Intellectual Conservatism and Class Bias against Soldiers

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 12:27 PM 5/19/99 -0400, Margaret wrote:
>Milgram was interested in how diluted an authority
>relationship would have to be in order for an
>individual to rebel against an odious task undertaken
>voluntarily.   He was careful to set it up such that
>anything going on was going on in the subject's head,
>not in the situation.  The guy in the lab coat had no
>power to compel obedience.  There was, in Bridgeport,
>not even the halo effect of the Yale association -- it
>could just as well have been run by Psychopaths-R-Us,
>for all the subjects knew.  
>
>Why would someone carry on, often visibly against their
>own will and judgement, doing something terrible to an
>innocent victim, for no reward, merely because some
>colorless dude in a lab coat says 'you have no choice'?
>Why don't our methods of socialisation give us the
>tools to resist being so obedient?   That's what he was
>interested in.   
>
>Of course, on one level it's clear why they don't:
>disobedient people wouldn't serve the interests of the
>powerful.  And that's why Milgram got such a
>hullaballoo and so much political stick, and why for so
>long it was impossible to get similarly subversive
>research funded.  

margaret, i think you are barking at a wrong tree. i do not question
milgram's conclusion that people are obedient to authority. but you do not
need an experimental design to demonstrate that, suffice it to look through
a window.  in fact, my objection is that in order to get a simple truth
like that we have to wrap that in the shroud of scientific respectability;
this is precisely what all spin doctors do throwing charts and graphs at us
to force us to capitulate (an inscription in the grad student lounge room
at rutgers during my good old days there read "we have graphs and charts to
back us up, so fuck off!").  in the same vein, neo-classical economic use
the language of mathematics to tell us banal truths about human behaviour,
but when wrapped in the techno-jargon they compel respectability of and
force any critical dioscourse to capitulate.

to reiterate, my objections were directed at science not at the assertion
that peopl ecan be compelled to blindly follow authority - that is too
painfully obvious to me.

that's it for today, i'm out of this place

wojtek