Hannah Arendt is widely praised and its Jerusalem book is often quoted all around the world, yet this portrayal of a "mailman" is more than dubious. The historian Hermann Langbein, who survived Auschwitz and later wrote the authoritative "Men and women at Auschwitz", showed that her ideas didn't match the facts. Recently, the first integral study of Eichmann's papers completely broke this "mailman" picture: he was a typical intellectual, who read philosophy books and even poetry, and liked writing. This "personality of a mailman" is a nonsense, unless writing long commentaries of Hegel's philosophy is "banal" for any "mailman".
Taking the Nazis as a whole is another big mistake. Some were sorry, some tried to mitigate the violence, at different levels. Primo Levi (also very critical of Arendt) remembered a young woman that became a guardian: at first she was horrified, she couldn't stand the violence and felt ill the first days, she tried to resign. A few weeks later, she was accustomed and hit prisoners. It's a pity his "grey zone" concept is despised by our Manichean world.
Apart from this, I totally agree with the denial aspect. The Standford experiment was very probably a trauma for this former guard, and his denegating discourse seems strongly biased by this. His main claims are:
- This experiment is a fraud, it claims to prove that we, the guards, became "evil" (his term), but that's wrong.
- The experiment was biased because the main experimenter made some important decisions along the way.
- We, the guards, did not loose our humanity, the material settings were inhumane and made us behave like this. For instance, we were sleep deprived.
- If a guard became violent, it's not because he was violent, it's because he was an amateur actor that had endorsed a violent role just for fun.
- The experiment author manipulated the students into saying things they didn't thought, and he kept their identities secret to give him "more control of the narrative".
Sure, this experiment is morally questionable and it's hard to build strong conclusions upon it, but if it was a fraud, why wasn't it debunked long ago? Why didn't most of the students protest they were wronged? Why caricature it with notions of good/evil? And would actors play a "violent cop" role for many days just on an impulse, with graduating violence? And, most of all: if an inhumane setting made them behave with less empathy, less humanity, isn't that a very interesting experimental result?
The Stanford Prison Experiment was debunked long ago. It's mostly taught today as a cautionary tale of how not to do psychological research, and as a case study in research ethics demonstrating why we have IBR's.
Taking the Nazis as a whole is another big mistake. Some were sorry, some tried to mitigate the violence, at different levels. Primo Levi (also very critical of Arendt) remembered a young woman that became a guardian: at first she was horrified, she couldn't stand the violence and felt ill the first days, she tried to resign. A few weeks later, she was accustomed and hit prisoners. It's a pity his "grey zone" concept is despised by our Manichean world.
Apart from this, I totally agree with the denial aspect. The Standford experiment was very probably a trauma for this former guard, and his denegating discourse seems strongly biased by this. His main claims are:
- This experiment is a fraud, it claims to prove that we, the guards, became "evil" (his term), but that's wrong. - The experiment was biased because the main experimenter made some important decisions along the way. - We, the guards, did not loose our humanity, the material settings were inhumane and made us behave like this. For instance, we were sleep deprived. - If a guard became violent, it's not because he was violent, it's because he was an amateur actor that had endorsed a violent role just for fun. - The experiment author manipulated the students into saying things they didn't thought, and he kept their identities secret to give him "more control of the narrative".
Sure, this experiment is morally questionable and it's hard to build strong conclusions upon it, but if it was a fraud, why wasn't it debunked long ago? Why didn't most of the students protest they were wronged? Why caricature it with notions of good/evil? And would actors play a "violent cop" role for many days just on an impulse, with graduating violence? And, most of all: if an inhumane setting made them behave with less empathy, less humanity, isn't that a very interesting experimental result?