Manipulating Man

...Not only is the city child different from the country child, but each has his own mother, a different assortment of brothers and sisters, a special position in the family hierarchy, etc...

...Elizabethan England did not survive a century, but Shakespeare is still with us...

...Science only split the atom...

...But that, pragmatically, is precisely what we must concern ourselves with...

...Who today????except perhaps the Haitian peasant????is visited by his God...

...While such moralizing might be appropriate in the work of a philosopher, it is certainly out of place in a book that maintains man has no "higher" values but merely rationalizes those kinds of behavior which pay off...

...Just as the animals in Skinner's cage learn to press the levers which deliver food, humans quickly learn to obey the rules and perform the tasks for which society will reward them...

...Yet didn't everything change when the earth was seen as round, when Darwin made man a creature of evolution, when the atom was split...

...Only those who have been trained from infancy to receive satisfaction from the preservation and improvement of the culture can be expected to put aside more personal satisfactions...

...History, no less than behavioristic experiments, proves that man is innately selfish...

...Then the Skinnerian scheme will no longer be academic...

...By that time, most psychologists agree, personality and character have been formed...

...The reasonable man," Shaw said, "tries to adapt himself to the world" (certainly the behaviorist's approach), "the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself...

...But Skinner is the first to admit that every culture is constantly evolving...

...For every person is subject to an environment as uniquely his own as his very chromosomes...

...The most effective members soon become too "demanding" and leave...

...Skinner becomes very annoyed with us for not applauding his science in a disinterested way, and for constantly concerning ourselves with questions like "Who will exert behavioristic controls...

...Psychologists have long insisted that man is trapped in the interaction of heredity and environment, that he has no control over the self and becomes what he must...

...And behind all this scientific jargon it is easy to see our old friends, the carrot and the stick...

...The man who sets himself up as that Godlike arbiter is already suspect...

...Individuals make and remake culture...

...No wonder Norman Mailer is in search of the "existential moment," that event whose virtue lies solely in its inexplicability...

...What is the history of man but a chronicle of the accomplishments, the discoveries and exploits, of individuals...

...Can anyone doubt that poets will be hard-pressed to lyricize about the moon now that man has set foot upon it...

...Man has always been manipulated, Skinner himself tells us, by obvious "aversive behavior" (punishment) or less obvious "reinforcement" (rewards or, as he puts it, "coercion...

...Certainly...

...Exactly...

...If Skinner's thesis were framed solely to tell us carrots are preferable to sticks, few of us would object, for that is the primary advantage of capitalist society over the police state...

...It is the lack of carrots that is causing the North Carolina commune built on Skinnerian concepts so much trouble...

...Although a technological scciety might produce all the types it could use, the greatest minds have always been those that technology would find both useless and troublesome...

...Who among us is wise enough to decide what traits mankind should discard or acquire...

...The interaction of genes and environment is the person, a person who can be the captain of his ship, the master of his fate...

...Nonetheless, the image that comes to mind is Aldous Huxley's inferior type, hatched solely to run an elevator...

...The development of a behavioristic technology would be a powerful weapon indeed, and we are right to regard it????as we should all controls, political, economic, or religious????with suspicion...

...Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man...

...technology made the bomb...

...Without the carrot, people simply do not bother...

...Science must unearth its truths even if people do not like them...

...Schools, with their regimented curriculums and conformist values, surely lessen this individuality...

...Skinner insists that "Nothing is changed because we look at it, talk about it, or analyze it in a new way...

...But the damage inflicted by schools is minimized by the fact that most children do not come under their influence until age five...

...We must identify ourselves completely with our culture, he insists, in order to overcome our fear of death: Cultures survive...

...If a person can no longer take credit or be admired for what he does," Skinner says, "then he seems to suffer a loss of dignity or worth, and behavior previously reinforced by credit or admiration will undergo extinction...

...Though Skinner imagines controllers who would be benevolent, it is quite strange that a scientist should have so unrealistic a view of man...

...Yet does this deterministic view necessarily put the lie to the idea of an autonomous man...

...And behaviorism is still, thank God, a science, not a technology...

...Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Co-author, "The Artist as a Black American: Horace Pippin," to be published in April by Doubleday In the flurry of excitement over B. F. Skinner's new book, with its frightening title, it is perhaps relevant to ask whether he is saying anything new...

...The current danger is that Women's Lib, in pursuit of its own legitimate goals, will unwittingly force all babies into day-care centers...

...A well-planned world, he says, would arrange for diversity...

...How, indeed, can a creature without higher values be coerced into forsaking them...

...Skinner denies this...

...Skinner's answer to the commune's failures would, of course, be that the members are products of our world, not his...

...This is the same kind of problem that forced the Soviets to abandon their philosophy "from each according to his capacity to each according to his need," and pay laborers on a piecework basis...

...But he prefers to call our carrots (money, fame, prestige) "coercion"????a not very nice word, a word clearly implying a deviation from "right" and "proper" values...

...He thinks mankind can be trained to be loving and thoughtful and sharing, but forgets that no trait is acquired unless it pays off...

...Yet there would also be no artists, thinkers, heroes, or rebels...

...The only reward in the commune is peer approval, and those who are capable of earning bigger rewards go to the outside world, where they can obtain them...

...In that mass-produced, carefully crafted population there might well be no murderers, thieves, or warmongers...

...Ironically enough, the psychologists' deterministic view of man does its major damage because it changes him...

...Nostalgia, Skinner would say...

...individuals do not...

...I think not...

...Those with power have always used it for their own ends, and there is no reason to suppose that their selfish preoccupations will diminish...

...This empty image of man is scarcely novel...

...We will be deciding not whether behavior should be regimented, but merely what kind of drummer will be followed...

...The manipulation of mankind is unacceptable not because man is a noble being, but precisely because he is not...

...Man is, in either case, a unique autonomous being, unlike any other...

...It matters little whether the self is born or whether it becomes...

...Why should a person try to "do his best" if whatever he does is inevitable...

...He is an egomaniac...

...For each truth learned, a million exciting possibilities are destroyed...

...Have not our current sex manuals warped our old sense of romance...

...No culture as we know it today is likely to exist 100 years hence...