Tag: vonnegut

Dissonance, Part III: order in disorder

June 3, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 3 Comments

Lately I have had Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night on the brain. I’ve talked about Festinger and Carlsmith’s tedium, Milgram’s volts … but not much about the book itself. So let’s move on to Das Reich der Zwei: the nation of two.

Some background, and my apologies if I mess up any details—I’m away from home at the moment, without my copy of the book, but I wanted to write this now:

Howard W. Campbell Jr. is born in the United States but spends most of his early life in Germany. He marries a German woman, Helga Noth, daughter of a police chief. He is a playwright; she, the lead actress in many productions. Together, they make up what he calls das Reich der Zwei. Together, they occupy a space uniquely theirs, sovereign and autonomous and separate from the rest of the world. Together, even as Germany descends into war and Howard becomes involved in the transmission of coded messages to US forces, they exist in a solitary, untouchable peace.

Observe a special sort of couple for any amount of time, and das Reich der Zwei becomes apparent. Between them, a culture will have developed. In a chaotic, dissonant world, they will have their own resonance. Their own lexicon and idioms and speech patterns, their own legends and mythologies, their own traditions and celebrations and solemn observances of tragedy. Try to make a home in their Reich der Zwei, and you will never move beyond resident alien status, will never be able to fully assimilate.

Such is the nature of the nation of two.

Helga meets an untimely end. Das Reich der Zwei crumbles. Howard is left at the mercy of other nations—Germany, the United States, Israel—snapping like hungry wolves for meat fresh from his bones.

Trying to emigrate from the nation of two, though, is as successful as trying to immigrate to it. That culture becomes part of you, and although you may adopt different customs, come to appreciate foreign cuisine and find the new language coming more and more easily, your heart will always belong to your nation of two.

Somehow, knowing that ein Reich like yours could exist makes it all the more difficult to survive in the bigger, noisier, messier world.

This is why, before the novel’s outset, Vonnegut says, “And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.”

Dissonance, Part II: shocking revelations

May 31, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

As previously mentioned, I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s early novel, Mother Night. Protagonist Howard W. Campbell Jr. writes his memoirs for the Haifa Institute, awaiting his trial for war crimes committed while serving as an American spy, producing Nazi propaganda.

The Nazi story is an unsettling one. Howard confesses, when pressed, that if Germany had won the war, he would likely have gone along with it, American spy or no, and this is an unfortunate truth many of us would rather not face. We like to think we are secure in our values and moralities, that we are unaffected by situational factors.

A defense used over and over again was this: “I was just following orders.” How could so many people “just follow orders” to commit such atrocities? One theory, particularly popular with Americans, was the Culture and Personality Theory: essentially, traits inherent to the German culture fostered in the German people an “authoritarian personality,” meaning they were naturally predisposed to “just follow orders.” The appeal of this explanation is, of course, that Americans would never do that, because our culture fosters independence and free thought. A competing theory, Situational Theory, posited that situational factors (e.g., Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I and the ensuing depression combined with Hitler’s charisma, nationalism, and success) positioned people for that sort of obedience. The implications of this are much less comforting: what happened in Germany could happen anywhere, to anyone, given the right conditions.

In 1961, when the trials of Nazi war criminals were just beginning, Stanley Milgram devised a now-infamous experiment. He recruited subjects for what he called a study on learning. Subjects were taken into a room and told that they were to be the “teacher,” and on the other side of the wall was another subject, the “student”; the teacher would ask the student a question, and when the student answered incorrectly, the teacher was instructed to deliver a shock of increasing severity.

The settings on the device used for shocks were marked, ranging from mild to extremely dangerous, 450V. Inevitably, the students got questions wrong, and the teachers delivered the prescribed shocks. As the voltage got higher, though, students became distraught, eventually begging the teachers to stop, crying, and finally going silent. Whenever the teachers showed signs of hesitation, though, the researcher instructed them to continue. Sixty-five percent of participants administered the maximum shock.

The students were actually actors, and no real shocks were given. Milgram’s results, though, support the Situational Theory over the Culture and Personality Theory. His subjects were normal members of American society, but they “just followed orders” and did things most of us would consider unacceptable.

(There are many criticisms of Milgram’s study, and he is largely responsible for the heightened standards of the Human Subjects Review Committee for ethics, including the addition of an informed consent making subjects explicitly aware that they can stop participating at any time. The results may be imperfect, but they are still troubling.)

So what does this mean for Howard W. Campbell Jr., Nazi propagandist and American agent, known for fraternizing with Eichmann and openly condemning the United States and its Jewish overlords? What does it mean for the other war criminals awaiting trial? What does it mean for me, as a reader, on the opposite side of those pages?

We are not so different as we would like to think.

[to be continued]

Dissonance, Part I: it’s good for you.

May 19, 2012 / Alice Thomsen / 0 Comments

Dissonance does funny things to people.

In 1959, Festinger and Carlsmith set people at a tedious, seemingly pointless task for an hour. After the task was finished, some of the participants were sent on their way; the others were asked to do a favor: go to the waiting room and tell the next “participants” (actors) that the task was interesting. Half these people were offered $20 (~$150 today), and the other half were offered $1 (~$7.50). When asked to rate their own response to the task, participants given $1 tended to call it more interesting than those given $20.

Here’s the explanation posed by Festinger and Carlsmith.

The task was boring. One would be hard-pressed to see it otherwise. But the participants told others that it wasn’t. The ones given $20 could use that money as solid justification, could tell themselves, “I said that because hey—$20!” The others, though, had only a dollar’s excuse. So, they reasoned, since the incentive wasn’t that great, there must’ve been more than that behind their claim that the task was interesting—for instance, maybe the task actually was interesting. If it hadn’t been, after all, why would they have said so for just a dollar?

We want to align things in our minds. When a few dissonant notes are struck, we want them to resolve into a major chord. Sometimes that means changing our circumstances—e.g., if I start reading a book and dislike it, I can stop. Other times, though, that means changing our perspectives.

I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The introduction begins …

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

… and concludes …

There’s another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you’re dead you’re dead.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

Vonnegut is known for his irreverence and the ubiquitous so it goes, but also—maybe most—for his dark humor. Jessica Hagy expresses it well:

Vonnegut, I would suggest, thrives on dissonance.

[to be continued]

Tag: vonnegut

Dissonance, Part III: order in disorder

Dissonance, Part II: shocking revelations

Dissonance, Part I: it’s good for you.

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