The devil is making a comeback, if as nothing else but an explanatory device. Deliverance ministries and exorcisms are reportedly the rage among young traditionalist Catholic priests. Budapest-based MAGA pundit Rod Dreher, who blows with the wind, has a new book about the supernatural and claims to have been delivered from a mysterious form of “spiritual oppression.” And according to Bishop Robert Barron, the founder of the Catholic media organization Word on Fire, the Church’s sexual-abuse scandal was first and foremost a “diabolical masterpiece.” Bishop Barron writes:
[T]he storm of wickedness that has compromised the work of the Church…is just too ingenious to have been the result of impersonal forces alone or merely human contrivance. It seems so thoroughly thought through, so comprehensively intentional.
On this account, human beings, too, bear a measure of responsibility—the devil’s masterpiece was produced “with the cooperation of lots of people”—but there is no full explanation that does not reckon with the devil’s “suggestion, insinuation, temptation, and seduction.”
That’s one way to think about the origins of evil. A different tradition of thought acknowledges that there is something mysterious about it, but denies that appealing to a deeper order of reality sheds light on that mystery. An example of this tradition is the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s assessment of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the so-called Final Solution. Arendt covered Eichmann’s 1961 trial for the New Yorker, leading to her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In response to criticism that the phrase “banality of evil” was a mere “catchword,” Arendt claimed that evil “possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension.” Instead, it is “like a fungus,” which lays waste despite not having any roots. Evil “is ‘thought-defying,’” she went on, “because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’”
Carl Elliott’s new book doesn’t propose a theory of evil, but it does supply ample material for one. The book is ostensibly about whistleblowers who exposed terrible abuses in medical research. Elliott discusses the Tuskegee syphilis scandal, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, experimental bone-marrow transplantation on patients with leukemia and lymphoma at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, total body irradiation experiments at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, experimentation on women with cervical cancer at the National Women’s Hospital in New Zealand, and a trachea transplantation debacle at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. In each case, Elliott profiles the whistleblowers, with the goal of “trying to understand their stories, comparing each one to the others, attempting to see patterns and draw out common moral threads.”
He also discusses his own harrowing experience as a whistleblower at his home institution, the University of Minnesota, where he now teaches in the philosophy department. Elliott came to the university in 1997 as a professor in its Center for Bioethics. The 2004 death by suicide of Dan Markingson, who had been enrolled, over the objections of his mother, in a drug study conducted by the psychiatry department, set Elliott on a path toward making himself persona non grata at the university. Initially, it rattled him that very few other people seemed to care about what had happened to Markingson, but eventually it infuriated him, as “every person who stepped into a new administrative position behaved just as their predecessors had,” stonewalling, protecting the powerful, and putting the putative interests of the institution over the truth. In his own judgment, “The struggle twisted me.” This book, Elliott writes, “comes out of a moral sensibility” shaped by that experience.
Despite its subject matter and dark title, the book is a relatively easy read. Elliott is an engaging storyteller, and he delights in painting first-person pictures of his meetings around the globe with fellow whistleblowers—all dissenters to the “necessity of the occasional human sacrifice on the long, glorious march of scientific progress.” He claims that the book is “about whistleblowers, not about me,” but there is a lot about Carl Elliott in it, and a line toward the book’s end—“As usual, these black thoughts lead me back to my own predicament”—rings a bit too true. Elliott’s self-image is that of a dour misanthrope, befitting a self-described lapsed Presbyterian. Following in his father’s footsteps, he went to medical school, graduating in 1987, but he decided against practicing medicine. The reason, he writes, is that “[m]edical training was turning me into a terrible human being. I was becoming harder, meaner, and more entitled”—and so, amusingly, he went and did a PhD in philosophy instead.
Elliott’s disgust for the medical profession isn’t disguised. It’s also uncharitable and overstated. “By the time medical trainees are in their second year of residency,” he claims,
they have become different people. No longer do they see patients as fellow human beings with equal standing…. The doctors have come to think of themselves as aristocrats, with all the entitlement, privilege, and unshakable sense of superiority conferred by their title.
That is certainly true of some, perhaps many, but it is just as certainly not true of all. Elliott is similarly disgusted with bioethicists. According to him, they “pretend they are watchdogs…but they act more like show dogs, groomed and displayed to assure the outside world that academic medicine takes ethics seriously.” Not so, he claims: on his account, bioethicists have been generally useless to whistleblowers. As a one-time professional bioethicist himself, he is apparently an exception to this rule.
Such a man might be expected to have few friends, but there is a tenderness for human suffering behind the gruff facade, and there is an odd and winning hopefulness to this book, as if Elliott can’t quite convince himself to give up on humanity’s prospects. Perhaps it’s because he finds us fascinating. It’s unclear, however, just how fascinating he finds whistleblowers, though there’s no question he admires the people he profiles. On his telling, they are simply people who did the right thing, often at great cost to themselves. Yet the book’s thesis about whistleblowers is confused. On the one hand, Elliott claims that “[w]hat they share is not a character trait but a common experience, and even that has turned out very differently for each of them.” On the other hand, he claims that, “[w]hen I talk to whistleblowers…I hear the ethics of honor and shame,” with its characteristic elements of conscientiousness, self-respect, and personal integrity. So do whistleblowers share a “character trait”—namely, a commitment to honor—or not? The argument needs further refinement in other respects, too. Elliott claims, for example, that “whistleblower narratives are not so much moral justifications as stories about the self,” but what’s the distinction here? Are stories about the self never moral justifications? Are moral justifications necessarily framed in impersonal terms?
What seems to fascinate Elliott is not so much that some people blow the whistle on institutionally sanctioned abuses, but that many more people don’t. At one point early in the book, he wonders, “What kinds of stories would…bystanders tell?” He doesn’t profile any bystanders, but he draws from the literature on bureaucracy and groupthink (“rationalized conformity”) to paint a damning picture of moral dereliction. It’s as if Elliott backs his way into a theory of evil without ever making it his primary focus. It is the background against which his cast of whistleblowers stand out.
Catholic readers who have suffered through the Church’s sexual-abuse scandal might experience a sense of déjà vu. “One of the great mysteries of crime and sin,” Elliott writes, “is how organizations composed of ordinary people can produce behavior that, from the outside, looks unthinkable.” One answer is found “in the nature of bureaucracy,” which is the world of clerks and clerics. Bureaucracies feature a “prescribed chain of command,” which tends to insulate people lower in the ranks from a sense of responsibility for what they are charged with doing and may lead them “to bracket even deeply held moral convictions when they are on the job.” Bureaucracies make it people’s responsibility to do “what the guy above you wants from you,” and thus they tend to “transform moral concerns into practical concerns”: the right thing to do becomes the thing that will satisfy that guy.
Failure to be a “team player” invites rebuke and may even lead to expulsion and repudiation, with the further risk of retaliation. Groups react strongly when someone who was “one of us” breaks the implicit code of silence and solidarity. Remarkably but, on reflection, unsurprisingly, Elliott reports that “the force of social conformity is especially powerful in institutions that are driven by a deep sense of moral purpose.” He points to the “dogma” in academic health centers that medical research saves lives; the Church’s many good works have been used to do similar duty. The reasoning is simple and specious: “‘Since our group’s objectives are good,’ the members feel, ‘any means we decide to use must be good.’” Turning a blind eye, covering up crimes, stonewalling victims, protecting perpetrators, silencing dissenters, and punishing whistleblowers all follow naturally and predictably.
The typical attitude of the whistleblower is: “It was astounding that nobody gave a damn,” to quote the colorful words of one of Elliott’s protagonists. Elliott’s explanation of why more people swallow the whistle than blow it may not be complete, but it strongly suggests that recourse to the devil isn’t necessary. Pace Bishop Barron, “merely human contrivance” is sufficient on its own to wreak terrible harm.
The Occasional Human Sacrifice
Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No
Carl Elliott
W. W. Norton
$29.99 | 368 pp.
