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

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planned society, he says, control would be balanced by countercontrol, probably by "making the controller a member of the group he controls." This would help to ensure that punishment would never be inflicted, Skinner maintains, adding that it was the use of "aversive control" (punishment) that doomed Hitler: "The Nazi system had its own destruction built right into it. When you control that way, people are out to get you."

The ultimate logical dilemma in Skinner's thinking is this: What are the sources of the standards of good and evil in his ideal society? Indeed, who decides even what constitutes pleasure or pain, reward or punishment, when man and his environment can be limitlessly manipulated? Skinner himself believes in Judeo-Christian ethics combined with the scientific tradition. But he fails to answer how it is possible to accept those ethics without also accepting something like the "inner person" with an autonomous conscience.

Skinner has never responded fully to any of his critics, despite their number and stature. Often he has failed to understand them. Sometimes he has even branded them as neurotic or even psychotic. Occasionally he has seemed to imply that he himself is beyond criticism. "When I met him, he was convinced he was a genius," Yvonne Skinner remembers. And in Walden Two, Skinner's alter ego Frazier, assuming the posture of Christ on the cross, says that there is "a curious similarity" between himself and God—adding, however, that "perhaps I must yield to God in point of seniority."

In another Walden Two passage, Skinner sketches a more realistic self-portrait. With some bitterness, his alter ego Frazier addresses Burris: "You think I'm conceited, aggressive, tactless, selfish. You're convinced that I'm completely insensitive to my effect upon others, except when the effect is calculated. You can't see in me any personal warmth. You're sure that I'm one who couldn't possibly be a genuine member of any community . . . Shall we say that as a person I'm a complete failure and have done with it?"

This awareness that he is unfit for communal life may be one reason that Skinner has never tried to start a real Walden Two, never sent a Dear-President-Mittelbach telegram to the president of Harvard. In addition, he likes his own kind of life too well to give it up even for an ideal in which he believes so intensely, and even if he felt otherwise, his wife is opposed to the idea.

Says Yvonne Skinner, a former University of Chicago English major who studied with Thornton Wilder and is herself a gifted writer: "We had tremendous arguments about Walden Two. I wouldn't like it; I just like change and privacy."

Refusing Invitations

Fred and Yvonne Skinner live in an attractive, modern Cambridge house complete with swimming pool, a stereo system, a grand piano, a clavichord and, in the basement study, a small organ. In a sense, Skinner's own life-style is highly controlled and conditioned. His study contains a special clock that "runs when I'm really thinking. I keep a cumulative record of serious time at my desk. The clock starts when I turn on the desk light, and whenever it passes twelve hours, I plot a point on a curve. I can see what my average rate of writing has been at