Lord Jim Meets Stanley Milgram

January 23, 2007

Reading Obedience to Authority I kept thinking about Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. In that novel we meet a young man who goes to sea believing in conventional notions of duty and heroism. Early in the novel Conrad gives us an image of him standing in the fore-top of a ship, looking down upon the world "with the contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers" (5). That self confidence is shattered by an absurd event. Thinking that his ship was about to go down, he abandons it.. leaving behind its human cargo of pilgrims to their fate. Only the ship does not go down.. and when the young man and others are rescued from the sea, they have some awkward questions to answer. Conrad is not interested in this story as an example of one man's failure of courage, but as a signpost to something larger in human nature: we do not know ourselves.. and in moments of testing we may easily betray the values we profess to believe in.

The narrator of the novel, Marlowe, comments on the young man's attempts to explain the fateful action:

It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalties of its failure. [59]

That "moral identity" we could define as the folk psychology that lies behind our conception of virtue. Faced with dire situations we should make honorable choices.. and for a captain that means he will not abandon his ship in the face of imminent danger. In this case, though, we find a young man in the midst of a confusing and chaotic environment.. acting not so much from thought as from impulse.. and betraying that precious moral identity.

Before Stanley Milgram proceeded with his shock experiments he asked psychiatrists and college students to guess the result of his experiment. What percentage of people would administer the highest level of shock to the learners? Nobody who was asked to predict the results thought that ordinary people would administer shocks to the highest level. Most thought those people being tested would desist early on.. as soon as the shocks became painful. These predictors of human behavior were wrong.. as is well known. Over 60% of ordinary people, upon being given an order, gave shocks to the highest level possible.

Milgram tries to explain why people were so wrong in their assumptions about human action:

...the individual is preeminently the source of his own behavior. A person acts in a particular way because he has decided to do so. Action takes place in a physical-social setting, but this is merely the stage for its occurrence. The behavior itself flows from an inner core of the person... [31]

That is a description of a widely held folk psychology about the ways that human beings make moral choices. The value of Obedience to Authority is its ability to get us to convince us that human actions take place within a social context.. and that social context often overrides the moral choice that seemed so obvious when considered as an abstraction.

The genius of Milgram's book is the way he does not simply describe human actions, but draws the reader into his experiment. One of my early questions to my Freshman Studies class was whether they would have stopped earlier than the people in the book. I tried to open this as a possibility by noting that this took place a long time ago and that values have changed. I thought maybe someone would say: No way.. I would never do that! But they seemed to mostly buy into the conclusions.. offering comments like: I would like to think I would act differently, but I can see that the odds are I would act like the majority. To me that is a fascinating response. In effect it is an admission that given the proper authority they would kill an innocent person.. or at the very least administer incredibly painful shocks.

This ability to strip away a folk psychology in favor of a more situational appraisal of human actions is the goal of Lord Jim. A chasm lies there.. since all of our virtues are founded on that folk psychology. Conrad exploits the darkness of this action in a way that Milgram does not. Conrad shows the affect of this singular failure on those who hear his story:

"Such an affair destroys one's confidence. A man may go pretty near through his whole sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip. But when the call comes... Aha!... If I..." [49]

One hesitates to put into words the possibility of failure.

Even if Milgram is willing at the end of the experiment to bring out unharmed the man who was supposedly receiving the shocks.. and to explain to people that their actions were perfectly normal.. It is still impossible not to feel slightly haunted by the knowledge that we do not know ourselves.. and that our actions are driven by forces we don't fully understand.