Mestrovic -- Durkheim's Concept of Dérèglement Retranslated, Parsons's Reading of Durkheim...

Durkheims concept of dere`glementretranslated, Parsonss reading ofDurkheim re-parsed: an examinationof post-emotional displacement, scape-goatingand responsibility atAbuGhraib

Stjepan G. Mestrovic and Ryan Ashley Caldwell

The occasion of the 150th anniversary ofDurkheims birth provides an excellent oppor-tunity to re-examine Durkheims legacy inrelation to law and its attendant concepts:justice, responsibility, crime and punishment.However, we note at the outset that Durkheim,the son of a rabbi as well one of sociologysfounding fathers, understood sociology to be thescience of morality, and the law as having itsorigins in religion. In his words, morality is theindispensible minimum, that which is strictlynecessary, the daily breadwithout which societies can-not live (Durkheim [1893]1984, p.13). Contemporaryreaders will be tempted toask, Whose morality? TheDurkheimian reply is thatmorality is a universal con-struct such that all moralitiesand religions are true in theirown way so long as theypreserve and promotesocietal and internationalintegration. For example,Durkheim writes: Funda-mentally, then, there are noreligions that are false. Allare true after their own fash-ion: all full given conditionsof human existence, thoughin different ways. . . . Theyfull the same needs, play thesame role and proceed from the same causes(Durkheim [1912] 1995, p.2).

We propose to limit this examination to oneof his central concepts, anomie, and link it withhis overall project to establish a science of

morality. We will apply it to one of the deningepisodes in recent history that is on par with theDreyfus Affair, in which Durkheim partici-pated, namely, the abuse at Abu Ghraib, amilitary detention centre in Iraq, as brought topublic attention in 2004. We work within theoverall framework that Durkheim offers a grandtheory that is applicable universally as to howsocieties should function normally as well ashow they function in anomic, pathological ways.We begin with the argument that the abuse at

Abu Ghraib is best cap-tured by Durkheims origi-nal and contextual under-standing of anomie, notsubsequent or rival versionsof this concept. His disciple,Paul Fauconnet (1928),published a complex trea-tise on responsibility thatextends Durkheims treat-ment of legal, moral andquasi-religious issues inThe division of labour insociety (Durkheim [1893]1984). This analysis leadsto the neglected and dis-tinctively Durkheimianconclusion that societymust recognise collectiveresponsibility for socialconditions that createcrime (Cotterrell 1999,

p.107). In other words, it is US society as awhole, not a handful of so-called rotten applesthat are responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraiband elsewhere in the war in Iraq, in much thesame way as French society was responsible for

Stjepan G. Mestrovic is professor ofsociology at Texas A&M University. Hehas published extensively on Durkheimand war crimes from Bosnia to AbuGhraib and Iraq. His most recent booksare The trials of Abu Ghraib, Rules ofengagement, and The good soldier ontrial.Email: [email protected] Ashley Caldwell is an assistantprofessor of sociology at Soka Universityof America in southern California. Herareas of research include social theory,culture, womens studies, applied ethicsand issues of military accountability. Herrecent publications include using socialtheory and gender to critically understandthe war on terror, including the manypower permutations involved. Mestrovicand Caldwell have extensive participantobservation research experience at USmilitary court martials.Email: [email protected]

ISSJ 185rUNESCO 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600GarsingtonRoad, Oxford, OX4 2DK,UK and 350Main Street, Malden,MA 02148, USA.

the anti-Semitism and other anomic conditionsthat led to the Dreyfus Affair, not just a handfulof ofcers. While this conclusion will not comeas a surprise to Durkheimian scholars, it iscontrary to the popular perception that theabuse at Abu Ghraib is the result of the perverseactions of a few morally corrupt soldiers, whileofcers, civilian leaders and US society as awhole are exempt from responsibility.

Durkheim and Fauconnet both imply thecontroversial idea of collective responsibility. AsMay and Hoffman (1991) point out, collectiveresponsibility has been used in reprehensibleways by the Nazis to scapegoat Jews and later byworld opinion to blame all Germans for Nazism.On the other hand, they note that lawyers andgovernments routinely use collective responsi-bility to prosecute corporations and groupsafliated with some specic individuals, suchas terrorists and this kind of behaviour isgenerally deemed to be socially acceptable.Similarly, Mannheim (2003, p.44) argues thatas Fauconnet has stressed, even after thedisappearance of blood vengeance the collectiveelement survived at least in the eld of pecuniaryco-responsibility of the group. One of ourgoals in this chapter is to distinguish betweenhealthy and unhealthy, and integrative anddysfunctional collective responsibility. One ofthe keystones of Durkheims entire system ofthought is that the past cannot and should not bejettisoned entirely from modernity. Thus, pun-ishment will always contain an element ofpassionate vengeance: In the beginning, indi-viduals took vengeance themselves; now it issociety that avenges them (Durkheim [1893]1984, p.49). The creative tension in Durkheimsthought lies in discussing and understandingthe difference between socially integrativeand dysfunctional (anomic) vengeance (seeGruztpalk 2002).

The one and only synonym that Durkheimused for the concept of anomie is dere`glement,which literally means derangement. However,anomie has been and continues to be misunder-stood as a condition of normlessness. Doesthis discrepancy in understanding anomie asnormlessness versus derangement matter? Itmatters from the vantage point of Durkheimsoverall sociology, which holds that words andconcepts are not the idiosyncratic creations ofisolated individuals, but are the product of

immense cooperation. Language is part of asystem of collective representations that not onlycreate meaning but promote social solidarity. InDurkheims words ([1912] 1995, p.435), lan-guage is xed; it changes but slowly. . . . It iscommon to all because it is the work of thecommunity. The scientist may innovate, ofcourse, but his innovations always do a certainviolence to established ways of thinking (Durk-heim [1912] 1995, p.435). Nowadays and in starkcontrast to Durkheims position, postmoderndeconstruction of language and the notion ofspin, namely, that any idea can be redescribed inany way that one chooses, have come todominate academia (see Rorty 1989).We chooseto follow the Durkheimian approach to lan-guage and truth, which would regard postmo-dernism as a historical instance of intellectualanomie.

Conceptualising the problem

The factual evidence for the presence of extremesocial disorganisation and anomie comes fromthe US Government reports pertaining to AbuGhraib as well as testimony from the courts-martial which is described meticulously byMestrovic (2007) and Caldwell and Mestrovic(2008) based upon eyewitness accounts of thetrials and includes, but is not limited to, thefollowing points. There was a systemic lack ofaccountability. The ling system was disorga-nised. Government agencies and civilian con-tractors including the CIA operated outsideestablished rules and procedures established bythe Army Field Manual as well as the GenevaConventions. Nobody was certain who was incharge of Abu Ghraib. The prison was over-crowded. There was no organised system forreleasing prisoners. Soldiers failed to screenprisoners at the point where they were arrestedas well as the point when they were brought toAbu Ghraib. No one screened the civiliancontractors. New soldiers (but not entire units)were introduced to the personnel structure (aprocess that the Army calls cross-levelling). Thearmy failed to adequately train military policeand military intelligence in policing as well asinterrogation procedures. The military policedid not know what they or the militaryintelligence were not allowed to do. General

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Taguba cited egregious lack of military disci-pline. There was intense pressure to obtaininformation from a population of prisoners thatwas not capable of providing the desiredinformation. Soldiers were not trained in orfamiliar with the Geneva Conventions. Publicly,the US military upheld the Geneva Conventionswhile various attorneys for the White Houseopined that the Geneva Conventions did notwholly apply to the treatment of prisoners.General Taguba found poor paperwork andreporting procedures, along with a host of otherfacts that suggest extreme social chaos. Forexample, the supply ofcer at Abu Ghraib,Major David DiNenna, testied that he beggedthe Army for adequate water, food, toilets, lightbulbs and generators and that his pleas fell ondeaf ears. He testied in open court that he feltabandoned by the Army at Abu Ghraib(Mestrovic 2007, p.107). The documentationfor all these facts is immense and consistent (seeDanner 2004, Falk et al. 2006, Hersh 2004,Karpinski 2005, Strasser 2004, among manyother books on Abu Ghraib, as well as two lmdocumentaries, Rory Kennedys Ghosts ofAbu Ghraib and Errol Morriss StandardOperating Procedure).

The characterisation of all these and otherfacts as anomic is practically non-existent in theliterature. More important, the responsibilityfor the egregious disorganisation at Abu Ghraibwas not pursued at the trials, in public discourseor scholarship even though a handful of soldierswere sent to prison for specic acts of abuse.Who was responsible for the lack of toilets,water, light bulbs, generators and bullets at AbuGhraib? Who was responsible for the poisonedsocial climate, in the words of General Fay, atAbu Ghraib, which in turn set the stage for thesubsequent abuse? Despite the existence of thedoctrine of command responsibility, whichholds that military commanders are accountablevia omission or commission for the behaviour ofthe subordinates, most of Major DiNennassuperiors in the chain of command werepromoted, not punished. Durkheim (1893) heldthat as society progresses, the law changes in itsemphasis from retribution to restitution. Butneither retribution nor restitution characterisethe Armys or US societys response to thefailure to adequately supply, train, or prepare itssoldiers.

As for applying social scientic concepts inthe courtroom to make sense of the abuse atAbu Ghraib, Philip Zimbardo (2007) was anexpert witness in Ivan Fredericks court martialwhere he used the obedience to authorityparadigm and Mestrovic (2007) was an expertwitness in the court martials of Javal Davis,Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England, wherehe used Durkheims concept of anomie. MattTaibbi captures the laypersons reaction to theinjection of the sociological concept of anomieinto legal discourse: Mestrovic describedAbu Ghraib as a state of anomie. A what?[Colonel] Pohl snapped, frowning. A state ofanomie, the doctor repeated. Pohl shudderedand sipped his coffee, seeming to wonderwhether such a word was even legal in Texas(Taibbi 2005, p.48).

What is at stake here is the importance ofDurkheims legacy, not the desire to enter into afrivolous polemic with Zimbardo. In otherwords, which concept is better for understandingthe abuse at Abu Ghraib, Durkheims originalconcept of anomie or Zimbardos obedience toauthority paradigm? From Durkheims andFauconnets point of view, if obedience toauthority is the cause of the abuse, then thesoldier bears the sole responsibility for disobey-ing an unlawful order. Indeed, Zimbardo (2007)exhorts soldiers to be heroes and to refuse toobey unlawful orders. The US military also laysthe blame on the soldiers for failing to disobeyan unlawful order, but the International Tribu-nal at The Hague invokes the doctrine ofcommand responsibility, which holds militaryand civilian leaders as being themost responsiblefor acts of omission as well as commission (seeMestrovic 2008). Which approach is more just?This is an important legal and social issue whichfails to invoke the Durkheimian project, eventhough Durkheim addressed precisely thesesorts of sociological issues pertaining to law,justice and responsibility. As stated previously,the Durkheimian perspective places the ultimateburden of responsibility on the Army andsociety in general. Indeed, the military judge atthe Abu Ghraib trials immediately grasped theimport of Durkheims perspective and rejectedit, declaring several times, The Army is not ontrial here! But from Durkheims point of view,the Army was on trial, metaphorically speaking,at the Abu Ghraib court martials and the

Abu Ghraib: post-emotional displacement, scapegoating and responsibility 141

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metaphorical jury of ones peers was theinternational community.

Fauconnet (1928) elaborates on Durkheimto argue that traditional societies regarded entirecities, regions, institutions and families evenlivestock, pets and other animals as beingresponsible for crimes and punished entiregroups, not just individuals. Indeed, Durkheimdid write that traditional societies:

[p]unish animals that have committed the act that is

stigmatised or even inanimate things which have been its

passive instrument. When the punishment is applied solely

to people, it often extends well beyond the guilty person

and strikes even the innocent his wife, children or

neighbours, etc. . . . Nowadays, however, it is said that

punishment has changed in nature. Society no longer

punishes to avenge, but to defend itself. (Durkheim [1893]

1984, p.44)

Note the immediate relevance of Durk-heims theory to the fact that Afghan and Iraqileaders respond immediately and negatively tothe collateral damage, that is, the deaths ofwomen, children and livestock that sometimesoccur when coalition forces target a specicperson (for one example out of many, see Perlez2008). Modern societies hold that individualsare solely responsible for their actions. However,the ne point of this discussion is that Fauconnetand Durkheim concluded that the tradi-tional approach never disappears entirely fromcollective consciousness and is preferable toindividualistic, subjective, depictions ofresponsibility in modern law. Cotterrell quotesFauconnet: What is taken to be perfectresponsibility is responsibility weakened andreduced to vanishing point (Cotterrell 1999,p.107). The issue is extremely complex: modernsocieties seek to minimise collateral damage, butinternational law holds that the entire chain ofcommand, not the particular soldier who killedinnocents, is responsible. Our central point isthat Fauconnet and Durkheim offer a vastlydifferent understanding of what should havebeen the just and responsible reaction to thedisorganisation as well as the abuse at AbuGhraib compared to the actual response. Weshall argue that Durkheims grand theory leadsone to regard the exclusive punishment of ahandful of soldiers for the evils at AbuGhraib asa form of scapegoating. In Durkheims words,We have remained true to the principle of the

talion, although we conceive of it in a more loftysense than once we did (Durkheim [1893] 1984,p.47). Nevertheless, for Durkheim, punishmenthas remained an act of vengeance, at least inpart (p. 46).

We chose the abuse at Abu Ghraib as thevehicle for this discussion of anomie because itcaptured the collective imagination in the pre-sent era much as the Dreyfus Affair capturedwidespread attention in Durkheims lifetime andbecause of the intimate knowledge we gained ofthe abusers as well as the abuse at Abu Ghraibthrough the participant-observation research weconducted in our roles working for the defencein three separate court martials that were held atFort Hood, Texas, in the year 2005. In this briefstudy, we shall approach the abuse at AbuGhraib in much the same way as Durkheimapproached the topic of suicide vis-a`-vis anomie:namely, suicide and the abuse at AbuGhraib arevehicles for a much broader sociological discus-sion that involves the sociologies of knowledge,organisations, the military and culture. Numer-ous commentators on Durkheims Suicide([1897] 1983) seem to miss the obvious pointthat it is not a positivistic study of thephenomenon of suicide per se, but a study ofthe phenomena of social currents that compelindividuals to engage in murderous thoughts aswell as behaviour, against the self and others,ranging from the altruistic self-sacrice of asoldier to various shades of deliberate versusaccidental and unintentional violence.1 Simi-larly, the violence at Abu Ghraib ranged frommurder to verbal abuse and forcing naked,shackled Muslim men to wear panties on theirheads and the abuse involved the misuse ofculture (exploiting Muslim cultural beliefs re-garding nudity, dogs, prayer and so on), psychicabuse (such as isolation) and a wide spectrum ofsocial phenomena not usually regarded as abuse.Given the limitations of space, this chaptercannot serve as more than a sketch for such aDurkheimian approach to the abuse at AbuGhraib.

Durkheims overall sociology has beencriticised for not paying sufcient attention toviolence, despite the fact that every one of hisbooks deals with violence in some form, rangingfrom a discussion of corporal punishmentin Moral education, sacrice and scapegoats inThe elementary forms of religious life and to


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white-collar crimes in the business world inhis Professional ethics and civic morals (seeMestrovic 1988). In fact, the idea of sufferingis ubiquitous in all of Durkheims studies, fromhis analyses of crime and suicide to religion andsocial solidarity. He held that it is possible onlyat the cost of the violence that societymust inicton the individual, as theorised by the concept ofhomo duplex or the dualism of human nature(Durkheim [1914] 1973).2 One must distinguishbetween this sanctifying power of sorrow forthe sake of social solidarity and the seeminglysenseless suffering that results from anomie: Ifanomie is an evil it is above all because societysuffers through it (Durkheim [1893] 1984,p.xxxv). For example, Durkheims commenton the routine altruism expected of the soldieris directly relevant to understanding the abusecommitted by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib:

Now, the rst quality of a soldier is a sort of impersonality

not to be found anywhere in civilian life to the same degree.

He must be trained to set little value upon himself, since he

must be prepared to sacrice himself upon being ordered to

do so. Even aside from such exceptional circumstances, in

peace time and in the regular exercise of his profession,

discipline requires him to obey without question and

sometimes even without understanding. (Durkheim [1897]

1951, p. 234)

Indeed, the crux of the legal issues at theAbu Ghraib trials was whether the ofcers wereresponsible for the unlawful orders that wereissued or whether the soldiers were responsiblefor their failure to disobey the unlawful orders.Yet society expects soldiers to obey commandswithout question or understanding (for a de-tailed discussion of the complex issue of thesoldiers duty to disobey an unlawful orderversus the ofcers responsibility via the doctrineof command responsibility, see Mestrovic(2008). There is no easy solution to this dilemma,but our approach is to distinguish sharplybetween a soldiers normal altruism in a normalmilitary setting versus unnecessary suffering inanomic forms of social functioning.

The term anomie was coined by EmileDurkheim in The division of labor in society([1893] 1984) and in Suicide ([1897] 1951).Durkheim refers specically to dere`glement asthe synonym for anomie: letat de dere`glementou danomie ([1897] 1983, p.287). Anomie isdepicted by Durkheim as a general societal

condition of dere`glement or derangement literally, a rule that is a lack of rule ([1897]1951, p.257), or in the original French: con-sciences dere`glees et qui erigent en re`gle ledere`glement dont elles souffrent ([1897] 1983,p.287). Andre Lalande [1926] 1980 uses Durk-heims original understanding of anomie. Jean-Marie Guyau preceded Durkheim in using thisconcept in the year 1885: Cest labsence de loixe, quon peut designer sous le terme danomie(Guyau [1885] 1907, p.165). French dictionariessuch as the Littre refer to dere`glement as a stateof corruption, evil, agitation, torment, impietyand intemperance which leads to general suffer-ing and torment.3 It is signicant that theseterms can be applied to the social conditions andexperiences of both soldiers and prisoners atAbuGhraib as revealed in testimony and reportsand are in line with Durkheims general assump-tions about anomie that it is a disorganisedsocial condition that leads to unnecessarysuffering and distress (see Mestrovic and Brown1985). Extreme suffering and distress, in turn,can lead to scapegoating and the vendetta(Durkheim [1912] 1995, p.404).

Emile Littre was an important disciple ofAuguste Comte, who in turn inuenced Durk-heim. Given that Comte posited a progression ofsocieties from theological through metaphysicalto positivistic stages and that the effects of theprevious stages are not entirely eliminated, onemay suppose that Littre and Durkheim bothtook very seriously the ancient meanings ofwords. Like the Oxford English dictionary,Littres dictionary ([1863] 1963) seeks out themeanings of words based upon their empiricalusage in ancient texts. For example, even if it istrue that in contemporary French the statementthat ones refrigerator is dere`gle means that it ismiscalibrated, the more important point is thatthe ancient meanings that the refrigerator ispossessed by evil spirits (theological) or is notfunctioning in accordance with its essence(metaphysical) are not entirely lost. It iscommon for modern people to refer to theircomputers, watches and other machines aspossessed, even if this is said in jest and eventhough they seek to repair the machines byscientic standards. We wish to make two pointsin this respect. Firstly, we take seriouslyDurkheims precise choice of dere`glement asthe word to convey the meanings he intended


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based upon usage extant in his time as well ashistorical usages, which is a theme consistentwith his overall approach to all social facts.Secondly, to state that the military unit at AbuGhraib was miscalibrated, according to con-temporary French linguistic usage, is still pre-ferable to the claim that it exhibitednormlessness, which is a purely invented wordwith no long history of usage.

Durkheim treats anomie as acute andtemporary as well as chronic and long-lasting.In Suicide, as well as other works such asMoraleducation and Professional ethics, he also ad-dresses several varieties of anomie, among themconjugal, economic, marital, religious, political,military and intellectual, among others pertain-ing to various social institutions. Durkheimsscaffolding for understanding anomie includesArthur Schopenhauers philosophy in which theimperious will is unrestrained by rationalcategories or representations (Baillot 1927),theological understandings of anomia as sin(Lyonnet and Sabourin 1970) and various otherEuropean philosophers (Mestrovic 1985).Again, we stress that the notion of anomie as akind of sin automatically carries with it the ideasof expiation, scapegoating, suffering and justice;concepts that are important to Durkheimsoverall project of sociology conceived as thescience of morality.

Thus, Durkheims overall meaning ofdere`glement seems to be that it is a severe formof collective derangement. Literally, anomieseems to imply a condition of collective insanity,or more precisely, a societal analogue to a stateof individual personality disorder. This connec-tion between individual and collective psychicpathology is not surprising, given that severalof Durkheims contemporaries, especiallySigmund Freud, frequently made the analogybetween individual and collective consciousnessvis-a`-vis deranged psychic structures. HenriEllenberger (1970) offers what seems to be oneof the most comprehensive analyses of the manythinkers fromDurkheims era who subscribed tothis point of view. It is worth noting thatDurkheim and his contemporaries were writingat a time in which the disciplines of sociology,psychology, psychiatry and other social scienceswere not sharply distinguished from each otherin the manner in which they are today. Forexample, Freud held that psychoanalysis was a

tool to be used for apprehending culture, not justthe individual. Furthermore and in line withDurkheims overall assumptions, this perspec-tive on collective derangement should not bereduced to the contemporary version found inChristopher Lasch (1971), for example, whereina culture of narcissism is reduced to a society ofnumerous individuals who are deranged narcis-sists. To be true toDurkheims assumptions, oneshould argue instead that to conceive of AbuGhraib as a deranged (anomic) society is tograsp that it was a place full of violence of manysorts (including psychological and culturalabuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, learnedhelplessness and physical hardship) that led tomany varieties of suffering for all concerned.

While the derangement or madness of AbuGhraib was patently obvious to all whowitnessed the testimony at the trials at FortHood, Texas, along with the suffering that itentailed, this connection between anomie andsuffering in the case of Abu Ghraib is obscuredand sometimes invisible in general as well asscholarly discourse. Regarding the derange-ment, we note that the Fay Report as well astestimony showed that 90 per cent of theprisoners were not terrorists and were not hostileto the USA; that they had no information togive; that naked prisoners were routinely forcedto wear panties in their heads; that the abuseoccurred as part of a de facto policy that was notrelated to interrogation techniques; that theprison was in the middle of a war zone and didnot have adequate supplies of food, water,generators and bullets. Soldiers testied thatAbu Ghraib was not a normal prison, that theycalled it Bizarroworld and said that it washell on earth. Our point is that Durkheimsvery precise denition of anomie as derangementts the facts as they were presented in open trial.

As for suffering, one of the so-called rottenapples (corrupt soldiers) testied that the nightsat Abu Ghraib were lled with moans andscreams from prisoners who were shackled inpainfully contorted positions. The physicalsuffering of the prisoners may perhaps seemobvious, but other forms of psychic suffering arenot as obvious: isolation, humiliation, hope-lessness, panic, confusion. But the least obvioussuffering was that of the soldiers themselves. Farfrom the happy, fraternity party atmospheredescribed by the information media, testimony


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revealed that the accused soldiers suffered frompost-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia,depression and anxiety, in addition to thephysical hardships of unlawfully long workshifts, lack of adequate cooling and heating inthe work environment, unlawful ratios of guardsto prisoners, lack of water and food, inadequatetoilet facilities and a host of other factorsincluding but not limited to the fact that mostsoldiers slept in jail cells. All these facts, veriedin open court, are in line with Durkheimsneglected observation that anomie producessuffering of many sorts in various degrees forall participants in an anomic society.

Contrast with conventionalperspectives on Abu Ghraib

The facts that were disclosed during testimonyand in US Government reports are in line withDurkheims very precise understanding ofanomie as the derangement that produces wide-spread and unnecessary suffering. In otherwords, anomie is itself a form of irrationalviolence (in its many forms, from psychic tophysical) that does not and cannot promotesocial solidarity. Moreover, the anomic job ofthe soldiers at Abu Ghraib was primarily toinict suffering on prisoners and the soldierssuffered as they performed these anomic roleobligations. Over and over again, we heardsoldiers testify on the witness stand that theyperceived themselves as punishing prisoners,even as the prosecutor was arguing passionatelythat the abused prisoners were innocent of anycrimes. According to Durkheim ([1893] 1984,p.46), punishment has remained an act ofvengeance, at least in part. But Durkheimdistinguishes sharply between the vendetta as apure form of the vengeance exhibited by thesoldiers and the sort of attenuated vengeanceexhibited by the prosecutor in a military courtmartial. Nevertheless, as we have stated from theoutset, Durkheims ([1893] 1984, p.48) overallposition is ambiguous: All that can be said isthat the necessity for vengeance is better directednowadays than in the past.

The truth about Abu Ghraib has beenobscured in the general and scholarly discourseinto a plethora of inaccurate myths: that the

abuse was performed by seven corrupt soldiers,when testimony and reports show that the abusewas part of a widespread pattern of abuse thathad migrated from Guantanamo Bay and US-run prisons in Afghanistan as well as elsewherein Iraq;4 that the abuse was the result of applyinginterrogation techniques when in fact prisonerswere abused ad hoc in stairways, hallways andplaces and times that had no relationship tointerrogation; that the abuse was the result ofobedience to authority when in fact the testi-mony drove home the point that there was avacuum of authority and leadership at AbuGhraib.

There is something deceptively rationalabout these and other explanations for the abusebecause they attempt to mask the derangementuncovered by Durkheim as the most importantfeature of anomie. If the seven rotten apples canbe scapegoated as the root cause of the abuse,then the widespread, systemic and irrationalnature of the abuse does not have to beconfronted. If the abuse is somehow linked tofollowing rational techniques, then one does nothave to face the madness of a de facto policy oftorturing prisoners who were not hostile to theUSA and who had no information to give. If theabuse was merely the result of following ordersthen it somehow makes sense, even if such adefence does not sway judges who hold that thesoldier is obligated to disobey an unlawful order.In fact, the concept of anomie is not typicallyused to comprehend the abuse at Abu Ghraib orother sites of war crimes since Durkheims era and if it is implied, it is a distant echo of theParsonian version of anomie as normlessnessthat emerges, not Durkheims version as de-rangement.

Durkheims perspective was changed con-siderably by the most inuential Americansociologist of the twentieth century, TalcottParsons (1937). Parsons elaborated anomie intothe meaning of the war of all against all(Parsons 1937, p.407). His most famous disciplewas Robert K. Merton, whose Social structureand anomie (1957) became the most citedarticle in sociology. According to Merton(1957, p.161): as initially developed by Dur-kheim, the concept of anomie referred to acondition of relative normlessness in a society orgroup. It is a curious fact that despite thepopularity and esteem afforded to Mertons


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notion of normlessness, sociologists and crim-inologists have been relatively silent on themanyinstances of anomic war crimes that haveoccurred since Durkheim died in the year 1917,including but not limited to the Holocaust andgenocide in Russia, Yugoslavia and Rwanda, aswell as ethnic cleansing or war crimes inVietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and elsewhere(see Gutman and Rieff 1999). In summary, theconcept of normlessness has become a sort ofcottage industry in explaining domestic crime inthe USA, but is seemingly irrelevant in explain-ing war crimes throughout the world over thecourse of a century of discourse on abuse in wartime.

The prosecutor at the court martialsrevealed in open court that all of the abusedprisoners were not a threat to US citizens andhad no information to give them (Mestrovic2007, p.11). In fact, it is highly irrational, chaoticand deranged to use torture for the sake ofobtaining information on prisoners who had noinformation to give. Even if the soldiers whoabused the prisoners did not always know thattheir victims did not have information to givethem, the more important Durkheimian point isthat there were no established social mechanismsin place for ascertaining this important fact (forexample, there was no screening, no judicialreview boards, no assumption that prisonerswere innocent until proven guilty, no implemen-tation of the Geneva Conventions on processingand treating prisoners and so on). All thisuncertainty, unpredictability, social chaos andcapriciousness seem to support Durkheimscharacterisation of anomie as derangementmore than normlessness.

What does normlessness really mean?Parsons, Merton and other functionalists neverdene the term. From the perspective used here,that Durkheims understanding of anomie asderangement must lead to widespread yetunnecessary suffering, it is interesting that thefunctionalist understanding of normlessnessis emotionally neutral and does not implysuffering. Sociologists who have followed Mer-tons lead seem to believe that normlessness willlead to crime and deviance, but not suffering.The more important point, from Durkheimsperspective, is that the violence produced byanomie goes far beyond crime and includesmany forms of torment, agitation, sorrow and

suffering, including psychic pain. Moreover,regarding Abu Ghraib, it is not true that theGeneva Conventions and other norms ceased toexist it is more accurate to observe that theseand other norms were not followed. Finally, thefunctionalist perspective assumes that socialsystems are self-correcting but the militarysociety at AbuGhraib did not self-correct. In thewords of Captain Jonathan Crisp, defencecounsel for Lynndie England, the dysfunctionalsocial system at Abu Ghraib not only failed toself-correct but was self-perpetuating (Mestrovic2007, p.175). Durkheim ([1897] 1951) assumesthat anomie becomes chronic until self-con-scious and deliberate remedies are sought fromoutside the dysfunctional system.

In general, functionalists who followParsons and Merton assume that society is astable, self-maintaining and self-correcting sys-tem made up of norms, values, beliefs andsanctions.5 All these assumptions can be ques-tioned with regard to the reality of abuse at AbuGhraib. At Abu Ghraib the international norms(exemplied by the Geneva Conventions) weresometimes out of sync with national norms(based upon the US Constitution as well as USArmy eld manuals) as well as local norms(memorandums and competing interpretationsof permissible interrogation methods). US va-lues concerning the importance of democracywere out of sync with the dehumanising atmo-sphere established at AbuGhraib. The collectivebelief that the USA was a liberator was out ofsync with the belief that US soldiers acted liketormentors at Abu Ghraib. The sanctionsexemplied by court martials of low-rankingsoldiers are out of sync with sanctions for gravebreaches of the Geneva Conventions, which callfor the prosecution of high-ranking leaders, orwhat is referred to as the doctrine of commandresponsibility (see Human Rights Watch 2006).This doctrine exists as a sort of dead letter:ofcers are supposed to be held accountable forabuses committed by their subordinates on thegrounds that ofcers knew or should have knownof the abuse. In practice, ofcers are exemptfrom responsibility. In the courtroom at FortHood, the military judge hardly bothered torespond to arguments concerning the doctrine ofcommand responsibility.

But the most serious aw in the function-alist misreading of anomie is its excessive


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rationalism.Mertons depiction of innovation asa discrepancy between socially prescribed goalsand the illicit aims used to attain them fails tocapture the reality or motivations of the soldierswho abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Mertonsconceptualisation rests on the Parsonian modelof rational social action. But why were thesoldiers abusing the prisoners in the derangedways described above? In private conversations,convicted soldiers told us bluntly that they weretold that the prisoners were terrorists who wereplanning to or already had harmed Americansand to treat them like dogs in order to saveAmerican lives in the future. The vigilantepunishment of potential terrorists who had notbeen tried is not a socially prescribed goal inAmerican society. If Mertons concept ofinnovation must be used, we hold that thesoldiers were implementing a deranged, anomicform of innovation: both the goals and means

used were out of sync with the values of USsociety.

Anomie in a post-emotionalsociety

Thus far, we have highlighted the discrepanciesamong perceptions of the abuse at Abu Ghraibfrom Durkheimian, functionalist and conven-tional points of view. How can these discrepan-cies be reconciled? From our perspective, thepostmodern reply that social life consists of a seaof circulating ctions (Baudrillard 1986) thatcan be redened any way that one chooses is notsatisfactory. In his book Pragmatism and sociol-ogy Durkheim ([1950] 1983) took up theNietzschean perspective, which has become theintellectual bedrock for much of postmodern

The mall, a place for shoppers and zombies alike (2005). ickr/Mister Wind-Up Bird


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discourse, and rejected it. While he agreed withNietzsche that truth was seemingly malleableand reality was open to many interpretations,Durkheim regarded as sacrilege the Nietzscheanrejection of what Durkheim called the cult oftruth. We propose that many of these, as well asother discrepancies in conceptualising the AbuGhraib saga, can be captured in the concept ofpost-emotionalism with regard to both thesociology of knowledge involved in grasping themeaning of anomie and the laypersons grasp ofthe abuse at Abu Ghraib as the result of a fewrotten apples as distinct from systemic derange-ment. The drama of the evils committed at AbuGhraib using sex, violence and humiliationoccurred in the context of what may be calleda post-emotional society (Mestrovic 1997).

The post-emotional society harks back tothe past in order to create synthetic emotionalresponses in the present and post-emotionalismis dened as the tendency for emotionallycharged collective representations to beabstracted from their cultural contexts and thenmanipulated articially by self and others in newand articially contrived contexts (Mestrovic1997, p.2). Examples range from the Serbsinvoking a grievance from the year 1389 inorder to justify their violence in Yugoslavia inthe 1990s, Greece using the memory of Alex-ander theGreat in order to block the existence ofMacedonia in the 1990s and again in the year2008 to block Macedonias entrance intoNATO, to France and the UK still nursing theirwounds at losing their stature as founders ofcivilisation and the Enlightenment. Similarly,the USA used the moral code of America as thebeacon of democracy set upon a hill found in deTocquevilles ([1848] 2004) Democracy in Amer-ica to justify war against Iraq when the realenemy was Osama bin Laden. President BarackObama frequently claimed during his campaignthat the war against Iraq was a diversion fromcapturing or killing bin Laden. In Obamaswords: Because of a war in Iraq that shouldnever have been authorised and should neverhave been waged, we are now less safe than wewere before 9/11 (Obama08 2007). But it tooknearly 8 years for a highly visible politician tomake this obvious point.Moreover, it seems thatfew people read or recall the other portions of deTocquevilles classic, which deal with slaveryand the extermination of Native Americans. It is

as if the sinister side of US history emerged atAbu Ghraib in the form of post-emotionalracism, humiliation and violence. A moral codethat used to evoke genuine emotions among thePuritans was used at the beginning of the presentmillennium in an attempt to depict US motivesin the war against Iraq as noble even if themeansinvolved disregard for the Geneva Conventions.

We note that all the illustrations used aboveare variations of what Durkheim and Fauconnetcall the vendetta. According to Durkheim([1893] 1984, p.49), the vendetta was originallythe rst form of punishment The vendettainvolves vengeance by families and clans againstother families and clans. The difference betweenthe vendetta and justice lies in the fact that justexpiation is vengeance for something sacred,namely, a cause that promotes social integration(p.56).

While Mestrovic uses several theoreticalperspectives for the intellectual scaffoldingof post-emotional theory, including Freud,Riesman and Durkheim, the Durkheimian ele-ment will be emphasised in the present analysis.Durkheim ([1893] 1984, p.44) put forth asociology of passion: In the rst place, punish-ment constitutes an emotional reaction. All hiswritings are loaded with concepts pertaining tohis general claim that nearly every collectiverepresentation is in a sense delirious (Durkheim[1912] 1995, p.220). This passionate element inhis sociology perhaps derived from but wascertainly reinforced by the popularity of ArthurSchopenhauers ([1818] 1965) philosophy at thetime he was writing, stands in sharp contrast tothe emphasis placed by Parsons and otherfunctionalists on cognitive, rational aspects ofso-called rational social action. In a real sense,Parsons gutted Durkheims emotionally ladenconcept of anomie of its emotional import.Moreover, post-emotionalism in general is madepossible in a modern society dominated by theinformation media which intellectualises, ratio-nalises and denatures the emotional import ofevents. In a word, developments since Durk-heims death in the year 1917 point to aprogressive de-sacralisation of the social world,which is the essence of post-emotionalism. Inaddition, post-emotionalism itself is a form ofanomie or societal derangement that leads towidespread, unnecessary suffering (anxiety,depression, feelings of helplessness and so on).


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This seems to be the culmination of thedramatic and relatively new development insocial relations that David Riesman calledother-directedness in his 1950 book, The lonelycrowd. Riesmans ([1950] 2001, pp.240243)explicit use of Durkheimian theory and theconcept of anomie as elements of his theoreticalscaffolding in this best-selling sociology book ofall time has been neglected. For our purposeshere, the interesting connection between Durk-heim and Riesman is that both are extremelysensitive to the emotional nuances of social lifeand various types of suffering in different typesof society.

The modern, other-directed type has mu-tated from Riesmans description of a shallowconformist and manipulator of self and othersinto the sophisticated, post-emotional voyeur ofemotional drama considered as text, not reality.The Geneva Conventions are simply too inner-directed and old-fashioned to have a genuineimpact on other-directed society: they wereauthored by individuals who possessed internalmoral gyroscopes or a moral compass and whobelieved that moral standards should last for atleast their lifetimes. The other-directed, post-emotional type is resigned to the conclusion thatmoral standards can and do change much morerapidly so that one is expected merely to do thebest that one can under given circumstances. InDavid Riesmans terminology, the other-direc-ted or what we call the post-emotional type hasbecome the ultimate inside dopester:

The inside dopester may be one who has concluded (with

good reason) that since he can do nothing to change

politics, he can only understand it. Or he may see all

political issues in terms of being able to get some insider on

the telephone. That is, some inside-dopesters actually crave

to be on the inside, to join an inner circle or invent one;

others aim no higher than to know the inside, for whatever

peer-group satisfactions this can bring them. (Riesman

[1950] 2001, p.181)

Riesmans depiction of the helplessness of theobserver to change politics applies also to theAmerican soldiers sense of helplessness inchanging policies at Abu Ghraib. Testimonyrevealed that numerous attempts at whistleblowing were invalidated by superiors who,when informed of abuse by idealistic, youngsoldiers, told them just go back to work.

In line with Durkheims understanding ofanomie as derangement, Riesman likens anextremely other-directed or what we are callingpost-emotional society to a mental health ward,as when he writes:

The ambulatory patients in the ward of modern culture

show many analogous symptoms of too much compliance

and too little insight, though of course their symptoms are

not so sudden and severe. Their lack of emotion and

emptiness of expression are as characteristic of many

contemporary anomics as hysteria or outlawry was

characteristic of anomics in the societies depending on

earlier forms of direction. (Riesman [1950] 2001, p.244)

Note that, like Durkheim, Riesman contextua-lises anomie depending upon societys stage ofdevelopment: anomie will differ in traditional,inner-directed and other-directed societies; evenif all types of anomie are forms of derangement.And he concludes: Taken all together, theanomics ranging from overt outlaws tocatatonic types who lack even the spark forliving, let alone for rebellion constitute asizable number in America (p. 245). Perhapsthe numbers of anomics and of the helpless,post-emotional type of anomics have increasedstill further since Riesman wrote these words in1950.

Consider, as an illustration, one of the mosticonic photographs from Abu Ghraib, that of aprisoner who was named Gilligan by theAmerican soldiers and who is shown standingon a box, hooded, waiting to be electrocuted.One of the most eerie moments of the courtmartials at Fort Hood, Texas, was the testimonyby several soldiers that Gilligan was friendly andliked the soldiers, and that they liked him too.(Riesman emphasises that other-directed societyfavours the veneer of events being nice andfalsely agreeable to the peer group). Thisphotograph of what appears to be old-fashionedtorture was redescribed in the courtroom as afriendly incident in which soldiers were doingtheir job trying to keep Gilligan awake and thathe understood this so that he laughed and jokedwith them during the torture. The defenceattorney insisted that Gilligan and the soldierswho tortured him were friends. It did not appearto us that the witnesses who testied to this effectwere self-consciously lying. This iconic incidentwas redescribed as a sort of nice, post-emotional


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torture again, the behaviour and the emotionswere not connected. We learned through inter-viewing the soldiers involved that they feltanxious and depressed doing their jobs ofinicting suffering onto Gilligan and one maysurmise that Gilligan was experiencing a form ofStockholm syndrome. The real suffering in thisincident is not evident from the photo or thetestimony, but the anomic or deranged elementof the situation emerges when one appliesDurkheims understanding of anomie. There issomething crazy about the idea of friendlytorture.

Another important connection betweenDurkheims and Riesmans approaches to whatwe are calling post-emotional society is capturedby Riesmans line that in contemporary socie-ties, just because such a premium is puton sincerity, a premium is put on faking it(Riesman [1950] 2001, p.196). While Durkheimdid not foresee the fake sincerity that hasbecome the staple of modern propaganda,political campaigns, advertising slogans, televi-sion talk shows, spin doctors, and other aspectsof culture, he was a proponent of sincere andspontaneous collective effervescence. Fakesincerity is another subtle aspect of anomie asa form of derangement that leads to unnoticedforms of suffering that stem from sincereemotions not being validated by the collectiveconsciousness. The result is the learned help-lessness of the inside dopester.

In this context, one of the most remarkablethings about the abuse at Abu Ghraib is that itwas framed by the culture industry primarily asan interrogation technique. Some of the follow-ing were listed as being such techniques: yelling,shouting, inducing fear, loudmusic, the presenceof military working dogs and deception amongothers. If one reads this list of behaviour,without knowing that it was from an approvedlist of interrogation techniques, one might thinkthat they were a description of what angrypeople do in abusive relationships. The post-emotional soldier is put in the position of beingable to rationalise whatever emotions he or shemight be feeling even friendly feelings whileyelling, shouting and abusing prisoners asjust doing ones job of inicting suffering.Moreover, the soldier is convinced by the peer-group that the job of inicting suffering isbenecial to the American cause because it

might save the lives of American soldiers in thefuture by obtaining information (which, inreality, did not exist).

For example, the Company Commander,Captain Donald Reese, testied that he was toldby his superiors that the practice of prisonerswearing panties on their heads was an MIthing or a supply issue. When he rst saw theprisoners wearing panties on their heads, he saidthat he was shocked. But his genuine emotionalreaction was soon invalidated by the derangedsocial setting at Abu Ghraib. The MI thingexplanation is a vague attempt to claim thatwearing panties on ones head was an interroga-tion technique, even though such a technique isnot listed anywhere and no rational-legalauthority exists to support it. The supply issueexplanation is the back-up rationalisation: one isexpected to believe that theUSArmywas unableto procure blankets and clothing for detainees,so it had them wear womens panties (whichwere purchased in Baghdad) to protect themfrom the cold. The obvious, sincere explanationfor womens panties on the heads of Iraqiprisoners is that the Army was seeking tohumiliate the Iraqi detainees. But this simple,obvious explanation was never made in courtand is not really obvious in post-emotionalsociety. Instead, witnesses resorted to torturedlogic and preposterous claims, which were notchallenged by the judge, the attorneys, the juryor even the media. To this day, nearly 3 yearsafter the testimony, the fact that prisoners wereforced to wear panties on their heads is almostnever cited or discussed in the thousands ofarticles written by post-emotional opinion-ma-kers. The reason for this neglect is that this actcomes across as so crazy that it is easier to ignoreit than to try to explain it. The companycommanders explanation was accepted withoutemotional reaction by the judge, jury or media,as if he had said something to the effect that hedrank from a glass of water. Living in the post-emotional society feels like being in the TwilightZone. Preposterous, crazy explanations andbehaviour are tolerated so long as they can beexplained with reference, however tangential, tosome technique that proposes even the vaguestsort of rational action and without expressinggenuine emotional re.

We note that Captain Reese and otherwitnesses at theAbuGhraibwere given immunity


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from prosecution in exchange for their testi-mony against the soldiers who were literallychosen for conviction. Several witnesses testiedin open court that the Army threatened tocharge them with crimes that were levelled at therotten apples unless they agreed to testify againstthem. Durkheim and Fauconnet could not haveforeseen the increasingly standard practice offorcing testimony by intimidating and threaten-ing witnesses with prosecution. Immunity fromprosecution is also immunity from punishment.More important, it creates a rehearsed, stagedand what we call post-emotional atmosphere towhat used to be described in more spontaneousterms as the quest for justice.

Post-emotionalism in thesociology of knowledge usedto comprehend the anomicabuse at Abu Ghraib

The conceptual tools for comprehending theanomic evils at Abu Ghraib have also becomepost-emotional. We have already discussedthe functionalist misunderstanding of anomie,which has resulted in the seeming irrelevanceof normlessness to issues and sites pertainingto war crimes. However, even Philip Zimbardos(2007) famous Stanford Prison Experi-ment conducted in 1971, has been gutted ofemotional impact. It purports to apply acontroversial lesson from the Second WorldWar that ordinary people commit terribleacts because of obedience to authority to asituation that does not seem connected tocircumstances from Germany in the SecondWorld War. Is the connection valid? We cannotrepeat often enough that the testimony revealedan absence of authority at Abu Ghraib andthat the high-ranking ofcers who passivelyallowed the abuse at Abu Ghraib and else-where implicitly or explicitly escapedculpability completely, despite the existence ofcommand responsibility. All the blame has beenshifted to the low-ranking soldiers who com-mitted some of the abuse, which is a form ofscapegoating.

The major post-emotional component toZimbardos (2007) efforts to comprehend theabuse at AbuGhraib in terms of his obedience to

authority paradigm is that it is a reaction to avery particular understanding of Nazi atrocitiesin the SecondWorldWar which may or may notbe true. Like Stanley Milgram, Zimbardoattempted to synthetically apply amodel derivedfrom the Second World War Nazi era out of itsproper context to Abu Ghraib. In other words,Zimbardo takes a model of abuse from thefascist era and transplants it into a non-fascist,American context.

There is no good reason to suppose thatfascist models of behaviour will apply to other-directed, post-emotional societies such as theUSA. There are many different social-scienticanalyses of Nazi atrocities, ranging from ErichFromm (1992) to Bauman (1990) and otherswho cannot be reviewed here due to thelimitations of space. Moreover, the obedienceto authority paradigm is still hotly debated withrespect to understanding Nazis. But the impor-tant point for the purposes of the presentdiscussion is that Abu Ghraib did not havethe communication and command structureof either Nazi military units or ZimbardosStanford experiment. On the contrary, soldiersfrom Abu Ghraib testied consistently that theywere not sure who was the commander at AbuGhraib and were not certain to which chain ofcommand they belonged. In this fundamentalway, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib experienced ananomic (deranged) absence of authority, unlikethe mock guards at Stanford, who were inconstant contact and under the supervision ofthe mock warden, Philip Zimbardo.

Zimbardo admits on his websites that heorchestrated prison guard techniques basedupon his understanding of Nazi Germany. Thus,Zimbardos non-contextual imposition of Nazitechniques and the peculiarities of his totalcontrol over the Stanford experiment onto AbuGhraib constitutes post-emotionalism, on a parwith the Serbs in the 1990s pretending that theywere ghting the Battle of Kosovo from 1389, orthe USA attacking Iraq in retaliation for 9/11,which had no connection with 9/11 (the doc-umentation for the fact that there is no logicalconnection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq andalso that this connection was made by the BushAdministration, is extensive. The point is thatthere is no parallel among these events, which isthe essence of post-emotionalism. Again, wequote the then President-elect Obama, who


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accused the Bush Administration of a deliber-ate strategy to misrepresent 9/11 to sell a waragainst a country that had nothing to do with9/11 (Obama08 2007).

Other important differences betweenZimbardos post-emotional application of hisStanford experiment to Abu Ghraib and aDurkheimian perspective include the following:Zimbardos students knew that they wererelatively safe on the campus of a majoruniversity whereas soldiers at Abu Ghraibworked in a war zone in which they weremortared regularly and experienced daily fearthat they might not survive the night. Zimbardostructured his experiment as a post-emotionalresponse to the Second World War whereas theentire war in Iraq was a post-emotional responseto 9/11. In Durkheimian terms, the emotionaldesire for retribution should have been aimed atbin Laden but was instead displaced onto Iraqand Iraqis became scapegoats for the pain andsuffering experienced by Americans. The asso-ciation of Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaida wasfalse. To repeat, Barack Obamamade his case tothe American people 8 years into the War onTerror that American resources and prestigewere drained by the war in Iraq instead ofpursuing bin Laden. In Durkheimian language,President-elect Obama nally made the emo-tional connection between offence and punish-ment that the Bush Administration hadobscured post-emotionally by punishing thewrong country.

Zimbardo emphasises that his studentsknew that they could have walked out of theexperiment at any time, whereas soldiers in theUS Army could not walk out an abusivesituation without risking charges of mutinyand desertion. Zimbardo created a derangedsituation in which he made use of the real PaloAlto Police Department to arrest students whowere picked to act like prisoners, which musthave disoriented and shocked the students.Zimbardo deceived the students along the linesof Riesmans aforementioned fake sincerity. Therole of psychologists and psychiatrists in tortureis a topic of recent controversy in the USA andthese professions have played similar, proble-matic roles in the former Soviet Union (for asampling of the complexity of this controversy,see Stanley Fishs article in The New York Timesas well as the responses by bloggers [Fish 2008]).

Yet Zimbardo projects the scientic veneer ofan experiment onto a situation that was sopsychologically harmful to students it mostlikely would not have passed most contempor-ary university research and review boards in theUSA.

Perhaps the most glaring discrepancybetween the two situations lies in the notion ofresponsibility. Zimbardo subtly shifted theresponsibility for his experiment onto the pre-sumed complicity of the Palo Alto PoliceDepartment, the President of Stanford Univer-sity and the American Psychological Associa-tion such that the students who participated inhis experiment had to assume that they wererelatively safe because of the implicit participa-tion of these and other normative bodies. Assuch, they were absolved of real responsibilityfor their actions in the experiment. A differentsituation of what we call post-responsibilityoccurred at Abu Ghraib. Soldiers were con-vinced that their failure to obtain information(that did not exist) would result in the futuredeaths of other American soldiers. Throughoutthe trials we witnessed, the prosecutor ham-mered the point that even the release of thephotographs resulted in deaths to Americansbecause of the hatred the photos incited. In thisway, the testimony of soldiers that they tookphotographs to document the abuse to engagein acts of whistle blowing became distorted asfalse responsibility for the presumed effects ofthe photographs.

In summary, we stated at the outset thatZimbardos experiment is typically cited toexplain the abuse at Abu Ghraib and Durkheimis not cited. But Durkheims theory is prefer-able to Zimbardos because Durkheims grandtheory offers concepts (punishment, anomie,expiation, scapegoating and vendetta) that areuniversal and applicable to all societies, pastand present, traditional and modern. By con-trast, Zimbardo offers a theory based upona specic place (Germany) and time frame(the Second World War) that he uses to explainabuse at Stanford and Abu Ghraib. And wenote that from a Durkheimian perspectivethe profession of psychology bears some collec-tive responsibility, for the role of psychologistsin the abuse at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo andelsewhere remains controversial (see Mayer,2005).


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Post-emotional responsibilityat Abu Ghraib and inAmerican society at large

As noted from the outset, Durkheim assumedthat there were normal and healthy forms ofobedience to authority by soldiers, as well as forthe phenomenon of punishment. To repeat,society expects soldiers to obey authority, butit also expects authority to reect societysstandards of justice. It is not obedience toauthority per se that is the culprit but anomicobedience to anomic authority, by which wemean deranged normative standards that do notmake sense to the collective conscience. Simi-larly, Durkheim ([1893] 1984, pp.4452) insistedthat as societies become modern, punishmentbecomes less harsh, less an expression ofretribution and more an expression of restitu-tion. Nevertheless, and as we noted at the outset,Durkheim believed that the traditional elementof emotional retribution is never entirely elimi-nated in modern societies, even if it may beattenuated:

Thus punishment has remained for us what it was for our

predecessors. It is still an act of vengeance, since it is an

expiation. What we are avenging and what the criminal is

expiating, is the outrage to morality (Durkheim [1893]

1984, p.47).

Obviously, the harsh punishments at AbuGhraib were an anomic departure from thisnormal state of affairs. An understandableresponse to the outrage to morality that was9/11 resulted in yet another outrage to moralitythat was the abuse at Abu Ghraib. This is thepost-emotional tragedy that we have attemptedto describe. A witness testied at the trials thatAbu Ghraib was not a normal prison butthis assertion presupposes, in Durkheims fash-ion, that normative prisons can and do exist.Similarly, Durkheim ([1912] 1995, p.404)warned that punishment must avoid singlingout individuals with less social signicance toll the function of scapegoat. He elaborates:

When the pain reaches such a pitch, it becomes suffused

with a kind of anger and exasperation. One feels the need to

break or destroy something. One attacks oneself or others.

One strikes, wounds, or burns oneself, or one attacks

someone else, in order to strike, wound, or burn him. Thus

was established the mourning custom of giving oneself over

to veritable orgies of torture. It seems to me probable that

the vendetta and head hunting have no other origin. If every

death is imputed to some magical spell and if, for that

reason, it is believed that the dead person must be avenged,

the reason is a felt need to nd a victim at all costs on whom

the collective sorrow and anger can be discharged. This victim

will naturally be sought outside, for an outsider is a subject

minoris resistentiae; since he is not protected by the fellow-

feeling that attaches to a relative or a neighbour, nothing

about him blocks and neutralises the bad and destructive

feelings aroused by the death. Probably for the same

reason, a woman serves more often than a man as the

passive object of the cruelest mourning rites. Because she

has lower social signicance, she is more readily singled out

ll the function of scapegoat (Durkheim [1912] 1995, p.404,

emphases added)

Regarding scapegoating, he writes else-where:

When society undergoes suffering, it feels the need to nd

someone whom it can hold responsible for its sickness, on

whom it can avenge its misfortune and those against whom

opinion already discriminates are naturally designated for

this role. These are the pariahs who serve as expiatory

victims. (Lukes 1985, p.345)

Scapegoating and the vendetta, for Durk-heim, seem to be an anomic miscarriage ofjustice. With regard to the present discussion, itseems that all of Iraq became a scapegoat for thepain and sorrow of 9/11; the prisoners at AbuGhraib became scapegoats for the US Armysfrustrations; and the so-called seven rottenapples became the scapegoats for the Armysand American societys frustration, pain, shameand other suffering. Scapegoating involves post-emotional reasoning, because by its very natureit involves the synthetic and false displacementsof emotions onto false targets.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, theprisoners at Abu Ghraib were mostly ordinaryIraqis, and the seven soldiers convicted at FtHood though they were found guilty for someof the charges levelled against them were partof a widespread, de facto policy of abusetowards prisoners. Thus, anomie is not limitedto the prison setting at Abu Ghraib but rangesfar and wide to involve a weakening of theprevious high regard for the Geneva Conven-tions and subsequent, similar abuse at Guanta-namo Bay, Bagram Air Force Base inAfghanistan and scores of other US facilities in


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Iraq. In addition and in line with Durkheimsassessment in Professional ethics and civicmorals, professional organisations such as theAmerican Medical Association (there weredoctors at Abu Ghraib who turned a blind eyeto the abuse), the American PsychologicalAssociation and a number of other institutionsand groups whose functioning became increas-ingly anomic following the events of 9/11.Respectable analysts have labelled the war inIraq as a asco, the result of incompetence andas caused by a state of denial (see Galbraith2007; Ricks 2006;Woodward 2007). All this is inkeeping with Durkheims overall assessmentthat it is to this state of anomie that . . . mustbe attributed the continually recurring conictsand disorders of every kind (Durkheim [1893]1984, p.xxxv).

Let us return to the testimony concerningabuse of the prisoner nicknamed Gilligan. Thetestimony revealed that a superior said toSpecialist Sabrina Harman: Do whatever youwant to him, just dont kill him. This is notexactly a direct order, but more of an other-directed, ad hoc expression of de facto policy.This was the vague, post-emotional version ofthe normative, inner-directed moral compass orgyroscope (from Riesman) that soldiers weregiven to gauge their behaviour towards prison-ers for whom they were responsible. Interest-ingly, even though this was the anomic andclearly unlawful directive that was given toHarman, the judge and prosecutor both arguedthat Harman should have known better than tofollow this unlawful order. It is alleged thatcommon sense should have caused Harman todisobey this unlawful order, even though suchad hoc directives were commonplace at AbuGhraib. In a sense, the court put Harman andother soldiers in the position of judge and juryfor commands given in a war zone with all thepost-emotional pressures we have already dis-cussed (the most salient being that failure tofollow this unlawful order might result in thedeath of Americans in the future).

The defence attorney responded in court tothese claims by saying, Shame on the Army!for expecting an ill-equipped, ill-trained juniorspecialist to be able to challenge an unlawfulorder in such an environment. The importantpoint is that instead of the Army prosecuting theofcer who gave her the unlawful order, in

accordance with the established doctrine ofcommand responsibility, the court placed theresponsibility for the ofcers unlawful orderonto the low-ranking soldier for her failure todisobey an unlawful order (on this trend toblame the low-ranking soldier for failure todisobey an unlawful order, see also Solis 1998).

Consider Major General Geoffrey Millerswell-documented mission in the summer of 2003to Gitmoize Abu Ghraib. By Gitmoize hemeant that the procedures at Abu Ghraib weresupposed to be modelled on the procedures atGuantanamo Bay. Brigadier General JanisKarpinski, among others, documents the factthat this was General Millers intention andwrites:

The next day we greeted another visitor, who really would

change our lives. Major General Geoffrey Miller, Com-

mander of the terrorist detention centre in Guantanamo

Bay, Cuba, had been sent . . . to suggest improvement. . . .

His prisoners, accused terrorists ofmany nationalities, were

not regarded as prisoners of war and thus were not subject

to the restrictions of theGenevaConventions. Ours were. It

was hard to see how Miller could Gitmo-ize a chaotic

hellhole like Abu Ghraib. (Karpinski 2005, p.197).

One of these many procedures was that the roledistinctions between military police and militaryintelligence were supposed to be merged suchthat MPs would be softening up prisoners attimes other than during formal interrogation.The Geneva Conventions were ruled not toapply to Guantanamo Bay, but were supposedto apply to American-run prisons in Iraq,including Abu Ghraib. However, once soldiersand Abu Ghraib were Gitmoized, responsibilityfor the abusive behaviour of the soldiers at AbuGhraib was vehemently denied by the highestlevels of the chain of command in the US Army.The military judge would not allow GeneralMiller to testify at the trials of the soldiers.General Miller was never prosecuted and wasnever held responsible for the abuse that ensuedfollowing his visit even though the doctrine ofcommand responsibility holds that he wasresponsible. Thus, in another curious variationof post-emotional politics, the following logicwas put forth and largely accepted by the mediaand American society: (a) the documented abuseat Guantanamo does not constitute a war crimebecause theGeneva Conventions supposedly didnot apply there; (b) when similar techniques


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were used at Abu Ghraib, where the abuse didconstitute a war crime, the responsibility for theabuse was deemed to lie solely on the shouldersof the low-ranking soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Similarly, testimony revealed that some ofthe unauthorised techniques at Abu Ghraibmigrated from Afghanistan (in addition toGuantanamo) and under similar circumstances.The Geneva Conventions supposedly did notapply in Afghanistan; they did apply in Iraq; andthe soldiers in Iraq were responsible for theunlawful techniques from Afghanistan. There isa deranged (from Durkheim) or Kafkaesqueelement to such post-emotional logic pertainingto responsibility.

Conclusions

This thumbnail sketch survey of the change inmeanings of anomie from Durkheims era to thepresent has uncovered many areas for futureinvestigation and research, including issues in thesociology of knowledge. Durkheim was a grandtheorist whose concept of anomie captureduniversal structures in society that also go bythe names derangement and sin. In contrast toDurkheim and due to a series of rebellions againstgrand theory that go by names such as post-modernism and Mertons middle-range theories,the concept of anomie has been stripped of itsoriginal meanings as well as connotations. Themisunderstanding of anomie as normlessness hasbeen literally useless in understanding the manyinstances of war crimes that have occurred sinceDurkheims era, yet it continues to be quoted intextbooks and treatises.

The vacuum in meaning has been lled byconcepts that we call post-emotional: instead ofseeking universal concepts, scholars apply con-cepts from a particular era and context to asituation in another era out of context. Thispost-emotional tendency has been illustratedwith regard to Zimbardo, who misapplies theidea of obedience to authority taken from aSecond World War Nazi context to the abuse atAbu Ghraib. In addition, the abuse at AbuGhraib was itself a post-emotional misplace-ment and displacement of a host of emotionalreactions from 9/11 and other sites of collectiveeffervescence that resulted in out-of-contextaggression. We conclude that Durkheims un-

derstanding of anomie as literally a form ofderangement seems to apply to these post-emotional instances of scapegoating and mis-placed responsibility that seem to plague thetimes in which we live.

We draw several conclusions from thisanalysis. One is that Durkheims theory shouldbe studied in relation to abuse, war crimes,justice, punishment and related topics not only byscholars, but also by jurists, diplomats and otherswho work in international relations and law.Although he was writing over a century ago,Durkheims ideas still apply and offer fresh(because they have been largely ignored) perspec-tives on contemporary issues such as collateraldamage, surgical air strikes, the detainment andtreatment of prisoners, adherence to the GenevaConventions and other, related issues. Hisperspective is worthy of being rediscovered andof serious discussion. In addition, the relevance ofZimbardos paradigm should be reconsidered.His attempt to graft a model of abuse based uponfascism onto non-fascist, American sites of abuseseems to fall at, even though it continues to bewidely cited. We believe that a vigorous debate asto who is more relevant for understandingcontemporary abuse, Durkheim or Zimbardo,would be highly benecial to the social sciences aswell as policy-makers.

Also, we conclude that according to Durk-heimian theory, the US response should haveincluded the following elements. Normativestandards such as adherence to the GenevaConventions should have been strengthenedrather than weakened. Professional ethical stan-dards among physicians, psychologists, lawyers,supply ofcers, nurses, corrections ofcers andothers should have been followed rigorouslyalong the lines that he suggests for preventinganomie in his Professional ethics. The naturaldesire to avenge 9/11 should have been attenu-ated as far as possible and restricted toOsama binLaden and his followers along the lines of whatthe military calls surgical police actions. Existing,normative institutions and structures such asfederal courts and the US Constitution should beused to try alleged terrorists and the prisonfacility at Guantanamo should be closed. Theabuse at Abu Ghraib should have been expiatedby punishing high-ranking civilian and militaryleaders in accordance with the established doc-trine of command responsibility. In all these


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ways, the response of theUSA to terrorismmighthave been perceived as it was in response to PearlHarbour and the Second World War: a mea-sured, just and largely attenuated effort atpunishing wrongdoers in the eyes of the worldcommunity.

We have criticised the response that ensuedas being anomic and post-emotional. Adherenceto the Geneva Conventions was weakened andinevitably, this led to abuse. The abuse at AbuGhraib, by the Armys own admission, broughtshame to the US Army and also contributed tothe insurgency against the USA. It also pro-voked a desire for vengeance against the USA,which led to further chaos and instability in Iraqand neighbouring regions over the course of 8years. In line with Durkheims theory, there nowexists a need for restitution regarding the abuseat Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere, aswell as to expiate the original crime that was 9/11. It is not without reason that scores of authorshave characterised the war against Iraq as aasco. The USA has lost the moral prestige itenjoyed since the end of the Second World War.If the USA is going to regain that moral prestigewe believe that it will be along the lines ofDurkheims neglected theory in this area ofsocietal and international crime, punishmentand expiation.

Our conclusions may have seemedmarginalseveral years ago, but is now in line with

majority public opinion in the USA. President-elect Obama seemed to speak for the majoritywhen he promised: As President, I will closeGuantanamo, reject the Military CommissionsAct and adhere to the Geneva Conventions(Obama08 2007). From Durkheims point ofview, all these and other changes in publicopinion signalled the possibility that a longperiod of anomie may be healed. There may be away out of post-emotional society. We remindthe reader that in Durkheims views, politicalleaders such as Bush and Obama reect thecollective consciousness more than they actuallylead it.

Finally, a Durkheimian approach to thecurrent state of affairs regarding Abu Ghraib,Guantanamo and other sites of abuse calls for acollective soul-searching and healthy debatesimilar to what ensued in France following thepainful ordeal of the Dreyfus Affair. Along withEmile Zola and others, Durkheim becamepersonally involved in this case, which symbo-lised very much more than the unjust scapegoat-ing of one Jewish ofcer. Ultimately, it exposedthe widespread anti-Semitism in France. Simi-larly, a collective soul-searching and publicdebate concerning the responsibility for theabuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is neededin the USA. This is because, as we stated at theoutset, Durkheims reply to the question, Whowas responsible for the abuse? is all of us.

Notes

1. For example, Durkheim([1897] 1951, p.43) writes: Thesoldier facing certain death to savehis regiment does not wish to dieand yet is he not as much theauthor of his own death as themanufacturer or merchant whokills himself to avoid bankruptcy?This holds true for the martyrdying for his faith, the mothersacricing herself for her childetc.. On p. 45 he adds: Thus thescholar who dies from excessivedevotion to study is currently and

not wholly unreasonably said tohave killed himself by his labour.All such facts form a sort ofembryonic suicide and though it isnot methodologically sound toconfuse them with complete andfull suicide, their close relation toit must not be neglected. Forsuicide appears quite anothermatter, once its unbrokenconnection is recognised withacts, on the one hand, of courageand devotion, on the other ofimprudence and clear neglect.

2. Durkheim invokes this conceptalso in his well-knowndiscussion ofretribution versus restitution per-taining to law: Two conscious-nesses exist within us; the onecomprises only states that arepersonal to each one of us, charac-teristic of us as individuals, whilstthe other comprises states that arecommon to the whole of society(Durkheim [1893] 1984, p.66).

3. According to the LittreDictionnaire de la langue francaise


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([1863] 1963), vol. 2, p.1672), theprincipal meaning of dere`glementis derangement: Dere`glement,derangement are words expressingtwo nuances of moral disorder:What is derange is disarranged[hors de son rang] or is withoutplace.What is deregle is out of rule[hors de la re`gle]. The state ofdere`glement is more serious thanthat of derangement. One of themany sources that Littre cites isJacques Bossuet, who describesdere`glement in the followingterms, among others: mal,egarement, peche`, tourments, innide mise`res, maladie, desordre,

dangereux, souffrir, impiete,intemperance, dessechement,miserable captivite (Bossuet [1731]1836, pp.4379). It is important tonote that Durkheim uses many ofthese words to describe anomieand also that the Englishequivalents of many of thesewords were used by soldiers andinvestigators in sworn afdavits todescribe the social climate at AbuGhraib.

4. Regarding this precise pointand in addition to the sources wehave already cited, see the lmdocumentary, Taxi to the Dark

Side, directed by Alex Gibney,which won the 2007 AcademyAward for Documentary Feature.Our point is that the connection ofthe abuse at Abu Ghraib withsimilar abuse in Afghanistan andGuantanamo is no longer open toquestion.

5. These assumptions areubiquitous and mostlyunquestioned in literally hundredsof articles, treatises andtextbooks. However, one is at aloss to nd any of these secondaryinterpreters quoting Durkheim inthese regards.


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