If during the last 40 years you’ve taken a psychology course in high school or college, you might have heard of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in the early 1960s. In the best-known variation, individuals come to a laboratory to participate in a teaching and learning experiment for which they will be paid $4 for an hour. They are asked to serve as a “teacher” by administering shocks to a “student” in an adjoining room when he or she responds incorrectly. An “experimenter” in a lab coat supervises.
Actually the “teachers” were the subjects of the experiment, and the question was when they would rebel against the authority in the lab coat, who assured the “teacher” it was necessary to continue administering shocks to the “student,” who was an actor not receiving shocks at all. In the earliest versions of this experiment at Yale, 65 percent of the “teachers” never disobeyed, moving in 15-volt increments to 450 volts, a level marked on the control panel with DANGER — SEVERE SHOCK. They did this despite complaints from the “student,” followed by silence. Experts had not predicted so much brutal obedience.
Although nearly everyone agreed that Milgram’s obedience experiments were brilliant, he was heavily criticized. For one thing, some of the teacher-subjects remained deeply troubled by their obedience. And in 1974, when Milgram published Obedience to Authority about his findings, he concluded that people abandon their humanity when their personalities merge with larger institutional structures. “This,” he said, “is the fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.”
The “fatal flaw” claim bothered me when I read Milgram’s book, and I wrote a short essay, The Burden of Imagination, saying if the “students” had encouraged the “teachers” to consider what their obedience could do outside the laboratory — as in the Holocaust, for example — there would have been a lot more disobedience. My essay appeared in my book, Writing from Experience, which was not a best seller, but a social psychologist at Bard College, Stuart Levine, found it.
Levine has long been fascinated by Milgram’s obedience research. He corresponds with other Milgram scholars and teaches a seminar on the subject at Bard. Two years ago he invited me to visit his seminar and share my critique, which I’ve now done twice.
Scholars looking for evidence to counter Milgram’s “fatal flaw” conclusion have long been interested in the story of Le Chambon, a village in southern France where people risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi Germany’s death camps. Many of those saved were children. Levine invited a Swiss social psychologist who has studied Le Chambon for years, Francois Rochat, to visit Bard in April, a timely invitation when cities all over our nation considered offering sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.
Rochat’s lecture was titled When Common Decency Prevails: From Milgram’s Disobedient Subjects to Rescuers During the Holocaust. We have more to learn from Milgram’s disobedient subjects, he said, than from those who obeyed. Rochat’s language was unusual for a social scientist. He spoke of the beauty of the rescuers’ deeds and their human generosity. He said: “Rescuers teach us that small deeds are the most important of all.”
Among the Milgram scholars who gathered at Levine’s invitation, there was considerable skepticism about the concept of “common decency.” Arthur Miller, who has written a great deal about Milgram, insisted the decency found in Le Chambon is not common or ordinary. It is, he insisted, heroic. Others claimed disobedience often depends on the level of risk.
Here in the Upper Valley we have a chance to weigh in on the question of “common decency” as our fellow citizens consider whether to offer “sanctuary” to undocumented immigrants. In “Faith Groups Gather in Hanover to Discuss Issue of ‘Sanctuary’” (Valley News, April 9), staff writer Rob Wolfe wrote that a sanctuary can be any city, state or religious congregation that refuses to cooperate with federal authorities seeking to detain or deport noncitizens.
Although the risk of disobedience here is not comparable with that in Le Chambon, where people faced the likelihood of death, providing sanctuary has something in common with the generosity of rescuers during World War II. Civil disobedience takes courage when the president and his attorney general roll back police reforms, intensify domestic political resentments, seek to reduce poor people’s access to food and health care, and embellish calls for “law and order” with false claims about rising crime rates. Providing sanctuary may be the most defiant act so far as citizens seek ways to oppose Trump’s vision of what makes America great.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.