At 10:26 PM 04/05/04 -0500, ulia Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
snip
At the risk of drawing a lot of fire from all quarters:
It occurred to me that perhaps the thing to do is to identify all the people who participated in the torture-for-amusement, and turn them over to the Iraqi people.
Some sort of justice (or at least poetic justice) would be served, and it would be a hell of a deterrent against anyone else doing anything remotely like it for a good, long time.
As *rational* as your suggestion is, I doubt it would prevent this kind of abuse. Understanding where it comes from *might* help people figure out ways to prevent it.
Brutality of this sort is hardly a new problem, one could say it is a *feature* of human behavior. It comes out in other places, like the near impossibility of stamping out hazing in college.
In fact, I make a claim that the punisher side of hazing and the brutality that went on in that Iraq prison are manifestations of the same underlying conditionally turned on psychological mechanism. I don't have a name for it, but it is the counterpart to capture-bonding also known as Stockholm Syndrome.
I have written a lot about capture-bonding, of which Elizabeth Smart and Patty Hearst are both examples. Other examples of the same psychological trait being expressed are battered wife syndrome, army basic training, and even sex practices like B&D.
In real short form, for millions of years tribes captured people (mostly women) from other tribes. Those who had the psychological trait to reorient to their captors often became ancestors, the ones who didn't became breakfast. A million years of this kind of live or die filter makes the trait almost as much of an instinct as walking.
A longer version of this argument is part of the article here: http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html
If humans respond to capture and abuse by bonding, then the trait to abuse captives is likely to have also been selected. The argument isn't as obvious as the survival link with capture-bonding. But it figures that in a world where 10% of an average tribe's females were captured, those who had the genes for an "instinct" for the brutal behavior needed to capture and turn on the capture-bonding trait in the captives left more descendents than those without it.
And, like the capture-bonding trait, over a long enough time the trait to induce capture-bonding would become nearly universal. I.e., it would be triggered in response to the conditions needed to turn it on. I suspect that's the evolutionary origin of the trait expressed by the "guards" in Zimbardo's famous Stanford prison experiment. http://www.prisonexp.org/ The trait to be brutal gets automatically switched on by the mere presence of captives.
I am open to a name for the "trait to induce capture-bonding" (Or we could use the acronym TTICB.)
Of course prisons didn't exist in tribal times. A captive escaped, became part of the tribe or was killed. So in the stone age a brief brutality episode (like the few days to a week duration of hazing) would be followed by integrating the captive into a tribe. Prisons keep the TTICB switched on, but frustrated. Very "unnatural," like hazing that is not permitted to let up on the targets.
These conditionally switched on mechanisms (like the mechanism for inducing wars I posted about a few weeks ago) operate below the thinking or rational level. Indeed, the rational level is likely to make up grotesque justifications for the brutal behavior induced by switched on lower level psychological mechanisms. So while it might help, the prospect of punishment isn't likely to greatly deter brutality against prisoners
Back to the question of how to prevent this sort of abuse. Even the most brutal would be reluctant to do it on camera. Perhaps as David Brin has suggested in "The Transparent Society" guards and prisoners should both be wearing web cameras. At least if they were being recorded all the time and watched live some of the time these abuses would not go on for most of a year before being exposed.
Keith
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