The Third Wave

A low-profile German film called "The Wave" was on television the other day. It's based on the "Third Wave" experiment, carried out as part of a politics class at a high school in Palo Alto, California, in 1967. The teacher Ron Jones started with a class of students (picture them sitting cross-legged on tattered grass in their sheepskin coats and calico dresses) incredulous of how so many people supported the Fascist and Nazi movements of 1930s Europe, and decided to play a trick on them that would give them a taste of Fascism.

He started by introducing a bits of stage business to his lessons - desks in straight rows; Wagner on the record player, a special salute.  He also introduced a few mottos: Strength Through Discipline; then Strength Through Community; finally Strength Through Action. Most (not all) of the students really got into it. Other students from other classes also got interested, and Jones had to think of a way of "initiating" them into the movement. A few students tittle-tattled on their less dedicated colleagues. After 4 days Jones stopped the experiment out of fear that the movement had got too strong, no doubt wagging his finger and saying "now do you understand?" as the scales fell from his students eyes.


Of course, he had not introduced them to anything like Fascism. He had avoided any political position. He had just given them a glimpse of a bit of discipline and community spirit, both of which were anathema to the prevailing ideology of individual expression that held sway in the field of education in late-60s California, and liable to be mistaken for Fascism amongst the less rigorous left wing thinkers. It could just as well have been an introduction to Communism, the Navy, or supporting West Ham. (As Slavoj Zizek has said on the matter: "Strength through discipline; strength through community; strength through action: where's the problem?)

I shouldn't be too harsh on Ron Jones. He was a high school teacher, not a psychologist, and he did make a point, although it wasn't exactly the one he wanted to make. I don't know how much he would have known about the more famous and more disturbing Milgram experiment (aka the Yale Experiment) which began in 1961 and fills in the gap between Jones' ersatz community movement and an acquiescence in atrocities.

Milgram's experiment was set up to explore a related question: whether people who participated in the Holocaust had necessarily shared its aims. Milgram's volunteers were asked to help a scientist (in fact an actor) by delivering what they thought were increasingly painful, and ultimately fatal electric shocks, to a test subject (another actor). They all protested strongly; but all except one went ahead with the maximum voltage. The experiment ultimately showed that people will do anything if a man in a white coat with a clipboard tells them it's for the best.


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