I couldn’t imagine my gentle friend ‘torturing’ someone. But he did — or at least he thought he did, thanks to Stanley Milgram
Herb Winer, who was my fellow synagogue congregant, friend and mentor in my middle years, died a few weeks ago in New Haven, Conn., at the ripe old age of 98.
But he did — or thought he did — as a participant in the Stanley Milgram Experiment, an infamous behavioural study on obedience that threatened to dissolve Americans’ confidence in the existence of good and evil.
Baffled and upset by the instructor’s dispassion, Herb felt greatly conflicted. He wanted to stop, but also, “I wanted to be obedient.” It was after all an academic study, something he considered sacrosanct. He did stop, and relatively early, but he took no pride in it, because he couldn’t remember the voltage he stopped at. He told Granta, “if it was over 150 volts I would be very, very ashamed , and yet it might be.
The experiment was critiqued by Milgram’s colleagues for ethical and methodological reasons, but it had a huge impact on the general public, and in large part because of the timing. The trial in Jerusalem of Nazi eminence Adolf Eichmann, seized by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires, began in 1961, for the first time exposing the Holocaust — and Eichmann’s central role in its mechanics — in all its gruesome detail.
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