Word of the Day: Banal
10/04/2007
No, it’s not a really long yellow canal.
ba nal [buh-nal, -nahl, beyn-l] – adjective
devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite: a banal and sophomoric treatment of courage on the frontier.
Over the weekend while sniffing around a really good blog I came across this article: The Banality of Heroism. It’s a good read, but first you’d have to know a little something about one of the guys who wrote it.
Philip Zimbardo orchestrated the The Stanford Prison Experiment. The experiment was a study on the human response to captivity, especially the effects of imposed social roles on behaviour. He sums it up in the article nicely: “The idea… was to see what happens when you put good people in a dehumanizing place.“
To do this, he hired undergraduate volunteers to play the roles of guards and prisoners in a mock prison constructed under the Stanford psychology building. In the end, the experiment ended abruptly, because each group quickly took on behaviours and identities associated with the roles, wardens used increasingly more degrading forms of punishment, and the prisoners let themselves get more and more victimised. People lost objectivity because of the situation.
It’s often compared to the Milgram Experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram, which was a study of obedience to authority. The subjects were made to think they were performing a teaching study, and were required to act as “teachers” and administer an electric shock to the “learners” if the “learners” got answers wrong. An authoritative person in a white lab coat told them to administer the shock, and an actor posing as the learner would act out his pain and desperation and getting shocked at levels that are potentially lethal. So despite the “learner” pleading, writhing in pain and even acting dead, the “teachers” continued to administer the shocks at the request of the person in the lab coat.
Joseph Dimow – one of the subjects that objected and dropped out of the experiment early – wrote Resisting Authority: a retrospective of the situation.
We’ve come to understand through studies like these, the “banality of evil” – that under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people are capable of committing otherwise unthinkable acts.
But perhaps we should consider the possibility that the flipside – the “banality of heroism” exists. That concept would suggest that we are all heroes in the making, waiting for the moment in life to perform the deed. I like that idea. There have been cases of these, and you can read that in the article. It goes on to make a case for the re-definition of what we think of as heroes and the definition of a new kind of hero; not the knight in shining armour, not Aragorn nor Frodo. But someone who would otherwise be pretty ordinary. Someone who could sit next to you in the train or bus tomorrow. Someone who probably won’t have his bust cast in iron and left in a museum. Someone who might not even be written about in the paper tomorrow.
But someone who will stand up to social norms or rules and buck the accepted behaviour for the right thing to do.
I love this idea. I really do. It’s such a simple ideal.
That there’s a hero in all of us. We just have to do the right thing.
