Nazi? You?

Ever thought about how you would have reacted had you lived in Nazi Germany? Ronald Bailey reflects on a famous experiment that meant to discover whether it could happen here, in America. His conclusion is instructive:

However, the arc of American history has been toward correcting old evils and the commissioning of fewer atrocities over time. Why? Because our institutions of freedom have maintained and expanded the norms that limit the powers wielded by authorities.

For example, a free press is able to criticize practices like slavery and racial discrimination and help establish new norms. If Bill and Joanne down the street send their kids Joe and Kathy to an ethnically mixed school, in other words, it must be OK. In addition, American governmental powers are fragmented and in competition with one another. As another Milgram experiment showed, if two experimenters disagreed about continuing the experiment, the majority of participants sided with the one who argued for stopping it. In other words, when people could refer to an authority figure who agreed with their moral views, they were much more likely to act on them. Similarly, dividing up governmental power increases the chances that some authorities will act ethically and thus inspire people to act on the dictates of their consciences.

Milgram didn't really explore why it was that Germans created death camps while Americans did not. The answer is liberty. In 1974, Milgram more generously noted, "It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." Americans have not escaped the natural human tendency to defer to authority. Instead, we have had the good fortune to find ourselves in the situation where our social institutions have traditionally limited what authorities can get away with. The institutions of liberty are what enable people to act on what Lincoln called, "the better angels of our nature."

In other words, American culture, society and government are structured in ways that discourage the kind of thing that led to Nazi totalitarianism. The capacity to be a Nazi resides within each of us, but there are fundamental aspects of our culture that keep these potentialities in check. The lesson to draw from this, I think, is that culture and culture-making institutions matter. A lot. This is a point similar to what Sam Huntington wrote about how these American institutions evolved out of an Anglo-Protestant culture, and we would be foolish to give up on that culture, even as Anglo-Protestants are in relative decline.