About 40 years ago, a bunch of longhaired, weed-smoking college kids showed up at Stanford University for a game of make believe. Some planned to be prisoners and some hoped to be guards, but they wouldn't know which role to assume until they had been randomly divided into seemingly dichotomous groups.
The famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Stanford Prison Experiment, designed and conducted by the world famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo, has a special and creepy place in America's psyche. As an alumnus of Stanford, the story of those dark two weeks was told over and over when I arrived as an undergraduate in the mid 1980's. The events were viewed as part cautionary tale, part campfire story. We all tried to get out idealistic minds around the inescapable conclusion that Walt Kelly's Pogo had told our parents back in the 1950's. "We have met the enemy and he is us." By the time I learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment more formally, it had been pedagogically tied to the equally famous Milgram Experiments at Yale University.
I remember listening to the findings of these social inquiries and thinking first of Lord of the Flies. Since then I've seen the same themes replayed in countless books, a zillion movies and, of course and unfortunately, the evening news. Go watch District 9 and ask yourself if we'll ever really learn. How quickly we descend! Such an effortless slide...
So, it was with great interest and not a little trepidation that I read the article in this summer's Stanford Alumni Magazine in which participants in the Stanford experiment, now 40 years older, are interviewed and debriefed yet one more time. There's the kid who found himself a "guard" and quickly fancied himself the warden in Cool Hand Luke; he found that he had a surprisingly easy knack for unrecognized sadism, deftly placing paper bags on "prisoner's" heads and forcing them to excrete into buckets. There's the passive resistance that the "prisoners" themselves falteringly attempted but inevitably failed. Perhaps most chilling, there is the real "warden", Professor Zimbardo himself, recalling how he frighteningly prowled the basement of his own department, Stanford's newly formed "jail", with his hands clasped behind his back, a parody of Franco and Stalin and countless other despots and tyrants. Anyone struck by the barbarism of Abu Ghraib would do well to review the Prison Experiment at Stanford. Dystopia, it seems, stems not from an active desire to do evil; it is more a passively slippery willingness to allow the clearly horrific to morph into something boring and normal. Hannah Arendt called this The Banality of Evil in her study of the Holocaust. As one of the "guard" participants says in the Stanford Magazine piece, he realizes in retrospect that he was following some kind of internal guideline, a script that he didn't even know that he knew so well
"How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take?" he recalls asking himself. He goes on to note that no one stopped him; indeed, that the other guards followed suit with increasing brutality.
Remember that these were good kids! These were, for the most part, peace-loving, war hating hippies, and it took only a tincture of permission to help them along the dim path of rank dehumanization. And less we climb up onto our high horses and declare that it wouldn't be we who would follow suit, recall that both Milgram and Zimbardo showed us that it is very, very hard to predict who among us can be monstrous.
I have thought about these issues a lot - they're inescapably compelling existential quandaries - but it is on my mind now even more as I prepare for a panel at Comic-Con in which I discuss with other authors the nature of apocalyptic tales. I've been nervous about what I might say on this panel; what business do I have describing the end of the world? True, the novel I wrote is in fact apocalyptic, but writing about the loss of industrial infrastructure, the romanticization even of the survivalist ethos - that's nothing new. We love that stuff and we find ourselves watching Mad Max and Resident Evil with repetitive gleeful abandon.
So why am I nervous? The other authors are nice folks, right? We're writing and discussing a well-loved trope. Why do I feel, well, guilty, I guess, in my indulgence of this narrative arc?
And then the Stanford Magazine arrived and I reviewed the prison experiment and I admit that I felt a sort of frightening sense of understanding. The story I wrote came a bit too easily - the dehumanization of Man flew off of my pen. Like Harry Potter, like all of us, we each must endure our internalized Voldermorts.
My novel, a zombie novel, features things that were once human but that have been actively dehumanized because the people around them said so. The things they're fighting are zombies, sure, but so is everyone else in the book - they just haven't suffered the full progression of the disease. So while those who have not yet turned dissect and butcher and study those who have, what happens to the characters is uncomfortably familiar. Alone, on the island where my novel takes place, away from the cultural sanctioning to cut open something alive and sentient, the protagonists feel their own humanity bouncing around in the raw emotional radioactive mist. Are they the guards or are they the prisoners? Are they doing right or are they doing wrong? And is there, in the end, really a difference?
