Day 19 - Obedience as Virtue?

"A child who grows up in an environment where only obedience is rewarded with survival gets very black and white about authority."

I recently heard this said by Paul Gibbons on the Complete Liberty Podcast - Episode 66, and it resonated with me deeply. I say this not because of any unique parenting to which I was subjected, but as a result of the fact that my experience of having obedience so readily instilled in me would be considered not just normal but praiseworthy in our culture. Arguably, it is this principle of following authority that has been more thoroughly ingrained in me than any other.

Whether it was obedience to God, parents, church, state, teachers, adults, person's wearing special clothing, or any number of the other seemingly endless categories to which I had to gratefully submit, the issue was not to whom you were being obedient but that you were obeying. The highest compliment was, "You're such an obedient little boy," not "You consistently discern what's right and act accordingly."

Think for yourself; did your very first lesson involve learning that disobedience would result in physical pain? I would venture that, for most of us, one of the earliest concepts we came to comprehend was that disobedience = physical beating. Don't put the toy down when told, beating. Don't pick the toy up and put it away when told, beating. And my personal favorite for guaranteeing that you won't obey: don't sit quietly without moving, beating. I'm guessing that many of us literally had insult added to injury when, as we got older, we not only were beaten, but first it was explained to us that not only were we deserving of a beating given our lack of obedience, but the physical pain that was to be inflicted on us against our will was for our own good. This of course meant that while we gingerly avoided sitting down, we should feel a humble gratitude toward whatever individual had so generously chosen to come to our aide in this way.

Of course, I do realize that there is a term more generally accepted for this type of action, but like many words, it serves only to legitimize what would otherwise cause significant dissonance between action and stated belief. The word in question is spanking, but seeing as I've never heard of a case of domestic abuse where a spouse was accused of spanking another person as a result of disobedience, I chose to use the term that is applied in the latter situations, since in these cases, the same action is rightfully portrayed in an unfavorable light.

Seeing as my parents and hopefully many who know them will likely read this post, I wish to be explicit that although I remember being the recipient of corporal punishment at their hands, it was done to no greater degree or in any greater frequency than would be accepted as normal and appropriate in our culture. My point is not to draw attention to my parents, whom I love and respect deeply for all that they've given me. Instead, I wish to speculate that the level of unquestioning obedience modeled by the workers in places like GTMO isn't surprising given the primal level on which such a severe physical and emotional conditioning toward obedience has been ingrained.

Thankfully, the incredible influence that stems from a human desire to be obedient is not one that has gone unstudied. In his landmark social psychology experiment, Stanly Milgram "measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience." Although Milgram's focus certainly wasn't on determining the causal factors of such obedience, to my knowledge, there exists no more clear and indisputable evidence of just how far people will go in order to obey.

Through his experiment, Milgram unexpectedly made public the shocking reality that most people need no more incentive than that of obedience to cause extreme physical pain to the point of presumed unconsciousness in someone else. In his study, the incentive to obey by presumably giving high voltage electrical shocks to another human being was provided by nothing more than a stranger in a lab coat who authoritatively told the unwitting test subjects that "the experiment requires that you go on."

At a mere 11 pages in length, Milgram's summary article, The Perils of Obedience(pdf), is undoubtedly one of the most priceless modern contributions toward understanding the nature of human social interaction. Although I can't offer a high enough recommendation for reading the article in it's entirety, I know my own busy schedule, and so I'll quote paragraphs 111-112.

"The essence of obedience is that a person comes to see himself has the instrument for carrying out another persons wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift in viewpoint has occurred, all the essential features of obedience follow. The most far-reaching consequence is that a person feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear—it acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority.

Language provides numerous terms to pinpoint this type of morality: loyalty, duty, and discipline all are terms heavily saturated with moral meaning and refer to the degree to which a person fulfills his obligations to authority. They refer not to the “goodness” of the person per se but to the adequacy with which a subordinate fulfills his socially defined role. The most frequent defense of the individual who has performed a heinous act under the command of authority is that he has simply done his duty. In asserting this defense, the individual is not introducing an alibi concocted for the moment but is reporting honestly on the psychological attitude induced by submission to authority."

On the eve of this Memorial Day weekend, let me ask you, how many times have you heard military members praised for their loyalty, their fulfillment of duty, and their discipline? How many times have you heard them praised for their specific actions, such as "I'm so proud of you for dropping those bombs and killing all those people"?

Is there a similarity in principle between the choice of words used to describe how children are "spanked" and how military personnel are lauded for their "loyal fulfillment of duty"? I don't intend that as a rhetorical question, and so in personally answering it, I admit to having consoled myself innumerable times on the manner in which I was "honorably serving" and "doing my duty for my country."

However, I can no longer distract myself with such meaningless conglomerations of words. After all, I will not deny that I have violated others' liberty in order to obey someone else's authority, and of one thing I am sure, there is no honor in that.




ADDENDUM: I received an email containing additional information in regard to the following sentence I had written about Stanley Milgram.

"Although Milgram's focus certainly wasn't on determining the causal factors of such obedience, to my knowledge, there exists no more clear and indisputable evidence of just how far people will go in order to obey."

EMAIL: "Milgram did go into detail on this point in Obedience to Authority . . . In the second half of the book, after he's finished with his description of the experiment, Milgram does a cybernetic analysis of how hierarchical structures subvert individual people's agency and autonomy. I would very much recommend it to your attention."