Mind Moves Over coffee with friends recently, someone uttered the name of Ian Huntley. She lamented his behaviour towards "those two darling girls" and hoped to God she would never bump into someone like him. "To think there are people like him walking around and we might not see them for what they are."
The conversation skirted around the usual problems of city gridlock, elections and house prices before it turned to the subject of those "awful pictures" of prisoners in Iraq. Again it was lamented that there were people who could do such things. From the conversation it sounded like whatever virus of depravity had invaded the morally bankrupt lives of these individuals, we were immune from it. It was obviously a comfort to believe we were all standing on higher moral ground, and yet I couldn't escape the uneasy feeling that we share far more as humans than we often care to admit. In ways we may not wish to acknowledge, 'I am that soldier... '
Lynndie England was 21 years old, pregnant and in love when she stepped inside Abu Ghraib prison to visit her boyfriend who was one of the guards there. Now we see her as the smirking face of a young woman holding a leash attached to a naked hooded Iraqi prisoner, or pointing in a mocking way to the genitals of another "detainee".
Gary Bartlam, an 18-year-old from Tamworth, Staffordshire, left in photos for developing to a local pharmacist. Between shots of camels and his regiment in Iraq, there were shots of Arab men forced to perform sex acts with each other. The shop assistant was struck by the obvious disgust and shame apparent in their faces and passed them on to the police. In so doing, she exposed the British Army to continuing public outrage. Why wasn't Gary more careful? Did he believe what he had done was acceptable?
In many respects I believe these images have served us all well. They have exposed not so much the immorality of selected individuals but the immorality of war itself. For human beings, it's not so much what we are but where we are that determines what we do. Behaviour is powerfully influenced by context and war is one context where people behave in a manner they very quickly want to forget. Think about it. You're 20 something, you're not so bright - you write "rapest" on some unfortunate man's leg. You're cooped up in an unbearably hot building with fighting men who've overdosed on testosterone and watched their buddies die. You've been told, or it's been tactfully implied, to "soften up" the detainees before their upcoming interviews. Which sounds absurdly innocent in its own way, as though you're making it easier for them in the long run.
But you say, "I would never sink so low. I'm a Catholic, a humanist, a buddhist, a vegetarian I know right from wrong; I've been raised to respect the dignity of other people." Maybe, or maybe you overestimate your moral strength, which humans are easily parted from in extreme situations. This was scarily revealed in the Milgram experiments, a series of social psychology experiments.
Stanley Milgram was a 27-year-old research psychologist who shocked good Christian folk in New Haven into realising their hidden potential for murder. It was the summer of 1961. He invited volunteers to sign up for a "learning" experiment where they had to inflict the learner with increasing voltages of electricity every time they made a mistake. Stanley stood close by and assured them all was well when the learner screamed with pain and asked to be released. He assured naïve subjects that nothing bad would happen as they gradually increased the voltage to lethal doses. A total of 65 per cent followed through and inflicted what they believed were lethal doses. In reality, the learners who were punished were actors who mimicked pain in response to fake shocks. But this was concealed and the subjects were more often traumatised after the experiment for having inflicted death by electric shock to another human being.
Milgram wondered if his subjects had been in the room with the learner, if they had to forcibly place the learner's hands on a electric plate, might this have made them back off earlier. Surprisingly, the answer was no, at least with 35 per cent of his subjects.
He revealed to all of us how vulnerable we are to a kind of mindless obedience to authority and to what we regard as acceptable in extreme and unusual conditions. There was no particular personality type who was more likely to inflict cruelty or to desist from doing so. But those most likely to obey to the point of inflicting death had a strong allegiance to an established religion and/or a history of military service.
Milgram's experiments help us to appreciate the fragility of human morality in the face of extreme situations. There is a line of reason and self-control that we can all cross in an effort to survive and belong. When we observe some obvious injustice in our workplace and walk on by, convincing ourselves it's unavoidable. Or when we condone situations that create harm to others, like war, isolation and extreme poverty, through our silence and passivity. Our aim should be to put in place the necessary conditions to allow us to live out our higher aspirations and to question seriously our support for situations that make this virtually impossible.
Dr Tony Bates is principal psychologist at St James's Hospital, Dublin, and author of Depression: a common sense approach (Newleaf)
