Beyond Science and Behaviorism
Gow, Haven Bradford
Beyond Science and Behaviorism The End of the Modern Age by Allen Wheelis Basic Books, $5.95 The Science of Behavior and the Image of Man by Isidor Chein Basic Books, $12.50 It is ironic that at...
...Since," he wrote, "science is an almost sacred entity among Americans in general and American academicians in particular, the desire to emulate the procedures of the older natural sciences is very strong among the newcomers in the marketplace of erudition...
...What I do know is that today some of their old brag and bounce seems to have evaporated...
...It is a hope, a wish, a statement of faith...
...Denied all those security mechanisms relied upon by yokels of the past, coated by a thin uncomfortable veneer of intellectuality, and burdened with vast leisure time and disposable income, they itch for a Great Cause that does not demand much prudence...
...The New Class, or Puritan Chic as I choose to call it, is best understood as political folderol...
...but perhaps because he, as a social scientist, is restricted by the limitations of science itself, his formulation fails to satisfy...
...And in his campaign he distilled all the rhetorical enormities, the desperation, the slovenly thought and bad manners into a campaign that can be most precisely characterized as impudent, slanderous, and inept - even for an American election...
...Why were they not treated seriously by people so famous for their pretentions to seriousness...
...Discussing his best-selling book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner discloses that it "tries to analyze the behavior of those who have taken part in the struggle of freedom...
...Philip Ber-rigan was released from stir...
...And of course, how can one talk of expanding freedom while wishing away one of the greatest extirpators of freedom in modern times, communism...
...Is it worth living...
...The citizenry gave him the old heave ho...
...In sum, they are the perfect suckers, and the ideologues have been preying on their vulnerability...
...What is life all about...
...in fact, the New Politics is regularly described as an alliance embracing - among other oppressed classes - "intellectuals...
...Beyond Science and Behaviorism The End of the Modern Age by Allen Wheelis Basic Books, $5.95 The Science of Behavior and the Image of Man by Isidor Chein Basic Books, $12.50 It is ironic that at the same time that science has made such startling advances, there exists so much eloquent and outraged protest against the scientific world view which furnishes the theoretical basis for the scientific enterprise...
...In attempting to do so, Chein examines various theories of freedom, and even tries to develop a viable theory of his own...
...Packaging Corporation of LaPorte, Indiana...
...They have been called the New Class - a term, I gather, deriving somehow from Milovan Djilas' term for the bureaucratic pests who reign in the progressive paradises of eastern Europe...
...As he says, "...the New Class is capable of supreme ruthlessness in its pursuit of power, it has consistently given its own ambitions not only for power but for status and wealth as well, the benefit of every conceivable doubt while excoriating or making fun of the needs and wishes of others and putting them always in the most highly unfavorable light...
...Can science adequately deal, if at all, with these questions...
...This "leap in pride," he continues, is made manifest by the belief that reason, unaided by faith and unchecked by moral authority can resolve the riddles of the universe...
...For how long I do not know...
...It seems to be the only way to smarten up a chump...
...Other works as critical of scientism have appeared in recent years and the list continues to grow...
...Few psychologists, he tells us, even the most dedicated and gifted, pause to reflect upon the metaphysical presuppositions of their positions...
...One issue which continues to agitate social scientists involves "freedom" and "dignity," and when they expound on this issue they - consciously or unconsciously - reveal their metaphysical biases...
...The New York Times alleges that Dr...
...How can one reasonably expect an improved environment without encouraging scientific research...
...They are peculiar creatures of liberal America's late twentieth-century corporate society...
...Science, therefore, claims the Modern Age, achieves knowledge of great certitude, while the faiths of man, acting through tradition, "no longer seem deserving of the status of knowledge...
...A new openness has crept into stolid Britain...
...Well, the 1972 elections were not called off - much to the misfortune of the candidate of the New Politics...
...Peter Berger came out with yet another book - this one, A Rumor of Angels - in which he argued for a resuscitation of religious rather than "scientific" explanations for things that we think, feel, and do...
...Ronald W. Beaty, a convicted felon...
...Not one of Puritan Chic's principles or proposals can be adhered to for long without slamming chin first into a contradiction...
...Everyone slogged in guilt...
...Fully thirty-one per cent of the performers on the floor of the Democratic Convention had done some sort of graduate work...
...He must deal with love and hate, life and death in his everyday experience...
...Tommy Rettig, the child actor of the 1950s who appeared as Lassie's master on television, was arrested for possession of marijuana...
...there is a God and He loves us...
...To be sure, the credibility of such a hypothesis cannot be ascertained by "giant computers" or in "gleaming laboratories...
...Its politics and morality are imbecilic...
...his commitment to science does not blind him to the fact that metaphysical presuppositions and judgments permeate any attempt to develop a valid position on freedom...
...Who is my neighbor, and should I love him and be concerned with his suffering...
...Their dearth of certitude relegates them to an inferior realm, arbitrary, passionate, irrational, stained by time and place, incapable of mathematical expression...
...One of their leaders, the great Clod Populist himself, blundered into such a fix on November 7. The result was disaster, and now there is dubiety within the ranks...
...Skinner, for example, tells us in the Spring issue of Center magazine that he can avoid metaphysical judgments when he formulates his positions on freedom, dignity, and the nature of man...
...Cathleen Douglas, wife of Justice William O. Douglas, (continued on page 27...
...This is not a scientific hypothesis the credibility of which can be established by certain crucial experiments...
...And with the publication of Allen Wheelis' latest work, we now can add The End of the Modern Age to his impressive list...
...A list of their contradictions would run for pages...
...Constitutional process has worked swiftly in Kampale, Uganda where the aggressive young President Idi Amin has signed a decree empowering the government to ban any newspaper for a "specified or indefinite period...
...No wonder its members are so sciolistic and unserious about policy...
...And now the crusade has lost some of its gas...
...The vision of the Modern Age," Wheelis tells us, "is a Promethean leap in pride...
...it may or may not be true...
...According to the Modern Age, all that reason requires is the proper path to knowledge and truth - and that avenue is the method of positive science...
...An abnormally high proportion of the advocates of the New Age were supposedly well-educated...
...Democratic process is a serious matter as are lawlessness, income distribution, foreign policy, and social problems such as poverty and ecology...
...Theodore Roszak, for example, documents in The Making of a Counterculture the alienation that results when a society begins viewing everything - including man - "scientifically...
...Members of Puritan Chic are not serious about politics, and they do not have to be serious about politics...
...Finally from New York we hear that the Long Island Railroad is again running, but so are the police...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...he must make conjectures of great importance which might or might not be true and which do not lend themselves to experiments in the laboratory: Man possesses freedom and dignity...
...Haven Bradford Gow EDITORIAL I (continued from page 3) cities, bring mayhem and murder to students and faculty...
...THE CONTINUING CRISIS (continued from page 2) tention to subject suspected drug users to urine tests...
...How can one favor increased wealth for the poor without supporting economic growth...
...THE MOVEMENT: The Rev...
...Many of Puritan Chic's select are members of a technical and professional elite that has very little understanding of how it came to be elite...
...Consequently, Chein spends much of his time disposing of the notion that a proper respect for science requires that the social scientist view man as a robot whose responses are completely determined by forces beyond his control...
...From Paris comes word that the dynamic Ministry of Education is allowing French students to use ball-point and even felt pens...
...And when they do break from their institutional cocoons into a position of responsibility, they merely pass the buck, an easy matter of obfus-cation and allegation in an age whose public discourse encourages procrastination...
...H. Bruce Franklin, former Stanford University professor, and five other idealistic young people for allegedly harboring Mr...
...we are morally accountable for our deeds...
...and a record $122,000 was paid for a Holstein cow in Amenia, New York...
...But these people are bored, tantalized by power, and not terribly intelligent - though many are talented and some are "brilliant...
...So why did such a supposedly well-educated slice of the American people address itself so unseriously to such serious matters...
...Few, indeed, are aware (or willing to acknowledge) that their "scientific" positions are based upon such metaphysical assumptions as "Knowledge is good" and "Extra-mental reality does exist," assumptions without which the scientific enterprise would be meaningless...
...we should love our neighbors as ourselves...
...In fact, claims Chein, in his own field of psychology those who assume that the method of positive science is the only valid way to grasp truth and reality predominate...
...Irving Kristol explains their unserious approach to politics as a preference for "symbolic politics...
...1 am not concerned about those who think I am being amateurish as a metaphysician,, because I am not engaging in metaphysics...
...And through it all les enrages could gather bilious inspiration from a maladroitly run war of questionable usefulness...
...The FBI arrested Mr...
...But every now and again they find they cannot evade reality, and the consequences of their rhetoric and wobblings swat them down...
...Such propositions cannot be avoided...
...Max Jacobson tried to turn President Kennedy into a speed freak...
...It was even rumored that the Nixon crowd was going to suspend the 1972 elections...
...we need to ascertain if they are true, whether to believe, and whether to act upon them...
...I do not think it is metaphysical when it raises the question of whether the individual is really worthy of credit or admiration, or whether he is responsible for what he does...
...What is the good life for man...
...Unfortunately, when we ask these questions we find, Wheelis tells us, that "The computers are silent, the test tubes do not react to these queries, and he who concerns himself with them might do better in church than in a laboratory, and the church might better be a forest glade, if any such are left, than the temple of a third sect...
...The Food and Drug Administration has recalled those gonorrhea test kits manufactured by the U.S...
...But in this divinization of science one embarrassing truth is neglected: Man does not (and cannot) live by the bread of scientific method alone...
...Many whack downt voluptuous salaries, and more are insulated in corporate or academic positions which demand little responsibility or contact with the more obstreperous realities of the outside world or the world of the common man...
...The pronunciamentos of Puritan Chic sound like winds whistling through the empty skull of an idiot...
...But important questions remain concerning Puritan Chic...
...Indeed, one crucial conjecture that we must face concerns science itself: "The long range influence of science will be good for mankind...
...Attired solely in his natural pelt, Mayor Geoffrey Domson of Spenborough went swimming with 100 members of the International Naturist Federation to dedicate a new $720,000 natatorium, and in Oxford young Master Quigby Catternal entered the Dewdrip Pub for a pint of ardent spirits, clad only in a pair of risque black boots...
...Giving into this desire, the experimental psychologists, for instance, have succeeded to such an extent that their studies have commonly nothing more to do with anything human beings are or do...
...The result, says Wheelis, is the belief that' 'it is possible not only to know the world, but to test that knowledge, to verify it, to prove it beyond any doubt...
...How, for instance, can one oppose racism while advocating quotas...
...And, as Whellis correctly observes, the "scientific method is no help, for by their nature these matters lie forever beyond the realm of science...
...But still something needs to be added if we are to understand why they have treated serious matters unseriously...
...His discussion is well-intentioned...
...They are rarely in positions where they can be held accountable for their inanity...
...Indeed, as Wheelis trenchantly observes, ' All the great and fundamental questions are answered, if at all, only by leap of heart, by deepest feeling, by faith...
...It was during these years that everything became a crisis...
...Chein, however, is not philosophically naive...
...Peter Berger, for example, devoted much of his work, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, to a blistering attack on this world view...
...Like The End of the Modern Age, Isidor Chein's work attacks the presumption of those intellectuals who identify reason with science...
...And Norman Podhoretz suggests their hypocrisy when he contrasts their protestations to idealism and enlightenment with the historic record...
Vol. 6 • February 1973 • No. 5
