WEEK 09: Everyday good

The Banality of Heroism

One might learn about Milgram’s Shock Experiment and Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment (briefly discussed in the assigned reading), and be left cynical about human nature and fearful of our fellow humans. But the authors of this week's reading, Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo, want to go beyond the bad news.

There were a couple of small rays of hope in Milgram’s findings. For one thing, we mustn’t forget that one third of the participants did stop. Perhaps their mothers had raised them right. Or perhaps they had more imagination than the other two thirds. We’ll look at this unexpected idea of imagination closely in a minute.

Two thirds of us seem prepared to do terrible things to avoid conflict with authority. Is there anything that can sway someone who is cowed by authority to resist?

Modeling non-conformism

Milgram ran variations of his experiment to see what factors might affect compliance with the experiment on the part of the "Teacher."

In some versions, the participants were allowed to choose the voltage to use. Few went beyond 60 volts. In other versions, Milgram experimented with the proximity of the authority figure and the person being shocked. If the authority figure was in the room with the Teacher, compliance went up. If the authority figure spoke to the Teacher over an intercom system, compliance went down. If the Learner was actually in the room with the Teacher when being shocked - yes, you guessed it, compliance went down. On the other hand, if the Teacher never actually met the Learner first, compliance went up.

Most important to my mind were his experiments with conformity. In some versions, other actors pretended to be the people doing the shocking and worked alongside the real subjects who just read the word pairs the Learner was supposed to try to remember. Milgram discovered that conformity and modelling were powerful forces. Sometimes, Milgram had directed these actors to comply with the experiment; other times, they would refuse to continue. One variation had two actors and one real subject, and Milgram found that when the two actors refused to go beyond a certain shock level, thirty-six of forty subjects also refused to go on. Even a single actor standing up and saying they refused to go on was enough to raise the awareness of some participants and lead them to realize what they were doing and that they could make other choices than obeying the guy in the lab coat.

This is one of the sometimes underappreciated values of the rebel: not just the rebel’s own individual resistance, but the fact that it models resistance for others, and shows them there are alternatives to the path of conformity they are on. Milgram drew particular attention to this: “The rebellious action of others severely undermines authority.”

Franco and Zimbardo want to go further. If it’s true that ordinary people can be the agents of great evil, it is also true that they can be, and often are, capable of extraordinary heroic good. Franco and Zimbardo talk about a few examples of this, including Frank De Martini, a construction manager at the World Trade Center who, along with three other ordinary citizens, combed the building looking for survivors immediately after the 9/11 attack, and dragged many people out, saving lives. The four men themselves perished when the building collapsed on them. These were ordinary people, not superheroes or trained emergency rescue workers. How can we get more of these people in our world?

If there is a Banality of Evil, Franco and Zimbardo want to argue, there is also a Banality of Heroism. Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary evil — or extraordinary good.

The banality of heroism concept suggests that we are all potential heroes waiting for a moment in life to perform a heroic deed. The decision to act heroically is a choice that many of us will be called upon to make at some point in time. By conceiving of heroism as a universal attribute of human nature, not as a rare feature of the few “heroic elect,” heroism becomes something that seems in the range of possibilities for every person, perhaps inspiring more of us to answer that call. (Franco and Zimbardo, p. 31)

What can ordinary people do so that they will be more likely to act heroically — or at least less likely to act as mindless agents of evil — in critical situations?

"Everyday" Heroes

Franco and Zimbardo discuss a number of people you have probably never heard of. The fact that they are not legendary is part of why they are included. This is about everyday heroism. People like you and me.

Everyday heroes are people you've never heard of who showed courage or resisted participating in things they felt were wrong, perhaps even trying to make the world a better place and decrease the suffering of others, including people they don't know and are not related to. Here's one of my favourites. I recently learned that his name is Harold Clifford. He took part in the original Milgram experiment.

What made Harold Clifford more able to stand up to authority than 2/3 of participants in the experiment? Among the things Franco and Zimbardo point to are how one is raised. Consider a modern Old School hero you've probably heard of, Malala Zousafsai. Malala is an activist for women's right to education and came to be seen as an enemy by the Taliban in her native Pakistan. In 2012 a Taliban gunman attempted to assassinate her, boarding a bus and shooting her and two other girls. Yousafzai was shot in the head and unconscious in the hospital for a time. But she recovered with her brain intact. Despite the danger, she continued to advocate for universal education for girls, and in 2014 she became the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not an expert on her story, but it is clear that she was inspired by her father's commitment to human rights, and that he encouraged her to pursue justice for women, even though there might be some risk. Maybe Harold Clifford also had parents who encouraged moral courage and resistance to unjust authority.

The Heroic Imagination

Franco and Zimbardo focus on the curious idea of developing a “heroic imagination.”

They tell the story of another government functionary during World War II, Chiune Sugihara. Sugihara was a consul working in the Japanese embassy in the small European country of Lithuania at the time the Nazis were about to take it over.

Sugihara, signed more than 2,000 exit visas for Jews hoping to escape the Nazi invasion, despite his government’s direct orders not to do so. Every morning when Sugihara got up and made the same decision to help, every time he signed a visa, he acted heroically and increased the likelihood of dire consequences for himself and his family. At the end of the war he was unceremoniously fired from the Japanese civil service. (Franco and Zimbardo, p. 32-33)

Franco and Zimbardo suggest that among the reasons Sugihara had the inner moral resources to risk his own safety and livelihood - and even that of his family - for the sake of saving other people who were strangers was that he had previously in his life practiced resistance to authority in smaller ways. He had defied his parents' wishes and studied languages rather than medicine. He had married a non-Japanese woman, and he had resigned a post in protest against the Japanese treatment of Chinese during the occupation of Manchuria.

He had also been brought up in a Samurai tradition whose values were different from those of mainstream Japanese culture. That culture required strict adherence to the demands of superiors. But the Samurai tradition included the idea of always helping those in distress. We might compare this to a modern Canadian who has a religious upbringing, for instance Muslim or Christian or Buddhist, whose values conflict with the mainstream Capitalist individualism of our own culture. They would have an alternative moral compass to that of self-interest.

When Sugihara felt a “moral tickle,” unlike many of us who would simply try to bury it and plod forward, he looked into it and discussed it with his family, coming to the conclusion that it would be wrong not to help the Jews escape persecution, whatever his government told him.

Finally, perhaps, he had imagination. This may seem like an odd quality in a hero, but Franco and Zimbardo think it is crucial. Arendt and Milgram had explained Eichmann’s participation in the holocaust as largely due to his lack of imagination. Imagination is key because it allows you to think about the consequences of your actions and to remember and re-enact in your head similar situations in the past.

In addition, it is key to empathy. Somehow, perhaps, the Japanese man was able to imagine himself as a Jew. He was able to imagine what it was like to be somebody else, to see how that somebody else was another human being just like him. He was able to imagine how he would feel in the future if he did not help them now.

Franco and Zimbardo point out that part of the heroic imagination is simply to imagine that you are capable of heroic action, to imagine yourself acting heroically in situations. This actually prepares you to do so when the real thing comes along. Throughout the second half of their article, they provide hints for guidelines you could follow if you wanted to nurture your heroic imagination. Here's a summary:

• Stay awake - don't sleepwalk through your existence
• Stand up to authority (in small ways) regularly - it will gradually grow your ability and tendency to do so
• If something gives you a “moral tickle,” don’t ignore it; now is the time to think hard and logically about it; maybe talk it over with others
• Resist the urge to rationalize inaction ("Nobody else would do anything in this situation either" - "If I get involved I may cause more trouble for myself or others.")
• Have an “heroic imagination”
  • imagine you can be a courageous, caring person
  • understand and empathize with others - "put yourself in their shoes"
  • think about the past and the future, don't just muddle through the present focused on your own self-interest in the narrowest sense
    

The Bystander Effect

On page 31, the authors discuss what is sometimes called the Bystander Effect — the tendency of people to stand by while injustice happens because they feel it is not their responsibility as long as they aren’t personally committing the injustice: “Research has shown that the bystander effect is often motivated by diffusion of responsibility, when different people witnessing an emergency all assume someone else will help. … we fall into the trap of inaction when we assume it’s someone else’s responsibility to act the hero.” In Milgram's experiments when other actors pretended to be Teachers doing the shocking, the real subjects, just reading the word pairs, rarely intervened or stopped participating in the passive role they'd been given. The majority of them considered the possibility that harm was being done to another person as not their responsibility, since they weren't directly doing it.

Over the next week, try to watch for the Bystander Effect. It could be someone harassing a woman and nobody else saying or doing anything, or an employee being treated less fairly because of their race or gender, etc. If you personally are doing the silent bystander thing, does it make it more difficult when you are consciously aware of yourself doing it? One of the ideas the authors explore is that simply being conscious and aware that we might be allowing evil to occur can lead us to saying something or taking action.

Old School Heroes - making a comeback?

Franco and Zimbardo are fond of this idea of "heroism." I tend to think the word is intimidating. Most of us might not have it in ourselves to be as courageous and committed as Malala Yousafzai or Frank De Martini, the guy who gave his life saving other people from the collapsing World Trade Center. At the same time, the idea of a hero may not be as meaningful as it used to be. I prefer to concentrate on everyday good, rather than heroism. Though sometimes doing good or not doing evil are heroic acts in our world.

What does "hero" mean now? When I have polled Humber students asking them who their heroes are, by far the most common answer I get is one or another parent, or both. A few people usually mention superheroes. Some name leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela.

In the Winter 2021 poll, the only political figure mentioned was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the American left-wing Democratic congresswoman, appearing in conjunction with singer, feminist, and activist Dolly Parton. The propher Muhammad got a vote, and a few people mentioned fictional characters from comics, movies, animes, video games, etc. Batman and Luke Skywalker were mentioned by name.

When I first started doing this, around 2013, by far the largest number of people who got mentioned as "heroes" (after parents, of course!) were successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, various famous athletes, and major celebrities, from Kanye to Miley Cyrus to even Marilyn Monroe! (Read her biography, ladies!) Donald Trump - who was only a reality tv star and billionaire back then - made a few appearances in the poll results as well.

Obviously, different people are interpreting the word hero in different ways. For some, it is just whoever has done the most for them personally; for others, it is someone they would like to be, whose life and identity they would like to have; others think of unrealistic fictional characters with superpowers; for other people still, it may be someone who has done a lot for their subculture or perhaps for humanity or even the world in general. Sometimes people will say they are there own heroes. And usually one or two people have given up on the idea altogether. They say they have no heroes.

Franco and Zimbardo talk about the “dumbing down” of heroism in the contemporary world (p. 34). They say that our mass media has tended to present people who are rich, narcissistic, sexy, powerful, or famous as “heroes.” In the past, on the other hand, heroes were figures to look up to and emulate because of their strength and ideals. In the Western world, they were often underdogs who held out against powerful evil forces, characters more like Robin Hood or Frodo Baggins, or maybe Katniss Everdeen: people who had ideals beyond their own self-interest, followed a standard of right and wrong even if it was difficult or painful, and generally risked something important — if not their lives then their social standing, their livelihoods, their connections to their families or loved ones, etc. in the service of humanity and justice. This is what I'm calling Old School Heroism here.

More recent Humber polls suggest that young people today are moving away from "dumbed down" heroes and back in the direction of Old School heroes in many cases. They still tend to choose family members over any more public figures, but there is more interest in political activists and even the celebrities mentioned are usually in some way involved in political action, such as representatives of a rising marginalized group, e.g. Kobe Bryant or Beyoncé.

Old School heroes can be characterized as having certain common traits, whether their quest is for The Holy Grail or to "rob from the rich and give to the poor" in the Middle Ages or to achieve full civil rights for African Americans and brotherly love among all Americans in the 1960s:

• Caring about at least some other people. (Not just yourself or your family)
  
• Some kind of “quest” that is bigger than yourself.
  
• Some kind of potential risk or sacrifice.
  
• Persistence in the face of adversity.

Are any of your heroes like the Old School heroes? If not, what do you find heroic and thus worthy of emulation today? Some would say that our culture has been telling you your heroes should be self-serving criminals getting all they can get. Are these values we should be applauding and encouraging in each other and ourselves?

I think it's true that we are all shaped by our society and its norms. But I also think it's true that we are society. We can decide to re-shape those norms, if we wake up and see how they may be misguided.

For your consideration: The structure of our society has been encouraging the banality of evil in us. Also for your consideration: we can choose to practice non-conformism to the evil norms; we can resist authority; we can work to change the norms. The first evil is the unthinking conformity itself.

This lesson is in many ways about the nature of good and evil. These are words that most people rarely use these days, and they are associated perhaps with medieval superstition or religions that all define them differently. I like to end my lectures with three rather strange propositions, that I believe are worth thinking about more. I think they say a lot about my personal way of thinking about good and evil.

1.
Sleepwalking through life is evil.
Staying awake is heroic.

2.
Unthinkingly obeying authority is evil.
Challenging authority is heroic.

3.
A lack of imagination is evil.
Imagining that the world (and you) can be better is heroic.