ARPA / December
10.1177/0275074005278511
Russell,
Gregory / 2005
MAKING THE UNDOABLE DOABLE
MAKING THE UNDOABLE DOABLE
Milgram, the Holocaust, and Modern Government
NESTAR RUSSELL
ROBERT GREGORY
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
This article interprets Stanley Milgram’s laboratory experiments on obedience, and their significance in understanding the Holocaust and the ways by which governmental systems enable people to do things they would otherwise find undoable. Milgram tended to conflate “proximity”—between participants and learners—and sensory perception, and overlooked the difference between physical and emotional distance. Neither Milgram nor his
commentators have fully recognized the importance of the shock generator in these experiments. Milgram’s paradigm shows why the Nazis’ search for increasingly “productive” killing means, which minimized levels of sensory
perception among immediate perpetrators, was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition of the Holocaust.
Milgram’s key concept of “the agentic state” is reinterpreted as an act of moral choice, rather than as a psychological state of mind. An understanding of the conditional nature of legal-rational (bureaucratic) authority is essential if
ways are to be found of resolving “the paradox of modernity.”
Keywords: Milgram; Holocaust; bureaucratic authority; dehumanization; individual responsibility
It is difficult to harm a person we touch. It is somewhat easier to afflict pain upon a person
we only see at a distance. It is still easier in the case of a person we only hear. It is quite
easy to be cruel towards a person we neither see nor hear.
—Bauman (1989, p. 155)
Something happened in the twentieth century that made it morally and psychologically
possible to realize dreams of destructiveness that had previously been confined to fantasy. . . . The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that
produced the two world wars and Hitler.
—Rubenstein (1978, p. 6)
INTRODUCTION
Social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s (in)famous laboratory studies of obedience have
been described as “perhaps the most widely cited and provocative set of experiments in
social science” (Miller, 1986, p. 1). He discovered that a substantial majority of his experimental participants, all randomly chosen, willingly followed orders to administer strong and
potentially lethal electric shocks to another person. Milgram (1963, 1974) saw significant
parallels between the obedient participants in his experiments and the perpetrators of the
Initial Submission: November 16, 2004
Accepted: April 11, 2005
AMERICAN REVIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Vol. 35 No. 4, December 2005 327-349
DOI: 10.1177/0275074005278511
© 2005 Sage Publications
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Holocaust, many of whom typically sought to exculpate themselves by arguing that they
were “just following orders.” However, this theoretical connection has been the subject of
some intense criticism. In the context of this particular debate, we argue that the critical factor in reducing levels of obedience in his four main experimental variations was not proximity or distance per se (between his participants and the “learners”) but heightened levels of
participants’ sensory perception, and that a central component of this experimental regime,
the shock generator, was much more significant than has so far been acknowledged, even by
Milgram himself. Both these factors are crucial in connecting his experiments to explanations of the Holocaust (which, of course, are far wider and more complex).
Furthermore, what he called the “keystone” of his analysis (Milgram, 1974, p. 133), the
“agentic state,” is better understood not so much as a psychological condition than as a physical condition in which people are insulated from the human consequences of their actions—a
condition in which their sensory perception is kept at low levels to diminish their emotional
strain. Milgram’s experiments speak strongly to modern technology’s capacity, especially in
large organizational contexts, to render the morally and socially undoable doable.
The article is in three parts. In the first, we develop our arguments about the meaning of
the Milgram experiments, and in particular the importance of the role of the shock generator
itself. The second part relates our reinterpretation of the experiments to elements of the Holocaust, and to the nature of modern governmental systems in general. The concluding part
reconsiders Milgram’s key concept—the agentic state—in the context of what we call “the
paradox of modernity.”
PART 1: INTERPRETING MILGRAM
The Experimental Paradigm
The essential profile of Milgram’s experiments is as follows. A confederate of Milgram’s,
posing as a potential participant, enters a laboratory where there is a scientist wearing a lab
coat (who is, in fact, another confederate, hereafter called the experimenter). The ostensible
participant is then introduced to a waiting naïve, and actual, participant. The experimenter
tells both persons the project they have volunteered to take part in was designed to investigate
the effects of punishment on learning. They are then told that one person is required to be the
teacher and the other the learner. The selection is rigged to ensure that the confederate is
always made the learner and the participant the teacher. The participant watches as the experimenter straps the learner—a 47-year-old man whom most observers found “mild mannered
and likable” (Milgram, 1974, p. 16)—to a chair and attaches an electrode to his arm. Clearly,
the learner is unable to break off the experiment by taking flight. The participant is then taken
into an adjacent room and placed before a machine called a shock generator. There are 30
switches on it, aligned in 15-volt increments from 15 to 450 volts. Switches are labeled in
groups ranging from “SLIGHT SHOCK” and leading up to “VERY STRONG SHOCK” followed by
“DANGER: SEVERE SHOCK.” The final two switches (435 and 450 volts) are ominously labeled
“XXX.” The participant is given a sample 45-volt shock and is then instructed by the experimenter, standing nearby, to give the learner a shock each time an incorrect answer is
AUTHORS’NOTE: The authors wish to thank Ann Walker, of Victoria University of Wellington, for her helpful comments on drafts of this article. They also wish to thank the three anonymous referees and Trevor Bradley and Mark
Thornton, both of Victoria University of Wellington, for their contributions to this project. All responsibility rests
with the authors.
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proffered. Each incorrect answer warrants for the learner a shock one level higher than its
predecessor.
Once the experiment has started, the participant is soon required to deliver shocks of
increasing intensity. In fact, no shocks at all are being administered, though the participant
does not know this. As the “shocks” increase in intensity, the ostensible pain being experienced by the learner also becomes increasingly apparent by way of shouts and protests (actually via a tape recording) emanating from behind a partition that visually separates the
teacher from the learner. For example, at 120 volts the learner is heard to say “Ugh! Hey, this
really hurts!” Typically, the participants express their concern over the learner’s well-being.
Yet the experimenter continues to insist “The experiment requires that you continue,” “You
have no other choice, you must go on.” Such commands were designed to generate feelings
of tension—what Milgram called strain—within the participant. If the participant continued
to obey these strain-producing commands to the 270-volt level, the learner, in obvious agony,
was heard to scream, “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out.
Do you hear? Let me out of here!” At the 300-volt level, the learner refuses to answer and
instead responds with agonized screams. The experimenter commands the participant to
treat further unanswered questions as incorrect and accordingly to inflict the next level of
shock. After a 330-volt shock has been administered, the learner suddenly falls silent. The
participant is again ordered to treat any further unanswered questions as incorrect and to continue administering shocks of increasing voltage. Once the participant has administered
three successive shocks of 450 volts, the experimenter stops the process.
Milgram described the main experimental paradigm to three groups, without disclosing
the results. One group comprised 39 psychiatrists, who then predicted that only about 1 participant in a thousand—a “pathological fringe”—would administer the highest shock. However, in the event, 25 out of a sample of 40 participants (62.5%) did so. So, how could a substantial majority of participants choose to ignore the learner’s desperate pleas, then the
eventual ominous silence, and continue to inflict more shocks of increasing magnitude?
A psychological dilemma was inherent in Milgram’s experimental paradigm. The participant is confronted with two choices: either go on obeying what they perceive to be a legitimate authority figure and continue their involvement in the procedure or refuse to obey the
experimenter’s strain-generating commands and defect. Both courses of action are stressful
for the participant—the first because it entails inflicting apparently increasing pain on
another person, and the second because dissent in the face of commands from a legitimate
authority figure, one they had willingly contracted to work with, is experienced as reneging.
Deciding to confront the experimenter instead of hurting an innocent person might appear to
be the relatively less stressful of the two options, but as Milgram (1974) observes,
The teacher cannot break off and at the same time protect the authority’s definitions of his
own competence. Thus, the subject fears that if he breaks off, he will appear arrogant, untoward, and rude. Such emotions . . . suffuse the mind and feelings of the subject, who is miserable at the prospect of having to repudiate the authority to his face. (p. 150, italics added)1
Milgram also noticed that these sources of strain encouraged participants, irrespective of
their choice, to employ what he termed “strain-resolving mechanisms.” These were techniques used by participants to ease the feelings of tension their choices generated. For example, those who sided with the learner, and therefore refused to continue inflicting the shocks,
frequently offered to return the money ($4.50) they had earlier received for agreeing to participate in the experiment. Those who sided with the experimenter, and continued to shock
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TABLE 1: The Four Variations
Variation
Remote
Voice-feedback
Proximity
Touch-proximity
Main Feature
Obedience Rate (%)
Learner unseen but eventually heard (banging)
Learner unseen but voice heard throughout
Learner seen and heard
Learner seen, heard, and touched
65
62.5
40
30
the learner, simultaneously expressed genuine concern to the experimenter about the
learner’s well-being. After these concerns were met with indifference and uncompromising
demands to continue, the strain experienced by many participants was then apparently
relieved somewhat by the experimenter’s undertaking that he would accept responsibility for
any harm done to the learner. Typically, the participants then continued to administer the
shocks, albeit without any real enthusiasm for the task.
Milgram’s Four Main Variations: The Effects of Physical Proximity
Milgram pursued an observation he had made during a pilot run of the original experiment. He had noticed that when delivering the shocks, participants would frequently avert
their eyes from the learner, whom they could see dimly through a silvered glass. As a result,
Milgram hypothesized that as the learner’s suffering was progressively made more apparent
to the participants—by stimulating, successively and cumulatively, their auditory, visual,
and tactile perceptual senses—rates of obedience would decrease, as more of them came to
feel directly complicit in the infliction of pain on the learner. Consequently, he devised four
experimental variations to test the effects of what he variously called “closeness,” “proximity,” or “salience” between participant and learner (see Table 1).
In the pilot of the first variation, which he termed the remote experiment, there was no
contact of any kind between the two—the learner was hidden behind a wall and could be neither seen nor heard by the participant. In this pilot, Milgram had expected that the verbal and
voltage designations on the control panel would effectively reduce levels of obedience by
serving as a visual indicator of the potential dangers to the learner. However, virtually every
participant in the pilot study proceeded through to the final switch “seemingly indifferent to
the verbal designations” (Milgram, 1974, p. 22). So, at the 300- and 315-volt shock levels,
the learner was instructed to bang on the wall that separated him from the participant and
thereafter fall silent.
In the second experiment, the voice-feedback (VF) condition, from the outset the participant could hear through the partition the learner’s somewhat muffled though clearly
discernible verbal reactions to the shocks. In the third variation (termed the proximity experiment), the participant was in the same room as the learner and could therefore hear and see
the consequences of his or her continued obedience. The fourth variation, called the touchproximity (TP) experiment, was the same as the third, except that at the 150-volt switch the
learner suddenly refused to “accept” any more shocks. The experimenter then asked the participant personally to force the learner’s hand onto the shock plate before flicking the switch.
The results of these variations supported Milgram’s hypothesis: 65%, 62.5%, 40%, and
30% of the participants obediently completed the remote, VF, proximity, and TP experiments, respectively. Although there was only a small decline in the obedience rate between
the remote version and the VF experiment, in the former all participants had remained obedi-
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ent until the point (the 300-volt level) where the learner banged on the wall. This high rate of
obedience suggests that had the learner refrained from banging on the wall, the results of the
first experiment would have replicated the virtual 100% obedience rate that emerged from
the (remote) pilot study. Thus, if the remote experiment (with some auditory stimulation) had
involved full remoteness, then there is good reason to suspect that the overall compliance
results of this set of experiments would instead have been of the order of 100%, 62.5%, 40%,
and 30%, respectively.
Proximity: Physical and/or Emotional?
Milgram (1974) argued that because participants were not able to see or hear or required
to touch the learner up until the 300-volt switch in the remote experiment, they were aware
only in a “conceptual” sense that their actions were causing pain to another person. “The fact
is apprehended but not felt” (p. 36, italics added). However, participants in this experiment
were certainly acutely aware of the presence of the experimenter and could easily hear his
consistent demands for continued obedience. So the experimenter was clearly the participant’s “central emotional figure in the situation” (Milgram, 1974, p. 145). In the face of the
experimenter’s insistent demands, most participants prioritized the amelioration of their own
perceptually painful experience over and above the much lesser strain they experienced
through their relatively benign conceptual awareness that they were hurting another person.
When the learner was heard banging on the walls at the 300- and 315-volt levels, the participant began to experience a new source of perceptual strain, and the experimenter was no
longer the sole emotional figure in the participant’s universe. This new perceptual information forced many participants to reconsider the effects of their actions on the learner. From
this point in the remote experiment, a large proportion of participants appeared to find that
relieving the learner from his seemingly life-threatening experience was less stressful than
continuing to obey the experimenter. Rates of obedience dropped, though a large majority of
participants continued to obey.
This interpretation, whereby most participants self-interestedly prioritized their need to
avoid a confrontation with the experimenter over the learner’s apparent pain, also applies to
the VF variation, which involved auditory perceptual stimulation only and generated very
similar rates of obedience.2 It would appear that most of the obedient participants in both the
remote and VF conditions were unwilling or unable to see clearly the connection between
their own actions and the consequences for the learner.
Therefore, under conditions where the painful effects on the learner were perceptually
apparent but not of sufficient intensity to counteract the strain the participant would have
experienced by disobeying the experimenter, then many participants were prepared to obey.
Again, their willingness to do so was enhanced by the experimenter’s repeated assurance that
he would accept consequential responsibility.3 In obeying, the participants were mainly concerned about alleviating their own, rather than the learner’s, stressful situation.4
That many in the first two experiments were probably aware that what they were doing
was wrong was also apparent in the way some used what Milgram termed “avoidance” to
help reduce the emotional and psychological strain generated by their continued obedience.
As mentioned, some participants in the pilot study would avert their eyes from the learner
while they continued administering the shocks. When later asked to explain why they would
not watch while they delivered the shocks, one participant admitted that he did not want to
see the consequences of his actions. During the actual VF experiment, similar incidents
involving other reactions were observed. Some participants would purposefully talk over the
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learner’s pained appeals. “These subjects do not permit the stimuli associated with the victim’s suffering to impinge on them. . . . In this way, the victim is psychologically eliminated
as a source of discomfort” (Milgram, 1974, p. 158).
Like all participants in Milgram’s experiments, those who employed avoidance-type
techniques were—from the start—conceptually aware of the harmful effects of their actions
on the learner. However, on being confronted by perceptual sensory information to this
effect, participants who then engaged in avoidance differed from others in that they actively
sought to ensure that such particularly painful implications could not remain at the forefront
of their consciousness. These participants no longer wanted to know what they knew and,
again, if they could purposely be placed out of sight (and sound and touch), it was then easier
to keep them out of mind.
The proximity and TP variations made it increasingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for participants to engage in such avoidance behavior. In the former experiment, the
effects on the learner of the participant’s complicity could be directly heard and seen, with
rationalizations and avoidance behavior becoming less “available” to shield participants
from the consequences of their apparently harmful actions. Their sense of personal responsibility for what was happening to the learner became much stronger, and for many, unavoidable. They were also aware that the learner could see them: “The actions of the subject now
come under scrutiny by the victim. . . . His surveillance of the action directed against him may
give rise to shame or guilt, which may then serve to curtail the action” (Milgram, 1974, pp.
38-39). Consequently, rates of obedience declined sharply. In the TP experiment, participants were not only conceptually aware that their actions were producing pain, but through
multiple senses they also became perceptually aware of this fact by seeing and hearing a man
screaming in pain under the force of their very own hands. The relationship between the participant’s actions and the learner’s pain was no longer causally ambiguous.
Milgram (1974, pp. 32-43) argued that the participants’ progressively enhanced perceptual awareness of the learner’s plight—as a result of having to hear, see, then touch the victim—was a function of the increasing physical “closeness” between the participant and the
learner. In the words of a leading commentator on his experiments, “Obedience declined as
the distance between teacher and learner was reduced and when the distance between the
experimenter and subject was increased” (Blass, 2002, p. 10765, italics added). By manipulating the independent variable of physical proximity, Milgram showed how the main emotional figure in the participant’s mind increasingly became the learner rather than the
experimenter.
However, although Milgram was investigating the relationship between physical proximity and resolution of the participant’s emotional strain, he had little if anything to say about
emotional distance itself, as distinct from physical distance. Although the confederate
learner was deliberately chosen as a likable, middle-aged man, and although many participants expressed strong concern about his apparent plight—and were relieved to be reconciled with him at the end of the experiment—he was a stranger to them. Milgram (1974, p.
10) speculated that obedience rates may have been even higher had the learner been presented as “a brutal criminal or a pervert”; but obedience rates may also have been much lower
overall had the learner been a loved member of the participant’s family, a friend, or even an
acquaintance.5 So Milgram confirmed what most people instinctively know—that it is far
easier to maltreat others if they are personal strangers, even easier to do so if they are cultural
strangers, and especially if we engage in rationalization processes of self-deception that
serve to dehumanize them. As Wilson (1993) argues,
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When we need to reassure ourselves as to the propriety of following orders that require us to
inflict pain on others, we denigrate the victims. . . . If we did not believe that justice and sympathy were important, we would not bother to denigrate the victim; we would either attack or
help as our own interests required. Sympathy is not absent when we attribute qualities that
excuse our indifference; the attribution is necessary to prevent a strong sense of sympathy
from leading to an incapacitating feeling of helplessness. (pp. 52-53)6
The morally desensitizing effects of physical distance are greatly enhanced when we are
dealing with strangers, especially cultural strangers, and are greatly weakened, if not totally
counteracted, when we are not. Furthermore, although there is clearly a positive relationship
between physical proximity, on one hand, and the emotional strain that arises from sensory
perception, on the other, the two categories need always to be kept conceptually separate.
Milgram did not draw this distinction clearly enough, given the emphasis that he placed on
(physical) closeness per se as being the critical independent variable in explaining progressively lower obedience rates.7 It is theoretically conceivable, for example, that the effects of
great physical distance can be negated by the impact of strong emotional closeness.
If this is so, the type of behavior that Milgram found in his experiments can, theoretically,
be constrained only if emotional empathy, if not closeness, can be maintained or enhanced
despite the attenuating effects of physical distance. Yet, what Milgram (1974, p. 39) saw as “a
physical separation of the act and its effects . . . [the lack of a] . . . compelling unity” arose
from what is not only a crucial factor in the design of his experiments but is also, by metaphorical extension, a defining feature of modern organizational society. The primary source
of this disjunction in the remote and VF experiments was not the physical partition but the
shock generator itself.
The Meaning of the Shock Generator
If the lack of a “compelling unity” between participant and learner exhibited in the remote
and VF experiments was a key factor in enhancing obedient participants’ self-deception by
minimizing the emotional strain they experienced, then what was the primary source of this
lack of unity? Milgram (1974) clearly saw it as a function of physical proximity: “The concrete, visible, and proximal presence of the victim acted in an important way to counteract
the experimenter’s power and to generate disobedience. Any theoretical model of obedience
will have to take this fact into account” (p. 40). The lack of unity was certainly inherent in the
structural partition that formed a physical separation between the teacher and the learner.
When this barrier was removed, in the proximity and TP variations, both were in direct
visual, then tactile, contact.
However, we find it surprising that the importance of the shock generator itself in both
creating physical and emotional distance has hardly been recognized in commentaries on the
experiments. This is all the more surprising in view of the fact that the experiments are so
commonly and rightly associated in many people’s minds with the administering of electric
shocks. The point is that the shock generator was the means by which pain was inflicted on
the learner by the participant. Inflicting pain in this particular way was a function of impersonal technological capacity rather than direct physical force. Even when the participant was
required personally to place the learner’s hand on a shock plate (as in the TP variation), the
punishment still had to be administered by flicking the shock generator switches.
To appreciate the significance of this point, one need only consider what results Milgram
might have obtained if instead of requiring participants to inflict punishment by means of the
shock generator the participant had been required to administer some other, more direct,
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physical penalty. For example, how far would Milgram’s participants have gone if they had
been required personally to beat, bludgeon, or whip the learner, ultimately to the point of
unconsciousness or beyond? Under such conditions, there would have been no “lack of
unity.” It is hard to believe that Milgram would have secured enough willing participants
to engage in such an experiment. But he had little trouble finding enough of them to inflict
pain by way of the shock generator, regardless of how many remained obedient or became
defiant.8
The use of this piece of apparatus, by its nature, greatly enhanced participants’ perception
that they were engaged in what was essentially a technical task rather than one with moral
implications. The shock generator lent itself to the application of precise standard operating
procedures—flicking the switches in the right order at the right time—and so in itself greatly
strengthened both the physical and emotional distancing of participants from the apparent
effects of their procedurally correct but morally dubious actions. Few, if any, participants
would have doubted the authenticity of this piece of apparatus, which displayed a carefully
chosen manufacturing label to give it a high degree of verisimilitude.9
Milgram himself seems to have been ambivalent about the importance of the shock generator. He claims early in his book that “The precise mode of acting against the victim is not of
central importance [italics added],” and that the delivery of electric shock was employed in
the study for “technical reasons” (Milgram, 1974, p. 14). And he makes no direct reference to
the shock generator as such in any of the six factors that he identifies in accounting for the
effects of physical proximity on obedience rates (Milgram, 1974, pp. 36-40). On the other
hand, he shows later in the book that he understood how the shock generator made it easier
for participants to carry out the experimenter’s commands.
Thus, creating physical distance [italics added] between the subject and victim, and dampening the painful cries of the victim, reduces strain. The shock generator itself constitutes an
important buffer, a precise and impressive instrument that creates a sharp discontinuity
between the ease required to depress one of its thirty switches and the strength of impact on
the victim. The depression of a switch is precise, scientific, and impersonal. If our subjects
had to strike the victim with their fists, they would be more reluctant to do so. (p. 157)
Yet the shock generator was of greater importance in Milgram’s experimental paradigm
than even he himself believed. It was a key contextual factor in explaining “unexpectedly”
high levels of obedience in those experimental variations where there was far less perceptual
stimulation than was the case in the TP mode.10 This is a significant element in understanding
the behavior of many perpetrators of the Holocaust.
PART 2: MILGRAM, THE HOLOCAUST, AND BEYOND
“The Banality of Evil” and Willing Executioners
Milgram (1974, p. 175) acknowledged the obvious: that there were “enormous differences” between the circumstances of Nazi Germany and his own laboratory experiments.
But he was convinced that both his obedient participants and the Nazi perpetrators were
strongly influenced by a “common psychological process” inherent in large bureaucratic
organizations.11 In his words,
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Thus, there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one man decides to carry out the evil
act and is confronted with its consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for
the act has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized
evil in modern society. (p. 11)12
Milgram had clearly been influenced by Hilberg’s (1961) painstaking delineation of the
intricacies of the Nazi’s destructive bureaucracy and its dehumanizing effects on those
within it. Similarly, Milgram specifically endorsed the explanatory power of Arendt’s (1963)
concept of the banality of evil, which he saw as being fully consistent with his own explanations. After observing the trial in 1961 of former Schutzstaffeln (SS) bureaucrat Adolf
Eichmann, Arendt coined the term to capture the reality of “ordinary” people whose complicity in the organized pursuit of malevolent purposes flowed not from any personal monstrosity but from their thoughtless incapacity to empathize with others, their inability to balance technical with moral competence, and their desire to achieve advancement by
impressing their superiors. Arendt (1963) saw in Eichmann a man who was, like many others, “neither perverted nor sadistic . . . [but] terribly and terrifyingly normal” (p. 276). He was
best understood, she argued, primarily as a passive recipient of orders, which he sought to
carry out in the most efficient and competent way possible. He was the quintessential “desk
murderer.”13 Milgram (1974) endorsed the general utility of Arendt’s thesis, which he
believed came “closer to the truth than one might dare imagine” (p. 6).
However, other scholars had been documenting the occurrence of acts of gratuitous brutality by Holocaust perpetrators, and this growing body of evidence raised pressing questions
about the validity of depicting ordinary bureaucrats going about their business indifferent to
the horrific human consequences that flowed from their dutiful paper shuffling. Arendt was
clearly aware of the limitations of the “mindless obedience” interpretation. In the introduction she wrote for Naumann’s (1966) Auschwitz, which documented the 1963-1965 trial of a
score of SS men who served in the infamous camp, she observed that
no one had issued orders that infants should be thrown into the air as shooting targets, or
hurled into the fire alive, or have their heads smashed against walls; there had been no orders
that people should be trampled to death, or become the objects of the murderous “sport”,
including that of killing with one blow of the hand. (in Naumann, 1966, p. xxiv)
For his part, it seems that Milgram (1974) regarded such evidence as being complementary to his position, at best, or at worst largely irrelevant. It was, he argued, typical of modern
bureaucracy, even when designed for destructive purposes, “that most people involved . . . do
not directly carry out any destructive actions. . . . Any competent manager of a destructive
bureaucratic system can arrange his personnel so that only the most callous and obtuse are
directly involved in violence” (pp. 121-122). In other words, in Milgram’s view most of the
perpetrators were ordinary mindless bureaucrats who simply needed thugs at the bottom end
of the hierarchical chain to do the real, hands-on, dirty work.
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen’s highly provocative work Hitler’s Willing Executioners, like
Hilberg’s (1961) and Browning’s (1992) seminal studies, showed that most of the actual killers during the Holocaust were, in fact, ordinary people rather than zealous and militaristic
Nazi ideologues. But Browning and—in particular—Goldhagen argued that these ordinary
people frequently, willingly, and often enthusiastically volunteered to engage in murderous
violence. They were not indifferent individuals obediently doing their jobs. Goldhagen
pressed the point that many who personally and directly killed did not need to be selected and
were not so selected, as Milgram had suggested, because they were the most callous
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or obtuse. Furthermore, with what Zangwill (2003, p. 98) has described as “his best
card,” Goldhagen showed that some of the ordinary perpetrators went even further than volunteering to undertake the grizzly deeds—(like Eichmann) they willingly disobeyed SSReichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s orders to stop their killing.14
Goldhagen’s (1996) explanation of a uniquely German strain of exterminationist antiSemitism largely discounted Browning’s emphasis on peer pressure. It also excluded the idea
of blind, dutiful obedience as a major causal factor in the Holocaust. According to
Goldhagen,
Arguments holding that Germans inflexibly obey authority—namely that they reflexively
obey any order, regardless of its content—are untenable. By extension, so are the claims by
Stanley Milgram and many others that humans in general are blindly obedient to authority.
All “obedience”, all “crimes of obedience” . . . depend upon the existence of a propitious
social and political context, in which the actors deem the authority to issue commands legitimate and the commands themselves not to be a gross transgression of sacred values and the
overarching moral order. (p. 383)
Even before the publication of Goldhagen’s highly controversial book, Blass (1993)—
who generally shared Milgram’s views—had expressed doubts. According to him, “While
Milgram’s approach may well account for . . . [the bureaucratic desk murderers’] . . . dutiful
destructiveness, it falls short when it comes to explaining the more zealous hate-driven cruelties that also defined the Holocaust” (p. 37).
So, where does this leave the Milgram legacy in relation to the Holocaust? We believe that
both proponents and opponents of the theoretical connection between his experiments and
the Holocaust have largely accepted Milgram’s own interpretation of the results as a study in
obedience. But the significance of these results lies not solely, or even principally, in explaining why people are obedient to legitimate authority figures but in understanding how the contextual technological features of modern organizational society facilitate what Mommsen
(1991) has called “the realization of the unthinkable.”
Making the Undoable Doable
What matters is whether the killing methods that the Nazis predominantly relied upon sufficiently reduced or avoided stimulation of the actual perpetrators’ perceptual senses. If so,
these methods are likely to have enabled the killers to act on their motivations, whatever they
happened to be. If, indeed, the shock generator enabled Milgram’s participants, a cross section of ordinary people, to act on their motives and continue to press the switches, then perhaps the Nazis’ most relied upon methods of killing had a similar effect on the “ordinary”
perpetrators.
During Hitler’s invasion of Russia—Operation Barbarossa, which began on June 22,
1941—the Nazis began shooting en masse defenseless Jewish civilians in the occupied areas.
Initially, those who were shot were almost exclusively Jewish men. A few weeks into the
invasion, the first written orders were issued to kill all Jews—men, women, and children.15
The victims were certainly not the first Jews to be killed by the Nazis, but these actions made
up the first explicit, coordinated, and purposeful steps toward the implementation of what
was later known as “the Final Solution.” However, this “feasibility study” (Browning, 1995,
p. 114) had both technical (manpower) and psychological limitations. The latter were what
the actual executioners referred to as “Seelenbelastung—‘burdening of the soul’—with reference to machine-gun fire or rifle fire directed at men, women, and children in prepared
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ditches” (Hilberg, 1980, p. 91). Himmler, “the architect of genocide” (Breitman, 1991),
greatly increased the available manpower,16 but the Seelenbelastung continued to impede
progress as many of the German executioners were greatly traumatized by the shootings (see
Klee, Dressen, & Riess, 1991; Lifton, 1986; Rhodes, 2002).
Frustrated by the inability of many of his men to follow an order, despite their willingness
to do so, on August 15, 1941, Himmler asked the commander of Einsatzgruppen B (one of
the four original shooting squads), Artur Nebe, to organize for him an execution to observe
while he (the SS-Reichsführer) was visiting Minsk. Himmler wanted to see for himself what
the problem was. Karl Wolff, his chief of personal staff, later stated that “he knew ‘from his
[Himmler’s] own mouth’ that he had never seen a man killed” (Padfield, 1990, p. 342). Nebe
quickly organized an execution of about a hundred people—two of whom were women.
Before the shooting began, Himmler conveyed an air of casual indifference as he asked the
Jews some questions. However, when the shooting started, his carefree attitude toward the
fate of the victims rapidly evaporated and his lack of experience of face-to-face killing was
clearly exposed. Rhodes (2002) records that
both Wolff and Bach-Zelewski remembered that Himmler was shaken by the murders.
“Himmler was extremely nervous,” Bach-Zelewski testified. “He couldn’t stand still. His
face was white as cheese, his eyes went wild and with each burst of gunfire he always looked
at the ground.” (p. 152)
Like some participants in Milgram’s experiments, Himmler took full advantage of the
option of looking away, a choice not open to those pulling the trigger.17 When the two
women lay down to be shot, members of the killing squad lost their nerve, fired badly, and
the victims did not die immediately. At that point, Himmler reportedly “panicked . . .
[and] . . . jumped up and screamed at the squad commander: ‘Don’t torture these women!
Fire! Hurry up and kill them!’” (Rhodes, 2002, p. 152). Straight after this mass execution,
Bach-Zelewski told Himmler,
Reichsführer, those were only a hundred. . . . Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando,
how deeply shaken they are! These men are finished [fertig] for the rest of their lives. What
kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages! (Hilberg, 1961, p. 218,
brackets in original).
This event persuaded Himmler that shooting was too perceptually stressful for those who
had to carry out the killings. Concerned by their emotional distress, he then asked Nebe to
find other “more humane” ways of doing it (Hilberg, 1961, p. 219). But until a solution could
be found, the shootings had to continue.
There is little doubt that the Nazis and their collaborators were able to kill at a rapid rate
while using firearms, before and after the introduction of gassing methods. Matthäus (2004,
p. 244) records that “already by the end of 1941, the death toll among noncombatants was
devastating. Between 500,000 and 800,000 Jews, including women and children, had been
murdered—on average 2,700 to 4,200 per day—and entire regions were reported ‘free of
Jews.’” At Babi Yar, outside Kiev, during 2 days late in September 1941, some 33,000 were
shot (Goldhagen, 1996, p. 154), and during a 48-hour period in early November 1943, about
43,000 Jews were murdered (Arad, 1987, pp. 365-369). However, the Nazis found shooting
to be insufficiently “productive,” not only because there were increasing numbers of people
to be killed but, perhaps more important, because it resulted in unavoidable levels of
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perceptual stimulation on the part of the killers, sufficient to jeopardize their continued effectiveness. As Bauman (1989) has argued,
It was exceedingly difficult for the shooters to overlook the connection between shooting and
killing. This is why the administrators of genocide found the method primitive and inefficient, as well as dangerous to the morale of the perpetrators. Other murder techniques were
therefore sought—such as would optically separate the killers and their victims. (p. 26)
As a result of experimentation undertaken by Nebe (and at about the same time—and
independently—by others, like Commandant Rudolf Höss’s deputy, Karl Fritzsch, at
Auschwitz), the Nazi regime eventually found their solution, in the form of permanent concrete gas chambers, where it was not necessary that the perpetrators see, hear, or feel the
human consequences of their actions.18 Typically, under the guise of being disinfected, the
naked victims were herded into the hermetically sealed concrete “showering” enclosures,
and after the doors had been closed, diesel fumes were discretely pumped in. According to
Hilberg (1961, pp. 571-572), the process was later supplanted by the adoption of the most
preferred technique, whereby pellets of the pesticide Zyklon B were surreptitiously poured
into elevated vents where they vaporized, killing those trapped inside the chambers. By this
means, the Nazis could kill large numbers of people, at a more sustained rate over time and
less overtly, than would otherwise have been possible with the mass shooting method.
The use of gas chambers greatly reduced the psychological and emotional strain experienced by the now fewer Nazi perpetrators required to implement the final murderous steps.
The hands-on work involved in organizing the killing queues, removing the bodies from the
chambers, collecting gold teeth and hair, and so on was delegated to the Sonderkommandos,
comprising mainly Jewish deportees (Traverso, 2003, pp. 39-40).19 Nor was the alleviation
of their strain achieved solely in the interests of the Nazi perpetrators themselves. This sustainable rate was necessary for purely instrumental reasons—to get such a large-scale task
done.
About 60% of all the Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished in the Third Reich’s six
death camps, and the great majority of them were killed in the gas chambers (Hilberg, 1980,
p. 93). However, arguments that the Holocaust could not have occurred without the availability of 20th-century killing technology have drawn some stern criticism. For example,
Dawidowicz (1981) has argued that “the [mass shooting] procedures used everywhere
behind the Russian front were crude and primitive. (To talk of harnessing modern technology
to mass murder is nonsense.)” (p. 12). And Wistrich (2001) has observed that
no high technology was required for the 40 per cent of Holocaust victims who died through
malnutrition, famine and disease in the ghettos, through being worked to death in labour
camps, through deportations late in the war that turned into horrific death marches; or
through the gruesome executions in pits, trenches and ravines, using machine guns, rifles and
revolvers. (p. 228)
Wistrich approvingly cites the views of Herbert (2000) and Goldhagen, who are both critical of the argument that “somehow only technology made horror on this scale possible”
(Goldhagen, 1996, p. 10). On the contrary, Wistrich (2001) observes that “the murders were
frequently carried out in a traditional, even ‘archaic’ way” (p. 228).
Because such a large proportion of victims perished through the use of these more
primitive killing methods, these counterarguments have considerable force. However,
two important points should be kept in mind. First, was it merely coincidental that none of
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the three most relied-upon killing methods during the Holocaust—gassing, shooting, and
deprivation—required the perpetrators to touch their victims, thus avoiding what Milgram
later found to be the most powerful type of perceptual stimulation capable of generating disobedience?20 We suspect not. Second, the Nazis were attempting to engage in a historically
unique strategy of warfare, which included as a core element the aim of wiping out a whole,
and large, ethnoreligious category of human beings.21 Until World War II, the technology of
warfare used by nation-states had been designed typically to bring the enemy’s military
forces to its knees, and it entailed indiscriminant and usually random killing (almost exclusively of men by men). This kind of technology was of itself incapable of achieving the
Nazis’ unusually grandiose goal of eliminating, as quickly as possible, all members (men,
women, and children) of such a large category of people.22 Consequently, the regime had
urgently to devise new means with which to achieve this purpose. The early use of less productive methods of killing, like the mass shootings in the East, and intentional starvation
adopted by some “attritionist” Nazis (Browning, 1995), were plainly inadequate for the task.
Over time, through the application of instrumentally rational thought, the regime was able
to take advantage of the latest technological innovations. The most ambitious exterminationist Nazis, such as Himmler and his key subordinates with an administratively “can-do”
attitude, including Heydrich, Eichmann, Nebe, Christian Wirth, Höss, and Fritzsch, and
many others, sought out the method of killing that eventually became capable of achieving
the so-called “Führer’s wish.” The means they settled upon through processes of trial and
error—the “Twisted Road to Auschwitz” (Schleunes, 1970)—minimized the extent to which
the actual executioners had direct contact with their victims. So, the Nazi regime was able to
find a much greater number of willing or coercible executioners to carry out its genocidal
task. For these reasons, the permanent Zyklon B gas chambers may have been the “most perfect [killing means] the Nazis had time to invent” (Bauman, 1989, p. 26).
In relation to the Nazis’progressive development of more technically and psychologically
effective means of mass killing, Hilberg (1961) observed that “the bureaucrat of tomorrow”
would not encounter such problems:
. . . already, he is better equipped than the German Nazis were. Killing is not as difficult as it
used to be. The modern administrative apparatus has facilities for rapid, concerted movements and for efficient massive killings. These devices not only trap a larger number of victims; they also require a greater degree of specialization, and with that division of labor the
moral burden too is fragmented among the participants. The perpetrator can now kill his victims without touching them, without hearing them, without seeing them. (p. 760)
At the time of writing, Hilberg had been able to call upon the experience of humankind’s
first deployment of nuclear weapons in war. But he would not have known then that the navigator of the U.S. bomber Enola Gay, from which the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, claimed that after the mission he “had a bite and a few beers and hit the sack, and had
not lost a night’s sleep over the bomb in 40 years” (quoted in Verkamp, 1993, p. 151).
Such statements can seldom, if ever, be made by persons required to use lethal weapons on
victims who must be seen, heard, and touched. For example, consider the following recollection of an American who had joined the French Foreign Legion soon after the outbreak of the
First World War. He recalled bayoneting a “young fellow . . . as delicate as a pencil.” For
months afterward, he could not sleep “for remembering what that fellow looked like, and
how my bayonet slipped into him and how he screamed when he fell” (quoted in Bourke,
1999, p. 210). This is not to say, however, that raw blood lust in warfare is never a real motivating force. Clearly, it can be (see Abrams, 1969; Hankey, 1917; Keegan & Holmes, 1985).
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But in general, the military operates more effectively by employing means, both technical
and psychological, that numb the consciences of the great majority of combatants rather than
by exciting the animal instincts of the few.
Comparing the extent to which different weapons stimulate an aggressor’s sensory perception helps to shed light on how the unthinkable can become not only thinkable but also
ultimately doable. With that in mind, a Harvard law professor has suggested the following
means of avoiding nuclear war in an age when the U.S. president is always followed by a military officer carrying what is euphemistically known as the “the football”—a briefcase containing the codes required to launch a nuclear strike:
I proposed to place the code number in a little capsule that would then be implanted right next
to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry a big, heavy butcher knife as he or she
accompanied the president. If ever the president wanted to fire nuclear weapons, he would
have to kill one human being personally and realize what an innocent death is. Blood on the
White House carpet—it’s reality brought home. When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort his judgment.
The president might never push the button.” (Fisher, 1983, p. 408)
Today, those who are asked by commanding authorities to carry out acts of mass killing
may indeed be conceptually aware of the human consequences of their technological activities, but to the extent that they can deploy state-of-the-art weaponry, as well as the most
sophisticated means of psychologically and emotionally transmuting real people into “nonhuman” legitimate targets, they are more than ever before shielded against perceptual awareness of those outcomes. By such means is the undoable rendered doable.
PART 3: THE “AGENTIC STATE” AND
THE PARADOX OF MODERNITY
The “Agentic State” Real or Illusory?
As several scholars have argued, Milgram’s experiments say less about obedience to
authority per se than about people’s responses in particular contextual situations (Zimbardo,
2004; Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 2000).23 Under some circumstances they obey, whereas
under others they are defiant. Milgram’s contribution to an understanding of the contextual
relevance in understanding obedience to authority derives from the fact that virtually all of
his experimental variations—certainly the four discussed in detail above—reflected the
structural conditions of large bureaucratic organizations. His laboratory replicated a hierarchical authority system; a division of labor; separation of the participants from the consequences of their actions; the need to carry out tasks in a technically competent manner and to
work according to standard operating procedures; dispassionate, impersonal directive
speech (including the reification of the experiment); the instrumental use of advanced technology; peer group pressure; and the binding factors that instilled a felt duty of commitment
to organizational purposes. Milgram (1974) was in little doubt about the impact of the
organizational context on individual behavior:
Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain
the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an
organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limita-
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tions of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of
authority. (p. 188)
His concept of the “agentic state” spoke directly to this phenomenon, and the responses of
many obedient participants suggested how easily people working in a bureaucratic context
can engage in moral self-deception. According to Milgram (1974), on entering an authority
system a person “no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others” (p. 134). They just do what they
are told to do. Avoidance behavior enabled participants to convince—or rather deceive—
themselves that the experimenter was responsible for what was occurring and would be
required to shoulder the blame for any possible consequences.
For Milgram, the agentic state appears to be some form of psychological pathology that a
person can enter virtually against his or her own will, as if beyond any personal control. The
reflexive moral ethos of the organization supplants the reflective conscience of the individual.24 However, his representation of the agentic state obscures the fact that it is chosen
behavior that is at issue, rather than some form of involuntary entrancement or entrapment.
The obedient participants were themselves responsible for their own personal actions—they
chose to accept as legitimate the experimenter’s commands.25 As a social psychologist,
Milgram’s disciplinary mind-set would have encouraged him to explain behavior in sociopsychological terms (just as his undergraduate education in political science would have
equipped him to draw links between his experiments and governmental systems). Similarly,
Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis has also been challenged. Clarke (1980), for example, has
called the choice to obey the will of another “elective heteronomy”—a position of chosen
“choicelessness.” To say this is not to suggest that moral dilemmas are always, if ever, easy to
resolve. The choice may be a “Hobson’s choice”—but it is a choice nevertheless.
Getting Things Done
Milgram’s shock generator was not only a central methodological component of his
experiments. It also stands as a metaphorical symbol for modern technological means—in
their many forms—that help to make the morally undoable doable by minimizing levels of
sensory perception, reducing emotional strain, and enabling people to deny to themselves
and others responsibility for their own individual actions. Technology is shaped by humankind but reciprocally shapes humankind. Max Weber’s words were indeed prescient. He saw
how the specific nature of modern bureaucracy developed “the more perfectly the more the
bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official
business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which
escape calculation” (quoted in Gerth & Mills, 1974, p. 216). Although “dehumanized” is an
amorphous and nonscientific description, Weber’s use of this adjective strongly implies the
bureaucratic production of a personality type with little or no capacity to empathize with others and therefore unable to exercise any form of morally reflective judgment. Such an image
is not too far removed, if distant at all, from the conventional idea of a sociopath.
The effects of modern technological capacity are most clearly apparent in military organizations, where today’s weaponry is so sophisticated in its precision and destructive power
that acts of killing may be conceptually understood by those whose job it is to flick the
switches and press the buttons but does not give rise to stressful levels of sensory perception
of the real human consequences.26 State-of-the-art weapons technology enhances the capacity for mass killing, but even when more personalized and less sophisticated weapons are
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used, such as machetes, modern communications, information, and transport systems are
usually indispensable to the pursuit of genocidal aims. It is to a greater or lesser extent similarly the case in all large governmental and corporate organizations, where employees are
separated from the human consequences of their activity by apparently benign and often statistical “realities.” These are perceived not by face-to-face contact but through computer
screens displaying stylized and reductively quantitative representations of individual and
social human experience and which through electronic developments such “e-government”
replace social encounters—especially at the “street level” (Lipsky, 1980)—with electronic
transactions. Computer technology, a quintessential means of bureaucratic calculation,
enhances efficiency and administrative capacity while it diminishes empathy.
Nor does it matter that in recent years many political scientists and students of public policy and administration perceive changes in governmental structures and processes that seem
at first blush to be light years away from the traditional Weberian model of bureaucracy. The
displacement of the concept of “government” by that of “governance,” involving formal and
informal networks of power and authority in which decisions are made and services “delivered” in a much closer relationship between officialdom and citizens, appears to promise an
antidote to psychopathological bureaucratic impulses. However, although modern governmental processes in some countries may now be less structurally bureaucratic than earlier,
they are invariably still driven by the norms and logic of a relentlessly instrumental rationality that can be given practical expression in increasingly precise, quantitative, and technically efficient ways. (The terminology of “principal-agent” relationships, central to so much
public sector reform, shares the same linguistic roots as the “agentic shift.”)This remains the
ultimate source of the capacity, in fact the need, to deal with people not as people but as if they
were objects, abstractions, or (mere) statistics. Weber did not argue that modern bureaucracy
was necessarily efficient, rather that it embodied, in the pursuit of imperative control over
human beings, predominantly instrumentally rational norms (Albrow, 1970). It provided the
technical means of carrying out whatever large-scale, complex tasks those who controlled it
thought desirable. It got things done.
Modern organizational structure enables people to do things without feeling any emotional pain themselves, or by feeling only minimal pain, and in this way enables them to do
things that can only be done with little or no feeling. As Bauman (1989) has it, “The more
rational is the organization of action, the easier it is to cause suffering—and remain at peace
with oneself” (p. 155). Seemingly ordinary people can become complicit in the pursuit of
malevolent purposes, or benign ones that have deleterious unintended consequences (Adams
& Balfour, 1998; Bauman, 1989; Gregory, 1995).27
Is There an Answer?
The structural features of a modern, rationalized society embody a paradox, inherent in
the Janus-faced character of bureaucracy. Its norms of impersonal and dispassionate commitment to professional standards of competence and duty are simultaneously both a virtue
and a vice. They are indispensable for the achievement of benevolent purposes, but they help
facilitate the pursuit of malevolent ones. Indeed, without bureaucracy the latter could not be
effectively pursued at all. There is, therefore, inherent in modern bureaucracy a strong potential for what might be called a moral deficit, because there is a far greater instrumental need to
suppress people’s moral sense in the implementation of evil designs than there is to enhance
them in the pursuit of humane ones. (For most people, qua bureaucrats, administering, say, a
public health system will be far less morally challenging than running a death camp.)
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This moral deficit is actually a deficit in morally autonomous action and stems from the
relationship among crucial variables that are either explicitly identified or implicitly suggested in Milgram’s experiments—in particular, physical and emotional closeness and sensory perception. Emotional closeness is more likely to be a function of primary relationships,
but the degree of empathy felt toward others will often depend on whether these others are
perceived to be of “us” or of “them”—religiously, culturally, ideologically, politically, and so
on. Such closeness is not usually generated within the secondary relationships that characterize large organizational and governmental systems that operate on the basis of impersonally
mandated legal-rational authority. Indeed, as mentioned, that is seen as their special virtue.
The bureaucratic monkey—that hears no evil, sees no evil, speaks no evil, and feels no evil—
sits heavily on the backs of its victims. Only under conditions of physical proximity between
the doers and the done-by can emotional closeness be generated, to the extent that concomitantly higher levels of sensory perception engender emotional stress, if not a caring form of
empathy. Thus, because such conditions are not usually typical of large organizational systems, the humanistic—as distinct from the instrumental—challenge is to find means of trying to ensure as far as possible that impersonal, distant, and insensitive systems are operated
by people who can simultaneously balance morally autonomous choice with instrumentally
rational necessity.
What aspects, if any, of instrumentally rational organization can act as a counterweight to
the dehumanizing effects of the structural dimensions outlined above, which Milgram’s
experimental paradigm replicated? Ironically, the strongest potential antidote is to be found
in the nature of bureaucratic authority itself. Legal-rational authority, understood by Weber
as the lifeblood of the modern bureaucratic form, is always conditional and not absolute. It
inheres in the office, not the person holding the office, and is expressed in the form of impersonally mandated rules that are not only applied dispassionately and nonarbitrarily—sine ira
ac studio—but that are knowable beforehand and always limited in the scope of their application. The very legitimacy of legal-rational authority inheres in its conditionality.
Bureaucratic structure and authority therefore can be seen to exist in a state of mutual tension. Although legal-rational authority is conditional, bureaucratic structure works to diminish among bureaucrats a sense of that conditionality and to enable “principals” to widen inexorably what Barnard (1968, pp. 168-169) and Simon (1965) called the “zone of indifference”
within which organization members will comply with what they perceive to be legitimate
commands. Hitler required Nazi officials and the German armed forces to swear an oath of
obedience to himself, as Führer, not just for symbolic reasons but as a means of supplanting
the legal-rational norms that were deeply embedded in the German bureaucratic apparatus.
He thus had, for his purposes, the best of both worlds—the psychopathological propensities
inherent in bureaucratic structure together with sworn obedience to his personal, arbitrary,
authority.28
So, Milgram’s experiments and the conclusions he drew from them point to a paradox of
modern times. If some believe that humankind is today generally less barbaric than in
premodern times, it is only because barbarism has taken new, technologically sanitized
forms, not because we have any good reason to expect that the 21st century will prove to be
any less brutally destructive than, say, the 20th.29 True, the world has not seen since the 1940s
any comparable case of industrial genocide carried out by a modern Western state. During
the latter part of the past century there were several examples of governmental mass murder,
driven primarily by genocidal or political intent but without the application of the sort of
advanced industrialized means that characterized the Nazi Holocaust—for example, in the
former Kampuchea, in Zimbabwe, in Rwanda, and even in the Balkans. (And there is almost
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daily no shortage of evidence, from virtually any part of the globe, of humankind’s capacity—impelled by all sorts of motives—to brutally kill, maim, and humiliate in face-to-face
situations.)
In general, however, the increased psychological and emotional costs that must be paid as
a consequence of such action can be rendered far less than prohibitive by the progressive
development of more efficient, impersonal, and devastatingly effective forms of destructive technology. Under such conditions, our individual and collective capacities for selfdeception are now even greater in an age of sophisticated technological accomplishment
than they were in a pre-Enlightenment era in which the forces of mystery, superstition, and
magic shaped men’s beliefs and impelled their actions.
Modern bureaucracy, with its technological capacity to make the undoable doable, was a
necessary if by no means a sufficient condition of the Holocaust. This relationship is mirrored on a larger scale by that between accountability and responsibility. The former has
become a dominant idea in governmental reform because it represents the desire to ensure
that these systems work more effectively and efficiently. The latter concept, on the other
hand, speaks to the moral dilemmas that lie at the heart of most, if not all, governmental activity, yet by comparison little is said about it, as instrumentally rational questions drive out substantively (morally) rational ones in a sort of Gresham’s law of public sector reform. Yet, as
in the relationship between bureaucracy and the Holocaust, so too in that between accountability and responsibility—the former is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition of
the latter. Only if this is more widely understood can there be any real prospect of trying to
resolve the paradox of modernity.
The content and methods of tertiary teaching in public administration, policy, and management have the potential to act as at least a partial counterweight to the powerfully dehumanizing impulses discussed here. In this regard, Mosher’s (1968) observation of nearly 40
years ago seems even more compelling today: “The needs for broadening, for humanizing,
and in some fields for lengthening professional education programs may in the long run
prove more crucial to governmental response to societal problems than any amount of civil
service reform” (p. 133). Unfortunately, it is much easier said than achieved, given the pressures on universities to develop and market educational programs designed to serve the needs
of today’s organizational society. It is difficult indeed to envisage any triumph of responsible
over accountable action so long as these educational systems are preoccupied with training
people to do things rather than with developing their capacities to think critically and
independently about what they are required to do.
NOTES
1. Such a “situational obligation,” as Milgram called it, was one of the binding factors that kept the participant in the agentic state—see Milgram (1974, pp. 148-152).
2. This interpretation is based on Milgram’s verbatim records of the responses of two of his fully obedient
participants in the voice-feedback (VF) condition—the pseudonymous Fred Prozi and Elinor Rosenblum
(Milgram, 1974, pp. 73-77, 79-84, respectively). We assume that Milgram recorded in his book the statements
made by these particular participants because they were representative. The former was clearly aware that he
was complicit in hurting another person but did not want to be held responsible for it. He was willing to continue
once the experimenter had assured him “The responsibility is mine.” Milgram (1974, p. 160) noticed that the
experimenter’s offer to accept total responsibility for the participant’s actions generated a “perceptible reduction in strain” on the part of the participant, although not all of them—Prozi being an example—readily accepted
the experimenter’s word on this and needed further reassurance before they were willing to continue. In
Rosenblum’s case, her obvious nervousness during the procedure showed that she was concerned about what
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was happening to the learner. She continued, however, like Prozi, because she knew it would enable her to avoid
having to confront the experimenter. But as the learner’s desperate emotional reactions to the stronger shocks
intensified, her guilty conscience—stimulated by her self-awareness that she was complicitly responsible—
forced her to contemplate over and over again the possibility of doing the right thing: engaging in sudden and
total disobedience. As she said, “I was tempted so much to stop and to say: ‘Look I’m not going to do it anymore.
Sorry. I’m not going to do it’” (Milgram, 1974, p. 83). However, total disobedience was obviously too big a burden for her to shoulder on behalf of the learner. It was easier for her to continue administering the shocks and
later justify her actions: “It is an experiment. I’m here for a reason. So I had to do it. You said so. I didn’t want to”
(Milgram, 1974, p. 83).
3. Lutsky (1995, p. 60) argues that the participants may have lacked a clear ethical definition of the situation
because the experimenter was not malevolent and seemed unconcerned about the learner’s plight. Similarly, it
has been suggested that many obedient participants had believed the experiments were actually a fake but played
along anyway (Orne & Holland, 1968). Milgram later asked his participants in a questionnaire if they had
believed the experiments were real. Although there is significant ambiguity in the interpretation of their
responses, Milgram reported that 75% of the participants believed that the learner was definitely or probably
receiving the shocks (Parker, 2000, pp. 118-119).
4. We acknowledge, however, that fear of having to confront the experimenter was probably only one of
several possible sources of strain, some being primarily self-regarding and others more altruistic. We know, for
example, that one defiant participant was worried that the stress might have caused him to suffer a heart attack
(Slater, 2004), whereas others would have experienced feelings of guilt or shame due to personal philosophical
precepts such as “one should not impose one’s will on another” or “one is responsible for what one does to
another” (Rochat & Modigliani, 1995, p. 208).
5. As one judge asked a Nazi war criminal who had also claimed that he was “just following orders:
“Now, . . . after receiving an order . . . from a superior officer, to shoot your own parents, would you do
so?” He blinked his puffy eyes as if to prolong his deliberations and then scanned the courtroom. . . .
Then, taking a deep breath, he expelled the words like one who had been hit in the chest: “Mr President,
I would not do so.” (Musmanno, 1961, p. 120)
6. Milgram (1974, p. 204) found that obedient participants were twice more likely than defiant ones to
assign to the learner the responsibility for his own suffering.
7. See not only Blass (2002), quoted above, but also Grossman (1995), who, in his analysis of psychological
dimensions of killing in war and society, argues that there is an inverse relationship between “resistance to killing,” on one hand, and “physical distance from target,” on the other.
8. Milgram (1974, pp. 14-16) received 296 responses to an advertisement placed in the local newspaper, and
a 12% response rate to a direct mail solicitation sent to several thousand New Haven residents.
9. “SHOCK GENERATOR, TYPE ZLB, DYSON INSTRUMENT COMPANY, WALTHAM, MASS.
OUTPUT 15 VOLTS-450 VOLTS” (Milgram, 1974, p. 20). Waltham, Massachusetts was closely identified with
electronics equipment manufacturing.
10. It must be acknowledged that the perceptually intense touch-proximity (TP) variation still generated a
very significant proportion of totally obedient participants, 30%. The participants’ actions of forcing the
learner’s hand onto the shock plate made this ostensibly painful outcome possible, but in this condition the shock
generator remained the means by which the punishment was administered. We speculate that had the participants been required to generate the pain themselves—by, say, striking the learner—the rate of total obedience
would have been much less than 30%.
11. Milgram’s bachelor’s degree was in political science, and this background was almost certainly influential in his efforts to link his social psychological experiments to an understanding of both the Holocaust and governmental bureaucracy in general.
12. Best illustrating this point was an experimental variation, called the “peer administers shock” condition,
in which the participant was ordered to perform the subsidiary task of asking the questions of the learner while
another participant (actually a confederate) administered the shocks in response to incorrect answers (Milgram,
1974, pp. 121-122). Under this variation, 37 out of 40 participants (93%) passively continued to carry out their
prescribed role while the confederate administered the shocks. Post-experimental interviews with the obedient
participants revealed that they did not believe their involvement made them in any way responsible for the
learner being shocked, and they typically blamed the peer who administered the voltage.
13. Others, such as Lozowick (2002), have dismissed this interpretation of Eichmann’s behavior, arguing
instead (as did the prosecution at his trial) that the man was a fanatical anti-Semite who enthusiastically did all
he could to kill Jews, even after being ordered to stop late in the war.
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14. See Goldhagen (1996, pp. 356-357).
15. On July 17, 1941, the order that now “all Jews” were to be shot was committed to writing for the first time
(Streit, 1994, pp. 108-109).
16. See Büchler (1986, p. 14).
17. Himmler’s reaction was not an isolated event. For example, during his trial, SS Brigadier General Erwin
Schulz pointed out that he would organize for several shooters to aim at each civilian. “With a keen sense of delicacy, General Schulz would avert his head as the rifles were aimed. Then, after the volley had been fired, he
would turn around and see that ‘all persons were lying on the ground’” (Musmanno, 1961, p. 177).
18. The gas chambers in which the Nazis had killed intellectually handicapped people from 1939 had used
cylinders of pure carbon monoxide. By the start of the invasion of Russia these cylinders were too expensive to
produce, very difficult to transport out of Germany, or did not exist in the quantities that would be required to kill
such large numbers of victims (see Breitman, 1991, p. 197; Browning, 1985, p. 59; Friedlander, 1995, p. 286).
This was a hurdle that Nebe and, elsewhere, Fritzsch overcame in eventually making possible gassing on a massive scale (see Arad, 1987; Browning, 1985). As Höss said in relation to Fritzsch’s experiments at Auschwitz,
Up to this point it was not clear to me, nor to Eichmann how the killing of the expected masses was to be
done. Perhaps by gas? But how, and what kind of gas? Now we had discovered the gas and the procedure. (Höss, quoted in Berenbaum, 1997, p. 184)
19. Traverso (2003, p. 40) observes that Primo Levi (1988, p. 37) “regarded the concept of the Sonderkommandos as ‘National-Socialism’s most demonic crime, . . . an attempt to shift the burden of guilt onto others, specifically the victims, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.’”
20. In his experiments, Milgram (unsurprisingly) did not try to control for the other two senses—smell and
taste. Smell in particular was a strong repugnance factor in the Holocaust. In the years before the use of the gas
chambers, many perpetrators were sickened by the stench of piles of bodies burning in open fires, while later the
offensive smell from death camp crematoria chimneys was commonly remarked on. The latter, of course, was a
modern, “industrialised” means of disposing of large numbers of bodies, one that greatly reduced the repugnance levels that were associated with the former, “primitive” means of disposal. See, for example, Arad (1987,
p. 172).
21.
Unlike the case with any other group, and unlike the massacres before or since, every single one of the
millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total. In principle, no Jew was to
escape. In this important respect, the Nazis’ assault upon Jewry differed from the campaigns against
other peoples and groups—Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Poles, Ukrainians, and so on.
Assaults on these people could indeed be murderous; their victims number in the millions, and their
ashes mingle with those of the Jews in Auschwitz and many other camps across Europe. But Nazi ideology did not require their total disappearance. In this respect, the fate of the Jews was unique.
(Marrus, 1987, p. 24)
22. Höss recollected a conversation he had with Eichmann at Auschwitz:
We discussed ways and means of carrying out the extermination. It could be done only by gassing, as it
would have been absolutely impossible to dispose, by shooting, of the large numbers of people that
were expected, and it would have placed too heavy a burden on the SS men who had to carry it out,
especially because of the women and children among the victims. (quoted in Arad, 1987, pp. 8-9)
23. Lutsky (1995), in distinguishing between obedience as description and as explanation, argues that the
Milgram experiments have had the effect of overemphasizing obedience to authority as a Holocaust explanation.
Also, see Ross and Nisbett (1991).
24. Consider Barnard’s (1968, p. 269) positive endorsement of the telephonist who stayed at her post while
watching her bedridden mother’s house burn down. According to Barnard, “she showed extraordinary ‘moral
courage’, we would say, in conforming to a code of her organization—the moral necessity of uninterrupted service.” But as Ramos (1984) points out,
It is precisely this type of unqualified loyalty of the jobholder to organizations which eventually transforms them into agencies of moral corruption, inducing individuals, for instance, to accept the Nazist
[sic] horrors as normal facts of state life, or to indulge in violations of the law like those in which President Nixon and his staff were caught during the Watergate case. (pp. 96-97)
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25. Invoking Barnard’s (1968) warrant once again: “The decision as to whether an order has authority or not
lies with the persons to whom it is addressed, and does not reside in ‘persons of authority’ or those who issue
these orders” (p. 163).
26. In his discussion of emotional distance in modern warfare, Grossman (1995) argues that although “social
distance” is fading as a means of enabling killing in Western war, in this more egalitarian age it is being replaced
by “a new, technologically based form of psychological distance. During the Gulf War this was referred to as
‘Nintendo warfare’” (p. 169).
27. As Milgram (1974) observed of his obedient participants,
Typically we do not find a heroic figure struggling with conscience, nor a pathologically aggressive
man ruthlessly exploiting a position of power, but a functionary who has been given a job to do and who
strives to create an impression of competence in his work. (p. 187)
28. The oath sworn by soldiers of the German armed forces required them to render “unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler.” That sworn by public officials required them to be “loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler” and
to “respect the laws and fulfil my official duties conscientiously.”
29. Rummel (1994) claims that between 1900 and 1987, governments around the world murdered a total of
more than 169 million people. He says, “We have no concept for murder as an aim of public policy, determined
by discussion among the governing elite in the highest councils, and imposed through government bureaucracy”
(pp. 26-27).
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Nestar Russell is a graduate in psychology and criminology from Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]
Robert Gregory is an associate professor of public policy and administration in the School of Government,
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected]
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