Rats, pigeons and men
Liam Hudson
Beyond Freedom and Dignity B. F. Skinner (Cape £2.25) In 1961, Professor Skinner published a book called Cumulative Record — a collection of his papers that demonstrated his style as a psychologist with a clarity one could only admire. It revealed his single-mindedness, his energy, his originality, and his unselfconscious quirkiness. For the record was not merely cumulative, but mildly extraordinary. In his time, Professor Skinner has devised a box in which his own daughter passed a substantial part of her infancy. He has taught pigeons to play ping-pong, pecking at the ball with their beaks. And in a way oddest of all, he has trained pigeons to act, again by pecking, as the steering mechanism for a ballistic missile. He also invented the Skinner Box — for rats rather than daughters; he pioneered a form of progratmned learning; and he has forayed into the realm of pharmacology, and also into linguistics, where he has jousted — rather unsuccessfully — with Chomsky.
And a gifted polemicist, he has by no means restricted himself to the nuts and bolts of experimentation. Persistently, he has attacked those shibboleths of his trade he does not like: his fellow psychologists' reliance on formal theories, their blind — and blinding — faith in sampling and statistics, and their reluctance to come to terms with the hidden potentialities each living organism possesses. Instead, he has urged us, we should 'shape up' the behaviour of rats and pigeons and men by judicious use of rewards.
In the wake of J. B. Watson, Professor Skinner has gone on to declare his general, philosophical position, proclaiming the doctrine of behaviourism — the belief that psychologists should ignore human experience, and concentrate instead on stimulus and response, input and output, and the lawful relations between the two. He approaches people as though they were objects, and claims that this is the only right and proper way. And in his utopian novel, Walden Two, he has portrayed the kind of world he hopes behaviourism will lead to: a state of grace in which we have all been shaped up ', and all signs of discord expunged.
To many admirers of Professor Skinner's protean zeal as an experimenter — and, however, ambivalently, I am one — Walden Two remains a disappointment, and a puzzle, too. For the world it sketches is devoid, precisely, of its creator's most winning quality: his idiosyncracy. Harmoniousness merges there with polite, hygienic conformity; and conformity with tedium. It seems that the personal vision underlying his laboratory work as a psychologist is unexpectedly, inexplicably dull. And so it proves. Not just dull, in fact, but more than a little stale.
In his new book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Professor Skinner sets out his view, in general terms of how behavioural engineering could save Twentieth Century Man from the pit. His point is that the rhetoric of individualism, of freedom and dignity, has blinded us to the need to impose harmony upon ourselves. Albeit in a low key, he preaches hell-fire, and, with modesty, offers us his own research tech niques as salvation. This message is worrying, and in a number of ways. It reflects, first, a disconcerting indifference to the fact that a behavioural technology capable of changing human societies does not exist.
Also, a taste for control of a direct and literal kind over the lives of his fellow men — especially, one fears, drop-outs, deviants and radicals. And an insensitivity that is positively breathtaking to ways of life other than his own.
Professor Skinner's conception of a formative environment, as displayed recently, for example, on television, is saved from banality only by being so resoue.lingly authoritarian. Delinquents in reform school collect tokens for good behaviour in ways reminiscent of the house system in British prep schools: Haig, Wellington, Nelson and Drake — and teams of little wretches collecting stars for good deeds, and black marks for bad. Perhaps because he has no interest in sociology, he ignores the likelihood that such minicultures as these are inadequate, in principle, as a means of reforming whole adult societies: the ghettos of Chicago, New York, Washington; the corruption of the police; the graft of politicians. A schedule of reinforcement that will make the mayor an honest man — it's a touching thought! But there are no such schedules. And if there were it's the corrupt mayor himself who would decide how and when they were to be used. The book, then, has an air of emptiness. On page 34, it is true, Professor Skinner quotes the Goncourt brothers' promising comment about the social function of pornography: " . . . one tames a people as one tames lions, by masturbation." But the hilarious possibilities this formula possesses as a basis for Walden Three are not pursued. The author lapses back instead into generalised chat around his chosen theme. Compared with his earlier work, Beyond Freedom and Dignity makes characterless reading. The generalities are too general, and there are no sharp particularities, as there once were, to focus what he means.
Despite its lack of conviction, Beyond Freedom and Dignity comes to us from the United States, bearing with it a whiff of brimstone. Both the left and the right have taken offence. Spiro Agnew has denounced its author as a threat to the traditional American liberties, and a Congressional committee is investigating his funds: " N.I.M.H. Grant number K6-MH-21, 775 -01 ", or so the acknowledgements declare. But it is hard to see why. The book is reductive. It does make play with the fantasies of the Brave New World, And it does come out for Science as a good thing. But it does all this in a way that is both decorous and passé. For this reason, it is disappointing to read; it is a book one puts down discouraged. Like the prophets of individualism he attacks, Professor Skinner is now a man trapped in his own rhetoric of general categories. A solipsist in his castle of words. And the chances of his changing his mind, of altering his point of view, now seem infinitesimally small.
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