He wasn't called O'Malley, of that I am sure, but he was a professor of psychology at Brown University where at the time of this incident with which I have begun today's reflections, and indeed he was in "punishment" or "aversive therapy. Brown's department of psychology specialized in experimental psychology. I suspect the name and word Freud and Freudian were rarely used and if so then somewhat condescendingly, examples of old fashioned, pre scientific psychology. I think from what I later learned during a long career at Brown as a teacher and professor of German and Media Studies (the latter very late in my forty year career there) he inflicted pain on rats to see if painful or pleasurable rewards were the better motivators in rat behavior. This exchange took place in the early part of the 1970s or perhaps even earlier and the various experiments such as the Millhaven team from Yale, I believe, performed on their volunteers still resounded in the growing study of baseline human behavior. Were people otherwise thought of as good people capable of administering violent electric shocks to other people while these other people were apparently strapped to chairs with a wire or wires attached to them? It seems that the supposedly good people were indeed quite capable and even willing to apply high voltage shocks to the allegedly willing volunteers who cried out and writhed in apparent agony while their tormentors, the good people, simply obeyed their white coated scientist mentors and pressed the levers connected to the wires and the victim volunteers ever higher.
The point of the experiment, or a point, was to discover what otherwise good people chosen at random and with enough mental intelligence to know that pressing an electric lever would cause increasing pain to the person who was in any case visible behind a glass partition. The victim was trained in the correct forms of screaming and twisting while the shocks were administered, though the victims were reacting to a series of light bulbs of different colors or diefferent gradations of height which told them how great the shock was supposed to be. The volunteer torturers were all assured that the seated victims were volunteers, knew what would happen to them, and that in the end none of them would have any lasting effects from the shocks administered to them.
The Nazi period was not very far in the past at the time of these experiments and the experience of the death camps and the ways in which otherwise good people became vicious toward others while imprisoned in the camps intrigued many people. "How could the Germans do those things?" summed up the background of the experiments; and how could and can other non-German good people do thse things in other parts of the world including in the good old USA? Obedience to authority was said to be a German trait though it was clearly known to many people that it is not at all confined to one part of the globe or to one nationality or ethnicity. It is an ancient problem for human beings and in most cases the answer that came most often from the torturers was something akin to "I did what I was ordered to do." The orders were given by people with the right to have authority - doctors, scientists, policemen, camp guards, prison guards, dictators, presidents of republics - in fact by all manner of people. The question that arose therefore was is there nothing in the human being which rises up against such horror and says no no matter what the cost to the nay sayers?
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing posed this question in his 18th century dramatic work, "Ugolino," about the execution of a father and his son in an Italian court. They are starved to death in order for the despot who hates the father to see to what depths of immorality his enemy will sink in order to live. In fact in the play the father kills and eats his child which had a depressing effect on those followers of the Enlightenment who had hoped for a better ending.
I think of this in the past week because I am once again like most of us in this country, the USA, and the wider world are learning of the "treachery" of an intelligence analyst who in the grips of a moral crisis about his job at a place with the unlikely name of "Booze, Allen, and Company" in which among other things he had access to e-mails, telephone conversations, and other electronic communications of Americans and could selectively "spy" on them to gather mega data for the NSA, the government contractor of his work for Booze, Allen, and Co. Some hail him as a hero for standing up to big government and its invasion of personal privacy. Others speak of him as a traitor because he had taken some sort of oath never to reveal what he did.
Of course, America at least was founded by a gang of traitors with a price on their heads. Washington, Adams,Jefferson and all the founding fathers, so called, faced hanging by the British if caught because they too had taken oaths as officials of various types of the British Monarch and had broken those oaths by rebelling against their lawful master. They were not spies, of course, but traitors much like Benedict Arnold of the Continental Army was a traitor to the rebel cause and escaped hanging by fleeing to England.
But history is not the strong suit of Americans generally and generally cited only when it is on the "right side" which is to say, truth and treason are all and always relative.
So those who call for the arrest and rendering of this young man who broke his oath not to tell of government spying programs believe that he should accept his possible fate because he knew what he was doing was illegal. Civil rights advocates in the USA accepted jail terms and worse in the name of a righteous - to them - cause and did not flee to England or Hong Kong or Iceland. Surely this chap, had he any dangling male parts of sufficient proportion, should also accept his legal fate, being rendered which somehow sounds terrible. I think of rendering as the creation in cooking of a sauce from a piece of meat or a vegetable which must be cooked down to yeld up or to render it suficiently liquid to be called gravy, for example.
In any case, rendering has sufficiently negative connotations to be something to avoid as this "traitor/hero" is attempting to do while admitting that "the other side" believes it must do this to him because he broke a law.
But then there is a streak of meanness in people which historically has always made numbers of us attend executions or slow down to gape at victims of traffic accidents. Religions historically are about right and wrong and have clear and concise views of them as anyone reading, for example, Leviticus or Deuteronomy in the Old Testament knows. We witness Islamic Sharia Law being imposed on people in those countries which support such a body of law and must in witnessing these executions admit that there is some kind of vicarious pleasure (real pleasure for the executioner?) in watching someone hanged, beheaded, stoned, etc.
I don't know what to do with this hero/traitor. He has at the very least generated a most interesting debate about government power to do as it pleases with privacy. As usual in these cases the head of state, in this case President Obama has defended the practice of spying on citizens by saying something like the choice is either the reign of terrorists or a bit of intelligence gathering and relative security from the terrorists. What price freedom?
I think I would not renew his contract with his present employer, the USA government in fact. But I would also ponder the usefulness of the contract the government has with its intelligence gathering agencies if the head of state has to defend unconstitutional acts by saying this hurts me more than it hurts you or some such empty adage.
Our prisons are not better than those of other countries and far worse than those of countries such as Denmark or Sweden, for example. Rendered to a maximum facility in deepest Colorado, for example, the imprisoned person's life is over as far as it can be called a human life. The humiliations surrounding the rendering and imprisonment will effectively end human life for him, his family and friends, many of them, and perhaps for those who support such methods of punishment.
Will aversive therapy work to prevent others from emulating his foul acts? I don't know what Professor O'Malley found out. The evidence so far is that aversive conditioning does lttle more than besmirch the aversive conditioner, be that a single human being or a government or nation.
As a reader of those wonderful stories of Leaphorn and Chee, Navajo Tribal Policemen in the American south west, I am always impressed by the concept of restoring the troublesome individual to harmony with his traditions, his people, his way of life. What good does it do to lock someone up for years or put him to death? Does he change? Is the society better off because it did this to him? Do unto others, etc. Well, the Code of Hamurabi believed that thousands of years ago. It is an understandable primitive reaction to violence done by someone to us and ours. If the violence or misdeed actually helped the person or persons to whom it was done, or generated useful community wide meditation and thought and resolve about changing the society and community for the better, would that suffice to make the misdeeds understandable and bearable without killing or punishing the individual who acted against the prevailing laws and customs?
Not yet, I fear in America. Not in Russia or in many places outside of the Navajo reservation? Perhaps we could appoint him professor, visiting or guest, of psychology at Brown or some similar place, in many ways a most terrible punishment indeed. And make him study and give lectures and sit on committees to ponder redesigning curricula including the curriculum of psychology. Make him think and talk about this matter of what he did and why, engage with students anf colleagues and a broader public - then we would punish him in ways most people cannot imagine but insiders can. But his punishment would produce more of what his original acts intended namely to stir up a debate about the limits of government in an age of corporate and religious terrorisms. We need this debate and we need these professors - not teachers, that is something different but people who profess something and are allowed to do so by virtue of a degree or family or money or other entitlement and who in professing may if not overpaid as so many are today help bring about rethinking and then even reshaping the nature of our social contract.
No comments:
Post a Comment