ABSTRACT
This is an analytical essay in
which I reflect on the theme of obedience and social consciousness. Studies in
psychology, philosophy, and history that deal with these issues often limit
their reviews to interpretations consonant with their own clearly delineated disciplines.
The overriding objective of this paper is to explore these
topics from a varied theoretical approach, and to find commonalities in them. These
concepts have a number of nuances, reflecting distinct and even opposing psychological,
cultural and philosophical dimensions. In its basic definition “obedience” refers
to a situation in which a person accepts the instructions or orders of another
individual or group. Their obedience may be voluntary or involuntary. In the
latter case obedience becomes submission. The idea of “consciousness” can refer
to personal or socially shared awareness, and in many cases, it is the
antithesis of obedience.
Key words: individual consciousness, collective consciousness,
obedience, active minorities, cognitive dissonance
INTRODUCTION
Real personal empowerment and social change require,
however a deeper appreciation of the social determinants that affect them. The
overriding objective of this paper is to explore ideas about obedience and
social consciousness in ways that include their development in social
psychology, history, and philosophy. When people become aware of the multiple
ways in which different forms of obedience affect their lives, whole new worlds
are open to them.
The word “obedience” has psychological, philosophical,
legal, and historical connotations, but in its basic meaning, it refers to a
situation in which a person accepts the instructions or orders of another
individual or group. In some cases, this compliance is voluntary, but in
others it is forced, as in the case of submission or subjection. Obeying can also
refer to a reasoned assent to the influence of others. It can likewise be
considered as compliance with a set of principles or moral dictates. Social
consciousness is normally the antithesis of obedience, but when it refers to
obeying the dictates of reasoned reflection, both experiences may form part of
the same phenomenon.
Obviously, part of the problem is semantical. Obedience
may mean: a) submission to another person’s wishes or orders, b) the acceptance
of a creed or a faith as in monastic obedience, c) the acceptance of reasoned
principles as in the practice of scientific research (the adoption of the
principles of systematic skepticism, objectivity, reliability and
accountability), d) the acceptance of generally acknowledged secular laws, and e)
the disciplined acceptance of the dictates of one’s conscience. In the same way consciousness has many
meanings; it may mean a simple awareness, as in being awake, or a deeper
personal awareness as in the perception of one’s own emotional states. It can
also refer social consciousness that happens when people collectively elaborate
aspects of their social world.
Obeying is an act that may be active, or not (like the
contrast between raising one's hand to vote -an act-, and standing motionless
at a red light -inaction-); it can imply the observance of rule, a custom, or an
order, sometimes without reflecting on the goodness or convenience of this
compliance. Accepting a suggestion or indication after assessing the
potential benefits – or the ethics of agreeing to its fulfilment – is also part
of its cluster of meanings.
There are two main problems to overcome when reflecting
on the noun "obedience." First, as I have noted, it is a word with an
enormous variety of meanings, some of which are contradictory. Second, the
different meanings of this word may have incompatible contexts, and even
lexicons. We can briefly mention three examples of these contexts. Firstly, a
thesis student may accept or reject his or her tutor’s suggestions. In this
case the student does not have to obey even though the tutor is obviously an
authority. Rather, he or she must reason his decision. In another case, children
may reason with a parent or a teacher after receiving a command, even though they
know that they will finally have to accept the what the authority figure
decides. But in another context a soldier or a police officer may find it more
difficult to refuse an order from his superior. All of these examples have social and ethical
relevance for us. It is a subject with important cultural roots and affective
impact, and its ambiguity increases its social force. It is necessary to
examine these discrepancies and compare them. We all obey. Children are
expected to respect the warnings of their parents and teachers. At the social
level in democracies, laws are supposed to be the product of a collectively established
social pact. It is assumed that they represent the will of the population they
impact, and therefore they must be respected by all citizens.
In this article I consider – from very different
points of view – the general concept of obedience. The reason for this
diversity is the need to encompass the concept in its breadth. Since the
Nuremberg Trials, which we consider in this text, obedience has been a
collective, political, and personal problem. It is closely related to other concepts
such as legal and ethical responsibility, which in a liberal democracy falls on
the individual and not on groups or families as was the case in Roman and
medieval law.
In this work, I define the
notion as: action of complying a) with the will of another person or group, b) with
a cultural norm or a law, c) with a social obligation, or d) with a majority. I
include in these reflections the effects of operant conditioning as in studies
on behavioral modification with respect to learning of contingencies.
The organization of this
article is as follows: First, I make a brief reference to: certain works in social and behavioral psychology.
Then I discuss certain historical and legendary references (such as Iphigenia's
obedience to her father Agamemnon, and Abraham's obedience to God). I end this
section with a consideration of the notion of due obedience for state officials
and military personnel, and a reflection on the position of the Nuremberg
trials.
In the end I consider the
capacity we have to say "no" as elaborated by Mead, Sartre and
Schütz. I conclude with some final reflections.
METHOD
I have employed the structure
of the essay in these reflections. They consist of a general consideration of
the ideas of obedience and consciousness, which are topics of urgent interest
to all the social sciences. I have written this from a personal perspective,
largely according to my own experiences with community facilitation projects. I
have intentionally chosen diverse areas of thought (psychological research, interpretation
of legends, considerations on legal provisions regarding military practices and
reflections on certain philosophical positions related to the existential
capacity we have to choose). These themes touch the breadth of human
experience, and demonstrate the complexity of the thinking subject. There is much
content that I have had to ignore, or mention only very briefly; my criterion
for selecting these topics – in the short space of this article – was the need
to cover the concept broadly enough to be able to include the main trends for
psychologists, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and other professions.
Due to the personal nature of
these reflections, I have used the grammatical first person to express my
positions. I consider this to be an ethical position, that is, that of taking
responsibility for the text.
Justification
Obedience is a topic that has preoccupied social psychologists for more than seventy years. With different methodological approaches, Milgram (1963 and 2005), Zimbardo (2009), Asch (1956), and Moscovici (1996) have considered its social and ethical aspects, along with the disturbing implications of conformity and deference to the majority, in the sense of the submission of the individual to the dictates of a collectivity.
The same uneasiness appears in
very old contexts of reflection. Beginning with the Old Testament and the Greek
tragedies of the sixth century B.C., we find similar doubts. I have felt it necessary
to include these legends because obeying has had a very positive cultural value
for a long time and, at the same time, its ethical price has been repeatedly questioned.
We are the inheritors of these contradictory traditions. Complying with the king's
demands was an obligation that was almost never put in doubt. But from the
beginning of historical times there have been certain authors such as the
Greeks Sophocles and Euripides, and later the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
thinkers, such as Erasmus, Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Rousseau and
Voltaire that opened the door to dissidence. Some of them paid a heavy price
for their nonconformity, for example, Giordano Bruno.
The thinking that has been
done about obedience is quite varied. On the one hand, in the XVII century there
was Thomas Hobbes (n.d.) for whom submission formed the philosophical basis of
an ideal society. Hobbes's work is a justification of the absolute state. He
proposed the idea of a social contract that he considered necessary because, in
his opinion, people are essentially selfish. For this reason, he felt that they
have to submit to a greater power in order to live in peace. Hobbes considered
that the only way people have to defend themselves against the invasion of
foreigners and against the wrongs of others is to give all the state’s power to
one man or an assembly of men. The citizens can vote to authorize “one will” to
act in everyone’s name. Hobbes considered this kind of renouncement to be an
act of “unity”. This done, the multitude, thus united in one person called state,
leads to the generation of the Leviathan, or the supreme good personalized in
one leader (Hobbes, p. 99-100).
On the other hand, from ancient
times, there have been severe criticisms of the virtues of political obedience.
For example, in the fifth century before the Cristian era, Sophocles (Antigone
full text.pdf. n.d.) wrote the play Antigone. In this play the main character
refuses to obey Creon, the king. Antigone says that she can say “no” to
anything she considers “vile”. Creon sentences her to death for this. The play,
far from being an account of justice achieved, is a tragedy in which Creon
himself pays a severe price for his heavy-handedness.
In the European Renaissance, Étienne
de la Boétie in 1572, at the beginning of his book, "Discourse on
Voluntary Servitude" (2015), expressed his reasons for writing it as
follows. He said that he wanted to find out how so many men, so many cities,
and so many nations submit to the yoke of a single tyrant. A king really has no
more power than what his subjects give him, and he can only harm them if they comply
with his demands. (p. 18).
Obedience is not always
unwanted. As I have pointed out, it is appropriate to obey the law in a
democracy. The referee is obeyed in competitive games. It refers to something
complex in human culture that must be seen in its multiplicity.
THE MULTIPLICITY OF MEANINGS
FOR “OBEDIENCE”
Social psychology and behaviorism
Two of the particular research
areas in which obedience has been a subject of study is in social psychology
and behaviorism. They have their own methods and vocabularies, and they stand
out for presenting particular theoretical positions on people’s tendency to
obey. In this context they obey the expectations of authority or the
expectations of the majority. In behavioral (operant conditioning) terms they learn
(obey) the contingencies in their environment and act accordingly. In what follows
I review the studies of Milgram (1963 and 2005), Zimbardo (Stanford Prison
Experiment, and 2007), Asch (1956), Moscovici (1996) and Skinner (1985).
Milgram’s experiments
Milgram (2005) showed that
people tend to obey certain figures recognized as legitimate authorities. In a
widely known work, he employed an experimental situation in which participants
were ordered to perform acts which probably contradicted their own norms, that
is, they were ordered to harmfully punish a third person. In reality, the
experiment was a feigned situation in which no one was really hurt. The orders
were given by a simulated "experimenter" dressed in a lab jacket, and
the setting was a replication of a psychological experimental lab. The subjects
believed they were participating in a scientific study of operant learning, and
they did not know the real reason for their contribution. The study was
replicated by Jerry Burger (2009) with slight changes. He obtained obedience
rates that were similar to Milgram’s, who found that most of the subjects
obeyed the orders they received, without questioning the ethics of their
actions. In this case the experiment deals with blind obedience to an authority
figure.
Zimbardo's experiments
A study conducted by Zimbardo
(2007) at Stanford University is also well known. Zimbardo simulated a prison
situation and assigned the subjects to different groups: the prison
“authorities”, the "prisoners" and the "guards." In the
results, the participants assigned as imprisoned inmates recreated the
situation of obedience to their jailers, and the guards, and on their own
initiative, took the role of repressors, sometimes in a brutal way, as if it
were a real prison. Any one of the subjects could have ended their
participation at any time. All participants took on roles known to them,
without reflecting on why they were doing so.
Zimbardo said in his book, The
Lucifer Effect (2007), that one of the main conclusions of the Stanford prison
experiment is that the subtle power of situational variables can override the
will to resist this influence. The participants in these studies were ordinary
college students or volunteers. They had had no experience with prisons, and
yet they ended up obeying an assumed social norm to the point of cruelty. They
did things they never would have imagined they would do.
Zimbardo examined a number of
psychological processes that can induce a good person “to do wrong”, including
de-individuation, obedience to authority, passivity in the face of threats,
self-justification, and rationalization. Another fundamental psychological
process is dehumanization. It describes attitudes that do not allow people to
see others as human beings. It turns them into enemies who “deserve” torment,
torture, and even extermination (Zimbardo, 2007, Prologue, p. 6).
What is the main difference
between obedience as described by Milgram and Zimbardo? In the case of the
former, the participants obey an authority figure, even against their own
normative systems. In the second case, they assumed without question a system
of social roles widely known in their culture. This second type of obedience
is not induced by an authority figure, at least not directly. It is
situational, where cultural aspects, social expectations, social pressure, and
self-justification interact to shape the behavior of individuals. These
situations appear naturally in total institutions such as prisons, in the
military world, and even in schools where the social expectations of closed
groups lead to phenomena such as bullying.
In the two cases reviewed so
far, the experimenters simulated situations in which obedience is expected,
that is, the subjects assume roles where there are culturally regulated
behaviors (obedience to an authority or to a system of known roles).
In the case of Solomon Asch
(1956) the situation is different: the authority is "a majority",
that is, an abstract entity. In an experiment he carried out, the
participants were expected to make correct judgments about the length of a
clearly defined set of lines that were presented to a group in which they
formed a part. They were told that it was an study dealing with perception. The
experimental participant was always one of the last to speak. All the others in
the group were collaborators in the experiment, and all gave identical but
incorrect answers. When it was the turn for the experimental subjects to give
their answers, they found themselves alone, a minority of one. In this
situation they tended to bow to the artificial collectivity, and would join the
majority in their answers. This was interpreted as the power of the majority
over the minority.
Later, Serge Moscovici, in The
Psychology of Active Minorities (1996) reported on modifications he made in the
experiments carried out years earlier by Asch. He repeated the original format,
but added one more accomplice, whose task was to give the correct answer before
the subject's turn. With this backing, the experimental subjects dared to
follow their own inclinations and responded with the correct answer.
Moscovici, referring to this
phenomenon in real-life situations, called the dissidents who first dare to say
the truth, "deviants from the majority" or "active
minorities." His book recognizes examples of these minorities in political
life, including the history of the Russian dissident Aleksandr Isayevich
Solzhenitsyn, Nobel laureate and Russian author of several books, including A
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In this book Solzhenitsyn denounced abuses
committed in Stalin’s Russia. His book acted as a breach in the political dam
of that country, and provoked a debate about the negative aspects of Stalinism
among people who previously had perceived these wrongs, but who had not dared
to express an opinion.
As Moscovici (1996) points
out, an individual’s behavior ensures his or her membership in the social
environment. Reality is considered as something uniform, and deviation from the
norm represents a kind of failure in social insertion. Conformity is understood
as consensus and balance.
For a long time, deviants have
been treated as nuisances. Moscovici, on the other hand, re-labeled them as
"active minorities" where they lose their pathological connotations
in the face of dominant social expectations. They are individuals who have
their own code of ethics, and today we recognize them among feminists, fighters
for racial equity, "gays," and certain political opponents. Influenced
by the example of the active minority, other people, who were previously marked
by anomie, can engender their own place in society.
Operant conditioning
Operant conditioning does not
refer directly to obedience as I have been defining it. Rather, it is a body of
techniques for manipulating the environmental consequences of behavior. The
positive reinforcement (reward) for a given behavior tends to increase its
frequency, and negative reinforcement (punishment) tends to diminish it. A
subject is more likely to repeat behaviors that are associated with positive
consequences, and less likely to repeat those that produce negative results. In
general, it is associative learning; behavioral contingencies can come
"naturally" from the environment in an unmanipulated way, that is, in
a "normal" way (for example, people take care where they step because
of their experience with tripping), but they can also come from programs to
artificially cause certain consequences. In this case, "obedience" is
not necessarily conscious; the subject simply learns the contingencies of his
acts.
Operant conditioning originated
with the work of the psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Research that he
and others have done has produced a very detailed technology that is used in
teaching, medicine, psychology, and other disciplines, called "behavioral
modification”.
There is an interesting
account about its power in Skinner's autobiography A Matter of Consequences,
(1985) in which he narrates an encounter with the humanist Erich Fromm. In
1958, the two attended a symposium. Fromm said that conditioning techniques do
not take into account human free will, and told Skinner: "People are not
pigeons" in reference to studies done by Skinner with this species.
Skinner took revenge by making up a small conditioning session right there in
relation to Fromm himself. He passed a small note to his friend Halleck Hoffman
saying that he was going to condition Fromm's left hand. Fromm was sitting
directly across the table from Skinner. Skinner turned his chair so that he
could easily control the times in which he looked directly at Fromm who was gesticulating
as he spoke. Then Skinner “rewarded” Fromm by looking at him directly when he
raised his left hand. In a very short time, Fromm was moving his arm in the air
so vigorously that his watch fell off. (Skinner, 1985 and Psyciencia, 2015).
In this story Fromm
"obeyed" Skinner, but without knowing it. If Fromm had understood
what Skinner was doing to him, he could have refused his involvement.
Conditioning techniques work in two basic situations: a) when the subject is
unaware of the disposition of contingencies, and b) when he is or she aware of
them and accepts them. In fact, in certain addiction treatments, patients
voluntarily undergo aversive conditioning programs to eliminate their unwanted
habits.
Legends and institutions
In what follows we radically
change our cultural references. The results of academic studies related to
obedience are fundamentally different from the discourses on legends. The
former point to the cognitive and emotional factors involved in the phenomenon.
Legends, on the other hand, relate certain experiences that remain as stories
or prototypes of behaviors that successive generations later judge, emulate or
reject. They have different lexicons and contexts, and not all of them have survived
culturally. The situations they describe are part of our theme, and because of
their deep ancestral roots they cannot be ignored as if they were unrelated to
modern experience. They are still relevant today, and they refer to very actual
phenomena.
In a similar vein, I will
review obedience in the military world. This context can be distinguished from
all others. Obedience is the most fundamental duty of the soldier, but the 20th
century has taught us that it must have limits, that when the order is illegal
or immoral the soldier must obey a higher rule and disobey his chain of
command.
Agamemnon
Greek mythology exalts the
values of heroism, but also is concerned with the notion of destiny that
sometimes haunts and bends heroes and kings, taking away the very qualities
that could have made them great. In the following paragraph I will make a
very brief synopsis of the Greek legend of Agamemnon’s family tragedy, and then
analyze some aspects of his life in greater detail.
According to Euripides' play,
"Iphigenia in Aulis" (Euripides, n.d.), the Greek queen Helen has run
off with the Trojan prince, Paris; she was the wife of Menelaus, Agamemnon's
brother. As the play opens, Agamemnon has been chosen as head of the army that
will go to Troy to rescue her. When Agamemnon wanted to set sail with his soldiers
however, he found himself stranded on the beaches due to bad weather, with multiple
armies camped there and frustrated by the lack of deployment. An oracle told
him that, in order to go to war, he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia.
She finally obeyed him, because she valued her filial duty more than she did
her own life. Clytemnestra, the girl's mother, and Agamemnon's wife, also
submitted to the oracle's will, but she never forgave her husband. It is a
chronicle of bitterness and terror that begins with an ambitious hero who
sacrifices everything for his own quest for glory and power: his legacy is
hatred.
There are elements here that
catch our attention: war has its demands. Once the powerful have assembled an
army ready to go into battle, they have to fight or lose control of the
situation. Power requires everyone’s obedience to its dynamics, even that of
the rulers, and they become the artifacts of the mechanics of their own
command. Agamemnon did not want to sacrifice his daughter, but he could no
longer act according to his own will and at the same time maintain his kingdom.
The priest also knew the price
of authority and command. He clearly didn’t have as much to lose as the king,
but he knew that the soldiers, despite their tears over the impending
immolation of the king's daughter, needed a sign from the monarch of his
willingness to move on. Iphigenia herself obeyed: she meekly offered herself to
the exactions of her rank: noblesse oblige. Blood requires more blood in
this imaginary: the blood of the soldiers must be preceded by that of the royal
house.
Agamemnon represents obedience
to a culture that demands violence. He is not the only leader who has allowed
himself to transgress the most basic norms of humanity: Greek tragedies and
those of Shakespeare are full of these stories; in our time, the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries also offer many non-fictional examples. In this short
article there is no space to expand on the subject, but in the book "The
Hero's Grip" (Cronick, 2018) this topic is developed more extensively.
Abraham
Another historical and
legendary reference to obedience has to do with religious authority and not
power strategies. It is a topic of interest now because there are acts of
violence in the name of almost all faiths; certain individuals feel called upon
to defend their dogmas with bombs, massacres, and guns.
The case of Abraham in the Old
Testament[1]
(recognized by the three major monotheistic religions) is of interest in our
reflections. It is one of the first stories about violence as a direct command
from God[2],
but at the same time it contains the theme of forgiveness. Evidently in this
sacred book there are countless stories in which God participates violently on
behalf of the Israelites (the sacrifice of the Egyptian firstborn, the violence
of Joshua in Jericho, and many other examples). Abraham's willingness
to sacrifice his son Isaac is an intimate account. It examines the father's
motives and the son's obedience, and in many ways resembles Iphigenia’s
obedience before Agamemnon leaves for Troy, although for Abraham it is an
immensely painful duty. We find, however, a repeated theme here in very
different cultural and historical sources. For this reason, they deserve our
attention.[3] Abraham’s story differs from that of
Agamemnon because Abraham was not attempting to consolidate his power. His
sacrifice was a pure case of religious obedience.
Abraham, a wealthy Israeli
patriarch from prehistoric times, appears in the Old Testament as Noah's heir.
The sequence of events is:[4]
God tested Abraham saying that he must take his only son, Isaac, to Moriah, and
offer him as a burnt offering. Abraham obeyed, and erected an altar, laid out
the wood, bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood.
Then he took up a knife with the intention of killing him. But the Angel of the
Lord called him from heaven saying not to do it. Once Abraham had shown
obedience, it was not necessary to actually carry out the sacrifice.
The story has many possible
interpretations, but in the context of this article we will concentrate on
Abraham's direct obedience, and Isaac’s acceptance both of his father’s
intentions and God’s will.
Kierkegaard (1954), using the
pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, raises the image of Abraham's "dread"
when he decides to obey God's order to sacrifice Isaac, the son of his old age
who could have fulfilled the prophecy of being the progenitor of the Nation of
Israel. Kierkegaard asks about the everyday morality of Abraham's obedience. He
remembers that Abraham did not ask God to change his mind. Abraham acted out of
faith that accepted God's command, as he also accepted (at the last moment)
divine forgiveness for his son.
By placing Abraham in the
category of the particular, Kierkegaard also places him in relation to Hegel:
Abraham relates to God as does the Hegelian slave to the master in the
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1987). He does not obey separate
consciousnesses, but an unhappy and global consciousness. Abraham cannot ask
whether the divine command is right or true; he cannot ask whether the voice he
heard really represented God's will: objective truth is not a valid goal to
lessen the demands of such a jealous God.
Abraham is a loving and
immensely pained father, but his experience can be related to other religious
mandates – more nefarious – to kill in the name of a faith or an ideological or
nationalist cause.
Due obedience and the modern
state
In the military tradition we
find another cultural lexicon and other historical contexts. The problem of due
obedience for State officials, particularly among the military and police
forces, remains unresolved. This modern problem can be distinguished from the
obligation to obey the oracle experienced by Agamemnon and Iphigenia, or
Abraham's obligation to accept God's will. It is not an obligation that
requires sacrificial blood as a sign of obedience and submission to the tribe
and culture. But it is related to a very long tradition of the relationship
between kings, their generals, and their soldiers.
The military institution is an
instance of the state characterized by an unbreakable chain of command; The soldier’s
discipline rests on his immediate and unquestioned compliance with the orders
of his superiors. In the military tradition, the man of arms cannot take the
initiative to question the orders he receives from his superiors: he must
answer "Yes, Sir!" and obey them. However, some demands may be illegal
or immoral. What is the responsibility of the military subordinate in these
cases?
National and international
jurisprudence has not completely clarified the nature of these conditions;
Since 1945, governments and world courts have debated two conflicting
positions: a) the traditional expectations of due obedience in the military
world, and b) the legal limits of military and civilian ethics.
It is worth reviewing these
realities. In Spanish America, there are certain "exonerating"
conditions from criminal responsibility for subordinates who "only follow
orders." Here, I am using two Chilean authors Rocío Rivero Velarde (2016),
and Juan Pablo Cavada (2019). According to the first, in the case of unlawful
orders, Article 62 of Chilean Law No. 18,834, on the Administrative Statute
states that:
...
[it] contemplates the duty to represent an order that the official considers
illegal before the superior, and in the event of the latter repeating it, the
rule assumes that the official ... he must comply with it, being exempt from
all responsibility, which will fall entirely on the superior who has insisted
on the order.... (Rivero, 2016, p. 4)
In other words, according to
this law, it is sufficient for the superior to repeat the illegal order for the
official to have to comply with it. It is also understood that said official
will be exempt from any personal responsibility.
Cavada, reviewing the penal
codes of several Latin American countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, El
Salvador and Nicaragua) and Spain, found similar "exonerating"
situations. For example, Article 40 of the Bolivian Penal Code identifies the
following mitigating circumstances for the responsibility of subordinates. The
subordinate is exonerated:
When
the perpetrator has acted for an honorable motive, or driven by misery, or
under the influence of serious and unjust moral suffering, or under the
impression of a serious threat, or by the ascendancy of a person to whom he
owes obedience or on whom he depends (Cavada, p. 4).
On the other hand, Article 32
of the Colombian Penal Code adds: "Due obedience may not be recognized
when it comes to crimes of genocide, forced disappearance and torture"
(Cavada, p. 4).
In the United States soldiers
may disobey an “unlawful” order, but it is not always possible to tell the
difference between what is lawful and unlawful. Decisions about this tend to be
“after the fact” in court cases. During the Vietnam War in the My Lai massacre,
some of the officials were court-martialed for following orders to kill
hundreds of civilians. The soldiers who refused to obey did not face
court-martial. The court described the order as “palpably illegal” because the
summary killing of an enemy who has submitted is murder. (Conorman and Dualan
Attorneys at Law, 2022)
The need to make explicit the
"exonerating" conditions in the penal codes of many countries is a
direct reflection of three institutional instances: a) the Nuremberg trials, b)
the International Court of Justice in The Hague originally established in 1945
and c) the subsequent approval of the Statute of Rome in 1998, all of which
limit military immunity at the international level. Historically, before the
adoption of these legal instruments, people – as individuals – were not
responsible for having obeyed improper orders. The development of the individual’s
legal responsibility occurred in the twentieth century; previously, legal and
ethical obligations were limited to states, monarchies, and nations, as
abstract entities.
The Nuremberg trials
The Nuremberg trials took
place from November 1945 to October 1946 in accordance with the resolutions
adopted by the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics, and Great Britain.
This trial established
precedents and certain jurisprudence on the legal and moral responsibility of
subordinate at the international level. The individual responsibilities of
high-ranking members of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist regime were
determined in relation to crimes and abuses against humanity committed in the
name of the Third Reich. Hitler had already committed suicide. Among those
sentenced were: Martin Borman, Karl Dönitz, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann
Göring, Rudolf Hess, Gustav Krupp and Joachim von Ribbentrop. The charges
included: conspiracy against world peace, planning, provoking and conducting an
offensive war, crimes and attacks against the Law of War, and inhuman crimes (EcuRed,
n.d.).
The jurisprudence on crimes
and abuses represented a legal advance that would later be reflected in the
United Nations and also, from 1998 in the establishment of the Permanent
International Criminal Court. The traditional approach to international law
based on relations between States was also changed. At Nuremberg the idea of
the rights and duties of private persons was added. Since then, crimes
committed by people such as state officials could be tried internationally.
There was criticism of these
trials for several reasons, including: (a) the judges tried "crimes"
that had not been declared as such until after they had been committed (in
violation of the guarantees of non-retroactive application of the law), (b) the
judges came from the winning side in a war and those who were tried were the
vanquished, and (c) among the "judges" was the Soviet Union, which
had perpetrated similar crimes. However, given the enormity of the atrocities
committed by National Socialism, it was evident that more than just a peace
treaty was needed. Those subjected to trail had the right to legal
representation and an individual trial in front of a judge.
From the second half of the
twentieth century, it is assumed that there is in each individual the ability
to deny the orders he receives from a superior.
The ability to say
"no"
We have reviewed lexicons and
cultural aspects that describe conflicting facets of obedience. We will now
explore some existential and cultural stances that may be used to confront undue
obedience. First we will review the possibility of consciousness as an
corrective to undue obedience as elaborated by G.H. Mead (1972). He says that the
personality “appears” in the form of multiple models that arise in the
individual’s consciousness in appropriate contexts. Mead says that the self-aware
human individual assumes the organized attitudes of his social group or
community to which he belongs. This, of course, would include obligations with
long cultural traditions, with what would be considered today ethically dubious
elements.
But Mead says that the person
is not completely subject to the norms of society; he can challenge them (say
"no") using his inner voices. According to Mead, the person is
structurally divided into the "I" and the "me."[5]
The "I" may react to the inner voices that arise from the “me”,
thanks to the adoption of the attitudes of others.
The action of the
"I" is spontaneous and does not reflect on anything. It is not
perceptible within itself; This happens because the "I" exists only
in the present. This actuality of the "I" is the mechanism that
allows it to act with a certain independence of the "me." In Mead,
the "I" does not react to the attitudes of others, but the
"me" contains their viewpoints, as a series of organized outlooks that
one adopts for oneself.
It can even be said that the
performance of the "I" is uncertain and unpredictable. Intuitively we
can understand this by remembering occasions in which we have planned to act in
a certain way, but when the moment arrives, we do something else. On a simple
level we may plan to spend the afternoon working, but we end up loafing away
the available time.
Although the "me"
may demand a certain kind of "I", in the sense of fulfilling the
expectations of itself that the former has developed, the "I" acts
with palpable independence in the sense of the creation of new experience. It
is through the autonomy between the parts of the psyche that spaces are opened for
change, although we can then be surprised or even frightened when we reflect on
our actions. In this way, we may have planned to say nothing about how we feel
about a given issue at a coming meeting, but suddenly we find ourselves
participating fully in all the discussions. Our “I” has liberated us to act.
There have been other
formulations on this relationship between the immediate and the reflected. We
can mention those of Schütz (1993) and Sartre (1989)
which are very similar. Sartre (1989) said that immediate and present
consciousness has a past, but one cannot identify with it. This is so because one
lives in the present: the person is radically free to determine (choose) what he
or she is going to be (and do), and is absolutely responsible for these
choices. We cannot even be aware of the immediate motives that impel us to
act, because when we know them, they already exist in the past. In Sartre's
famous phrase, we appreciate that: "I am condemned forever to exist beyond
my essence, beyond the motives of my act: I am condemned to be free"
(1989, p. 466). Sartre says that it is one of the most basic attributes of
ontology, including our "for-itself",[6]
that is, the flow of our past experience seen from the present; it is the only
key we have to identify ourselves as subjects, but it has little to do with
what we are or what we will be. It is only in the negation of the Hegelian
"in-itself"[7] –
what we are in the perpetual instant of now – that our identity can be
elaborated.
But, if Schütz and Sartre
claim that we cannot control the next instant in our lives, they both recognize
that the project of the person we have elaborated leads us in generally
foreseen directions. That is, the project exists as a pattern from the past
that influences us to a certain degree in our leap to the future that we
experience at every moment of the present. It is only a project and not a
mandate. For this reason, we are unpredictable: that jump to freedom is the
great moment to initiate changes, and yet we may not take that opportunity.
It can also happen that people
become so emotionally tied to their beliefs that they have difficulty
challenging them (Festinger, 1968). In his book, A Theory of Cognitive
Dissonance, Leon Festinger (1968) discussed how some people need to maintain a
high level of uniformity in their beliefs. Underlying this tendency is a great
deal of emotional insecurity, and fear of challenge. When these beliefs are
false or inadequate, people use a variety of strategies to protect themselves
from the truth. Extreme examples are beliefs that the Earth is flat or that
vaccines cause cancer, but, in general, when people have a deep affective
investment in particular views, it is hard for them to dispute them. This
experience is called “cognitive dissonance”. It can cause anxiety, and this
discomfort can increase one’s efforts to deny inconsistent -albeit correct-
information. There are few “cures” for this situation. When the need to believe
is weak, it is easier to overcome, but when it is strong people will go to
great lengths to avoid the truth. Sometimes group pressure can weaken the need
for consistency, but only when the group does not share the mistaken views.
When the person’s social environment supports these views, change is difficult.
Sometimes new information can overwhelm the old beliefs, but in general, the
only way to productively deal with this conflict is through an increase in the
person’s self-confidence and general emotional strength. This is not a
situation of obedience to external entities; rather it is a case of obedience
to one’s own past, and one’s self-image.
In a practical sense we can
ask, what are the collective mechanisms for awakening a social consciousness? Some
are clear: when we know the “real” rules we are obeying we can take a stance. If someone had told the subjects in Asch’s,
Milgram’s and Zimbardo's experiments that their ability to resist manipulation was
being tested, they might have changed their behavior. If there were credible
sources for interpreting the declarations made by public and state celebrities,
people would not have to believe everything they hear. Mosovici has told us
that one important tool of resistance is found in the social environment,
especially in the presence of an active minority that relieves the pressure
towards conformity and allows the individual to express his ideas more
independently.
Another tool for reducing obedience
is to teach and promote empathy. Cronick (2024) mentions how this capacity
relates to people’s sense of identification. It has to do with individual and
group affectivity, and relates also to massive political events. It is
difficult for a pilot to drop bombs on a population when he or she has
empathetic ties with those people.
Perhaps the most powerful tool
for resisting thoughtless obedience is cultural and educational preparation. In
an institutional sense, an accessible, comprehensive, and obligatory
educational project for the entire population would be a basic, indispensable
resource. A friend once told me how amazed she was when she first saw the
periodic table on a classroom wall: she suddenly discovered that there is order
in the universe, and that there are objective means for understanding it. It
changed how she viewed her life from that moment on.[8] In
other words, she added a new incentive to her accumulation of cultural wisdom.
The ability to say
"no" is our primary tool against undue obedience. In it we have the
possibility of a relative autonomy and can reflect on ourselves; we can deny
our own intentions and those that the Other has in relation to us. We can even
distance ourselves from our own life project as it has been in the past.
Of course, tyrants have resources,
too, the chief of which is fear. There are times when we have said “no” in our
inner dialogue, but are afraid to act or speak out.
A few additional brief
thoughts on fundamentalism and obedience
In an article published 27
years ago, Carlos Kohn (1992) reflected on the nature of fundamentalism, which
he defined as:
…
any subordination of concrete men, that is, as individuals, to an abstract
principle radically superior to themselves, which legitimizes a given or
proposed social order, as an all-encompassing prescription of the "ought
to be" [and recreates the] Behemont […] under the tutelage of a Leviathan
(The State) to use Hobbesian language (Kohn, p. 74).
This is an allusion to Hobbes
second book in which he said that obedience is to be desired, and that it leads
to a good and peaceful life. Speaking to the English people after the civil war,
he said that they should obey the crown, God, and their parents.
Beliefs must be classified as
a powerful imaginary that orients people, not only according to traditional
patterns coming from their own cultural identities, but also according to the
interests linked to the management of political power.
Kohn prophetically said,
modifying the first sentence of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, that "a
ghost still haunts the world: the ghost of fundamentalism" (1992, p.63).
Millet (2000) also refers to
fundamentalismo in regard to Hegels´s rejection of what he considers scientific
fundamentalism, that is, all closed forms of thinking that claim to have
definitive answers, but are not based exclusively on reason. In the end, perhaps
this extends to all forms of social thought that claim to have answers to all
the possible questions that can be posed by a thinking person.
Since then, Kohn’s premonition
has become a warning and omen: it is increasingly common for men and women of
the twenty-first century to manage their existential anxieties by meekly
submitting to atavistic dictates that they have been taught to obey, and
politicians take advantage of their need for spiritual shelter. This tendency
fits in with Festinger’s idea of cognitive dissonance. That is, people’s
cognitive insecurity makes them easy prey for political interests.
It then happens that this meek
submission becomes horrifying when they are also shown the dagger of Abraham
that they will have to wield as a test of their faith and as a sign of their
devotion. They even perceive themselves as part of a just cause dedicated to the
achievement of what is worthy and beneficial for the homeland, such as, racial
supremacy, Sharia law, the evangelization of the natives and other ancestral
goals. Today it is worse: political leaders chain the obedience of their
followers to motivations that are not so patrimonial, such as the fortune of a
transnational company and the maintenance of the prices of oil, diamonds, gold
and copper.
Final Thoughts
The academic experiences of
Milgram, Zimbardo, Moscovici, Skinner, and Festinger can help us understand the
tragedies of Agamemnon and others, and perhaps give us alternatives. The
proposals of these authors point to the environmental aspects of obedience, that
is, those pressures that influence us culturally or socially to accept the
domination of someone else. We have seen how twentieth-century jurisprudence,
both national and international, has directed its attention to the legal limits
of obedience seen as an obligation of State officials. Mead, Schütz, and
Sartre point to the internal resources we have to resist them.
I repeat Zimbardo’s (2007,
Prologue, p. 6) observation (cited above): one of the main conclusions of the
Stanford prison experiment is that the subtle but pervasive power of a
multitude of situational variables can overcome a person’s the will to resist
this influence.
The power wielded by the crowd
can be paralyzing. But there are those who resist. There is a lot of debate about
where the ability to act independently lies. Is it in the brain? Is it in hidden
cultural resources? Neurological experiments (Radder and Meynen, 2012,
Libet, 1999 and others) have not yet shown clear evidence for the existence of
conscious autonomy of decision-making processes. Interestingly, they found a
"readiness potential," measured as an electrical impulse at the apex
of the skull in electroencephalogram studies, that precedes the subject's
awareness of his or her act. It is difficult to interpret these results
philosophically, but they definitely do not contradict the idea of an impulsive
"I" as proposed by Mead, Schültz, and Sartre.
Mead, Schültz, and Sartre
mention the importance of reflection that occurs after the act, the
accumulation of experience, and the elaboration of an intentional project. In
many cases, it is a matter of individual preparation to face the situations
that should be resisted. As in the case of the application of behavioral
modification techniques, if the subject or patient knows about the dispositions
of reward and punishment contingencies, and knows where they come from, he or
she is in a position to make his or her own decisions. If Eric Fromm had picked
up on Skinner's trick, he wouldn't have fallen into the ridiculousness of
waving his hand in the air – as if he were just another pigeon in a behavioral
experiment.
After the Second World War,
especially after the Nuremberg Trials, there was a global reflection on
repressive practices and the degree of responsibility that individuals have in
this regard. It is still a timid debate; It appears infrequently in schools,
universities and the media. The issue opens in the barracks only with occasional
reiterations of the scant regulatory codes on the limits to due obedience. This
discursive silence in the cantonments, among the police and in prisons prevents
a valid and meaningful discussion about the right and obligation of a soldier,
a security agent or a prisoner to break an order.
I have tried to explore
certain types of obedience that can finally be classified into two categories:
a) that which ends with submission and that can lead to vassalage and violence among
the faithful, and b) that which results from a thoughtful decision to obey -or
deny- the order received.
Although Hegel and Kierkegaard
were Christians, I have not pointed to any particular dogma or ideology. Nevertheless,
we may ask: What would have happened if Abraham had asked God why he wanted
such a brutal proof of his devotion? Or if he had doubted the goodness of such
a divine order? Perhaps he could have been a renovator of the foundations
of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim creeds. This is not the place to
imagine what changes he would have made to these traditions, but at least the
devotee who has inherited these beliefs might have had the right to say
"no" to the demands of dogmas that sometimes require blood. Modern
conflicts, for example, between the Irish in the north and south, and the
Israelis and the Palestinians would not have the same justification.
History, its legends and
traditional texts cannot be modified, but modern laws can be reconstructed. In
humanistic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and in
law schools, debates must be opened about the history of obedience in human
culture. There must be renewed considerations about what are the conditions for
provoking and controlling tyranny, and finally evaluations about what place
awareness should occupy today. Part of individual and group autonomy is
resisting unwanted influence from others. There are soldiers who die in modern
"crusades," and terrorist insurgents who do not question the reasons
for murdering others, taking revenge, and, in the process, blowing themselves
up. On the other hand, the need to set limits in the upbringing of children and
in the coexistence of citizens should be an obligatory part of ethics and
civility.
What we have to ask is what
kind of courage do we need today? Do we need that of the Kierkegaardian
individual, isolated from his fellows, who blindly obeys as Abraham did? We
must pay attention to other models: Nelson Mandela said "no" to
Apartheid and was even able to negotiate a relationship of non-submission with
his own jailer in South Africa. In captivity, he cultivated an ethic of
obedience to his own conscience.
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[1] Old Testament. Genesis. Chapter 22,
verses 1-12.
[2] The severity of the Old Testament
was radically changed in the New Testament. It is to be remembered that the New
Testament was transcribed in historical times while the Old Testament
represents millennia of oral history. Jesus is quoted as saying: “Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto
it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets”. (New Testament. Matthew. Chapter 22. Verses 36-40.
King James Version)
[3] Both these stories may represent
historical allegories about the end of human sacrifice. To support this idea,
we can refer to another of Euripides' plays, Iphigenia in Tauris (2001), in
which she receives divine pardon and survives.
[4] The Old Testament, Genesis 22
[5] This division of the consciousness
began with Hegel’s separation of “being” into an “I” and the “Other”. He also
elaborated this division with other classifications, some of which I mention in
this article. My interpretation of The Phenomenology of the Spirit owes more to
its later influence in psychoanalysis and existentialism, and less to the
tradition that led to Marx. Later Freud divided consciousness into Ego,
Superego, and Id, referring to the contrast between self-awareness, morality,
and desire. Other authors such as Mead, Schütz and Sartre later developed their
own interpretations of the subdivisions of the aware being.
[6] In Hegel the “for-itself (für sich). Is a reflective,
self-comprehending, form of consciousness.
[7] In Hegle the “in-itself” (an
sich) is a hypothetical, unreflective form of consciousness. It is a kind of
potentiality with no reference to other things.
[8] For this reason, tyrants often
attempt to eliminate or reduce massive educational projects.
