of being a Hitler and a Strangelove for having contrived it...

...In every interview, the handling of both questions and answers depends entirely on the assumptions the social scientist makes when he develops the questions and interprets the answers...

...It is thus an enormously important book, both for its content, and especially for the response it provoked...

...But while Burke comes at the problem from the standpoint of institutions and social order, our concern here focuses on the need of individuals for personal structure: as people can no longer find structure in family and church, they seek it increasingly in government...

...Throughout the book he assumes that those of his subjects who resisted the authority had greater moral resources than those who did not...

...Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the fashion has been to expect those advancements to come from the social sciences—from sociology, psychology, political science, and anthropology, among other disciplines...

...What Can We Learn from Social Science...

...The problem with relying on personal explanations about motives is that people often don't know their own motives...

...at 150 he demands to he released from the experiment...

...At 120 volts he complains verbally...

...Indeed, until not too long ago, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Harvard would have to defend his thesis before the entire philosophy department, which at various times included such figures as Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana...

...The Real Issues Surrounding Authority The problem of authority is not to be understood in terms of dichotomies like authority and obedience versus "conscience" and "inner morality...

...In this connection, the most critical and fascinating problem of authority occurs when people consent to coercion, when coercion therefore becomes authority—as is so often the case in totalitarian societies...

...People may disagree about how much man's understanding of himself has advanced in this age of social science...

...Social science, and social psychology in particular, is often criticized for merely cloaking common sense in scientific or pseudoscientific jargon, but Milgram's findings violated, or seemed to violate, all our preconceived ideas on obedience and disobedience to authority...

...Perhaps most importantly: why does the bulk of the intellectual class, who control our intellectual and social idiom, increasingly consent to the imposition of social values, an imposition obscured by the myth that radical consent is "freely chosen" from "inner moral qualities" ? These are among the questions we must ask, if we are to have any hope of understanding the modern crisis of authority—and especially of averting what increasing numbers of very sober observers are coming to see as a slow but steady decline into authoritarianism...

...The facts made popular recently by Solzhenitsyn were well known in intellectual circles by 1950, when The Authoritarian Personality appeared...

...By apparent luck of the draw, the volunteer ("subject") finds himself seated in front of an impressive electronic board, featuring a long row of buttons, designated with electrical currents going in 15-volt increments from 15 to 450 volts...

...It was only in the mid-thirties that sociology, psychology, and the rest were certified by the philosophy of science to be separate departments, and philosophy was left with what many of the scientifically-minded regarded as the fever-swamps of either linguistic philosophy or metaphysics...

...The reason reflects two critical assumptions intellectuals especially make about the consent necessary to maintain strong authority...

...Unfortunately, while Obedience to Authority gives us social science at its best, it also gives us a vivid illustration of the weaknesses of a social science cut off from philosophy, and of the critical limitations in our intellectual discourse on the problem of authority...

...A second "volunteer" ("learner"), apparently luckless in the draw but in fact part of the experimental team, sits in a chair, with an electrode attached to his wrist...

...Nowhere does Milgram offer a convincing discussion of motive...

...I prefer the narrower word, because power seems to me a property of both authority and coercion...

...The Twilight of Authority," Public Interest, Spring 1969...

...Following from this, the lack of consent (abdication) assumed to characterize all radical or revolutionary commitments to authority suggests the inappropriateness of using the word to describe radical movements...

...Robert Nisbet gives the reason: "Human beings...will tolerate almost anything but the threatened loss of authority in the social order...

...Which, in point of fact, is just what Milgram argues about his subjects...

...It is perhaps most important as a symbol of our society's vulnerability to authoritarianism—not so much for what it says, as for what it does not say...

...Why did those who defied the experimenter do so...

...The experimental results were quite different from these predictions...

...The universities especially, which were once regarded as bastions of openness and tolerance, became by 1968, if not earlier, our most conspicuous centers of authoritarianism...

...Or put another way, once a person has consented to traditional authority, he has abdicated, become passive...

...Thus, it becomes permissible to accept the answers literally, and at face value...

...And the answer to that question depends in substantial part on the depth of our understanding of the complicating philosophical issues involved—about the nature of authority, about the influence of social roles, and so on...

...The only man without it is the man whose thoughts and feelings and actions are random—which is no man, except perhaps the insane...

...It is the longing for a total, pure myth—symbolized easily and always by the myth of the Aryan man...

...One reason for disobedience, which I hope the discussion that follows will make more understandable and credible, is the "morality" of revolt against authority, independent of the content of the actions revolted against...

...One might guess that in 1968 the general decline of trust and confidence in institutions reflected in all surveys on the subject would have inspired a substantially higher rate of defiance than the rate Milgram recorded a few years earlier...

...but underneath, like the core myth, the marginal myth is totalist: but everywhere we have historical records this idealism has meant intolerance, backed by bloodshed on a scale never approached in core totalitarian systems...

...The second assumption, which vastly (over)simplifies the problem of interpretation, is that the person being interviewed both understands his own motives and will tell them to the interviewer...

...However difficult it is to use the word, there is no other word...

...To help him understand the point of it all, eight categories of shock intensity designate groups of buttons, going from "Slight Shock" at one end, to "Danger: Severe Shock" and "XXX" at the other...

...In simple terms, the question becomes: when and under what circumstances do people want to be told what to do...

...Its celebrated F-scale, which supposedly measures authoritarian personality traits, would give the highest marks for tolerance and unauthoritarian behavior to the radical students who turned American campuses into armed camps in the 1960s: An explanation for this double standard in theories of authoritarianism must go considerably beyond lack of information...

...Lastly—and here the fashion is especially ominous—he nowhere thinks to consider that at least some of his subjects who disobeyed may have done so for deeply authoritarian reasons...

...The authority is a laboratory technician, of impassive manner and stern appearance, clad in a grey technician's coat, who commands the "subject" to continue ("The experiment requires that you continue"), and when necessary assures him that "There is no permanent tissue damage...

...Almost none were sorry for having participated...

...The experiment was done under false pretenses, and the fact that the great bulk of volunteers expressed gratitude for the experience seems beside the point...

...To study the comparative effects of pain-infliction versus an authoritative command, Milgram recruited volunteers, ostensibly for a study of "memory andlearning," from the adult, male, working population around New Haven...

...On the other hand, a radical never yields his moral autonomy: his commitment to revolutionary ideals is generated from within, from his—and here Milgram's words fit exactly—"inner moral qualities," and "conscience...

...Milgram and his Yale colleagues were stunned, participants were accused by their wives of being Eichmanns, and the New York Times reviewer said the experiment may have been permitted in the early sixties when we were insensitive to such things, but would never be funded now...

...And what about the morality side—the "clear moral imperative" ? In his research design, Milgram implies that moral considerations are to be found entirely in sympathy for the "learner...

...As I shall try to demonstrate, that motive, which suffuses Milgram's own simple dichotomy, represents the greatest authority problem our society now faces—the problem of authoritarianism masquerading as idealism and morality...

...The reason is that blood shed for revolutionary idealism—for the marginal myth —is idealistic bloodshed, undertaken for "tolerance" and "goodness" and "inner moral qualities"—for the purpose, as James Reston recently described Maoist China, of bringing out "what is best inman, what makes him good...

...By pretending to deal, "value-free," only with "the facts," most social scientists avoid and thereby obscure the really difficult, philosophical questions—questions of value—on which all knowledge claims must ultimately rest...

...With this formulation, it is hardly worth saying that throughout the book he is on the side of "inner moral qualities...

...Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority...

...By refusing to ask philosophical questions, we abdicate responsibility to our intellectual idiom, which, as in the Milgram book, is thereby left free to provide the answers...

...There was a time, before they thought they discovered scientific objectivity, when all of these disciplines in a university were in the philosophy department...

...They are questions that Milgram, in his book that many very serious people are treating as a classic, nowhere thinks even to consider...

...It is a dependence the best social scientists well understand...

...The problem comes into focus, I think, in considering when and under what circumstances it becomes appropriate to use "authoritarian" to describe a Communist or socialist government...

...Whatever the value of the experiment, it is difficult to avoid noting the irony that while Milgram deplores the authority that science and scientific trappings had for the great majority of his subjects, he uses that same authority to justify what many believe to be his unethical research methods...

...But they are a small minority...

...Milgram's conclusions follow those argued by Hannah Arendt about the "banality of evil," in her 1963 book about Eichmann...

...Moreover, there is a vast literature affirming the proposition that when certain kinds of authority decline, the way is open to authoritarianism...

...Milgram's Results and Conclusions This is the basic experimental situation, and Milgram goes through nearly twenty variations of it, moving the "learner" and technician around, introducing women, even in one variation moving the experiment to Bridgeport, away from Yale...

...Although Mil-gram tried to dramatize the extent of surprise by asking for predictions about what would happen and by framing his question in a way that could not help but bias the predictions in the direction of disobedience, nevertheless the surprise and dismay at his results has been almost universal, especially among intellectuals...

...One recent occasion was presented in the publication of what has been billed as a seminal study of the problem of authority, by a psychologist with all the resources of a scientific laboratory at his disposal...

...One psychiatrist and three middle-class adults predicted a break-off point of 300 volts, but they were conspicuous exceptions: the mean predictions of the three groups were 120 (psychiatrists), and 135 (both college students and middle-class adults...

...From 330 volts on, the "learner" makes no further sound...

...the revolution is "betrayed...

...It is this problem that Burke addressed in his famous statement: "Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without...

...his argument throughout the book tends toward blanket condemnation of authority and obedience, on behalf of "inner moral qualities...

...that his answers need no interpretation) absurd on its face...

...Why increasingly have they been unable to find in family and church and local community the personal structure and values which they are now increasingly seeking in authoritarian political structures...

...This hypothesis—of both result and reaction—adds an interesting dimension from which to understand both the experiment and its critics...

...The problems of interpretation go beyond Milgram's simple dichotomy between authority and morality...

...In the "memory and learning" study, the "subject" asks questions of the "learner," and for every wrong answer he "punishes" the "learner" by giving him an electric shock, beginning at the minimum 15 volts and increasing the voltage 15 volts for each wrong answer, right up to 450...

...The trouble is, no matter how hard you try, where complex social and moral phenomena are concerned, there are always intervening variables.* I pretend to no originality here, but no matter how hard he tries to be "value-free," the social scientist is always thrown back to his research design—which means to philosophical questions, which most social scientists, with their training in quantitative methods, have neither the expertise nor the inclination to address...

...By complicating issues I am not referring to the question of whether Milgram's research was ethical, a question which troubled many critics and which Milgram considers so important that he devoted ten pages in an appendix to discussing it...

...One problem concerns the extreme tension induced especially in subjects who continued administering shocks up to the limit...

...Until only recently, these new social positivists have regarded philosophy as a quaint anachronism—curious as many think archaeology is curious, but of no practical value in an age of objectivity and "facts" to man's search for himself...

...We come, then, to the reason why our intellectual and moral vocabulary does not permit the use of "authority" to describe radical movements...

...Milgram begins his discussion of methodology (Chapter 2) by reaffirming admirably the importance of simplicity: "To study obedience most simply, we must create a situation in which one person orders another person to perform an observable action and we must note when obedience to the imperative occurs and when it fails to occur...

...Obedience to Authority grew out of a series of experiments Milgram undertook at Yale in the early sixties, to study, as he put it, "when and how people...

...Not only, as Milgram himself notes repeatedly, is morality not limited to one side...

...This argument offers the cleanest moral case and avoids the untidiness of complicating issues...

...That assumption—which is based, simply, on a philosophical mistake—has stunted our intellectual and moral discourse...

...Unfortunately, it is in consideration of the conceptual and philosophical issues that Milgram's analysis goes conspicuously soft...

...Call it a "sense of belonging," or "community," or "purpose"—they all refer to the longing and search of everyone for personal structure...

...Among those complicating issues are the terms and assumptions underlying our entire intellectual and moral consideration of the problem of authority...

...He also asked three groups (psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults) to predict their own break-off points—the points at which they would defy the authority...

...Very likely from authority: parents, teachers, or others...

...But the experiment was not really for a study of memory and learning...

...In post-interviews, they all gave moral reasons, and Milgram accepted them at face value...

...On the surface, tolerance is the very essence of revolutionary idealism...

...By complicating issues, I am referring rather to the issues generally ignored by those many observers who share the opinion of social psychologist Roger Brown, given on the book jacket, that Milgram's experiments are "the most important social psychological research done in this generation...

...First, he tends to use the word "authority" only to describe traditional forms of authority—including family, church, and local cornmunity, in addition to right-wing totalitarian political systems...

...But the Aryan myth presents but one side of the authority problem—the core myth, attached to the core values of society...

...Those who disobeyed Mil-gram's grey-coated technician, whatever moral reason they gave, could have done so for any number of other reasons...

...And that is scary, particularly when the authority is Eichmann's boss...

...To speak of "Che Guevara's authority," "Mao's authority," or "Timothy Leary's authority" somehow jars the ear and sounds unidiomatic...

...Authority is certainly to be found in the person of the technician, but is that the only place where authority can be found...

...It seems vulgar to have to say so, but we are used to making rather severe moral distinctions between the authority of Hitler and the authority of Jesus...

...Between half and two-thirds of all "subjects" followed the authority and shocked the "learners" right up to the limit—to the full 450 volts...

...And for the problem of authority, that abdication is particularly dangerous...

...it becomes "traditional" and, for the first time—authoritarian...

...Whatever his book actually says, I doubt Milgram would disagree...

...Unfortunately, there is no avoiding the fact that empirical research is only as valuable as the interpretation of data is persuasive...

...And yet, and yet...it's not that simple, especially as applied to studies of complex social phenomena such as authority, obedience, and morality...

...Here, he argues, is the fundamental lesson, now certified in the laboratory: "Ordinary people, simplydoing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process...

...There is a very serious (and in my opinion, very dangerous) world view operating here...

...His greatest difficulty appears in his attempts for simplicity—in his trying to maintain a careful separation between obedience and authority on the one hand and "inner moral qualities" on the other—the grey-coated technician versus the screaming "learner...

...In considering Milgram's conclusions, it is important to keep in mind his own formulation about what he was doing, especially what the experiment would show: when and how people...

...The responses are of course simulated—by the forty-seven-year-old accountant ("mild-mannered and likable") who played the "learner"-"victim"--but it is clear the "subjects," who at the start are given a real sample shock of 45 volts to reinforce the appearance of authenticity, believe it all...

...Because the occasions are rare when social science claims for itself an important breakthrough in understanding, few opportunities are available to scrutinize both its theory and its practice—especially to appreciate its severe limitations...

...Yet one can't help noticing the ironic coincidence—which may not be mere coincidence—that social and psychological disorder seem to be increasing, just as the potential for a "scientific understand-Mg" of man seems greatest...

...Under the circumstances, we have excellent cause for wondering how much social science, cut off from philosophy, can ever tell us about man, and whether our reliance on an impossible objectivity is not itself caused by the philosophical and social currents that are underminingour political and social order...

...There is authority, and there is authority: some authorities are more morally acceptable than others...

...Understanding Authoritarianism, Right and Left I hope it is clear that the problem here goes far beyond mere sloppiness or shallowness in our intellectual and moral vocabulary...

...But now the problems...

...and it is in large part responsible for the perils in our present condition...

...Milgram's book accepts without questioning them several popular assumptions in our culture about the problem of authority...

...For recent examples of the process, he gives us Vietnam, but unfortunately the book appeared too early to be sure of the appropriate comments about Watergate...

...But I am getting ahead of myself...

...Unfortunately, it is the complicating issues that form the essence of the authority problem...

...His protests continue as the shocks escalate, growing increasingly vehement and emotional...

...If so, it is reasonable to suppose both Milgram and most of his reviewers would have exulted at the "moral progress" thereby indicated...

...The act of consent itself may be active, but once it has occurred, the person loses his autonomy and becomes passive...

...The void does not have to be great, or seem great, for the fears it arouses to become sweeping, for sanity in politics to disintegrate...

...In asking questions, the first assumption tends to be that people will answer thequestion you ask and no other question...

...The word "authoritarian" becomes appropriate to describe Stalinist Russia, for instance, only if one can understand Stalin as a "conservative" Communist—traditional, and therefore right-wing—who lost his revolutionary idealism...

...And that, in fact, is the great dilemma of authority—it is to understand why and under what circumstances people will consent to-what kinds of authority...

...Electrode paste is applied "to avoid blisters and burns...

...The book, Obedience to Authority, by City University of New York Professor Stanley Milgram, has been celebrated almost universally (and in my view legitimately) by social scientists as social science at its best...

...The experiment begins, and with each wrong answer, the "subject" moves up the row of buttons...

...To put the problem in slightly different terms, toward the end of the 1960s, while right-wing totalitarianism was_ properly seen for what it is, the American intellectual and social establishment tended to see great "idealism" in radical violence...

...The problem of authority ultimately reflects man's need for structure...

...The full dimensions of the problem begin to emerge as we consider the following datum: throughout modern intellectual discourse on the problem of authority, there is a great reluctance to use the word "authority" to describe radical or revolutionary forms of authority...

...The important point here is to appreciate the dependence of social science on philosophy to produce real advancements in knowledge about man...

...The great gap in our intellectual discourse on the problem of authority comes into focus in trying to understand the 1960s...

...most answers were substantially under 100 volts...

...The basic problem of assumptions and interpretation infects the heart of Mil-gram's analysis of authority...

...But I offer no conclusion here about the ethical question other than to take note of it...

...Although in the final chapter, in a paragraph or two, and especially in a footnote which appears on the next to the last page, it is evident that Milgram is troubled by the simplicity of his analysis...

...The habit of accumulating data ("facts") by personal interview, a favorite technique of social science, has serious limitations, which mirror the limitations of social science itself...

...will] defy authority in the face of a clear moral imperative...

...The problem of authoritarianism—of "bad authority," if you like—is a problem, as Erik Erikson once put it, of the longing for totalism...

...In fact, the weakness of the analytical sections of the book underscores both the limitations of social science and of our entire philosophical discourse on the problem of authority...

...The assumptions are that consent (obedience) to traditional authority is always unquestioning and blind, while consent (obedience) to radical or revolutionary "authority" is never blind, but always freely and consciously chosen...

...Second, by ignoring the place authority may have had in encouraging his subjects' disobedience, he avoids any hint that authority may under certain circumstances either encourage moral action or lead to anything good...