Sucked into Obedience to Authority

January 10, 2007

With Freshman Studies we are back to Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority. My only misgiving about the book is its lack of bookiness. On reading it I am never quite sure what its existence as a book adds to my experience. The experiment is ingenious.. but it can be just as well explained in a lecture or an article. And once understood, is there anything more? Why should I read a book?

Obedience to Authority is extremely modest. At one point while noting a person's agonized response to the experiment, Milgram breaks in and admits that this tension is hard to capture in writing. It is no wonder, then, that the video clips of these experiments are probably more widely known than the book itself. But while something of the basic situation and the pull of authority can be understood through a video or lecture, the genius of the book is its ability to pull in the reader.. to slowly let the reader see him/herself in the responses of the teachers.

I have yet to have a student who really fights the idea that he or she would follow the trend and take the shocks to the highest point. Not too many books get people to admit that in the right circumstance they would kill someone.. but this one does. As I read the book this time it seemed to me that all the introductory material—the reproduction of the announcement, the photo of the testing machine, the photo of the nice man who would supposedly get the shocks—were parts of the rhetoric of the book. Likewise the pages that contained tables with surveys of expectations and then of actual results. By the time one is done with this material the reader has a sense that it could have been him/herself that answered the original announcement.. and that although most people think they would never shock someone else to the maximum level, actually most people do.. ergo: the reader would also take the shocks to the highest level.

Convincing people of their possible guilt is no small matter.. and in this case it is not the strength of the prose that does it. The reader is never won over by intensity of language or perorations. The trick is in the plainness of the text and its layering of examples and numeric charts. These turn out to be rhetorical moves that should not be underestimated.