Total Depravity

I have recently been reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment - an 1971 psychology study of prison life by Philip Zimbardo. In the experiment twenty-four young men, chosen to be the most healthy and ‘normal’ available, were given roles as either prisoners or prison guards.

‘Prisoners’ were ‘arrested’, dressed in smocks, chained at the ankles and locked up in cells. ‘Guards’ were given khaki uniforms and wooden batons and told: “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled”.

Originally intended to last two weeks, the experiment was terminated after six days on the grounds that it was unethical. Over the six days the guards had “steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanisation of the prisoners," Zimbardo recalls. Prisoners were stripped naked and place in solitary confinement, forced to clean toilet bowls with bare hands, simulate sodomy, or urged to turn on their fellow inmates, with the worst instances of abuse occurring during the night when the guards thought the staff were not watching.

Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early.

How, I wonder, could ordinary college students descend so quickly to this level of sadistic cruelty? And if they were just normal, young men does that mean I would have done the same in such a position? Of course I want to say I wouldn’t have, and never could; I want to say I am different in some essential way, but in the end I don’t think I am. I remember shamefully times in the schoolyard joining in the taunts of my classmates, deriding and humiliating an easy target.

I remember asking similar questions in Year 9 English when I first read Lord of the Flies - the William Golding novel about a group of British boys who, stranded on a inland, turn rapidly into savages. I don’t think I took as much away form the book as I should have. It was fiction, so I could distance myself from the implications. And there was Piggy, the boy who never forgot about that understandable and lawful world, even as it slipped away - perhaps he could be my moral equivalent. I guess I was clutching straws; anything that might suggest I wouldn’t be given over to the same desire to squeeze and hurt that the even Ralph found over-mastering.

Golding said of his novel: “The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. Before the war, most Europeans believed that man could be perfected by perfecting his society. We all saw a hell of a lot in the war that can't be accounted for except on the basis of original evil.” I think we have fallen again into the trap of the pre-war Europeans - we believe we can protect ourselves from the beast within.

After the horrendous images emerged from Abu Ghraib prison we were prepared to point the finger towards the soldiers, and the army who failed to monitor the situation, and the war which put them there. But perhaps the only reason this happened was to avoid facing the obvious truth that any of us could have done this; the realization that all our feeling of moral respectability are as fragile as a house of cards, set to blow over with the next gust of wind.