Wanted to draw your attention to an article by Dr. Phil Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo is a psychologist at Stanford University who is perhaps most famous for running the Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. The Stanford Prison Experiment, along with Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, which is also mentioned in the article, are both fascinating and disturbing studies which demonstrate, ala Lord of the Flies, that we are far more deeply affected by, and vulnerable to, the influence of our environments and of authority than we would like to imagine, and that this vulnerability means that any one of us could relatively quickly be led to engage in criminal and inhumane behaviours which are against our deepest held beliefs, ethics, or morals. You can watch a great 51 minute documentary which was produced about the Stanford Prison Experiment, called “Quiet Rage, The Stanford Prison Experiment” on Google Video.
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Last week, a couple of middle aged men went to a care home to meet an 85 year old lady called Jean Gambell. Soon afterwards she had a slight stroke, which it was thought may have been brought on by the reunion.
It is hardly surprising. Jean Gambell was meeting her brothers for the first time in 70 - yes that is not a typo, that is SEVENTY - years. As a teenager of 15, Jean had been incarcerated due to mental illness, as a result of her stealing a few small coins. The brothers allege that the coins were found later.
She was then in the system for an entire lifetime, losing contact with her family and by any reakoning completely wasting her life. Enough one would think, to send anyone over the edge of mental instability even if they were sane to start with. Yet the brothers found a frail old lady, who could identify them by name and showed remarkably little bitterness for her lot in life. More here.
Other than being entirely flabbergasted by the whole sorry tale, I would like to know:
Surely we should all be thoroughly ashamed that we live in a world where this could happen.
Posted in Doing Life, Ethics, Forgiveness, Power, What can we do? | 13 Comments »The following is excerpted from an interview with Ruth Padilla Deborst in the August 2007 issue of Christianity Today. Padilla Deborst is a distinguished theologian and educator and current president of the Latin American Theological Fellowship. She will be a featured presenter at the 2007 OTM conference Hear. Listen. Connect.
What good, if any, can come from North American Christians having such a concentration of wealth and power?
I don’t think it’s very useful to say, I’m sorry I have so much power. I wish I didn’t have it. Or for individual North Americans to try to erase that inequality personally. You could step out of the grid, but the grid still exists. Rather, I think you need to say, I do have power. Whom is it supposed to serve?
The free-trade agreements between our countries are supposedly about giving people opportunity. There’s something to that: Part of human dignity is the capacity to work. But people need to be granted that option. How can free-trade agreements really be free when this country subsidizes its agriculture and other industries in order to favor its own interests? North American Christians can do something about this with their own political power - by calling for trade agreements that are both free and fair.
Posted in Poverty, Power | 3 Comments »
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