The long shadow of Burrhus F. Skinner
There ought to be a cartoon to go with this title, but I'm buggered if I'm going to play with Paintbrush for an hour (urgent translation waiting in Inbox). So you'll have to make do with a description. From toes to neck, shadow stretches about four feet. From neck to cheekbones, another foot. From cheekbones to top of head, ooh, I dunno, about another five feet, let's live a little. In short (and he wasn't), Burrhus Skinner had a very, very tall forehead indeed.
But don't take my word for it.
I feel for this guy. I really do. To start with, having a name like Burrhus can't be an easy slog - obviously, like my former schoolmate Andrew de Jode, you would want to keep away from Spanish speaking countries for a kickoff. Not only that, but he had the misfortune to have an Arts degree hanging round his neck like a scarlet letter his whole life (plus a secret ambition to be a writer: again, check). All right, lately I'm rethinking this one, and there may be a future post in it somewhere: briefly, I'm finding that if you rechristen Arts as Humanities (a scarlet H rather than the accusing A), you can make some sort of a case for it not being booted off the University curriculum, on the basis that a little bit of canny heuristics derived from reading novels and poetry and thus figuring out how people think and feel gets you to a place that the plodding social scientists with their brute-force checklists and inventories can only dream of, i.e. a journey towards understanding of humanity that actually fits comfortably within a single lifetime and can even be tentatively applied in the here and now. With the emphasis on tentative: no enlightened despots, please. Well, that should be obvious. Except that it wasn't to the said BF Skinner. Hinc illae lacrymae.
I don't pretend to know exactly what went wrong, and when, since I've only just skimmed the wikibio, and it's a bit cagey, as might be expected for someone whose daughters are still alive. But I'm going to stick my neck out and posit that somewhere along the line, Burrhus had a Defining Moment, and that the primal soup out of which this Defining Moment arose had quite a minestrone of rancour floating around in it (whether because of the unwritten and unwriteable Great Novel, or the giggles of the girls at That Forehead, or whatever, your guess is as good as mine), and out of this moment came the determination to take the human mind, then (c.1930) being talked up by the Freudians as something quite wild and wacky and perfectly suited to the production of Great Novels - always by other people - and blow it to smithereens. So far, so everyday story. But the amazing thing is that he bothered, and that having bothered, he actually succeeded. And to this day I'm scratching my head and wondering why.
Well, I can sort of see it, in a way. For without Behaviourism there would be no social science, or rather, there would be no funding for social science, since from the point of view of governments and other stakeholders, there is obviously little to be gained from understanding human behavior (and perhaps a great deal to be lost, where such behaviour happens to be the tyrant's own) unless you can actually control it in some way that is demonstrably more effective than anything a student of Thucydides could come up with. This was the original Skinnerian promise, backed up by the authority of that magnificent forehead: and you can see why a certain type of person would find this promise infinitely preferable to the bad news of Freudian psychoanalysis (want to change someone's behaviour? Sure: give me twenty years, a ton of money, a willing subject and a couch). For this type of person, there must be something very seductive about the idea that humans are just glorified rats that can be quickly and efficiently trained to vote for anything you like, and endure any tyranny you like, provided the guys with the lab coats and clipboards give you the proper gen on what reinforcement to apply, and when, and in what dosage. Not that the idea itself is all that new: after all, the Spanish Inquisition could be viewed as nothing but a prolonged and remarkably successful experiment in negative reinforcement. Which brings us to Walden Two.
Apparently, Burrhus never quite appreciated or understood the irony that his novel was published within a year of Orwell's 1984. Nor, oddly, did he seem to understand that the World War that had just been fought prior to publication of his Utopia had been fought precisely against the sort of thousand-year Reich vision he set forth therein. But more to the point, neither did he see that in order to define a Utopia, let alone bring it about through careful control of environmental variables, you have perforce to adopt a fundamentally despotic vision, according to which there is the population-to-be-controlled (whose subjective notions of what is good or bad are assumed to be perfectible and contingent) and the controller or controllers, who in godlike manner determine what is best for the former population, either arbitrarily (as in 1984), or based on private whim (as in Castro's Cuba), or according to a pretendedly objective and scientific morality (here's lookin' at you, Sam Harris). Further, that having established that some Harvard professors are more equal than others, and hence fit to "run society", you are then committed to collectivism body and soul, meaning that the eggs are henceforth not allowed to opt out of the omelette, which gives you Treblinka and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, among other horrors.
Herein, by the way, lies my beef with those who attribute the current stifling climate of Political Correctness and Social Justice to alleged "cultural Marxism". I don't quite buy the wikiexplanation that this is a common or garden conspiracy theory, since at least in some variants, the Cultural Marxism meme doesn't actually posit a conspiracy (as in, let's pretend we're not really Marxists); nevertheless, it strikes me that radical behaviourism, which I find to make a far more convincing Professor Plum in this particular library, is fundamentally pre-Marxist in its basic outlook: if anything, it is Fourierist. Marx, let's remember, did not actually make the claim that Scientific Socialism was "good" or "ideal" according to any utilitarian ethical system - merely that it was the predictable and inevitable outcome of observable conflicts. As a result, Marxists tend to be no more than enthusiastic amateurs in the art of invective and of shaming: their hoped-for revolution doesn't depend on ideological bullying so much as on triggering the economic hecatomb. But this is something that probably needs a post of its own. Let's just say that the burden of being wrong about nearly everything is a hard enough one for your poor Marxist to carry, without having all the ills of contemporary North American society piled onto your shoulders as well. Let's try to be a little more understanding and careful about the accusations we fling around.
Back to Skinner. What I want to say here is that he's gone underground, at least in appearance. He's a dormant virus. Or if you prefer, he's the invisible force behind the current shaming culture, living on in the current belief that buzzwords and hysterical putdowns, as "negative reinforcement", can be a valuable force for Change, or that we need to control what people see and hear, or what "stereotypes" they are exposed to, lest we "internalize" all this "social conditioning". Since Chomsky ripped him to shreds (though, for my money, Arthur Koestler's takedown in The Ghost in the Machine is far more entertaining) it's become unfashionable (as in, not big money) to confess to being a Skinnerian Behaviourist. But Koestler was already on to that when he denounced the International Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses, which I now find doing sterling business in every social science faculty in the land. Of course none of us are behaviourists any more... of course we recognize that people have minds, and agency, and free will. Now, excuse me but will you let us get back to our programmable but misbehaving rats?
If Freud gave us "ego" and phallic serpents before self-destructing in a cloud of swirling oedipus, if Marx gave us alienation and the capitalist mode of production before dissolving into a pool of stalinism, Skinner has ceded us, among other ticking packages, "toxic masculinity", even though he wouldn't have used those precise words. What I mean is that he gave us that little nudge of leadership we required in order to unashamedly look on our fellow human beings as rats, some of whom will carry infected fleas and others perhaps not, but it's as well to be careful. Of course, it's possible for the flea to be removed from the rat, and for the rat thus liberated to be no longer toxic, and a credit to his Gender Studies class, but that's scarcely the point. We are rats. That is, we areconditioned socialized into a set of norms and roles that perfectly account for our behaviour, and can be reconditioned at will, and if we still insist on behaving badly, that cannot possibly be because we are individuals with free will who happen to have somewhat different (but equally valid) aspirations and priorities from yours, but only because the government, upon whom the responsibility for correct conditioning primarily devolves, is still controlled by the Wrong People (wrong gender, wrong "race", wrong politics, you decide). Change the environment, change the conditioning, chuck in a training course or two, and you'll get the behaviour you want. The rats will obey. It is in their nature to. That's why we need more Power. Please.
But don't take my word for it.
I feel for this guy. I really do. To start with, having a name like Burrhus can't be an easy slog - obviously, like my former schoolmate Andrew de Jode, you would want to keep away from Spanish speaking countries for a kickoff. Not only that, but he had the misfortune to have an Arts degree hanging round his neck like a scarlet letter his whole life (plus a secret ambition to be a writer: again, check). All right, lately I'm rethinking this one, and there may be a future post in it somewhere: briefly, I'm finding that if you rechristen Arts as Humanities (a scarlet H rather than the accusing A), you can make some sort of a case for it not being booted off the University curriculum, on the basis that a little bit of canny heuristics derived from reading novels and poetry and thus figuring out how people think and feel gets you to a place that the plodding social scientists with their brute-force checklists and inventories can only dream of, i.e. a journey towards understanding of humanity that actually fits comfortably within a single lifetime and can even be tentatively applied in the here and now. With the emphasis on tentative: no enlightened despots, please. Well, that should be obvious. Except that it wasn't to the said BF Skinner. Hinc illae lacrymae.
I don't pretend to know exactly what went wrong, and when, since I've only just skimmed the wikibio, and it's a bit cagey, as might be expected for someone whose daughters are still alive. But I'm going to stick my neck out and posit that somewhere along the line, Burrhus had a Defining Moment, and that the primal soup out of which this Defining Moment arose had quite a minestrone of rancour floating around in it (whether because of the unwritten and unwriteable Great Novel, or the giggles of the girls at That Forehead, or whatever, your guess is as good as mine), and out of this moment came the determination to take the human mind, then (c.1930) being talked up by the Freudians as something quite wild and wacky and perfectly suited to the production of Great Novels - always by other people - and blow it to smithereens. So far, so everyday story. But the amazing thing is that he bothered, and that having bothered, he actually succeeded. And to this day I'm scratching my head and wondering why.
Well, I can sort of see it, in a way. For without Behaviourism there would be no social science, or rather, there would be no funding for social science, since from the point of view of governments and other stakeholders, there is obviously little to be gained from understanding human behavior (and perhaps a great deal to be lost, where such behaviour happens to be the tyrant's own) unless you can actually control it in some way that is demonstrably more effective than anything a student of Thucydides could come up with. This was the original Skinnerian promise, backed up by the authority of that magnificent forehead: and you can see why a certain type of person would find this promise infinitely preferable to the bad news of Freudian psychoanalysis (want to change someone's behaviour? Sure: give me twenty years, a ton of money, a willing subject and a couch). For this type of person, there must be something very seductive about the idea that humans are just glorified rats that can be quickly and efficiently trained to vote for anything you like, and endure any tyranny you like, provided the guys with the lab coats and clipboards give you the proper gen on what reinforcement to apply, and when, and in what dosage. Not that the idea itself is all that new: after all, the Spanish Inquisition could be viewed as nothing but a prolonged and remarkably successful experiment in negative reinforcement. Which brings us to Walden Two.
Apparently, Burrhus never quite appreciated or understood the irony that his novel was published within a year of Orwell's 1984. Nor, oddly, did he seem to understand that the World War that had just been fought prior to publication of his Utopia had been fought precisely against the sort of thousand-year Reich vision he set forth therein. But more to the point, neither did he see that in order to define a Utopia, let alone bring it about through careful control of environmental variables, you have perforce to adopt a fundamentally despotic vision, according to which there is the population-to-be-controlled (whose subjective notions of what is good or bad are assumed to be perfectible and contingent) and the controller or controllers, who in godlike manner determine what is best for the former population, either arbitrarily (as in 1984), or based on private whim (as in Castro's Cuba), or according to a pretendedly objective and scientific morality (here's lookin' at you, Sam Harris). Further, that having established that some Harvard professors are more equal than others, and hence fit to "run society", you are then committed to collectivism body and soul, meaning that the eggs are henceforth not allowed to opt out of the omelette, which gives you Treblinka and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, among other horrors.
Herein, by the way, lies my beef with those who attribute the current stifling climate of Political Correctness and Social Justice to alleged "cultural Marxism". I don't quite buy the wikiexplanation that this is a common or garden conspiracy theory, since at least in some variants, the Cultural Marxism meme doesn't actually posit a conspiracy (as in, let's pretend we're not really Marxists); nevertheless, it strikes me that radical behaviourism, which I find to make a far more convincing Professor Plum in this particular library, is fundamentally pre-Marxist in its basic outlook: if anything, it is Fourierist. Marx, let's remember, did not actually make the claim that Scientific Socialism was "good" or "ideal" according to any utilitarian ethical system - merely that it was the predictable and inevitable outcome of observable conflicts. As a result, Marxists tend to be no more than enthusiastic amateurs in the art of invective and of shaming: their hoped-for revolution doesn't depend on ideological bullying so much as on triggering the economic hecatomb. But this is something that probably needs a post of its own. Let's just say that the burden of being wrong about nearly everything is a hard enough one for your poor Marxist to carry, without having all the ills of contemporary North American society piled onto your shoulders as well. Let's try to be a little more understanding and careful about the accusations we fling around.
Back to Skinner. What I want to say here is that he's gone underground, at least in appearance. He's a dormant virus. Or if you prefer, he's the invisible force behind the current shaming culture, living on in the current belief that buzzwords and hysterical putdowns, as "negative reinforcement", can be a valuable force for Change, or that we need to control what people see and hear, or what "stereotypes" they are exposed to, lest we "internalize" all this "social conditioning". Since Chomsky ripped him to shreds (though, for my money, Arthur Koestler's takedown in The Ghost in the Machine is far more entertaining) it's become unfashionable (as in, not big money) to confess to being a Skinnerian Behaviourist. But Koestler was already on to that when he denounced the International Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Dead Horses, which I now find doing sterling business in every social science faculty in the land. Of course none of us are behaviourists any more... of course we recognize that people have minds, and agency, and free will. Now, excuse me but will you let us get back to our programmable but misbehaving rats?
If Freud gave us "ego" and phallic serpents before self-destructing in a cloud of swirling oedipus, if Marx gave us alienation and the capitalist mode of production before dissolving into a pool of stalinism, Skinner has ceded us, among other ticking packages, "toxic masculinity", even though he wouldn't have used those precise words. What I mean is that he gave us that little nudge of leadership we required in order to unashamedly look on our fellow human beings as rats, some of whom will carry infected fleas and others perhaps not, but it's as well to be careful. Of course, it's possible for the flea to be removed from the rat, and for the rat thus liberated to be no longer toxic, and a credit to his Gender Studies class, but that's scarcely the point. We are rats. That is, we are
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