Behavior: Skinner's Utopia: Panacea, or Path to Hell?

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Skinner argues that belief in free will comes only from man's need to be given credit for his "good" behavior and achievements. "Consider a woman who has a baby. It cost her a lot of pain and trouble to have it. But she didn't design that baby; it was all settled at the moment of conception what the baby was going to be like. The same thing is true when a man writes books, invents things, manages a business. He didn't initiate anything. It's all the effect of past history on him. That's the truth, and we have to get used to it." Theologians, humanists and conventional psychologists, including Freudians, cannot accept this uncompromising view. "The chief source of man's dignity," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "is man's essential freedom and capacity for self-determination." Carl Rogers has asserted that "over and above the circumstances which control all of us, there exists an inner experience of choice which is very important. This is the kind of thing Skinner has never been willing to recognize."

Skinner's detractors attack the whole concept of behaviorism, which Novelist Arthur Koestler, who has high amateur standing in psychology and other sciences, maintains is nothing but pseudoscience, "a monumental triviality that has sent psychology into a modern version of the Dark Ages." In ignoring consciousness, mind, imagination and purpose, Koestler says, Behaviorist Skinner and his admirers have abandoned what is most important. Similarly, Historian Peter Gay speaks of "the innate naiveté, intellectual bankruptcy and half-deliberate cruelty of behaviorism."

The gravest menace from Skinner is his authoritarianism in the view of his critics. They reject the notion that man can no longer afford freedom and believe in fact that he cannot afford the opposite. Says Harvard Social Psychologist Herbert C. Kelman: "For those of us who hold the enhancement of man's freedom of choice as a fundamental value, any manipulation of the behavior of others constitutes a violation of their essential humanity, regardless of the 'goodness' of the cause that this manipulation is designed to serve." To Kelman, the "ethical ambiguity'' of behavioral manipulation is the same whether the limitation on choice comes "through punishment or reward or even through so perfect an arrangement of society that people do not care to choose."

Existential Psychoanalyst Rollo May believes that Skinner is a totalitarian without fully knowing it. "I have never found any place in Skinner's system for the rebel," he says. "Yet the capacity to rebel is of the essence in a constructive society." Richard Rubenstein, professor of religion at Florida State University, wonders what might happen to would-be rebels in a Skinnerian society: "Suppose some future controller told dissenting groups to 'behave, damn you!' What would prevent the controller from employing his own final solution?"

Skinner is skeptical about democracy. Observing that society is already using such ineffective means of behavioral control as persuasion and conventional education, he insists that men of good will must adopt more effective techniques, using them for "good" purposes to keep despots from using them for "bad" ones. In his