Torture and education.

[Jim__]

When I was young and I went to a movie about WWII, and they showed prisoners being tortured, I wondered how they found the people to do the torturing. I certainly didn't believe that you could get the average American to torture people. Yet, if Abu Ghraib and other recent events teach us anything, it is that average Americans will torture people when they are so instructed by authority figures.

This essay, (https://intranet.cs.aau.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Education/F09/BAIT4_Education_after_Auschwitz.pdf) "Education after Auschwitz" written by Theodore Adorno (1966) speaks to the issue of where torturers come from, and how education can help to prevent the growth of potential torturers in future generations. He speaks of it from a psychological perspective because he believes people can more easily address it from this perspective than from a societal perspective. One of his main recommendations is that education must encourage autonomy, independent thinking. Something we (the US) are definitely not encouraging in our current educational system.

A brief excerpt from his essay:

When I speak of education after Auschwitz, then, I mean two areas: first children’s
education, especially in early childhood; then general enlightenment that provides an
intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be
possible, a climate, therefore, in which the motives that led to the horror would become
relatively conscious. Naturally, I cannot presume to sketch out the plan of such an
education even in rough outline. Yet I would like at least to indicate some of its nerve
centers. Often, for instance, in America, the characteristic German trust in authority
has been made responsible for National Socialism and even for Auschwitz. I consider
this explanation too superficial, although here, as in many other European countries
authoritarian behavior and blind authority persist much more tenaciously than one
would gladly admit under the conditions of a formal democracy. Rather, one must
accept that fascism and the terror it caused are connected with the fact that the old
established authorities of the Kaiserreich decayed and were toppled, while the people
psychologically were not yet ready for self-determination. They proved to be unequal
to the freedom that fell into their laps. For this reason the authoritarian structures
then adopted that destructive and, if I may put it so, insane dimension they did not
have earlier, or at any rate had not revealed. If one considers how visits of potentates
who no longer have any real political function induce outbreaks of ecstasy in entire
populations, then one has good reason to suspect that the authoritarian potential even
now is much stronger than one thinks. I wish, however, to emphasize especially that
the recurrence or non-recurrence of fascism in its decisive aspect is not a question
of psychology, but of society. I speak so much of the psychological only because the
other, more essential aspects lie so far out of reach of the influence of education, if not
of the intervention of individuals altogether.

...

However, there should arise no misunderstanding that the archaic tendency toward
violence is also found in urban centers, especially in the larger ones. Regressive
tendencies, that is, people with repressed sadistic traits, are produced everywhere today
by the global evolution of society. Here I’d like to recall the twisted and pathological
relation to the body that Horkheimer and I described in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.5
Everywhere where it is mutilated, consciousness is reflected back upon the body and
the sphere of the corporeal in an unfree form that tends toward violence. One need
only observe how, with a certain type of uneducated person, his language—above all
when he feels faulted or reproached—becomes threatening, as if the linguistic gestures
bespoke a physical violence barely kept under control. Here one must surely also
study the role of sport, which has been insufficiently investigated by a critical social
psychology. Sport is ambiguous. On the one hand, it can have an anti-barbaric and
anti-sadistic effect by means of fair play, a spirit of chivalry, and consideration for
the weak. On the other hand, in many of its varieties and practices it can promote
aggression, brutality, and sadism, above all in people who do not expose themselves
to the exertion and discipline required by sports but instead merely watch: that is,
those who regularly shout from the sidelines. Such an ambiguity should be analyzed
systematically. To the extent that education can exert an influence, the results should
be applied to the life of sport.

...

As I said, those people are cold in a specific way. Surely a few words about coldness
in general are permitted. If coldness were not a fundamental trait of anthropology, that
is, the constitution of people as they in fact exist in our society, if people were not profoundly
indifferent toward whatever happens to everyone else except for a few to whom
they are closely bound and, if possible, by tangible interests, then Auschwitz would not
have been possible, people would not have accepted it. Society in its present form—
and no doubt as it has been for centuries already—is based not, as was ideologically
assumed since Aristotle, on appeal, on attraction, but rather on the pursuit of one’s
own interests against the interests of everyone else.15 This has settled into the character
of people to their innermost center. What contradicts my observation, the herd
drive of the so-called lonely crowd ,16 is a reaction to this process,
a banding together of people completely cold who cannot endure their own coldness
and yet cannot change it. Every person today, without exception, feels too little loved,
because every person cannot love enough. The inability to identify with others was
unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something
like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent
people. What is called fellow traveling was primarily business interest: one pursues
one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk
too much. That is a general law of the status quo. The silence under the terror was
only its consequence.17 The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor,
was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very
few people reacted. The torturers know this, and they put it to the test ever anew.

...

All political instruction finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz
should never happen again. This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly,
without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do
this education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the
societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms. One must
submit to critical treatment—to provide just one model—such a respectable concept as
that of “reason of state”; in placing the right of the state over that of its members, the
horror is potentially already posited.