"I accuse you of one of the most diabolical machinations in the history of mankind!"
So begins Skinner's strawman attack on his own theory of radical behaviorism, as expounded in his pseudo-ficitonal Walden Two. I say pseudo-fiction because, while the story is set in a fictional commune or colony set up along the lines of his ideas, the story is really just a literary device to express and illustrate the workings of his theory. The book is about the theory, not about the fictional setting or characters, and its purpose is to examine the question of what the world would be like if his theory were to be followed in practice.
Behaviorism has its roots in the positivism of the late 19th century, which sought to understand the world in terms of observable phenomena, and dispose of metaphysical theory and speculation as scientifically worthless -- if it isn't verifiable by experiment, then it doesn't exist, or at least doesn't matter. The fact that positivism is itself unverifiable and therefore self-referentially incoherent did as little to deter its dedicated followers at the time, as it does to deter those today who continue to believe that science is some sort of ultimate truth, even though that "truth" can never be scientifically verified.
That positivism found its way into psychology in the form of behaviorist theory, which seeks to understand psychology solely on the basis of observable phenomena -- behavior, in other words. The causes of that behavior are to be found the history and environment (and, in modern versions, genetic makeup, and brain anatomy and chemistry) of the individual, all of which are amenable to verifiable observation. This is in contrast to the psychoanalysis of Freud and the analytical psychology of Jung, among other theories, which understand observable behavior as a symptom or consequence of an underlying mental structure that is otherwise inaccessible. To the behaviorist, ideas like "mind," "soul," and "consciousness" are at best relics of a bygone age of mysticism and muddled and misguided thinking, unnecessary in the "enlightened" world of science, and at worst delusional and dysfunctional, and in either case "scientifically" unverifiable and therefore serving no worthwhile purpose.
One of the claims of behaviorism, and particularly the "radical behaviorism" that Skinner expounds, is that much of what is wrong in the world (or what the behaviorist sees as "wrong") comes from these outdated and "unscientific" ways of looking at human psychology, and by discarding these outmoded ideas and focusing on behavior rather than thought, feeling, and consciousness, the world could be made into a better place. To ask the question, then, of what a behaviorist world would be like, is therefore to ask the question of what a world without mind, soul or consciousness would be like. This is the purpose of Walden Two -- to create, albeit fictionally, such a mindless and soul-less world, and examine how such a world would work, and what living in it would, or could, be like.
What it does not examine is whether such a world is sustainable. Whether such a world could exist within the confines of a fictional community situated in an otherwise non-behaviorist word is one thing; whether a world organized solely upon those principles could survive is quite another thing.
Behaviorism argues that concepts like mind, soul and consciousness are just artifacts of social behavior; there is no "self", no "mind", and so forth; these things are really just illusions produced by the social environment, and are there only to facilitate one's integration into a social setting. Inquiring into these ideas any further than that is simply worthless speculation. "Self" and "individual" exist only as particularizations of the social "we", and have no independent existence on their own -- they are mental images of a person's place in the social order, and are there only to understand how one fits into a society. Because of these claims, behaviorism dovetails rather well with a kind of social conservatism that leads toward social engineering and behavioral control. If the individual exists only as a subset of the group, then control over the indivdual by the group is necessary and justified since the group is the basis of the individual's existence. It is the obligation of the individual, therefore, to serve and obey the group, because without the group there is no individual, and what threatens the group is a threat to all of its member.
And here the dragon awakens. Behaviorism, taken to this extreme, begins to sound a lot like the "bicameral mind" of Julian Jaynes. It could be argued that behaviorism in fact represents a kind of reversion to the mental state of the bicameral mind, a neurologically driven psychological state whose purpose in evolution was the development of social order, but like many evolutionary developments, eventually became maladaptive -- that is, it became destructive to the very thing it arose to accomplish. The reasons for this are legion, having mostly to do with the inability of group-thinking to deal with environmental contingenies -- unexpected, or willfully ignored, situations and events that threaten human physical survival. It turns out that consciousness, and ideas like "mind", "soul", and "individual" appeared in evolution as a response to the catastrophic destruction wrought by the bicameral mind and the societies founded upon it. The kind of world that behaviorism seeks to create is not new, but has been done before, and has suffered destruction and annihilation every time it has appeared in history. Looked at from the standpoint of evolution, the psychological "I" is an advancement beyond the neurological "we", and if this is so, then behaviorism, and the world it envisions, are as rotten to their core as the illogic upon which they rest.
The real problem here is that behaviorism is far form dead; it is very much alive in social engineering (think "Facebook") and, more worrying, in the form of "behavioral medicine", which seeks not to find the causes of suffering in the psychology of the individual, but rather to push them out of the way by "normalizing" one's brain chemistry -- "normal", of course, being understood as what is socially acceptable, not individually unique. All but gone are the theories and methods of Freud and Jung, replaced by socially engineered "internet experiences", mindless stupidity like "yoga classes", and pharmacologically re-designed brain function. The mind is not the brain, anymore than your telephone is the conversations you have with it, but if you cut the wires, the conversations do not happen. Cut the wires in the brain, chemically or otherwise, and the conversations necessary for the mind to function go silent. The "I" sinks back into the "we", and thousands of years of human evolution are for naught. Children smile and behave in class, but at the price of whatever uniqueness they may have had to contribute being flushed down the toilet of obedience. And that kind of uniqueness is just what consciousness was evolved for -- to find new ways of thinking that get beyond the closed-mindedness of the group.
It gets worse. Like any other psychic process, when consciousness and the self are either repressed by social pressures or suppressed by chemical manipulation, they don't disappear -- they recede into the unconscious, where, unchecked by rational thought and moral examination, they grow in strength against their oppressors and morph into destructive powers that emerge with the force of the dragon's flame they have become. Want proof? As Joseph Campbell once said, "Read the newspapers." What you see in those newspapers is in fact the result of mental illness, but not the illness of any particular individual -- it is the illness of a culture that has sunk into the pre-conscious bicameral mind.
If any of this is right or even close to it, then behaviorism, and the modern theories and practices that it has mutated into, are indeed, " the most diabolical machinations in the history of mankind." It is impossible to go into all of the arguments that back up this position here; this is, after all, a review of Skinner's book. But a review of a book on theory has every reason to examine the consequences of that theory, and what behaviorism has become today, and what its practical offspring have wrought in the world, are a far cry from what Skinner envisioned decades ago.
You may or may not believe or accept what has been said here. So be it. Read the book: despite its age, what it says underlies so much of what has become commonplace that a critical understanding of the world and its events requires a familiarity with the ideas that shaped the world as it stands, and behaviorism is one of them. Read the book, think it through, and ask yourself one question:
Do you really want to get on that train?
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