Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ISSJ 185 r UNESCO 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DK, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Taguba cited egregious lack of military discipline. There was intense pressure to obtain
information from a population of prisoners that
was not capable of providing the desired
information. Soldiers were not trained in or
familiar with the Geneva Conventions. Publicly,
the US military upheld the Geneva Conventions
while various attorneys for the White House
opined that the Geneva Conventions did not
wholly apply to the treatment of prisoners.
General Taguba found poor paperwork and
reporting procedures, along with a host of other
facts that suggest extreme social chaos. For
example, the supply ofcer at Abu Ghraib,
Major David DiNenna, testied that he begged
the Army for adequate water, food, toilets, light
bulbs and generators and that his pleas fell on
deaf ears. He testied in open court that he felt
abandoned by the Army at Abu Ghraib
(Mestrovic 2007, p.107). The documentation
for all these facts is immense and consistent (see
Danner 2004, Falk et al. 2006, Hersh 2004,
Karpinski 2005, Strasser 2004, among many
other books on Abu Ghraib, as well as two lm
documentaries, Rory Kennedys Ghosts of
Abu Ghraib and Errol Morriss Standard
Operating Procedure).
The characterisation of all these and other
facts as anomic is practically non-existent in the
literature. More important, the responsibility
for the egregious disorganisation at Abu Ghraib
was not pursued at the trials, in public discourse
or scholarship even though a handful of soldiers
were sent to prison for specic acts of abuse.
Who was responsible for the lack of toilets,
water, light bulbs, generators and bullets at Abu
Ghraib? Who was responsible for the poisoned
social climate, in the words of General Fay, at
Abu Ghraib, which in turn set the stage for the
subsequent abuse? Despite the existence of the
doctrine of command responsibility, which
holds that military commanders are accountable
via omission or commission for the behaviour of
the subordinates, most of Major DiNennas
superiors in the chain of command were
promoted, not punished. Durkheim (1893) held
that as society progresses, the law changes in its
emphasis from retribution to restitution. But
neither retribution nor restitution characterise
the Armys or US societys response to the
failure to adequately supply, train, or prepare its
soldiers.
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Note the immediate relevance of Durkheims theory to the fact that Afghan and Iraqi
leaders respond immediately and negatively to
the collateral damage, that is, the deaths of
women, children and livestock that sometimes
occur when coalition forces target a specic
person (for one example out of many, see Perlez
2008). Modern societies hold that individuals
are solely responsible for their actions. However,
the ne point of this discussion is that Fauconnet
and Durkheim concluded that the traditional approach never disappears entirely from
collective consciousness and is preferable to
individualistic, subjective, depictions of
responsibility in modern law. Cotterrell quotes
Fauconnet: What is taken to be perfect
responsibility is responsibility weakened and
reduced to vanishing point (Cotterrell 1999,
p.107). The issue is extremely complex: modern
societies seek to minimise collateral damage, but
international law holds that the entire chain of
command, not the particular soldier who killed
innocents, is responsible. Our central point is
that Fauconnet and Durkheim offer a vastly
different understanding of what should have
been the just and responsible reaction to the
disorganisation as well as the abuse at Abu
Ghraib compared to the actual response. We
shall argue that Durkheims grand theory leads
one to regard the exclusive punishment of a
handful of soldiers for the evils at Abu Ghraib as
a form of scapegoating. In Durkheims words,
We have remained true to the principle of the
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notion of normlessness, sociologists and criminologists have been relatively silent on the many
instances of anomic war crimes that have
occurred since Durkheim died in the year 1917,
including but not limited to the Holocaust and
genocide in Russia, Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as
well as ethnic cleansing or war crimes in
Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and elsewhere
(see Gutman and Rieff 1999). In summary, the
concept of normlessness has become a sort of
cottage industry in explaining domestic crime in
the USA, but is seemingly irrelevant in explaining war crimes throughout the world over the
course of a century of discourse on abuse in war
time.
The prosecutor at the court martials
revealed in open court that all of the abused
prisoners were not a threat to US citizens and
had no information to give them (Mestrovic
2007, p.11). In fact, it is highly irrational, chaotic
and deranged to use torture for the sake of
obtaining information on prisoners who had no
information to give. Even if the soldiers who
abused the prisoners did not always know that
their victims did not have information to give
them, the more important Durkheimian point is
that there were no established social mechanisms
in place for ascertaining this important fact (for
example, there was no screening, no judicial
review boards, no assumption that prisoners
were innocent until proven guilty, no implementation of the Geneva Conventions on processing
and treating prisoners and so on). All this
uncertainty, unpredictability, social chaos and
capriciousness seem to support Durkheims
characterisation of anomie as derangement
more than normlessness.
What does normlessness really mean?
Parsons, Merton and other functionalists never
dene the term. From the perspective used here,
that Durkheims understanding of anomie as
derangement must lead to widespread yet
unnecessary suffering, it is interesting that the
functionalist understanding of normlessness
is emotionally neutral and does not imply
suffering. Sociologists who have followed Mertons lead seem to believe that normlessness will
lead to crime and deviance, but not suffering.
The more important point, from Durkheims
perspective, is that the violence produced by
anomie goes far beyond crime and includes
many forms of torment, agitation, sorrow and
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Anomie in a post-emotional
society
Thus far, we have highlighted the discrepancies
among perceptions of the abuse at Abu Ghraib
from Durkheimian, functionalist and conventional points of view. How can these discrepancies be reconciled? From our perspective, the
postmodern reply that social life consists of a sea
of circulating ctions (Baudrillard 1986) that
can be redened any way that one chooses is not
satisfactory. In his book Pragmatism and sociology Durkheim ([1950] 1983) took up the
Nietzschean perspective, which has become the
intellectual bedrock for much of postmodern
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Note that, like Durkheim, Riesman contextualises anomie depending upon societys stage of
development: anomie will differ in traditional,
inner-directed and other-directed societies; even
if all types of anomie are forms of derangement.
And he concludes: Taken all together, the
anomics ranging from overt outlaws to
catatonic types who lack even the spark for
living, let alone for rebellion constitute a
sizable number in America (p. 245). Perhaps
the numbers of anomics and of the helpless,
post-emotional type of anomics have increased
still further since Riesman wrote these words in
1950.
Consider, as an illustration, one of the most
iconic photographs from Abu Ghraib, that of a
prisoner who was named Gilligan by the
American soldiers and who is shown standing
on a box, hooded, waiting to be electrocuted.
One of the most eerie moments of the court
martials at Fort Hood, Texas, was the testimony
by several soldiers that Gilligan was friendly and
liked the soldiers, and that they liked him too.
(Riesman emphasises that other-directed society
favours the veneer of events being nice and
falsely agreeable to the peer group). This
photograph of what appears to be old-fashioned
torture was redescribed in the courtroom as a
friendly incident in which soldiers were doing
their job trying to keep Gilligan awake and that
he understood this so that he laughed and joked
with them during the torture. The defence
attorney insisted that Gilligan and the soldiers
who tortured him were friends. It did not appear
to us that the witnesses who testied to this effect
were self-consciously lying. This iconic incident
was redescribed as a sort of nice, post-emotional
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from prosecution in exchange for their testimony against the soldiers who were literally
chosen for conviction. Several witnesses testied
in open court that the Army threatened to
charge them with crimes that were levelled at the
rotten apples unless they agreed to testify against
them. Durkheim and Fauconnet could not have
foreseen the increasingly standard practice of
forcing testimony by intimidating and threatening witnesses with prosecution. Immunity from
prosecution is also immunity from punishment.
More important, it creates a rehearsed, staged
and what we call post-emotional atmosphere to
what used to be described in more spontaneous
terms as the quest for justice.
Post-emotionalism in the
sociology of knowledge used
to comprehend the anomic
abuse at Abu Ghraib
The conceptual tools for comprehending the
anomic evils at Abu Ghraib have also become
post-emotional. We have already discussed
the functionalist misunderstanding of anomie,
which has resulted in the seeming irrelevance
of normlessness to issues and sites pertaining
to war crimes. However, even Philip Zimbardos
(2007) famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971, has been gutted of
emotional impact. It purports to apply a
controversial lesson from the Second World
War that ordinary people commit terrible
acts because of obedience to authority to a
situation that does not seem connected to
circumstances from Germany in the Second
World War. Is the connection valid? We cannot
repeat often enough that the testimony revealed
an absence of authority at Abu Ghraib and
that the high-ranking ofcers who passively
allowed the abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere implicitly or explicitly escaped
culpability completely, despite the existence of
command responsibility. All the blame has been
shifted to the low-ranking soldiers who committed some of the abuse, which is a form of
scapegoating.
The major post-emotional component to
Zimbardos (2007) efforts to comprehend the
abuse at Abu Ghraib in terms of his obedience to
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accused the Bush Administration of a deliberate strategy to misrepresent 9/11 to sell a war
against a country that had nothing to do with
9/11 (Obama08 2007).
Other important differences between
Zimbardos post-emotional application of his
Stanford experiment to Abu Ghraib and a
Durkheimian perspective include the following:
Zimbardos students knew that they were
relatively safe on the campus of a major
university whereas soldiers at Abu Ghraib
worked in a war zone in which they were
mortared regularly and experienced daily fear
that they might not survive the night. Zimbardo
structured his experiment as a post-emotional
response to the Second World War whereas the
entire war in Iraq was a post-emotional response
to 9/11. In Durkheimian terms, the emotional
desire for retribution should have been aimed at
bin Laden but was instead displaced onto Iraq
and Iraqis became scapegoats for the pain and
suffering experienced by Americans. The association of Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaida was
false. To repeat, Barack Obama made his case to
the American people 8 years into the War on
Terror that American resources and prestige
were drained by the war in Iraq instead of
pursuing bin Laden. In Durkheimian language,
President-elect Obama nally made the emotional connection between offence and punishment that the Bush Administration had
obscured post-emotionally by punishing the
wrong country.
Zimbardo emphasises that his students
knew that they could have walked out of the
experiment at any time, whereas soldiers in the
US Army could not walk out an abusive
situation without risking charges of mutiny
and desertion. Zimbardo created a deranged
situation in which he made use of the real Palo
Alto Police Department to arrest students who
were picked to act like prisoners, which must
have disoriented and shocked the students.
Zimbardo deceived the students along the lines
of Riesmans aforementioned fake sincerity. The
role of psychologists and psychiatrists in torture
is a topic of recent controversy in the USA and
these professions have played similar, problematic roles in the former Soviet Union (for a
sampling of the complexity of this controversy,
see Stanley Fishs article in The New York Times
as well as the responses by bloggers [Fish 2008]).
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Post-emotional responsibility
at Abu Ghraib and in
American society at large
As noted from the outset, Durkheim assumed
that there were normal and healthy forms of
obedience to authority by soldiers, as well as for
the phenomenon of punishment. To repeat,
society expects soldiers to obey authority, but
it also expects authority to reect societys
standards of justice. It is not obedience to
authority per se that is the culprit but anomic
obedience to anomic authority, by which we
mean deranged normative standards that do not
make sense to the collective conscience. Similarly, Durkheim ([1893] 1984, pp.4452) insisted
that as societies become modern, punishment
becomes less harsh, less an expression of
retribution and more an expression of restitution. Nevertheless, and as we noted at the outset,
Durkheim believed that the traditional element
of emotional retribution is never entirely eliminated in modern societies, even if it may be
attenuated:
Thus punishment has remained for us what it was for our
predecessors. It is still an act of vengeance, since it is an
expiation. What we are avenging and what the criminal is
expiating, is the outrage to morality (Durkheim [1893]
1984, p.47).
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Conclusions
This thumbnail sketch survey of the change in
meanings of anomie from Durkheims era to the
present has uncovered many areas for future
investigation and research, including issues in the
sociology of knowledge. Durkheim was a grand
theorist whose concept of anomie captured
universal structures in society that also go by
the names derangement and sin. In contrast to
Durkheim and due to a series of rebellions against
grand theory that go by names such as postmodernism and Mertons middle-range theories,
the concept of anomie has been stripped of its
original meanings as well as connotations. The
misunderstanding of anomie as normlessness has
been literally useless in understanding the many
instances of war crimes that have occurred since
Durkheims era, yet it continues to be quoted in
textbooks and treatises.
The vacuum in meaning has been lled by
concepts that we call post-emotional: instead of
seeking universal concepts, scholars apply concepts from a particular era and context to a
situation in another era out of context. This
post-emotional tendency has been illustrated
with regard to Zimbardo, who misapplies the
idea of obedience to authority taken from a
Second World War Nazi context to the abuse at
Abu Ghraib. In addition, the abuse at Abu
Ghraib was itself a post-emotional misplacement and displacement of a host of emotional
reactions from 9/11 and other sites of collective
effervescence that resulted in out-of-context
aggression. We conclude that Durkheims un-
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majority public opinion in the USA. Presidentelect Obama seemed to speak for the majority
when he promised: As President, I will close
Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions
Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions
(Obama08 2007). From Durkheims point of
view, all these and other changes in public
opinion signalled the possibility that a long
period of anomie may be healed. There may be a
way out of post-emotional society. We remind
the reader that in Durkheims views, political
leaders such as Bush and Obama reect the
collective consciousness more than they actually
lead it.
Finally, a Durkheimian approach to the
current state of affairs regarding Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo and other sites of abuse calls for a
collective soul-searching and healthy debate
similar to what ensued in France following the
painful ordeal of the Dreyfus Affair. Along with
Emile Zola and others, Durkheim became
personally involved in this case, which symbolised very much more than the unjust scapegoating of one Jewish ofcer. Ultimately, it exposed
the widespread anti-Semitism in France. Similarly, a collective soul-searching and public
debate concerning the responsibility for the
abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is needed
in the USA. This is because, as we stated at the
outset, Durkheims reply to the question, Who
was responsible for the abuse? is all of us.
Notes
1. For example, Durkheim
([1897] 1951, p.43) writes: The
soldier facing certain death to save
his regiment does not wish to die
and yet is he not as much the
author of his own death as the
manufacturer or merchant who
kills himself to avoid bankruptcy?
This holds true for the martyr
dying for his faith, the mother
sacricing herself for her child
etc.. On p. 45 he adds: Thus the
scholar who dies from excessive
devotion to study is currently and
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