Chapter Four: The Human Experiment

Abstract

This chapter starts from the notorious Milgram experiment to find the historical and sociocultural origins of dehumanization described in the previous chapter. Delving into the unsteady edifice of simplexes on primitiveness and progress brings us to a default frame called ‘normality’ with neolithic origins and discriminating potential. We explore the genealogy of morbid energy condensed and transmitted across generations, from civilizational demonization to cultural essentialism and the superiority of the WEIRD. If we compare the usual suspect, enemy or witch in various societies, modern and premodern, it appears that the one we have to thank our life or welfare for comes to mind first as the cause of evil. The victim of simplication and exclusion is the very one on whose existence the ‘simplicator’ depends.

‘His answer is wrong.’ The test subject of the experiment hesitates after hearing the words of the instructor, for the implication is that he should pull the next lever. Behind the glass screen he sees the respondent, tied to a chair and barely recovered from the previous electric shock that had him screaming in agony. The agreement was that each incorrect answer to the quiz would be sanctioned with an electric shock of higher voltage. The subject stares at the next lever, the last one remaining with the highest discharge. ‘Lethal shock’, the sign above it warns in red capitals. After a little hesitation, the subject pulls the lever. Follows a sharp screech by the respondent behind the screen. Convulsions and silence. The respondent died right then, as far as the subject knew. Only afterward did the subject get to hear that this was an experiment and the electric discharges were staged. The instructor and the respondent in the chair were actors.

The scene is from the notorious Milgram experiment in 1961 in the then burgeoning field of social psychology which showed common people, you and I, to be capable of extreme acts of obedience in the presence of authority: ‘I did as I was ordered to.’¹ The laboratory could have been a concentration camp. Realizing that many forms of authority were competing in the experiment, including religious commandments for the believer, a later analysis emphasized that participants identified with the goals of science. The adapted tenet stated that individuals conform to the group and quickly pick up its institutions. A recent re-analysis further revealed the importance of context. Participants trusted that the scientists knew what they were doing and so they deferred their responsibility.² The role of context further nuances the thesis on individuals conforming. Yet, were the participants dealing with one context juxtaposed to the next, neither of which would be more ‘ethical’ or less ‘dehumanizing’? The re-analyses place perspectives in a matrix. They keep the (tensorial) question of humanity latent.

In the Milgram experiment, the subjects make abstraction of the wider reality they partake of. They differentiate spheres and equate the scientific sphere they are in with a frame of experience they were not yet acquainted with. All humans partake of the production source ‘knowledge’, but in the lab the production transforms into science. The lab (as far as the subjects know) has no competing frame that in the name of humanity could prevent the killing. You and I may learn from this experiment that an ‘immoral’ act arises from a ‘dehumanizing’ context, but those terms between quotation marks are not objective, so that is not how the experimenters, or the social sciences at large, put it. They abide by the neutral terms of objective representation to contend that morality is contextually determined. A subtle nuance of the claim perhaps but momentous in its consequences because thus they do not privilege one experience of context as more real or true. Basically, the scientist should be so objective as to accept that the guards of Auschwitz had their own morality.

Postmodern thought continued on this track with a position on objectivity so advanced it became cultural relativism. What the theory about simplexes warns about is precisely this reasoning. Staying within a frame as if no competing frames exist is the deal that scientists make to play the game of their particular discipline. Ceteris paribus, ‘other things being equal’, reality is so and so, as if these other things do not keep on influencing the things studied as well as each other. The scientific method has to bar events in order to specialize and establish specific patterns (e.g., chemical versus social effects). The film of events is reconstructed as a succession of snapshots because the flow itself cannot be captured in all its parallel and interacting layers. But should we therefore deny the existence of the flow?

The answer lies in the participants’ reaction after the experiment. They seek an explanation for their actions. What they did was not right, they sense in retrospect. They are aware that the lab or the camp made abstraction of the wider reality. Yes, they were in a scientific laboratory, a separate sphere of exchange with its own frame and rules of conduct, and their conduct was meaningful in that subsystem, but after the experiment they worried about how their feelings had dissociated from their conduct. The dissociation sustained the meaning expected in that sphere. To follow orders is a simplex, a frame concealing alternatives. Its reduction of complexity permits immediate action, the pulling of the lever. The simplex persuades that there is no frame to step out of. Moreover, I argue next, the sphere of the lab was severed from life, the source of production. Hence the subject could kill. I thus question the validity of the experiment, which true to life should be tensorial.

The subjects dehumanized themselves because the sphere they participated in got untied from ‘humanity’, a parallel sphere, the species. By untied I mean that the subjects did not believe to directly tap into and affect the sources of production. The military has its own hierarchy, law and military police to keep order. The soldiers know that outside the barracks other norms apply. They are aware of the plurality of spheres. That very plurality implies a level of reality where all spheres exist. Like the Spanish settler hesitating at the Amazon river and Putin choosing his lies, humans are aware of there being a world of the species parallel to that specific context. This ‘human’ sphere implies frames and a ‘conscience’ ruling out extreme cultural relativism. A species has its rights, as in the universality envisaged by ‘human rights’. What humanity’s frames are has to be intuited and can be conflictual. Humans, educated and non-educated, equally access this source. Spheres vary in their obstruction to access. How?

The figures above systematically combined four meanings in a matrix. A recombination of the meanings resulted every time in an alternative frame, among others shifting from British to American education, from animism to naturalism, from suspicion of paranoia to the mechanism of projection, and back.³ For each set of frames I could have drawn the sphere (which we will pay more attention to later on): the train compartment, a riverbed, an office. Irrespective of what happens in the sphere, it can be said that the frames are in tension. This tense relation expressed by the crossed diagonals is the third dimension constituting a tensor. They ‘stretch’ social space in different directions. The tensor, the relation between frames, does not belong to the sphere like the frames do. The tensor presupposes a parallel system of meaning the speakers can shift to. This sphere comparing frames is the one of humanity that the subjects of the Milgram experiment should have entered and alternated with from the lab, their local sphere, so as not to pull the lever. That, I believe, is what they say when regretting to have virtually killed the respondent. Had they mastered the tensor, they would not have been so readily stuck in the matrix, a certain relation between frames in the lab. That makes the study of tensors societally relevant. In the tensor we exit the matrix.

Think of the company manager’s simplex answer to ecologists denouncing ‘business as usual’. ‘There is no other way’ sustains the status quo. The CEO and politician proclaiming the hegemony of a matrix are contradicted by the tensor, namely by one person enacting the alternative frame. A man living high up in a pine tree to protect the Red Woods in California may eventually only save this tree in his lifetime, but his living proof that there is another way will contradict the simplex as long as he is remembered or the energy of his deed has been transmitted to adepts and things.⁴ Off-grid communities embody exceptions to the rule. The rule and its exceptions are two matrices forming a tensor (like living up in the tree) which itself keeps the sphere of humanity in sight and prevents the cutting apart of that sphere. Similarly, the attempt to comprehend another culture offers an antidote to cultural imperialism by acknowledging diversity at one level and affinity at another level.

Even in its most subjective, postmodern or poetic rendering, a cultural analysis uses a language democratically accessible for future generations. Hence it presumes a sphere common to humanity, populated by tensors. To call to mind the figures in the introduction, a description of frames in tension ‘feels meaning’. It does so in the vertical direction where (horizontally formed) meanings in frames and cultures of humanity interrelate. The tension is released by vertically and horizontally opening up. The tensor extends to the human species but emerges in local spheres, therefore speaks of moralities in the plural as well as relating them to life in the singular (and its various species) to discuss viability.

Superiority of the WEIRD

Take 2. Maybe the experimenters were wrong for another reason than their arrogated objectivity. Why do we prefer to believe that they discovered a universal truth about the blind obedience and cruelty of humans? Does the alternative disconcert too much, that the experimental results characterize an epoch and place? That would mean the results reveal a problematic evolution in society: just as science and education progress, humans become more manipulable. What if the lab we deem appropriate to comprehend ourselves echoes the falling apart of a particular lifeworld? After that, a set of simplexes replaced the multiplex. Subjects disconnected affectively. That would mean Western society is in a state of entropy, and this book is an entropology.

The abstraction of humanity and the ruin of empathy in the setup of the lab could not have come up in just any cultural system. The subjects were a uniform bunch, not at all representing various cultures, so the valuable insight that humans behave similarly in authority contexts was not tested. Rather than revealing something about human nature, the Milgram experiment made a discovery about the subjects’ society in the Global North. For one thing, it demonstrated the extent to which the WEIRD—white educated industrialized rich democratic—test subjects of psychology (mostly first year university students) have been brought up to simplicate populations and let these simplications fester into simplexes.⁵ As former colonial empire or superpower, their societies carry within themselves the separation of humanity. They imagine a culture with a superior mode of production. The marginalization of other modes of production as tapping from inferior sources requires an emotionally costly leap of faith (Remember humanity’s paleolithic bliss). What better place to reproduce the act of reductionism than the laboratory? The experiment pretends to disinter human nature in its bare, unpolished state, while it did not check whether a research population of another culture may have been not that easily manipulated.

Secondly, the experiment looks for our calculable inner program, as if contingent elements of behavior are not part of the human. Should the results not consider the subjects that did not push the button, or the times they didn’t, had they been given the chance? To reply that the experiment reveals how far ‘the’ human can go is to maintain the simplex trope of a human nature to be civilized by culture. Let me repeat the Milgram experiment five times, what makes me human is the diversity in responses. The one time I went too far I will remember most. Does that one act alone reflect my inner nature? The extreme act will strike me as extraordinary, a momentary lapse of self, a glitch of neurons. Experiments try to isolate patterns from spheres ruled by chance as if only patterns would be real. The lab, which is a local sphere, would reveal the universal, say, humanity. Experiments magically presume laws to be out there, of nature on which we as humans have to impose our culture; to ‘master our instincts’.

The experiment’s setup of a one-dimensional rapport between error and sanction does not seem arbitrary either. It sustained a state of self-inflicted violence that the test persons were already imbued with in their society and drew energy from to exclude (‘kill’) those categorized as other or inferior. The command gratified the need to ignore human affinity with the test subject. The experiment was salient for reflecting a local structure of governance in the Global North, which installed a frame of superiority versus inferiority on which competing citizens model themselves. To feel superior, another human category has to be invented that can be labeled and excluded. Consider the subject impressed by the scientists in their white coats. The hierarchy fits within a logic of progress that detaches the sphere of the lab from ‘knowledge’, which is a production source the subjects normally are familiar with and should have some say over. The next two sections investigate the detachment, concluding that Milgram inadvertently illustrated the demonization the belief in superiority requires. To think that the experiment revealed the nature of humans is the simplex we should get rid of.⁶ Human nature is not evil. The separation of humanity into production sources is. How did that simplex come about?

Demonization: A Genealogy of Simplexes

No better way to introduce the society of simplexes than ethnic stereotypes. If successful, stereotypes make listeners conform to a belief that presents subjective motive as rational. The genocide of Jews in World War II would not have been possible without stereotyping. Antisemitism had a long history. It goes back to ancient Greece.⁷ But the passage of time whereby certain beliefs turn into prejudices after generations of socialization does not in itself account for the emotion that leads to mass murder. The demonizing of a group or ‘race’ is not a reflex solely born from bad upbringing. Excluding a category of people from society points to an interest. Emotions get attached to it. The next paragraphs decode the cultural constructions by Western ‘civilization’, how it constrained exchange with other societies and became more ferocious from it through a lie.

The aim of the simplex is to manipulate. That is more than what stereotypes generally do, for these we attribute to lack of self-criticism. Stronger than the effect of indoctrination is the simplex’s gratification of the listener’s improper need to live a lie. The simplex evokes a fundamental emotional issue which it resolves in the same go. The Jewish diaspora’s norms possibly deviating from local norms did not set the group apart from another immigrated group. But their history as a ‘chosen people’ according to the Christians’ Old Testament did. And so did the new businesses, intellectual creativity or art they brought to a town. They performed ancient ceremonies that still exist and Christ himself underwent. The particular blessing that Jewish difference meant for a community, often underlined by spatial concentration of residence and cultural production, could also be perceived as a threat. Especially in a period of widespread crisis did it remind of the host community’s lack, and of the nemesis to the latter’s claim of civilizational (and religious) superiority. The simplex carries unspoken ambivalence because it severs the strong connection with the feeling that gave rise to it. Rumors spread in the community about the threat presented by a certain minority because of its deviance: Jews would lack the community’s morality. This one-layered idea of norm versus deviance conflates four meanings which recombined tell us that the larger community felt threatened because lacked something that the minority possessed and was jealously regarded for.

The tensor in Fig. 1 first translates the simplex (the binarity of norm versus deviance) into terms used in public discourse: ‘the community is threatened’ (first column) and ‘the minority is lacking something’ (second column). The diagonals across the rows subsequently reveal what is at stake in the prevalent discourse by recombining the meanings. The diagonals are read from left above to right below and then from right above to left below: ‘the community is lacking, a minority is threatened’ in tensor₁. Over time the terms evolve: ‘the community is indebted, the source of life (labor) suffers’ in tensor_2.

Fig. 1

The civilizational simplex of demonization (in two steps)

The tensor schematizes the relation between two frames of experience on how communities deal with difference. The public frame conflicts with unspoken feelings of shared humanity, reminiscent of the Spanish settler hesitating about the Amerindian’s inquiries. At the heart of European modernity and its civilizational project resides this conflict. In other words, a simplex was built on the first binarity and thus concealed the initial tension, which only comes into view by relating the two tensors. Simplex₁ in Fig. 1 transforms into simplex₂, a positive distinction formulated from the point of view of the educated: ‘We can civilize the primitive.’ Tensor₂ unscrambles the affective dimension juxtaposing in the first column the community suffering and in the second column those indebted for it. The diagonals reverse the relations between meanings to show the actual tension. The community is indebted to a category of people that suffer. They are the source of life, (religious) status, land or (human) resource. How to live with this indebtedness? The modern European projected indebtedness onto the source by imparting ‘civilization’. The cost of the lie showed in the intense emotion of the projectors. Pogroms. Holocaust. Racism. Social analysis can elicit personal interests and structural inequalities, while cultural analysis contextualizes the beliefs, but neither explains the energy of the inspiration. The analysis needs life-sensing, an existential approach, which says: discriminated are those whose existence one depends on.

My point is that the victim of demonization is not arbitrarily chosen. Key to this insight is the intense emotion involved in the simplex persuading into action, the amazing endeavor of modern civilization to venture overseas, leave no stone unturned to assimilate difference and the unknown, and educate, all with that same urgency. Where does the simplex draw its energy from? From unrest, discomfort (Unbehagen in German), guilt. About its lie: the victim—the ‘simplicated’—of exclusion is the very one on whose existence the ‘simplicator’ depends. Compare the typical identity of the suspect, ‘enemy’ or ‘witch’, in various societies, modern and premodern: the one we have to thank, for our life or superior status, comes to mind first as the cause of evil, especially in case of misfortune, self-doubt or powerlessness.⁸ To not carry the burden of responsibility for these myself, I will identify some (m)other. The archetypal witch in Europe was female, and more exactly an elderly woman mastering the traditional knowledge of medicine that modernity made a clean break with but descended from.⁹ The simplex ‘S/he is a witch’ during the witch craze preceding modernity illustrates the affective dimension in everyday speech about deviants and later about the primitive/uncivilized. The mother that bred life can take life back. The victim and object of simplication, focus of suspicion, weighs on the group as long as the members do not confront their feelings regarding the indebtedness. The mobilized members pretend to speak for the whole community when excluding the suspect of deviance. In the chapter on perpetual war, we heard the South silenced by the North. Why? Because of its ambiguous position as provider of the resources for the North’s privileges. Anti-woke voices drown out what they are really doing: recasting the subject into a source of production.

Apartheid victimized blacks through a segregation from which South African landowners profited. As autochthones and factory workers, blacks were the source of white wealth. A simplex such as ‘race’ or ‘civilization’ excluded them from what they produced. Also colonial regimes developed sophisticated bureaucratic languages administering simplexes.¹⁰ Native Americans and Australian aboriginals living in reserves remind us of the emotional reasons the powerful classes had for segregating the local populations in America and Australia. The culture of Western immigrants was to intervene in the commons. They had a strong tradition of autochthony, which is ownership over land, hence ending free access of humans to that source of production. The white newcomers sensed their indebtedness to the land’s first peoples. It is a structural indebtedness, persisting and irremediable. How to deal with that? Local populations for their part counted on exchange, for instance in the form of a blood pact. That the settler might learn from the animist was a possibility too. Instead, what prevailed in practice was the binarity of self and other. A cultural inversion invaded the territory of the autochthone. Whatever the choice later by the (ex-)colonizer, to have cultures interacting or segregated, or to speak of no cultures at all and only of society at large, the first simplex this later choice envelops is that of norm(al) versus deviance. ‘Another race’, ‘another culture’ and ‘another society’ are subsequent simplications that have not come to terms with the first simplex they built on. Before delving into this simplex, we should untangle the many forming the edifice.

The simplex draws its energy from the tensor it has compressed. The Dalit on the lowest stratum of castes in India are ‘outcasts’, ‘untouchables’, because of the system’s indebtedness to them. Ever since the religious prohibition on beef, they performed menial tasks of animal slaughter and leatherworking that the system considered polluting, ‘disgusting’, but could not do without.¹¹ If we conflate each sphere (a caste) with a frame (duty and status), the discriminatory institution will seem mere tradition, its psychological costs obscured.¹² Castes divide up life’s sources of production into modes of production, simplifying relationships by countering and replacing the multiplex reality of overlapping roles. Whatever the origin may be of the institution, such as formalizing an existing division of tasks, in recent history it has artificially separated the social network into a number of spheres and glued a certain frame to each. The practice sediments a simplication, and may therefore be said to normalize an unsustainable structure.

The tensor schematizing the entanglement of one simplex with another brings out the community’s ambivalent dependence on a minority, the source of riches. Immigrant labor, African, North-American, Dalit, aboriginal and Amerindian autochthones, are constructed into lesser copies of the invader or exploiter, moreover indebted to the latter’s education and development (tensor₂). A key narrative depicts whites sojourning in pristine territory to occupy the land, at high toll because of the explorers succumbing to local viruses and heat; teaching the ‘primitive’ inhabitants and bringing the potential of land and people to fruition.¹³ It is a small step from the distinction between civilized and primitive to that between the developed and the un(der)developed. Each refers to a linear evolution and a relation of superiority/inferiority whereby the first must help. ‘Cooperation’ the relation was called afterward.

Why not just give money to the poor? Why were social cash transfers not the foremost pragmatic response coming to mind in cooperation?¹⁴ Given the exploiter’s idea of ownership, the unacknowledged indebtedness to the autochthone population is sensed as structural. It cannot be remedied through exchange such as a cash transfer, which implies membership of the same (economic) sphere. A frame has to be imposed that redefines the relation with the autochthones. Basically, the choice was made between two extreme options, which correspond to progressive and conservative views. The autochthones have to be either newcomers to the exploiter’s frame of experience, which requires educating them into the frame, or eternal outsiders that could never belong to the exploiter’s sphere. The first (progressive) option surreptitiously places the autochthone in an inferior position, of having to break with a dark past of superstition, before internalizing the modern frame of Enlightenment and human rights through proper education. The newly ‘evolved’ are now forever indebted. The second option, exclusion, safeguards the elitist sphere. A unifying concept of humanity would have been an effective obstacle to exploitation after first contact. Well, alas. Enter ‘race’. Enter the colonizer’s categorization of societies. It meant a bewitchment comparable to the Maori concept of hau, a curse haunting a community member unable to return a favor. Denied membership into the new community, the haunted may escape the curse but are treated as innocent and inferior (Lévi-Strauss’s encompassing ‘meaning system’ combatted that). An alternative to this segregation is to ‘develop’ the giver, who thanks to the interiorized frame can eventually participate in the sphere. True, the progressive scholars considered the givers as members of their community. Yet, were they interested in the givers’ frames to transform European culture? The simplex of normal/deviant was taken for granted. On top of it grew the belief in the superiority of Western civilization. Cultural relativism prevented the exchange.

The simplication that other societies are underdeveloped, rather than that their cultures have logics to learn from, is possible thanks to the simplex that each sphere, initially named ‘tribe’, coincides with a separate source of production. This source has been called a culture. By this is not meant a cultural system, as in a set of reference frames, ideas and practices that members of a society could adhere to in different degrees and combinations. No, each ‘culture’ supposedly stands for a source of production, with its own standard of life. The potential for legitimation is clear. Without common human standards, the colonized, later named the Global South, can be exploited. Child labor, corporal punishment and weekend work are treated as locally common cultural features, which refer back to the ‘primitive’ source of production. The ‘civilized’ have their own source based on democratic rights. Other cultures should be approached with pluralism and with charity in the form of humanitarian aid, as Fassin demonstrates for Médicins Sans Frontières.¹⁵ The diagonals in Fig. 2 rewrite the dominant discourse of the columns, which says that Western society is pluralist, while ‘other cultures’ are distinct sources of production with their own rights and frames of experience. The diagonals in tensor₃ expose the separation inflicted on production sources: ‘the community has rights, the production sources get pluralism (segregation) and charity’. The equation of each sphere with a source and a frame sums up the essentialist take on cultures. Scholars that dislike the culture concept should ask themselves if they are not applying the flawed simplex₃, which covers up the exploitative relation. The figure suggests that replacing the simplex ‘race’ by ‘culture’, and later culture by ‘society’, does not alter the problematic simplication which tensor₃ unravels.

Fig. 2

Simplex, matrix and tensor of cultural essentialism (in three steps)

A category of humans is entitled to wealth and separated from those that are the source of wealth. Otherness is bestowed on the latter via apartheid, ‘race’, poverty. A simplex holds destructive energy by hiding this major tension. The best tactic to contain it is by building on another simplex. Like a matryoshka doll, the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is inserted within a similar looking distinction between normal and deviant. With the separation of people in a reserve or through a slur, or by ‘educating’ them, the violence spirals on. As generations pass, the dominant group’s history of trouble, tribulation and trauma about crisis and crime is grafted on the deviant (who ‘occupies’ the simplicators’ phantasy, see cathexis in psychology). The initial injustice inflicted on the victim has doubled.

Now comes the ploy. The injustice disappears from view if the inflictor hides the relation with the separated. The inflictor manages to forget the simplication by presenting cultures as so separate that their sources of production differ too, despite their joint participation in the planetary economy. Their source of riches would be inferior, stagnant or just different. Academics have been complicit in spreading the idea that developed economies long ago took the right course, the one with a future. That is how I explain the blatant absence of academically organized cultural exchange (versus consumerism) between (Global) North and (Global) South. The absence exists on both sides, for opposite reasons. Openness to oriental philosophy, Yoga and Buddhism, framed mostly as a marginal activity ‘after hours’, does not qualify as learning. And from the South, mainly intellectuals trained in the academic idiom participate in the dialogue. Critical scholars of similar education from universities across the planet are brought together, but no genuine attempt is made at deriving experiential frames from African communities to bring these logics of often little-educated friends and kin into dialogue. Yet, this very dynamic takes place spontaneously worldwide between individuals on market squares, in art venues, schoolyards, classrooms, street corners, restaurants, bars, malls, social media and other platforms. The biggest favor anthropology can do the world is not to antagonize the people with more ethics but to show the intuitions the collective has developed. Part II is the search for that, ‘collective reason’. What wisdom do the people hold?