The Wave

...both the name of two upcoming films, one of them German, about the "Third Wave Experiment" in fascism conducted by a high school teacher with his students in 1967, and a more general interest in behaviourist psychology experiments conducted in simulated "total institutions", not least prisons, (The Stanford Prison Experiment, BBC's critical re-examination of its legacy in the series The Experiment), or authoritarian power/knowledge regimes such as the laboratory (Milgram's experiments). There is also the repackaging of the tradition as entertainment, Big Brother specifically [and reality tv more generally]. Finally, and hardly least of all, the latter is followed by the phenomenon of Abu Ghraib prison, with Milgrim's old high school friend, Philip Zimbardo, who designed the Stanford Experiment, appearing for the defence in the trial of Sgt. Chip Frederick.

No doubt there are compelling reasons to be suspicious of the tacit endorsement by some German filmmakers of the conclusions reached by Milgram and Zimbardo (it will be recalled that "Die Welle" arrives on the scene after "Das Experiment"). The uniqueness of Germany's resurgent past is open to relativisation once it can be demonstrated that the reproduction of authoritarian structures in any setting can license unthinking obedience and callous indifference to human suffering. Small wonder then that Omer Bartov, in his Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Territories, feels compelled to highlight the shortcomings of Milgram's scientific "objectivity". Bartov reveals, with reference to Milgram's notes about his chosen subjects, a whole host of preconceptions which would have coloured his design of the experiment and the evaluation of any data subsequently collected. Indeed, they are appear to be little more than crude sterotypes about ethnicity and gender socialisation for the most part. This leads Bartov to conclude:

"I would argue that obedience to authority among those whose collaboration is most necessary, the educated professional elites, men and women of religion and faith...generals and professsors, comes from accepting the fundamental ideas that guide that authority and wishing them to help realise in practice; and that this becomes possible only if both the authority and those who obey it share the same prejudices, the same view of the world, the same fundamental perception of reality" (p191).

Bartov then moves onto further qualification by arguing that psychological, historical, sociological, ideological and political forces will manifest in different ways, depending upon their degrees of integration (and their later interpretation as such). Although he is not discussing this passage specifically, my earlier post on Randall Collins and his sociological concept of "forward panic", offers some clues as to the reservations he has towards Bartov. He claims, in essence, that Bartov does not adopt a sufficiently systematised approach that could explain the variation between micro and macro dynamics of violence. Collins is much closer to Goffman's thesis of "total institutions", such as the prison or the asylum, when he describes cases of violent bullying in Japan's private school system. His explanation is that such settings function in terms of high ritual density, so it is not surprising that the violence occurs on the edges of where this density can be maintained (e.g. attacks on new students or "outsiders", both of whom by definition lack solidarity ties).

So what I would like to investigate in the future is the extent to which Collins can be (mis)construed as offering an exculpatory argument for violent individuals operating in settings of high ritual density, such as Abu Ghraib. I very much doubt this was his intention, as he would otherwise appear an unusual bedfellow for the likes of Milgram or Zimbardo (which Bartov was more explicitly distancing himself from). This impression may only be confirmed or denied once his next volume on the macro level of violence is published, as this should logically necessitate more engagement with some of the other variables cited by Bartov.