Comparative Analysis Of The Bible and The Lucifer Effect

 

Evil System Makes Humans Do Evil Things:

Comparative Analysis Of The Bible and The Lucifer Effect

Ji-Oong Yang

Salt Lake Community College

 

Many people think that they are superior to the past. This thought may be caused by an idea that they have a more developed civilization. It cannot be denied that human civilization has made a big progress. However, although our generation possesses ourselves of many high technologies, the human nature itself is constant. My aim is to show this contention by analyzing and comparing the two different books. one is the story in the Bible which was written about 2,600 years age (Yee, 2007). The other is The Lucifer effect which was written by a renowned social psychologist (Zimbardo, 2007).

At first, let me tell the story in the Bible. The book of Judges is the 7th within the Old Testament, which presents the historical image of ancient Israel. Especially, it show us the way of life being in a state of anarchy in biblical Israel. When “there was no king in Israel” (Judg. 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25), it was hard to find law and order. So while Israelites occupied the territory of the Canaanites, they could not enjoy their lives. on the contrary, they were corrupt. It is natural that the historical writers of the Bible should criticize their ancestors’ failure which didn’t obey the commandment of their God.

The narrative includes two events which was very similar in meaning. So it seems that the second episode (Judg. 19:1-21:25) might be enough to mention to deal with our topic. The story started with an anonymous Levite who symbolized the life of obedience to the Torah which means the teachings of Moses. While the man had to abide by the law, he “took to himself a concubine” who “deserted him, leaving him for father’s house.” (Judg. 19:1-2) The man found his concubine, and planned to bring her to his home. on the way going home, they stayed overnight at a house in Gibeah. That night the men of the town had gathered about the house and were pounding on the door. They are “a depraved lot” who called to the aged owner of the house, “Bring out the man who has come into your house, so that we can be intimate with him.” (Judg. 19:22) But he refused, instead “the man seized his concubine and pushed her out to them” so that they might “rape her and abused her all night long until morning.” (Judg. 19:25) When the man found her dead, he took the corpse to his home, and picked up a knife, and took hold of his concubine and cut her up limb by limb into twelve parts. And he sent them throughout the twelve territories of Israel. This news gave a shock to the tribes of Israel, and they punished the tribe of Benjamin whose minor group was in Gibeah with no mercy.

Although this summary doesn’t show everything in detail, we can find three major points about the fallen situation in Ancient Israel. First, there is no name in this episode which is exceptional to the fact that the book of Judges shows many characters who have their own name. But this episode doesn’t present character’s names intentionally. Second, this story shows us very wretched life which the sight was shocking to look at. It is unimaginable to have a concubine for a Levite, to rape a weak woman with a group, and to cut the corpse with an unspeakable excuse. And the last, there was no one who might oppose the crime in that town. Everybody assumed the attitude of an onlooker. This narrative was an event written about 2,600 years ago.

Now, Peter Zimbardo, who is professor emeritus of social psychology at Stanford University, wrote a book, titled “The Lucifer Effect.” Its main idea is the problem about why good people turn evil. He considered that people are not evil in nature. Rather he thought that a bad social system makes them be evil. Therefore, he experimented on the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) which set a group of normal collegians apart to two groups randomly. one group was prisoner, the other were the guards. And then the experimenter observed the reaction of the simulated prison, which reached an unexpectedly shocking result, too. First, the guards put colored glasses to hide themselves and called the prisoners with number instead to name which affected the loss of identity. Second, the guards mistreated the prisoners with several kinds of cruelty. For example, they disturbed the prisoners in their sleeping frequently. And third, while some guards were troubled by pangs of conscience, they did not prohibit their colleagues’ ruthless behavior. Even though this experiment, which was executed in 1970, made a significant impact on the academic society, he hesitated to publish this investigation. But when Abu Ghraib’s abuse was informed to the world in 2004, he participated in this matter, and associated it with his SPE research.

According to his study, bad people did not exist, but only a bad system. Likewise the Bible said “there was no king in Israel” which means that there was a bad system for people, Zimbardo asserts that only a bad system exists. In relation to this assertion, he presents the three phenomena about the bad social system currently. The first is deindividuation, which means a condition of anonymity (Zimbardo, 2007: 299). If we look around the biblical story and SPE with concentration, something in common appears. Likewise, there was no name in the story of Judges, wherever anonymity is dominant, that society might become bad. Nobody knows who did it. Everyone hides themselves in the shadow of anonymity. The second is dehumanization and moral disengagement, which means “the central construct in our understanding of ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’” (Zimbardo, 2007: 307) Dehumanization is a central process in prejudice, racism, and discrimination. The maltreatment in the SPE and Abu Ghraib is not another from the biblical story. Because they all think that they (who were the guards, who was the Levite) are substantially different from the others (who were the prisoners, and who was the concubine), they treated the victims without mercy. The last is the evil of inaction, or passive bystanders. “Their silent presence at the scene of evil doings makes the hazy line between good and evil even fuzzier.” (Zimbardo, 2007: 314) The failure to act can be a form of evil, when helping, dissent, disobedience, or whistle-blowing are required. As some guards failed to stop ill-treatment, the residents of Gibeah didn’t forbid their young people’s evil conduct.

This comparison shows us something important. Although, as time passes, it looks like that the nature of humanity might progress greatly, humans are vulnerable to the evil system. Just think about the Holocaust. No matter how amazing technology is, it cannot keep us from doing an evil deed. By reflection to the past, we might sense our weakness constantly. The Bible and The Lucifer Effect don’t tell about the interesting story, but altogether teach us a sense of values on which we must meditate (Nelson, 2009).

 

 

 

Bibliography

Bible. (2004) The Jewish Study Bible. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nelson, Richard D. (2009) Judges: A Public Canon for Public Theology. Word&Word, 29(4), 397-406.

Yee, Gale A. (2007) Ideological Criticism: Judges 17-21 and the Dismembered Body. In Gale A. Yee (ed), Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (pp. 138-60). MN: Fortress Press.

Zimbardo, Philip. (2007) The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House.