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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Just about all of it. In the first place, a generalization covering both British and American schools, no time frame, is doomed, the corporal punishments alleged don't take place in American schools to much extent since they have been banned (public schools anyway). If you want a generalization that Rejali would accept, it would be British and American police departments, because of the "third degree".
Second, would either you or Alice Miller, or anyone else who wants to allege that the same behavior goes on, please like to tell me when strappado was practiced in British and American schools, like with names, dates, and individuals on whom it was practiced? How about crushing genitals (i.e. permanent damage)? How about prolonged sensory deprivation and illegally long and unbroken solitary confinement (that would be 30 days or more without a period of sunlight for an hour a day, etc.)? How about heat and cold torture (induced hyper- or hypothermia), or lesions of frostbite, or bombardment with loud noises and light, or gang interrogation of more than 24 hours, or stress positions (until limbs swell), or short shackling, or blows to the body, or waterboarding, or belly slaps, or withholding of medications for life-threatening injuries, or threats of death to next of kin or self, or incommunicado holdings? Those are just an incomplete list of the ones practiced by the Americans.
So tell me which school these are practiced at? Do you see the problem? At some point, the distinction isn't a distinction in degree, its a distinction in kind.
Third, as I reiterated several times now, from Rejali, the torturers are, when they commence their work, very, very normal. They are people doing a job. The roots of why they are being asked to do this job are at the societal level, and are the three reasons that Rejali gave.
Fourth, they are also, in the case of the Americans, soldiers in many cases, which means that they are from a class of individuals for whom it isn't correct to assume, as so many academic psychologists do going back to Freud's neurotic upper-class Viennese women, that their most traumatic experiences occur during childhood. If that's even a good assumption about whole swaths of society. I noticed this once when I had to fill out a psych questionnaire for tests I needed to have done. They assumed everything traumatic enough to profoundly affect my psyche happened as a child. That might be true of faculty, students, and staff at an elite academic institution, their prime clinical base, but is certainly wasn't true with me, nor with tons of people in society. For combat troops who've seen war, it is most certainly false.
I told you, I am willing to entertain that her ideas that the behavior arises from treatment they received in childhood if, and only if, we are talking about the people at the top of the food chain, and if we are talking about particular (and apparently somewhat irregular) propagation of techniques and very specific orders downward. That singles out the Bush people in a very small group. Even the Gestapo, though often alleged to have been top down on torture, was not, according to Rejali.
So if you want to talk about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Addington, et al.'s childhood, fine. If you want to talk about the implementing torturers in the prisons, then respectfully, no. AKA Smith mentioned Zimbardo. It isn't true he doesn't have causal theories, they are in his book, The Lucifer Effect, Chapter 16, starting on page 445 (in the paperback edition). He has charts and a multistep plan and the whole works. Most people will behave cruelly if ordered to in the circumstances that exist in the prisons America has set up (see Gray, for instance, http://www.irct.org/Default.aspx?ID=1038 and scroll down). That isn't because everyone was treated cruelly in schools, it's because most people will behave cruelly, because, as Zimbardo notes, disobeying that order to torture is heroic, not normal. Torture stops when the system that causes it is dismantled (that is really Rejali's point, but could also be Zimbardo, or Arendt or many others), not when we put superior individuals in.
ondelette (October 6, 2008 10:09 PM ):
I told you, I am willing to entertain that her ideas that the behavior arises from treatment they received in childhood if, and only if, we are talking about the people at the top of the food chain, and if we are talking about particular (and apparently somewhat irregular) propagation of techniques and very specific orders downward. That singles out the Bush people in a very small group. Even the Gestapo, though often alleged to have been top down on torture, was not, according to Rejali.
So if you want to talk about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Addington, et al.'s childhood, fine. If you want to talk about the implementing torturers in the prisons, then respectfully, no.
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What?
By what strange logic do you conclude that Bush could be warped enough by his childhood traumata to order torture and watch the videos thereof, but that Charles Graner, one of the implementers of that torture, could not be similarly warped by similar childhood traumata?
I'm also somewhat flabbergasted by your clear implication that unless brutal child-rearing practices include identical forms of torture as those employed by professional practitioners of torture in government prisons, those child-rearing practices cannot issue in the behavior of said professional torturers.
One of Miller's conclusions from her twenty years of psychoanalytic practice is:
This perfect adaptation to society's norms [becoming an obedient child]--in other words, to what is called "healthy normality"--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience.
He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology. Since authoritarian parents are always right, there is no need for their children to rack their brains in each case to determine whether what is demanded of them is right or not.
And how is this to be judged? Where are the standards supposed to come from if someone has always been told what was right and what was wrong and if he never had an opportunity to become familiar with his own feelings and if, beyond that, attempts at criticism were unacceptable to the parents and thus were too threatening for the child?
If an adult has not developed a mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of the authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem too threatening to him. (Emphasis added)
Does the above help to clarify Miller's thesis that brutalizing children, even in "socially acceptable" ways, damages their psyches in such a way as to make them vulnerable to manipulation by their "superiors" and to violent acting out of their rage against surrogates of their abusers when they are given permission or orders to do so?
Does it help to clarify the possibility that Rejali, the political scientist, is offering an essentially sociological description of torture, and that Miller, the depth psychologist, is offering a psychological explanation of it?
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