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For anyone who hoped that American soldiers stationed in Iraq were united in their dedication to high-minded ideals, the revelations from Abu Ghraib in 2004 came as a shock. Over a period of months, a more or less random assortment of military personnel devised and carried out tortures whose range and intensity astonished many observers. Female prisoners were raped, men sodomized with batons, and handcuffed children pelted with rocks. Unmuzzled attack dogs were set loose in holding cells until juvenile prisoners not only urinated on themselves but defecated as well. Adult detainees—sometimes rounded up on an every-man-in-the-village basis—were doused with phosphoric acid, stripped nude, and stacked in pyramids, forced to masturbate while being videotaped, and had electrical wires affixed to their genitalia. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh led a small chorus of pundits inclined to dismiss these actions as “people having a good time” while seeking “to blow some steam off.” But although there is little doubt that steam had been building up for quite a while in many of the young men and women responsible, it remained incomprehensible to most outsiders that they would vent it with such imaginative cruelty. After all, many of the direct culprits had unblemished or even stellar records of service. Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, who received one of the stiffest sentences of anyone involved in Abu Ghraib, had previously amassed over a dozen honors including three Army Achievement Medals and a Bronze Star, which is awarded for “heroic or meritorious achievement.” The fact that he and countless other men and women—more Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts among them—perpetrated such evil points us toward a deeper question. It is the same one that hangs over Nazi Germany and the Rwandan genocide, as well every instance of spousal or child abuse and every community in which racism or some other toxin is given cover: What makes good people do bad things? It is hard to think of a question that is at once more pivotal to understanding human nature and more frequently brushed aside. After all, it is tempting to believe that the only people capable of evil deeds are wholly evil men. Good people—which is usually to say people like ourselves—are not the problem, we like to think. Good people may make mistakes and compromises, but there are clear lines they will not cross. So we replace the hard question, often at the urging of our political leaders, with an easier one: Why are some people good and others bad? And just like that, we can forget about the cautionary story of Lucifer, “bearer of light,” who fell from God’s highest favor to the lowest moral decrepitude. We can forget about the millions of Germans who condoned or participated in the Holocaust. We can neglect the slave quarters in George Washington’s presidential residence. Or Martin Luther King Jr.’s adultery, for that matter. But in the meantime, “good people” will continue to cross ethical lines. And, as we will see, no matter how righteous we think we are, no one is immune. Driven, perhaps, by the spirit of our atrocity-ridden age, the authors of three new books bring their own expertise to bear on the universal human capacity for doing harm. James Hollis is a psychoanalyst, Jacob Needleman a philosophy professor, and Philip Zimbardo an experimental psychologist. Each approaches the question from a different side, but all of them essentially proceed from a famous dictum attributed to Socrates, who maintained, “no man does evil intentionally.” If men do not pursue evil voluntarily, then how does it arise? In Why Good People Do Bad Things, Hollis contends that the moral foundation necessary for positive ethical behavior is almost impossible to build, and our splintered ego is to blame. Drawing heavily from Carl Jung, he locates the crux of the problem in the tension between our inner selves and the need to adapt to survive in the outer world. “With each adaptation in service to survival or getting needs met, we risk further alienation from our inherent nature. … We become, perforce, our adaptations; we live them out and embody them through our psychopathologies.” Hollis says we cannot be good unless we are whole, and we cannot be whole unless we delve into the subconscious urges that compel us to act without examining our motives or the possible consequences. What is worse, men are to some extent the products of their society, and social norms may predispose them toward harmful or thoughtless behavior. If Hollis is right, eschewing evil has a prerequisite: the long and conscientious work of examining ourselves and our latent capacity to do harm. But “it is much easier to scapegoat others, blame, and feel superior to them,” he observes. “What [this] work requires is growing up, maturity, and who wants to do that?” In the youth-obsessed culture that brought us Jackass, Punk’d, and Desperate Housewives, that is the million-dollar question. Sadly, Hollis doesn’t have a robust answer. Although he comes at it from the standpoint of Greek philosophy and Judaic theology, Jacob Needleman advances a similar thesis in his somewhat overwrought Why Can’t We Be Good? The problem is not that we don’t know what is good, Needleman says, it’s that most of us are incapable of putting that knowledge into action. Moral development hinges on “confrontation with great ideas” and a commitment to pay deep attention to our inner selves. Moral action involves translating that reflective energy through the muscles of a body in tune with the “being of man”—for Needleman has faith that “[h]uman evil simply cannot be contained in the same mind that contemplates the beauty and order of the universal world.” But even if that faith were justified, which is a stretch, we arrive once more at a reality check. Needleman’s “universal world” may be all peaches and moonbeams, but the real one is full of men and women whose attention is torn in ten directions from the moment their bedside alarms go off. Hollis and Needleman may be useful guides for certain seekers, but if we really want to understand why “good people turn evil,” our proper laboratory is ordinary men. Fortunately, that is Philip Zimbardo’s focus in The Lucifer Effect. Zimbardo knows a thing or two about the ease with which even a conscientious person can inflict great harm, having personally unleashed evil with his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. In 1971, Zimbardo randomly assigned twenty experimental subjects to be either “prisoners” or “guards” in a makeshift jail in one of Stanford University’s academic buildings. All of the participants were run-of-the-mill undergraduates who had passed multiple screenings designed to weed out anyone at risk for mental instability. Zimbardo was primarily interested in how the prisoners would behave during their two weeks in “jail,” but to his surprise and eventual horror, it was the guards’ behavior that stole the show. Asked merely to maintain order while enforcing a handful of rules (i.e. “Prisoners must address each other by number only”; “Prisoners must participate in all prison activities”), the students playing guards quickly became overwhelmed by their role. Within the first twenty-four hours, arbitrary punishment and verbal abuse had become the norm. Physical abuse followed, and before the first week was out, some of the guards were gleefully forcing half-naked and thoroughly demoralized “prisoners”—students just like themselves who had committed no wrongdoing—to simulate sodomy. When the experiment was terminated on day six, one of the guards observed with dismay that some of his compatriots were disappointed—“somewhat because of the loss of money, but somewhat because they were enjoying themselves.” These were normal, middle-class students with top-notch educational backgrounds. Almost all of them had professed a preference to be assigned “prisoner” status before the experiment; they found the authoritarian role of a guard distasteful. So Zimbardo felt certain that something other than personality was at work. Nothing in the initial psychiatric screenings predicted the disturbing behavior of the “guards,” but the situation they’d been put in was toxic. In other words, this wasn’t a case of a few bad apples, but rather of a rotten barrel. “Within certain powerful social situations,” Zimbardo posits, “human nature can be transformed in ways as dramatic as the chemical transformation in Robert Louis Stevenson’s captivating fable of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” A wide body of evidence now exists to support this conclusion. Particularly famous are Stanley Milgram’s “obedience to authority” experiments—in which a startling majority of subjects administered what they had reason to believe were painful and even deadly electrical shocks to a fellow adult at the request of a white-coated lab technician. After recounting the Stanford Prison Experiment in astonishing detail, Zimbardo explores the results of other studies to tease out the main situational factors that make us vulnerable to perpetrating or condoning harmful behavior. Unsurprisingly, one of the most powerful involves dehumanization; when propaganda reduces another group of human beings to prisoner numbers, “cockroaches” (as Hutu extremists labeled Tutsis in Rwanda), or “towel heads,” the path toward torture or genocide is likely to be a downhill ride. Anonymity also appears to grease the wheels for bad behavior, as does the distant presence of an authority figure who is reluctant or ambiguous about discouraging it. Of course Zimbardo himself was such an authority figure, and he has had much time to reflect on his moral responsibility for what happened during his experiment. To use his terminology, he represented the “System” that created this toxic “Situation.” And it is on this level of analysis that he turns his attention to the real-life atrocities of Abu Ghraib, arguing persuasively that while Frederick and his fellow perpetrators cannot escape culpability for their crimes, they were not the rotten apples that military prosecutors made them out to be. Deprived of standard periods of leave and, in some cases, housed in prison cells themselves, Frederick and company were under enormous stress. They were also encouraged to “prepare” detainees for coercive interrogation by unidentified military (or perhaps CIA) personnel. Meanwhile, their Secretary of Defense and Commander-in-Chief were actively advocating torture tactics and exempting the U.S. military from the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. “This barrel of apples began rotting from the top down,” Zimbardo contends, demonstrating that his very own research was exploited in the process. For years the U.S. military has used lessons from the Stanford Prison Experiment in training programs designed to prepare their members for the possibility of capture. However, after September 11, these programs “were retrofit to be part of the arsenal of offensive tactics to elicit information from military personnel or civilians considered as enemies.” In other words, the situation created in Abu Ghraib and other prisons was tailor made to unleash the evils of torture while allowing the top of the command hierarchy to evade accountability. Given that the world is full of testing situations, and that the motives of powerful men are often impure, what is important is preparing ourselves to do good. Zimbardo marshals solid evidence, suggesting that those who are practiced at resisting the urge to fit into a group are more likely to stand tall when their peers either perpetrate evil or bless it with silent complicity. As Edmund Burke wrote, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” The challenge of a democracy is recognizing that the responsibility for preventing evil is broadly shared. Defining “nothing” is not as easy as it sounds. Is the culpability for Abu Ghraib, and the wider policy of violence and torture, shared by citizens who knowingly voted a second time for its creators? Should those who voted otherwise be satisfied with that single peep of dissent, or held to a higher standard of action? Those are difficult questions, but we may say one thing for sure: The border between good and evil runs through the middle of each of us, and pretending otherwise nourishes the part that treats malice with toleration.
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