Obedience to Authority

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”

How I wish Milgram had lived to see Jonathan Haidt's research. I get the feeling he would've nodded thoughtfully, “yes, that makes sense” — and then, more importantly, leaped two steps ahead on the implications and come up with new ideas for areas of research, perhaps even ways to educate, to help us overcome these worse aspects of ourselves. But maybe that'd be asking too much: he already changed the world once; that's more than most of us get to do.

Milgram was just as surprised and horrified by his findings as you or I when we first learned of them. Unlike you and I, he devoted years of his life to trying to understand them. This book is, I think, his cry to the world for help solving the problem: it's much too big to be solved by any one person. The book is two parts: the experiments, and his analyses. The first half describes the initial experiment as well as the many followups, each intended to suss out which factors are at play. The second half, written ten years later, is his distillation of his findings: basically, evolutionary pressures that have become maladaptive in a modern environment. This is what he struggles to understand, in an age before Facebook or remote-controlled drone bombings or the Cult of the Orange Traitor. (But after My Lai.)

Milgram is an unexpectedly good writer, conveying humility and compassion and great insight. And concern: he struggles to come to term with his findings — I wonder if he ever did? I wonder if any of us can?

Recommended reading for anyone with a moral sense, or anyone trying to develop one.