sociology 9 sociology exploring the architecture of everyday life readings 9 david m. newman DePauw University jodi o’brien Seattle University FOR INFORMATION: Copyright  2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc. SAGE Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: order@sagepub.com SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom Printed in the United States of America SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Sociology : exploring the architecture of everyday life : readings / editors, David M. Newman, Jodi O'Brien. — 9th ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4129-8760-8 (pbk.) 1. Sociology. I. Newman, David M., 1958– II. O'Brien, Jodi. HM586.S64 2013 301—dc23   2012031247 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Acquisitions Editor: David Repetto Editorial Assistant: Lauren Johnson Production Editor: Laureen Gleason Copy Editor: Erin Livingston Typesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd. Proofreader: Ellen Howard Cover Designer: Candice Harman Marketing Manager: Erica DeLuca Permissions Editor: Karen Ehrmann 12 13 14 15 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface ix About the Editors xi PART I. THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY 1 Chapter 1. Taking a New Look at a Familiar World 3 Reading 1.1. The Sociological Imagination 5 C. Wright Mills Reading 1.2. Invitation to Sociology 10 Peter Berger Reading 1.3. The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience 14 Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton Chapter 2. Seeing and Thinking Sociologically 27 Reading 2.1. The Metropolis and Mental Life 29 Georg Simmel Reading 2.2. Gift and Exchange 35 Zygmunt Bauman Reading 2.3. Culture of Fear 44 Barry Glassner PART II. THE CONSTRUCTION OF SELF AND SOCIETY 57 Chapter 3. Building Reality: The Social Construction of Knowledge 59 Reading 3.1. Concepts, Indicators, and Reality 61 Earl Babbie Reading 3.2. Missing Numbers 65 Joel Best Chapter 4. Building Order: Culture and History 75 Reading 4.1. Body Ritual among the Nacirema 77 Horace Miner Reading 4.2. The Melting Pot 81 Anne Fadiman Reading 4.3. McDonald’s in Hong Kong: Consumerism, Dietary Change, and the Rise of a Children's Culture 91 James L. Watson Chapter 5. Building Identity: Socialization 99 Reading 5.1. Life as the Maid’s Daughter: An Exploration of the Everyday Boundaries of Race, Class, and Gender 101 Mary Romero Reading 5.2. The Making of Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity Among Asian American Youth 110 Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee Reading 5.3. Working ‘the Code’: On Girls, Gender, and Inner-City Violence Nikki Jones 118 Chapter 6. Supporting Identity: The Presentation of Self 127 Reading 6.1. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: Selections 129 Erving Goffman Reading 6.2. Public Identities: Managing Race in Public Spaces 139 Karyn Lacy Reading 6.3. The Girl Hunt: Urban Nightlife and the Performance of Masculinity as Collective Activity 152 David Grazian Chapter 7. Building Social Relationships: Intimacy and Family 161 Reading 7.1. The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love 163 Stephanie Coontz Reading 7.2. Gay Parenthood and the End of Paternity as We Knew It 174 Judith Stacey Reading 7.3. Covenant Marriage: Reflexivity and Retrenchment in the Politics of Intimacy 189 Dwight Fee Chapter 8. Constructing Difference: Social Deviance 195 Reading 8.1. Watching the Canary 197 Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres Reading 8.2. Healing (Disorderly) Desire: Medical-Therapeutic Regulation of Sexuality 201 P. J. McGann Reading 8.3. Patients, “Potheads,” and Dying to Get High 212 Wendy Chapkis PART III. SOCIAL STRUCTURE, INSTITUTIONS, AND EVERYDAY LIFE 221 Chapter 9. The Structure of Society: Organizations and Social Institutions 223 Reading 9.1. These Dark Satanic Mills 225 William Greider Reading 9.2. The Smile Factory: Work at Disneyland 235 John Van Maanen Reading 9.3. Creating Consumers: Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids 245 Murry Milner Chapter 10. The Architecture of Stratification: Social Class and Inequality 253 Reading 10.1. Making Class Invisible 255 Gregory Mantsios Reading 10.2. The Compassion Gap in American Poverty Policy 262 Fred Block, Anna C. Korteweg, and Kerry Woodward, with Zach Schiller and Imrul Mazid Reading 10.3. Branded With Infamy: Inscriptions of Poverty and Class in America 271 Vivyan Adair Chapter 11. The Architecture of Inequality: Race and Ethnicity 283 Reading 11.1. Racial and Ethnic Formation 285 Michael Omi and Howard Winant Reading 11.2. Optional Ethnicities: For Whites Only? 292 Mary C. Waters Reading 11.3. Silent Racism: Passivity in Well-Meaning White People 299 Barbara Trepagnier Chapter 12. The Architecture of Inequality: Sex and Gender 309 Reading 12.1. Black Women and a New Definition of Womanhood 311 Bart Landry Reading 12.2. Still a Man’s World: Men Who Do “Women’s Work” 323 Christine L. Williams Reading 12.3. New Biomedical Technologies, New Scripts, New Genders 333 Eve Shapiro Chapter 13. Global Dynamics and Population Demographic Trends 347 Reading 13.1. Age-Segregation in Later Life: An Examination of Personal Networks 349 Peter Uhlenberg and Jenny de Jong Gierveld Reading 13.2. Love and Gold 357 Arlie Russell Hochschild Reading 13.3. Cyberbrides and Global Imaginaries: Mexican Women’s Turn from the National to the Foreign 365 Felicity Schaeffer-Grabiel Chapter 14. The Architects of Change: Reconstructing Society 377 Reading 14.1. Muslim American Immigrants After 9/11: The Struggle for Civil Rights 379 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo Reading 14.2. The Seattle Solidarity Network: A New Approach to Working Class Social Movements 388 Walter Winslow Reading 14.3. “Aquí estamos y no nos vamos!” Global Capital and Immigrant Rights 400 William I. Robinson Credits 411 Preface O ne of the greatest challenges we face as teachers of sociology is getting our students to see the relevance of the course material to their own lives and to fully appreciate its connection to the larger society. We teach our students to see that sociology is all around us. It’s in our families, our careers, our media, our jobs, our classrooms, our goals, our interests, our desires, and even our minds. Sociology can be found at the neighborhood pub, in conversation with the clerk at 7-Eleven, on a date, and in the highest offices of government. It’s with us when we’re alone and when we’re in a group of people. Sociology focuses on questions of global significance as well as private concerns. For instance, sociologists study how some countries create and maintain dominance over others and also why we find some people more attractive than others. Sociology is an invitation to understand yourself within the context of your historical and cultural circumstances. We have compiled this collection of short articles, chapters, and excerpts with the intent of providing comprehensive examples of the power of sociology for helping us to make sense of our lives and our times. The readings are organized in a format that demonstrates •• •• •• •• •• •• •• the uniqueness of the sociological perspective tools of sociological analysis the significance of different cultures in a global world social factors that influence identity development and self-management social rules about family, relationships, and belonging the influence of social institutions and organizations on everyday life the significance of socioeconomic class, gender, and racial/ethnic backgrounds in everyday life •• the significance of social demographics, such as aging populations and migration •• the power of social groups and social change In general, our intent is to demonstrate the significance of sociology in everyday life and to show that what seems “obvious” is often not-so-obvious when subjected to rigorous sociological analysis. The metaphor of “architecture” used in the title for this reader illustrates the sociological idea that as social beings, we are constantly building and rebuilding our own social environment. The sociological promise is that if we understand these processes and how they affect us, we will be able to make more informed choices about how to live our lives and engage in our communities. As in the first eight editions of the reader, the selections in this edition are intended to be vivid, provocative, and eye-opening examples of the practice of sociology. The readings represent a variety of styles. Some use common or everyday experiences and phenomena (such as drug use, employment, athletic performance, religious devotion, eating fast food, and the balance of work and family) to illustrate the relationship between the individual and society. Others focus on important social issues or problems (medical social control, race relations, poverty, educational inequalities, sexuality, immigration, global economics, environmental degradation, or political extremism) or on specific historical events (massacres during war, drug scares, and 9/11). Some were written quite recently; others are sociological classics. In addition to accurately representing the ix x  SOCIOLOGY READINGS sociological perspective and providing rigorous coverage of the discipline, we hope the selections are thought-provoking, generate lots of discussion, and are enjoyable to read. There are 41 selections in this reader, and 12 of them are new. These new readings focus on current, important social issues such as the pace of life in urban societies, gift exchange, media manipulation of statistics, status performance and race, parenting among same-sex couples, marriage promotion, cyberbrides, sexual regulation and consumer culture in high schools, gender technology in historical context, racism among well-intended white people, and working-class social movement tactics. Most of the new readings are based on research studies that were written in the past 5 years. In recent editions of this reader, we have increased the number of selections drawn from contemporary social research. In doing so, we hope to provide you with illustrations of the ways in which social researchers combine theories and empirical studies to gain a better understanding of social patterns and processes. Although the professional language of some of these selections may seem challenging for introductory readers, we are confident that you will find them highly relevant and come away with a sense of being immersed in the most significant details of contemporary sociology. To help you get the most out of these selections, we’ve written brief introductions that provide the sociological context for each chapter. We also included reflection points that can be used for comparing and contrasting the readings in each section and across sections. For those of you who are also reading the accompanying textbook, these introductions will furnish a quick intellectual link between the readings and information in the textbook. We have also included in these introductions brief instructions on what to look for when you read the selections in a given chapter. After each reading, you will find a set of discussion questions to ponder. Many of these questions ask you to apply a specific author’s conclusions to some contemporary issue in society or to your own life experiences. It is our hope that these questions will generate a lot of classroom debate and help you see the sociological merit of the readings. A website established for this ninth edition includes do-it-yourself reviews and tests for students, web-based activities designed to enhance learning, and a chat room where students and teachers can post messages and debate matters of sociological significance. The site can be accessed via the Pine Forge website at www.pineforge.com. Books like these are enormous projects. We would like to thank David Repetto, Laureen Gleason, Erin Livingston, and the rest of the staff at SAGE for their useful advice and assistance in putting this reader together. It’s always a pleasure to work with this very professional group. Thanks again to Jennifer Hamann for her assistance with reading selections and editing. Michelle Robertson joins us in this edition as a contributing editor, and we are especially grateful for her input. Enjoy! David M. Newman Department of Sociology/Anthropology DePauw University Greencastle, IN 46135 E-mail: dnewman@depauw.edu Jodi O’Brien Department of Sociology Seattle University Seattle, WA 98122 E-mail: jobrien@seattleu.edu About the Editors David M. Newman (PhD, University of Washington) is Professor of Sociology at DePauw University. In addition to the introductory course, he teaches courses in research methods, family, social psychology, deviance, and mental illness. He has won teaching awards at both the University of Washington and DePauw University. His other written work includes Identities and Inequalities: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality (2012) and Families: A Sociological Perspective (2008). Jodi O’Brien (PhD, University of Washington) is Professor of Sociology at Seattle University. She teaches courses in social psychology, sexuality, inequality, and classical and contemporary theory. She writes and lectures on the cultural politics of transgressive identities and communities. Her other books include Everyday Inequalities (Basil Blackwell), Social Prisms: Reflections on Everyday Myths and Paradoxes (SAGE), and The Production of Reality: Essays and Readings on Social Interaction (5th edition, SAGE). xi PA R T I The Individual and Society Taking a New Look at a Familiar World 1 T he primary claim of sociology is that our everyday feelings, thoughts, and actions are the product of a complex interplay between massive social forces and personal characteristics. We can’t understand the relationship between individuals and their societies without understanding the connection between both. As C. Wright Mills discusses in the introductory article, the “sociological imagination” is the ability to see the impact of social forces on our private lives. When we develop a sociological imagination, we gain an awareness that our lives unfold at the intersection of personal biography and social history. The sociological imagination encourages us to move beyond individualistic explanations of human experiences to an understanding of the mutual influence between individuals and society. So rather than study what goes on within people, sociologists study what goes on between and among people as individuals, groups, organizations, or entire societies. Sociology teaches us to look beyond individual personalities and focus instead on the influence of social phenomena in shaping our ideas of who we are and what we think we can do. Peter Berger, another well-known sociologist, invites us to consider the uniqueness of the sociological enterprise. According to Berger, the sociologist is driven by an insatiable curiosity to understand the social conditions that shape human behavior. The sociologist is also prepared to be surprised, disturbed, and sometimes even bored by what he or she discovers. In this regard, the sociologist is driven to make sense of the seemingly obvious with the understanding that once explored, it may not be so obvious after all. One example of the nonobvious is the influence that social institutions have on our behavior. It’s not always easy to see this influence. We have a tendency to see people’s behavior in individualistic, sometimes even biological, terms. This tendency toward individualistic explanations is particularly pronounced in U.S. society. The influence of social institutions on our personal lives is often felt most forcefully when we are compelled to obey the commands of someone who is in a position of institutional authority. The social institution with the most explicit hierarchy of authority is the military. In “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience,” Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton describe a specific example of a crime in which the individuals involved attempted to deny responsibility for their actions by claiming that they were following the orders of a military officer who had the legitimate right to command them. This incident occurred in the midst of the Vietnam War. Arguably, people do things under such trying conditions that they wouldn’t ordinarily do, even—as in this case—kill defenseless people. Kelman and Hamilton make a key sociological point by showing that these soldiers were not necessarily psychological misfits who were especially mean or violent. Instead, the researchers argue, they were ordinary people caught up in tense circumstances that made obeying the brutal commands of an authority seem like the normal and morally acceptable thing to do. 3 4  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY Something to Consider as You Read As you read these selections, consider the effects of social context and situation on behavior. Even though it might appear extreme, how might the behavior of these soldiers be similar to other examples of social influence? Consider occasions in which you have done something publicly that you didn’t feel right about personally. How do you explain your behavior? How might a sociologist explain your behavior? The Sociological Imagination C. Wright Mills (1959) “The individual can . . . know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.” Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them. Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many men been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly becoming “merely history.” The history that now affects every man is world history. Within this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one-sixth of mankind is transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful. Political colonies are freed, new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Revolutions occur; men feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are smashed to bits—or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy, capitalism is shown up as only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus. After two 5 6  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY centuries of hope, even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind. Everywhere in the underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence become total in scope and bureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the supernation at either pole concentrating its most coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation of World War Three. The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That—in defense of selfhood—they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap? It is not only information that they need— in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need—although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy. What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues. The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of man’s capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of “human nature” are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer— turgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of E. A. Ross—graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all that is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen’s brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph Schumpeter’s many-sided constructions of Chapter 1 reality; it is the basis of the psychological sweep of W. E. H. Lecky no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal of what is best in contemporary studies of man and society. No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions: 1. What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change? 2. Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this period—what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history making? 3. What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of “human nature” are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for “human nature” of each and every feature of the society we are examining? Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a creed—these are the kinds of Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  7 questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of man in society—and they are the questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to com­ parative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self—and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has his quality and his being. That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part, contemporary man’s self-conscious view of himself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use men whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values: in a word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the cultural meaning of the social sciences. 8  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between “the personal troubles of milieu” and “the public issues of social structure.” This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science. Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of his immediate milieu—the social setting that is directly open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by him to be threatened. Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary men. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call “contradictions” or “antagonisms.” In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals. Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war’s termination. In short, according to one’s values, to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one’s death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of men it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family, and religious institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states. Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them. Or consider the metropolis—the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city. For many upper-class people, the personal solution to “the problem of the city” is to have an apartment with private garage under it in the heart of the city, and forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled environments—with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter connection—most people could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this, however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining residence and work? Refurbish it as Chapter 1 it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new cities according to new plans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decide and to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to solve them requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable milieux. Insofar as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution. Insofar as war is inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in his restricted milieu will be powerless—with or without psychiatric aid—to solve the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him. Insofar as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  9 problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. Insofar as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth. What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination. . . . THINKING ABOUT THE READING Consider the political, economic, familial, and cultural circumstances into which you were born. Make a list of some of these circumstances and also some of the major historical events that have occurred in your lifetime. How do you think these historical and social circumstances may have affected your personal biography? Can you think of ways in which your actions have influenced the course of other people’s lives? Identify some famous people and consider how the intersection of history and biography led them to their particular position. How might the outcome have differed if some of the circumstances in their lives were different? Invitation to Sociology Peter Berger (1963) We would say then that the sociologist (that is, the one we would really like to invite to our game) is a person intensively, endlessly, shamelessly interested in the doings of men. His natural habitat is all the human gathering places of the world, wherever men* come together. The sociologist may be interested in many other things. But his consuming interest remains in the world of men, their institutions, their history, their passions. He will naturally be interested in the events that engage men’s ultimate beliefs, their moments of tragedy and grandeur and ecstasy. But he will also be fascinated by the commonplace, the everyday. He will know reverence, but this reverence will not prevent him from wanting to see and to understand. He may sometimes feel revulsion or contempt. But this also will not deter him from wanting to have his questions answered. The sociologist, in his quest for understanding, moves through the world of men without respect for the usual lines of demarcation. Nobility and degradation, power and obscurity, intelligence and folly— these are equally interesting to him, however unequal they may be in his personal values or tastes. Thus his questions may lead him to all possible levels of society, the best and the least known places, the most respected and the most despised. And, if he is a good sociologist, he will find himself in all these places because his own questions have so taken possession of him that he has little choice but to seek for answers. We could say that the sociologist, but for the grace of his academic title, is the man who must listen to gossip despite himself, *To be understood as people or persons. 10 who is tempted to look through keyholes, to read other people’s mail, to open closed cabinets. What interests us is the curiosity that grips any sociologist in front of a closed door behind which there are human voices. If he is a good sociologist, he will want to open that door, to understand these voices. Behind each closed door he will anticipate some new facet of human life not yet perceived and understood. The sociologist will occupy himself with matters that others regard as too sacred or as too distasteful for dispassionate investigation. He will find rewarding the company of priests or of prostitutes, depending not on his personal preferences but on the questions he happens to be asking at the moment. He will also concern himself with matters that others may find much too boring. He will be interested in the human interaction that goes with warfare or with great intellectual discoveries, but also in the relations between people employed in a restaurant or between a group of little girls playing with their dolls. His main focus of attention is not the ultimate significance of what men do, but the action in itself, as another example of the infinite richness of human conduct. In these journeys through the world of men the sociologist will inevitably encounter other professional Peeping Toms. Sometimes these will resent his presence, feeling that he is poaching on their preserves. In some places the sociologist will meet up with the economist, in others with the political scientist, in yet others with the psychologist or the ethnologist. Yet chances are that the questions Chapter 1 that have brought him to these same places are different from the ones that propelled his fellow trespassers. The sociologist’s questions always remain essentially the same: “What are people doing with each other here?” “What are their relationships to each other?” “How are these relationships organized in institutions?” “What are the collective ideas that move men and institutions?” In trying to answer these questions in specific instances, the sociologist will, of course, have to deal with economic or political matters, but he will do so in a way rather different from that of the economist or the political scientist. The scene that he contemplates is the same human scene that these other scientists concern themselves with. But the sociologist’s angle of vision is different. Much of the time the sociologist moves in sectors of experience that are familiar to him and to most people in his society. He investigates communities, institutions and activities that one can read about every day in the newspapers. Yet there is another excitement of discovery beckoning in his investigations. It is not the excitement of coming upon the totally unfamiliar, but rather the excitement of finding the familiar becoming transformed in its meaning. The fascination of sociology lies in the fact that its perspective makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all our lives. This also constitutes a transformation of consciousness. Moreover, this transformation is more relevant existentially than that of many other intellectual disciplines, because it is more difficult to segregate in some special compartment of the mind. The astronomer does not live in the remote galaxies, and the nuclear physicist can, outside his laboratory, eat and laugh and marry and vote without thinking about the insides of the atom. The geologist looks at rocks only at appropriate times, and the linguist speaks English with his wife. The sociologist lives in society, on the job and off it. His own life, inevitably, is part of his subject matter. Men being what they are, sociologists too manage to segregate their professional insights from their everyday affairs. Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  11 But it is a rather difficult feat to perform in good faith. The sociologist moves in the common world of men, close to what most of them would call real. The categories he employs in his analyses are only refinements of the categories by which other men live—power, class, status, race, ethnicity. As a result, there is a deceptive simplicity and obviousness about some sociological investigations. One reads them, nods at the familiar scene, remarks that one has heard all this before and don’t people have better things to do than to waste their time on truisms—until one is suddenly brought up against an insight that radically questions everything one had previously assumed about this familiar scene. This is the point at which one begins to sense the excitement of sociology. Let us take a specific example. Imagine a sociology class in a Southern college where almost all the students are white Southerners. Imagine a lecture on the subject of the racial system of the South. The lecturer is talking here of matters that have been familiar to his students from the time of their infancy. Indeed, it may be that they are much more familiar with the minutiae of this system than he is. They are quite bored as a result. It seems to them that he is only using more pretentious words to describe what they already know. Thus he may use the term “caste,” one commonly used now by American sociologists to describe the Southern racial system. But in explaining the term he shifts to traditional Hindu society, to make it clearer. He then goes on to analyze the magical beliefs inherent in caste tabus, the social dynamics of commensalism and connubium, the economic interests concealed within the system, the way in which religious beliefs relate to the tabus, the effects of the caste system upon the industrial development of the society and vice versa—all in India. But suddenly India is not very far away at all. The lecture then goes back to its Southern theme. The familiar now seems not quite so familiar anymore. Questions are raised that are new, perhaps 12  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY raised angrily, but raised all the same. And at least some of the students have begun to understand that there are functions involved in this business of race that they have not read about in the newspapers (at least not those in their hometowns) and that their parents have not told them—partly, at least, because neither the newspapers nor the parents knew about them. It can be said that the first wisdom of sociology is this—things are not what they seem. This too is a deceptively simple statement. It ceases to be simple after a while. Social reality turns out to have many layers of meaning. The discovery of each new layer changes the perception of the whole. Anthropologists use the term “culture shock” to describe the impact of a totally new culture upon a newcomer. In an extreme instance such shock will be experienced by the Western explorer who is told, halfway through dinner, that he is eating the nice old lady he had been chatting with the previous day—a shock with predictable physiological if not moral consequences. Most explorers no longer encounter cannibalism in their travels today. However, the first encounters with polygamy or with puberty rites or even with the way some nations drive their automobiles can be quite a shock to an American visitor. With the shock may go not only disapproval or disgust but a sense of excitement that things can really be that different from what they are at home. To some extent, at least, this is the excitement of any first travel abroad. The experience of sociological discovery could be described as “culture shock” minus geographical displacement. In other words, the sociologist travels at home—with shocking results. He is unlikely to find that he is eating a nice old lady for dinner. But the discovery, for instance, that his own church has considerable money invested in the missile industry or that a few blocks from his home there are people who engage in cultic orgies may not be drastically different in emotional impact. Yet we would not want to imply that sociological discoveries are always or even usually outrageous to moral sentiment. Not at all. What they have in common with exploration in distant lands, however, is the sudden illumination of new and unsuspected facets of human existence in society. This is the excitement and . . . the humanistic justification of sociology. People who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just what they were taught in Sunday School, who like the safety of the rules and the maxims of what Alfred Schuetz has called the “worldtaken-for-granted,” should stay away from sociology. People who feel no temptation before closed doors, who have no curiosity about human beings, who are content to admire scenery without wondering about the people who live in those houses on the other side of that river, should probably also stay away from sociology. They will find it unpleasant or, at any rate, unrewarding. People who are interested in human beings only if they can change, convert or reform them should also be warned, for they will find sociology much less useful than they hoped. And people whose interest is mainly in their own conceptual constructions will do just as well to turn to the study of little white mice. Sociology will be satisfying, in the long run, only to those who can think of nothing more entrancing than to watch men and to understand things human. It may now be clear that we have, albeit deliberately, understated the case in the title of this chapter. To be sure, sociology is an individual pastime in the sense that it interests some men and bores others. Some like to observe human beings, others to experiment with mice. The world is big enough to hold all kinds and there is no logical priority for one interest as against another. But the word “pastime” is weak in describing what we mean. Sociology is more like a passion. The sociological perspective is more like a demon that possesses one, that drives one compellingly, again and again, to the questions that are its own. An introduction to sociology is, therefore, an invitation to a very special kind of passion. Chapter 1 Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  13 THINKING ABOUT THE READING Peter Berger claims that sociologists are tempted to listen to gossip, peek through keyholes, and look at other people’s mail. This can be interpreted to mean that the sociologist has an insatiable curiosity about other people. What are some other behaviors and situations that might capture the attention of the sociologist? How does the sociologist differ from the psychologist or the economist or the historian? Are these fields of study likely to be in competition with sociology or to complement it? The My Lai Massacre A Military Crime of Obedience Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton (1989) March 16, 1968, was a busy day in U.S. history. Stateside, Robert F. Kennedy announced his presidential candidacy, challenging a sitting president from his own party—in part out of opposition to an undeclared and disastrous war. In Vietnam, the war continued. In many ways, March 16 may have been a typical day in that war. We will probably never know. But we do know that on that day a typical company went on a mission—which may or may not have been typical—to a village called Son (or Song) My. Most of what is remembered from that mission occurred in the subhamlet known to Americans as My Lai 4. The My Lai massacre was investigated and charges were brought in 1969 and 1970. Trials and disciplinary actions lasted into 1971. Entire books have been written about the army’s year-long cover-up of the massacre (for example, Hersh, 1972), and the cover-up was a major focus of the army’s own investigation of the incident. Our central concern here is the massacre itself—a crime of obedience—and public reactions to such crimes, rather than the lengths to which many went to deny the event. Therefore this account concentrates on one day: March 16, 1968. Many verbal testimonials to the horrors that occurred at My Lai were available. More unusual was the fact that an army photographer, Ronald Haeberle, was assigned the task of documenting the anticipated military engagement at My Lai—and documented a massacre instead. Later, as the story of the massacre emerged, his photographs were widely distributed and seared the public conscience. What might have been dismissed as 14 unreal or exaggerated was depicted in photographs of demonstrable authenticity. The dominant image appeared on the cover of Life: piles of bodies jumbled together in a ditch along a trail—the dead all apparently unarmed. All were Oriental, and all appeared to be children, women, or old men. Clearly there had been a mass execution, one whose image would not quickly fade. So many bodies (over twenty in the cover photo alone) are hard to imagine as the handiwork of one killer. These were not. They were the product of what we call a crime of obedience. Crimes of obedience begin with orders. But orders are often vague and rarely survive with any clarity the transition from one authority down a chain of subordinates to the ultimate actors. The operation at Son My was no exception. “Charlie” Company, Company C, under Lt. Col. Frank Barker’s command, arrived in Vietnam in December 1967. As the army’s investigative unit, directed by Lt. Gen. William R. Peers, characterized the personnel, they “contained no significant deviation from the average” for the time. Seymour S. Hersh (1970) described the “average” more explicitly: “Most of the men in Charlie Company had volunteered for the draft; only a few had gone to college for even one year. Nearly half were black, with a few Mexican-Americans. Most were eighteen to twenty-two years old. The favorite reading matter of Charlie Company, like that of other line infantry units in Vietnam, was comic books” (p. 18). The action at My Lai, like that throughout Vietnam, was fought by a cross-section of those Americans who Chapter 1 either believed in the war or lacked the social resources to avoid participating in it. Charlie Company was indeed average for that time, that place, and that war. Two key figures in Charlie Company were more unusual. The company’s commander, Capt. Ernest Medina, was an upwardly mobile Mexican-American who wanted to make the army his career, although he feared that he might never advance beyond captain because of his lack of formal education. His eagerness had earned him a nickname among his men: “Mad Dog Medina.” One of his admirers was the platoon leader Second Lt. William L. Calley, Jr., an undistinguished, five-foot-three-inch junior-college dropout who had failed four of the seven courses in which he had enrolled his first year. Many viewed him as one of those “instant officers” made possible only by the army’s then-desperate need for manpower. Whatever the cause, he was an insecure leader whose frequent claim was “I’m the boss.” His nickname among some of the troops was “Surfside 5½,” a reference to the swashbuckling heroes of a popular television show, “Surfside 6.” The Son My operation was planned by Lieutenant Colonel Barker and his staff as a search-and-destroy mission with the objective of rooting out the Forty-eighth Viet Cong Battalion from their base area of Son My village. Apparently no written orders were ever issued. Barker’s superior, Col. Oran Henderson, arrived at the staging point the day before. Among the issues he reviewed with the assembled officers were some of the weaknesses of prior operations by their units, including their failure to be appropriately aggressive in pursuit of the enemy. Later briefings by Lieutenant Colonel Barker and his staff asserted that no one except Viet Cong was expected to be in the village after 7 a.m. on the following day. The “innocent” would all be at the market. Those present at the briefings gave conflicting accounts of Barker’s exact orders, but he conveyed at least a strong suggestion that the Son My area was to be obliterated. As the army’s inquiry reported: “While there is some conflict Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  15 in the testimony as to whether LTC Barker ordered the destruction of houses, dwellings, livestock, and other foodstuffs in the Song My area, the preponderance of the evidence indicates that such destruction was implied, if not specifically directed, by his orders of 15 March” (Peers Report, in Goldstein et al., 1976, p. 94). Evidence that Barker ordered the killing of civilians is even more murky. What does seem clear, however, is that—having asserted that civilians would be away at the market—he did not specify what was to be done with any who might nevertheless be found on the scene. The Peers Report therefore considered it “reasonable to conclude that LTC Barker’s minimal or nonexistent instructions concerning the handling of noncombatants created the potential for grave misunderstandings as to his intentions and for interpretation of his orders as authority to fire, without restriction, on all persons found in target area” (Goldstein et al., 1976, p. 95). Since Barker was killed in action in June 1968, his own formal version of the truth was never available. Charlie Company’s Captain Medina was briefed for the operation by Barker and his staff. He then transmitted the already vague orders to his own men. Charlie Company was spoiling for a fight, having been totally frustrated during its months in Vietnam—first by waiting for battles that never came, then by incompetent forays led by inexperienced commanders, and finally by mines and booby traps. In fact, the emotion-laden funeral of a sergeant killed by a booby trap was held on March 15, the day before My Lai. Captain Medina gave the orders for the next day’s action at the close of that funeral. Many were in a mood for revenge. It is again unclear what was ordered. Although all participants were alive by the time of the trials for the massacre, they were either on trial or probably felt under threat of trial. Memories are often flawed and self-serving at such times. It is apparent that Medina relayed to the men at least some of Barker’s general message—to expect Viet Cong resistance, to burn, and to kill livestock. It is not clear that he 16  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY ordered the slaughter of the inhabitants, but some of the men who heard him thought he had. One of those who claimed to have heard such orders was Lt. William Calley. As March 16 dawned, much was expected of the operation by those who had set it into motion. Therefore a full complement of “brass” was present in helicopters overhead, including Barker, Colonel Henderson, and their superior, Major General Koster (who went on to become commandant of West Point before the story of My Lai broke). On the ground, the troops were to carry with them one reporter and one photographer to immortalize the anticipated battle. The action for Company C began at 7:30 as their first wave of helicopters touched down near the subhamlet of My Lai 4. By 7:47 all of Company C was present and set to fight. But instead of the Viet Cong Forty-eighth Battalion, My Lai was filled with the old men, women, and children who were supposed to have gone to market. By this time, in their version of the war, and with whatever orders they thought they had heard, the men from Company C were nevertheless ready to find Viet Cong everywhere. By nightfall, the official tally was 128 VC killed and three weapons captured, although later, unofficial body counts ran as high as 500. The operation at Son My was over. And by nightfall, as Hersh reported: “the Viet Cong were back in My Lai 4, helping the survivors bury the dead. It took five days. Most of the funeral speeches were made by the Communist guerrillas. Nguyen Bat was not a Communist at the time of the massacre, but the incident changed his mind. ‘After the shooting,’ he said, ‘all the villagers became Communists’” (1970, p. 74). To this day, the memory of the massacre is kept alive by markers and plaques designating the spots where groups of villagers were killed, by a large statue, and by the My Lai Museum, established in 1975 (Williams, 1985). But what could have happened to leave American troops reporting a victory over Viet Cong when in fact they had killed hundreds of noncombatants? It is not hard to explain the report of victory; that is the essence of a coverup. It is harder to understand how the killings came to be committed in the first place, making a cover-up necessary. Mass Executions and the Defense of Superior Orders Some of the atrocities on March 16, 1968, were evidently unofficial, spontaneous acts: rapes, tortures, killings. For example, Hersh (1970) describes Charlie Company’s Second Platoon as entering “My Lai 4 with guns blazing” (p. 50); more graphically, Lieutenant “Brooks and his men in the second platoon to the north had begun to systematically ransack the hamlet and slaughter the people, kill the livestock, and destroy the crops. Men poured rifle and machine-gun fire into huts without knowing— or seemingly caring—who was inside” (pp. 49–50). Some atrocities toward the end of the action were part of an almost casual “mopping-up,” much of which was the responsibility of Lieutenant LaCross’s Third Platoon of Charlie Company. The Peers Report states: “The entire 3rd Platoon then began moving into the western edge of My Lai (4), for the mop-up operation. . . . The squad . . . began to burn the houses in the southwestern portion of the hamlet” (Goldstein et al., 1976, p. 133). They became mingled with other platoons during a series of rapes and killings of survivors for which it was impossible to fix responsibility. Certainly to a Vietnamese all GIs would by this point look alike: “Nineteen-year-old Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tuyet watched a baby trying to open her slain mother’s blouse to nurse. A soldier shot the infant while it was struggling with the blouse, and then slashed it with his bayonet.” Tuyet also said she saw another baby hacked to death by GIs wielding their bayonets. “Le Tong, a twenty-eight-year-old rice farmer, reported seeing one woman raped after GIs killed her children. Nguyen Khoa, a thirtyseven-year-old peasant, told of a thirteen-yearold girl who was raped before being killed. GIs then attacked Khoa’s wife, tearing off her clothes. Before they could rape her, however, Khoa said, their six-year-old son, riddled with Chapter 1 bullets, fell and saturated her with blood. The GIs left her alone” (Hersh, 1970, p. 72). All of Company C was implicated in a pattern of death and destruction throughout the hamlet, much of which seemingly lacked rhyme or reason. But a substantial amount of the killing was organized and traceable to one authority: the First Platoon’s Lt. William Calley. Calley was originally charged with 109 killings, almost all of them mass executions at the trail and other locations. He stood trial for 102 of these killings, was convicted of 22 in 1971, and at first received a life sentence. Though others—both superior and subordinate to Calley—were brought to trial, he was the only one convicted for the My Lai crimes. Thus, the only actions of My Lai for which anyone was ever convicted were mass executions, ordered and committed. We suspect that there are commonsense reasons why this one type of killing was singled out. In the midst of rapidly moving events with people running about, an execution of stationary targets is literally a still life that stands out and whose participants are clearly visible. It can be proven that specific people committed specific deeds. An execution, in contrast to the shooting of someone on the run, is also more likely to meet the legal definition of an act resulting from intent— with malice aforethought. Moreover, American military law specifically forbids the killing of unarmed civilians or military prisoners, as does the Geneva Convention between nations. Thus common sense, legal standards, and explicit doctrine all made such actions the likeliest target for prosecution. When Lieutenant Calley was charged under military law it was for violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) Article 118 (murder). This article is similar to civilian codes in that it provides for conviction if an accused: without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being, when he— 1. has a premeditated design to kill; 2. intends to kill or inflict great bodily harm; Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  17 3. is engaged in an act which is inherently dangerous to others and evinces a wanton disregard of human life; or 4. is engaged in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of burglary, sodomy, rape, robbery, or aggravated arson. (Goldstein et al., 1976, p. 507) For a soldier, one legal justification for killing is warfare; but warfare is subject to many legal limits and restrictions, including, of course, the inadmissibility of killing unarmed noncombatants or prisoners whom one has disarmed. The pictures of the trail victims at My Lai certainly portrayed one or the other of these. Such an action would be illegal under military law; ordering another to commit such an action would be illegal; and following such an order would be illegal. But following an order may provide a second and pivotal justification for an act that would be murder when committed by a civilian. American military law assumes that the subordinate is inclined to follow orders, as that is the normal obligation of the role. Hence, legally, obedient subordinates are protected from unreasonable expectations regarding their capacity to evaluate those orders: An order requiring the performance of a military duty may be inferred to be legal. An act performed manifestly beyond the scope of authority, or pursuant to an order that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know to be illegal, or in a wanton manner in the discharge of a lawful duty, is not excusable. (Par. 216, Subpar. d, Manual for Courts Martial, United States, 1969 Rev.) Thus what may be excusable is the goodfaith carrying out of an order, as long as that order appears to the ordinary soldier to be a legal one. In military law, invoking superior orders moves the question from one of the action’s consequences—the body count—to one of evaluating the actor’s motives and good sense. In sum, if anyone is to be brought to justice for a massacre, common sense and legal codes decree that the most appropriate targets 18  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY are those who make themselves executioners. This is the kind of target the government selected in prosecuting Lieutenant Calley with the greatest fervor. And in a military context, the most promising way in which one can redefine one’s undeniable deeds into acceptability is to invoke superior orders. This is what Calley did in attempting to avoid conviction. Since the core legal issues involved points of mass execution—the ditches and trail where America’s image of My Lai was formed—we review these events in greater detail. The day’s quiet beginning has already been noted. Troops landed and swept unopposed into the village. The three weapons eventually reported as the haul from the operation were picked up from three apparent Viet Cong who fled the village when the troops arrived and were pursued and killed by helicopter gunships. Obviously the Viet Cong did frequent the area. But it appears that by about 8:00 a.m. no one who met the troops was aggressive, and no one was armed. By the laws of war Charlie Company had no argument with such people. As they moved into the village, the soldiers began to gather its inhabitants together. Shortly after 8:00 a.m. Lieutenant Calley told Pfc. Paul Meadlo that “you know what to do with” a group of villagers Meadlo was guarding. Estimates of the numbers in the group ranged as high as eighty women, children, and old men, and Meadlo’s own estimate under oath was thirty to fifty people. As Meadlo later testified, Calley returned after ten or fifteen minutes: “He [Calley] said, ‘How come they’re not dead?’ I said, ‘I didn’t know we were supposed to kill them.’ He said, ‘I want them dead.’ He backed off twenty or thirty feet and started shooting into the people—the Viet Cong— shooting automatic. He was beside me. He burned four or five magazines. I burned off a few, about three. I helped shoot ’em” (Hammer, 1971, p. 155). Meadlo himself and others testified that Meadlo cried as he fired; others reported him later to be sobbing and “all broke up.” It would appear that to Lieutenant Calley’s subordinates something was unusual, and stressful, in these orders. At the trial, the first specification in the murder charge against Calley was for this incident; he was accused of premeditated murder of “an unknown number, not less than 30, Oriental human beings, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle” (Goldstein et al., 1976, p. 497). Among the helicopters flying reconnaissance above Son My was that of CWO Hugh Thompson. By 9:00 or soon after, Thompson had noticed some horrifying events from his perch. As he spotted wounded civilians, he sent down smoke markers so that soldiers on the ground could treat them. They killed them instead. He reported to headquarters, trying to persuade someone to stop what was going on. Barker, hearing the message, called down to Captain Medina. Medina, in turn, later claimed to have told Calley that it was “enough for today.” But it was not yet enough. At Calley’s orders, his men began gathering the remaining villagers—roughly seventyfive individuals, mostly women and children— and herding them toward a drainage ditch. Accompanied by three or four enlisted men, Lieutenant Calley executed several batches of civilians who had been gathered into ditches. Some of the details of the process were entered into testimony in such accounts as Pfc. Dennis Conti’s: “A lot of them, the people, were trying to get up and mostly they was just screaming and pretty bad shot up. . . . I seen a woman tried to get up. I seen Lieutenant Calley fire. He hit the side of her head and blew it off ” (Hammer, 1971, p. 125). Testimony by other soldiers presented the shooting’s aftermath. Specialist Four Charles Hall, asked by Prosecutor Aubrey Daniel how he knew the people in the ditch were dead, said: “There was blood coming from them. They were just scattered all over the ground in the ditch, some in piles and some scattered out 20, 25 meters perhaps up the ditch. . . . They were very old people, very young children, and mothers. . . . There was blood all over them” (Goldstein et al., 1976, pp. 501–502). And Pfc. Chapter 1 Gregory Olsen corroborated the general picture of the victims: “They were—the majority were women and children, some babies. I distinctly remember one middle-aged Vietnamese male dressed in white right at my feet as I crossed. None of the bodies were mangled in any way. There was blood. Some appeared to be dead, others followed me with their eyes as I walked across the ditch” (Goldstein et al., 1976, p. 502). The second specification in the murder charge stated that Calley did “with premeditation, murder an unknown number of Oriental human beings, not less than seventy, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle” (Goldstein et al., 1976, p. 497). Calley was also charged with and tried for shootings of individuals (an old man and a child); these charges were clearly supplemental to the main issue at trial—the mass killings and how they came about. It is noteworthy that during these executions more than one enlisted man avoided carrying out Calley’s orders, and more than one, by sworn oath, directly refused to obey them. For example, Pfc. James Joseph Dursi testified, when asked if he fired when Lieutenant Calley ordered him to: “No I just stood there. Meadlo turned to me after a couple of minutes and said ‘Shoot! Why don’t you shoot! Why don’t you fire!’ He was crying and yelling. I said, ‘I can’t! I won’t!’ And the people were screaming and crying and yelling. They kept firing for a couple of minutes, mostly automatic and semiautomatic” (Hammer, 1971, p. 143). . . . Disobedience of Lieutenant Calley’s own orders to kill represented a serious legal and moral threat to a defense based on superior orders, such as Calley was attempting. This defense had to assert that the orders seemed reasonable enough to carry out; that they appeared to be legal orders. Even if the orders in question were not legal, the defense had to assert that an ordinary individual could not and should not be expected to see the distinction. In short, if what happened was “business as usual,” even though it might be bad business, then the defendant stood a chance of Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  19 acquittal. But under direct command from “Surfside 5½,” some ordinary enlisted men managed to refuse, to avoid, or at least to stop doing what they were ordered to do. As “reasonable men” of “ordinary sense and understanding,” they had apparently found something awry that morning; and it would have been hard for an officer to plead successfully that he was more ordinary than his men in his capacity to evaluate the reasonableness of orders. Even those who obeyed Calley’s orders showed great stress. For example, Meadlo eventually began to argue and cry directly in front of Calley. Pfc. Herbert Carter shot himself in the foot, possibly because he could no longer take what he was doing. We were not destined to hear a sworn version of the incident, since neither side at the Calley trial called him to testify. The most unusual instance of resistance to authority came from the skies. CWO Hugh Thompson, who had protested the apparent carnage of civilians, was Calley’s inferior in rank but was not in his line of command. He was also watching the ditch from his helicopter and noticed some people moving after the first round of slaughter—chiefly children who had been shielded by their mothers’ bodies. Landing to rescue the wounded, he also found some villagers hiding in a nearby bunker. Protecting the Vietnamese with his own body, Thompson ordered his men to train their guns on the Americans and to open fire if the Americans fired on the Vietnamese. He then radioed for additional rescue helicopters and stood between the Vietnamese and the Americans under Calley’s command until the Vietnamese could be evacuated. He later returned to the ditch to unearth a child buried, unharmed, beneath layers of bodies. In October 1969, Thompson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism at My Lai, specifically (albeit inaccurately) for the rescue of children hiding in a bunker “between Viet Cong forces and advancing friendly forces” and for the rescue of a wounded child “caught in the intense crossfire” (Hersh, 1970, p. 119). Four months earlier, at the Pentagon, Thompson had identified Calley as having been at the ditch. 20  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY By about 10:00 a.m., the massacre was winding down. The remaining actions consisted largely of isolated rapes and killings, “clean-up” shootings of the wounded, and the destruction of the village by fire. We have already seen some examples of these more indiscriminate and possibly less premeditated acts. By the 11:00 a.m. lunch break, when the exhausted men of Company C were relaxing, two young girls wandered back from a hiding place only to be invited to share lunch. This surrealist touch illustrates the extent to which the soldiers’ action had become dissociated from its meaning. An hour earlier, some of these men were making sure that not even a child would escape the executioner’s bullet. But now the job was done and it was time for lunch—and in this new context it seemed only natural to ask the children who had managed to escape execution to join them. The massacre had ended. It remained only for the Viet Cong to reap the political rewards among the survivors in hiding. The army command in the area knew that something had gone wrong. Direct commanders, including Lieutenant Colonel Barker, had firsthand reports, such as Thompson’s complaints. Others had such odd bits of evidence as the claim of 128 Viet Cong dead with a booty of only three weapons. But the cover-up of My Lai began at once. The operation was reported as a victory over a stronghold of the Viet Cong Forty-eighth. . . . William Calley was not the only man tried for the event at My Lai. The actions of over thirty soldiers and civilians were scrutinized by investigators; over half of these had to face charges or disciplinary action of some sort. Targets of investigation included Captain Medina, who was tried, and various higherups, including General Koster. But Lieutenant Calley was the only person convicted, the only person to serve time. The core of Lieutenant Calley’s defense was superior orders. What this meant to him— in contrast to what it meant to the judge and jury—can be gleaned from his responses to a series of questions from his defense attorney, George Latimer, in which Calley sketched out his understanding of the laws of war and the actions that constitute doing one’s duty within those laws: Latimer: Did you receive any training which had to do with the obedience to orders? Calley: Yes, sir. Latimer: . . . what were you informed [were] the principles involved in that field? Calley: That all orders were to be assumed legal, that the soldier’s job was to carry out any order given him to the best of his ability. Latimer: . . . what might occur if you disobeyed an order by a senior officer? Calley: You could be court-martialed for refusing an order and refusing an order in the face of the enemy, you could be sent to death, sir. Latimer: [I am asking] whether you were required in any way, shape or form to make a determination of the legality or illegality of an order? Calley: No, sir. I was never told that I had the choice, sir. Latimer: If you had a doubt about the order, what were you supposed to do? Calley: . . . I was supposed to carry the order out and then come back and make my complaint. (Hammer, 1971, pp. 240–241) Lieutenant Calley steadfastly maintained that his actions within My Lai had constituted, in his mind, carrying out orders from Captain Medina. Both his own actions and the orders he gave to others (such as the instruction to Meadlo to “waste ’em”) were entirely in response to superior orders. He denied any intent to kill individuals and any but the most passing awareness of distinctions among the individuals: “I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women, Chapter 1 and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers.” When Latimer asked if in his own opinion Calley had acted “rightly and according to your understanding of your directions and orders,” Calley replied, “I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so, sir” (Hammer, 1971, p. 257). His court-martial did not accept Calley’s defense of superior orders and clearly did not share his interpretation of his duty. The jury evidently reasoned that, even if there had been orders to destroy everything in sight and to “waste the Vietnamese,” any reasonable person would have realized that such orders were illegal and should have refused to carry them out. The defense of superior orders under such conditions is inadmissible under international and military law. The U.S. Army’s Law of Land Warfare (Dept. of the Army, 1956), for example, states that “the fact that the law of war has been violated pursuant to an order of a superior authority, whether military or civil, does not deprive the act in question of its character of a war crime, nor does it constitute a defense in the trial of an accused individual, unless he did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know that the act was unlawful” and that “members of the armed forces are bound to obey only lawful orders” (in Falk et al., 1971, pp. 71–72). The disagreement between Calley and the court-martial seems to have revolved around the definition of the responsibilities of a subordinate to obey, on the one hand, and to evaluate, on the other. This tension . . . can best be captured via the charge to the jury in the Calley court-martial, made by the trial judge, Col. Reid Kennedy. The forty-one pages of the charge include the following: Both combatants captured by and non­ combatants detained by the opposing force . . . have the right to be treated as prisoners. . . . Summary execution of detainees or prisoners is forbidden by law. . . . I therefore instruct you Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  21 . . . that if unresisting human beings were killed at My Lai (4) while within the effective custody and control of our military forces, their deaths cannot be considered justified. . . . Thus if you find that Lieutenant Calley received an order directing him to kill unresisting Vietnamese within his control or within the control of his troops, that order would be an illegal order. A determination that an order is illegal does not, of itself, assign criminal responsibility to the person following the order for acts done in compliance with it. Soldiers are taught to follow orders, and special attention is given to obedience of orders on the battlefield. Military effectiveness depends on obedience to orders. On the other hand, the obedience of a soldier is not the obedience of an automaton. A soldier is a reasoning agent, obliged to respond, not as a machine, but as a person. The law takes these factors into account in assessing criminal responsibility for acts done in compliance with illegal orders. The acts of a subordinate done in compliance with an unlawful order given him by his superior are excused and impose no criminal liability upon him unless the superior’s order is one which a man of ordinary sense and understanding would, under the circumstances, know to be unlawful, or if the order in question is actually known to the accused to be unlawful. (Goldstein et al., 1976, pp. 525–526; emphasis added) By this definition, subordinates take part in a balancing act, one tipped toward obedience but tempered by“ordinary sense and understanding.” A jury of combat veterans proceeded to convict William Calley of the premeditated murder of no less than twenty-two human beings. (The army, realizing some unfortunate connotations in referring to the victims as “Oriental human beings,” eventually referred to them as “human beings.”) Regarding the first specification in the murder charge, the bodies on the trail, [Calley] was convicted of premeditated murder of not less than one 22  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY person. (Medical testimony had been able to pinpoint only one person whose wounds as revealed in Haeberle’s photos were sure to be immediately fatal.) Regarding the second specification, the bodies in the ditch, Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of not less than twenty human beings. Regarding additional specifications that he had killed an old man and a child, Calley was convicted of premeditated murder in the first case and of assault with intent to commit murder in the second. Lieutenant Calley was initially sentenced to life imprisonment. That sentence was reduced: first to twenty years, eventually to ten (the latter by Secretary of Defense Callaway in 1974). Calley served three years before being released on bond. The time was spent under house arrest in his apartment, where he was able to receive visits from his girlfriend. He was granted parole on September 10, 1975. Sanctioned Massacres The slaughter at My Lai is an instance of a class of violent acts that can be described as sanctioned massacres (Kelman, 1973): acts of indiscriminate, ruthless, and often systematic mass violence, carried out by military or paramilitary personnel while engaged in officially sanctioned campaigns, the victims of which are defenseless and unresisting civilians, including old men, women, and children. Sanctioned massacres have occurred throughout history. Within American history, My Lai had its precursors in the Philippine war around the turn of the century (Schirmer, 1971) and in the massacres of American Indians. Elsewhere in the world, one recalls the Nazis’ “final solution” for European Jews, the massacres and deportations of Armenians by Turks, the liquidation of the kulaks and the great purges in the Soviet Union, and more recently the massacres in Indonesia and Bangladesh, in Biafra and Burundi, in South Africa and Mozambique, in Cambodia and Afghanistan, in Syria and Lebanon. . . . The occurrence of sanctioned massacres cannot be adequately explained by the existence of psychological forces—whether these be characterological dispositions to engage in murderous violence or profound hostility against the target—so powerful that they must find expression in violent acts unhampered by moral restraints. Instead, the major instigators for this class of violence derive from the policy process. The question that really calls for psychological analysis is why so many people are willing to formulate, participate in, and condone policies that call for the mass killings of defenseless civilians. Thus it is more instructive to look not at the motives for violence but at the conditions under which the usual moral inhibitions against violence become weakened. Three social processes that tend to create such conditions can be identified: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. Through authorization, the situation becomes so defined that the individual is absolved of the responsibility to make personal moral choices. Through routinization, the action becomes so organized that there is no opportunity for raising moral questions. Through dehumanization, the actors’ attitudes toward the target and toward themselves become so structured that it is neither necessary nor possible for them to view the relationship in moral terms. Authorization Sanctioned massacres by definition occur in the context of an authority situation, a situation in which, at least for many of the participants, the moral principles that generally govern human relationships do not apply. Thus, when acts of violence are explicitly ordered, implicitly encouraged, tacitly approved, or at least permitted by legitimate authorities, people’s readiness to commit or condone them is enhanced. That such acts are authorized seems to carry automatic justification for them. Behaviorally, authorization obviates the necessity of making judgments or choices. Not only do normal moral principles become Chapter 1 inoperative, but—particularly when the actions are explicitly ordered—a different kind of morality, linked to the duty to obey superior orders, tends to take over. In an authority situation, individuals characteristically feel obligated to obey the orders of the authorities, whether or not these correspond with their personal preferences. They see themselves as having no choice as long as they accept the legitimacy of the orders and of the authorities who give them. Individuals differ considerably in the degree to which—and the conditions under which—they are prepared to challenge the legitimacy of an order on the grounds that the order itself is illegal, or that those giving it have overstepped their authority, or that it stems from a policy that violates fundamental societal values. Regardless of such individual differences, however, the basic structure of a situation of legitimate authority requires subordinates to respond in terms of their role obligations rather than their personal preferences; they can openly disobey only by challenging the legitimacy of the authority. Often people obey without question even though the behavior they engage in may entail great personal sacrifice or great harm to others. An important corollary of the basic structure of the authority situation is that actors often do not see themselves as personally responsible for the consequences of their actions. Again, there are individual differences, depending on actors’ capacity and readiness to evaluate the legitimacy of orders received. Insofar as they see themselves as having had no choice in their actions, however, they do not feel personally responsible for them. They were not personal agents, but merely extensions of the authority. Thus, when their actions cause harm to others, they can feel relatively free of guilt. A similar mechanism operates when a person engages in antisocial behavior that was not ordered by the authorities but was tacitly encouraged and approved by them—even if only by making it clear that such behavior will not be punished. In this situation, behavior that was formerly illegitimate is legitimized by the authorities’ acquiescence. Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  23 In the My Lai massacre, it is likely that the structure of the authority situation contributed to the massive violence in both ways—that is, by conveying the message that acts of violence against Vietnamese villagers were required, as well as the message that such acts, even if not ordered, were permitted by the authorities in charge. The actions at My Lai represented, at least in some respects, responses to explicit or implicit orders. Lieutenant Calley indicated, by orders and by example, that he wanted large numbers of villagers killed. Whether Calley himself had been ordered by his superiors to “waste” the whole area, as he claimed, remains a matter of controversy. Even if we assume, however, that he was not explicitly ordered to wipe out the village, he had reason to believe that such actions were expected by his superior officers. Indeed, the very nature of the war conveyed this expectation. The principal measure of military success was the “body count”—the number of enemy soldiers killed—and any Vietnamese killed by the U.S. military was commonly defined as a “Viet Cong.” Thus, it was not totally bizarre for Calley to believe that what he was doing at My Lai was to increase his body count, as any good officer was expected to do. Even to the extent that the actions at My Lai occurred spontaneously, without reference to superior orders, those committing them had reason to assume that such actions might be tacitly approved of by the military authorities. Not only had they failed to punish such acts in most cases, but the very strategies and tactics that the authorities consistently devised were based on the proposition that the civilian population of South Vietnam—whether “hostile” or “friendly”—was expendable. Such policies as search-and-destroy missions, the establishment of free-shooting zones, the use of antipersonnel weapons, the bombing of entire villages if they were suspected of harboring guerrillas, the forced migration of masses of the rural population, and the defoliation of vast forest areas helped legitimize acts of massive violence of the kind occurring at My Lai. Some of the actions at My Lai suggest an orientation to authority based on unquestioning 24  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY obedience to superior orders, no matter how destructive the actions these orders call for. Such obedience is specifically fostered in the course of military training and reinforced by the structure of the military authority situation. It also reflects, however, an ideological orientation that may be more widespread in the general population. . . . Routinization Authorization processes create a situation in which people become involved in an action without considering its implications and without really making a decision. Once they have taken the initial step, they are in a new psychological and social situation in which the pressures to continue are powerful. As Lewin (1947) has pointed out, many forces that might originally have kept people out of a situation reverse direction once they have made a commitment (once they have gone through the “gate region”) and now serve to keep them in the situation. For example, concern about the criminal nature of an action, which might originally have inhibited a person from becoming involved, may now lead to deeper involvement in efforts to justify the action and to avoid negative consequences. Despite these forces, however, given the nature of the actions involved in sanctioned massacres, one might still expect moral scruples to intervene; but the likelihood of moral resistance is greatly reduced by transforming the action into routine, mechanical, highly programmed operations. Routinization fulfills two functions. First, it reduces the necessity of making decisions, thus minimizing the occasions in which moral questions may arise. Second, it makes it easier to avoid the implications of the action, since the actor focuses on the details of the job rather than on its meaning. The latter effect is more readily achieved among those who participate in sanctioned massacres from a distance—from their desks or even from the cockpits of their bombers. Routinization operates both at the level of the individual actor and at the organizational level. Individual job performance is broken down into a series of discrete steps, most of them carried out in automatic, regularized fashion. It becomes easy to forget the nature of the product that emerges from this process. When Lieutenant Calley said of My Lai that it was “no great deal,” he probably implied that it was all in a day’s work. Organizationally, the task is divided among different offices, each of which has responsibility for a small portion of it. This arrangement diffuses responsibility and limits the amount and scope of decision making that is necessary. There is no expectation that the moral implications will be considered at any of these points, nor is there any opportunity to do so. The organizational processes also help further legitimize the actions of each participant. By proceeding in routine fashion—processing papers, exchanging memos, diligently carrying out their assigned tasks—the different units mutually reinforce each other in the view that what is going on must be perfectly normal, correct, and legitimate. The shared illusion that they are engaged in a legitimate enterprise helps the participants assimilate their activities to other purposes, such as the efficiency of their performance, the productivity of their unit, or the cohesiveness of their group (see Janis, 1972). Normalization of atrocities is more difficult to the extent that there are constant reminders of the true meaning of the enterprise. Bureaucratic inventiveness in the use of language helps to cover up such meaning. For example, the SS had a set of Sprachregelungen, or “language rules,” to govern descriptions of their extermination program. As Arendt (1964) points out, the term language rule in itself was “a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie” (p. 85). The code names for killing and liquidation were “final solution,” “evacuation,” and “special treatment.” The war in Indochina produced its own set of euphemisms, such as “protective reaction,” “pacification,” and “forced-draft urbanization and modernization.” The use of euphemisms allows participants in sanctioned massacres to differentiate their actions from Chapter 1 ordinary killing and destruction and thus to avoid confronting their true meaning. Dehumanization Authorization processes override standard moral considerations; routinization processes reduce the likelihood that such considerations will arise. Still, the inhibitions against murdering one’s fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must also be stripped of their human status if they are to be subjected to systematic killing. Insofar as they are dehumanized, the usual principles of morality no longer apply to them. Sanctioned massacres become possible to the extent that the victims are deprived in the perpetrators’ eyes of the two qualities essential to being perceived as fully human and included in the moral compact that governs human relationships: identity—standing as independent, distinctive individuals, capable of making choices and entitled to live their own lives—and community—fellow membership in an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other and respect each other’s individuality and rights (Kelman, 1973; see also Bakan, 1966, for a related distinction between “agency” and “communion”). Thus, when a group of people is defined entirely in terms of a category to which they belong, and when this category is excluded from the human family, moral restraints against killing them are more readily overcome. Dehumanization of the enemy is a common phenomenon in any war situation. Sanctioned massacres, however, presuppose a more extreme degree of dehumanization, insofar as the killing is not in direct response to the target’s threats or provocations. It is not what they have done that marks such victims for death but who they are—the category to which they happen to belong. They are the victims of policies that regard their systematic destruction as a desirable end or an acceptable means. Such extreme dehumanization becomes possible when the target group can readily be Taking a New Look at a Familiar World  25 identified as a separate category of people who have historically been stigmatized and excluded by the victimizers; often the victims belong to a distinct racial, religious, ethnic, or political group regarded as inferior or sinister. The traditions, the habits, the images, and the vocabularies for dehumanizing such groups are already well established and can be drawn upon when the groups are selected for massacre. Labels help deprive the victims of identity and community, as in the epithet “gooks” that was commonly used to refer to Vietnamese and other Indochinese peoples. The dynamics of the massacre process itself further increase the participants’ tendency to dehumanize their victims. Those who participate as part of the bureaucratic apparatus increasingly come to see their victims as bodies to be counted and entered into their reports, as faceless figures that will determine their productivity rates and promotions. Those who participate in the massacre directly—in the field, as it were—are reinforced in their perception of the victims as less than human by observing their very victimization. The only way they can justify what is being done to these people—both by others and by themselves—and the only way they can extract some degree of meaning out of the absurd events in which they find themselves participating (see Lifton, 1971, 1973) is by coming to believe that the victims are subhuman and deserve to be rooted out. And thus the process of dehumanization feeds on itself. REFERENCES Arendt, H. (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Viking Press. Bakan, D. (1966). The duality of human existence. Chicago: Rand McNally. Department of the Army. (1956). The law of land warfare (Field Manual, No. 27–10). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Falk, R. A., Kolko, G., & Lifton, R. J. (Eds.). (1971). Crimes of war. New York: Vintage Books. French, P. (Ed.). (1972). Individual and collective responsibility: The massacre at My Lai. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. 26  PART 1 THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY Goldstein, J., Marshall, B., & Schwartz, J. (Eds.). (1976). The My Lai massacre and its cover-up: Beyond the reach of law? (The Peers Report with a supplement and introductory essay on the limits of law). New York: Free Press. Hammer, R. (1971). The court-martial of Lt. Calley. New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan. Hersh, S. (1970). My Lai 4: A report on the massacre and its aftermath. New York: Vintage Books. ______. (1972). Cover-up. New York: Random House. Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kelman, H. C. (1973). Violence without moral restraint: Reflections on the dehumanization of victims and victimizers. Journal of Social Issues, 29(4), 25–61. Lewin, K. (1947). Group decision and social change. In T. M. Newcomb & E. L. Hartley (Eds.), Readings in social psychology. New York: Holt. Lifton, R. J. (1971). Existential evil. In N. Sanford, C. Comstock, & Associates, Sanctions for evil: Sources of social destructiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ______. (1973). Home from the war—Vietnam veterans: Neither victims nor executioners. NewYork: Simon & Schuster. Manual for courts martial, United States (Rev. ed.). (1969). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Schirme...
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