Beyond Beyond Freedom & Dignity

Oct 2, 2024

Page numbers refer to the 9th printing, 1972 Bantam paperback.

Skinner advocates for an engineered society where the environment is designed to shape behaviour toward positive ends. He specifically points out the reproduction of the culture as a primary goal; behaviour should be incentivized which would not lead to cultural or literal extinction. The benevolent dictator in Skinnerian society is the behaviourist scientist who directs it toward the correct ends. What he never answers to my satisfaction is the question of whose ends we should pursue. This is incredibly important when Skinner advocates for a world where people are "automatically good."

In aggregate, people who have power will never act in a way which weakens that power. This is a contradiction in Skinnerian behaviourism if you try to apply it on a large scale. Society coagulates in e.g. a capitalist mode because the people who are best suited to a given system gain power and do exactly as Skinner says: they act in ways which reproduce that system. If it tends to kill itself then its reproduction is also its destruction on a long enough timescale. The phenomenon of the vulture capitalist is a good example: finance capital can go toe-to-toe with industrial capital now, so vultures can snap up a struggling firm and liquidate it, destroying jobs and products to reproduce the power and wealth of the vultures. On a long enough timescale this kills the real economy, which distributes resources to people, and the finance guys are left with a bunch of useless paper.

More viscerally, oil companies have moved mountains--they convinced every politician on earth that plastic recycling was viable, for example--in order to reproduce themselves and grow their fortunes. But this reproduction is slowly destroying all life on Earth. So what gives? Skinner would likely say that these executives and lobbyists are short-sighted and the "engineering problem" of designing a culture should fall to scientists. Maybe so, but we are stuck right at what Skinner wants to overcome: whoever designs our culture is asserting a particular set of values that exist outside his science of behaviour. The oil companies can buy whatever results they want from the scientists.

He identifies goodness with things which positively reinforce us (p. 99), but also admits that deferred consequences can complicate matters, a classic Diablo 4 situation:

"When a person spent a good part of each day in searching for food, it was important that he quickly learn where to find it or how to catch it, but with the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry and ways of storing food, the advantage was lost, and the capacity to be reinforced by food now leads to overeating and illness."

(pp. 167-168)

The structure Skinner lays out mimics the Marxist base and superstructure idea--culture is produced by and reinforces a set of deeper, material relations. Skinner describes his base structure as a set of reinforcers which are then articulated (in parallax) by cultural practices, art, and so on. Without the base of behaviours and reinforcers which reproduce humanity, there can be no superstructure, but the superstructure can still shape the base. The role of a culture (and its morality) is to bring the deferred consequences into the present, to impose a long view of survival onto people. The sin of gluttony became morally Wrong because it's materially unsustainable on an individual and societal level.

Marx's formulation, where production forms the base of society, exposes the problem with Skinner. More often than not, those who dominate the economic base write the laws and appoint the philosophers or scientists that occupy the superstructure. The morals that result amount to a justification of what exists, and programs to produce more of the same. Resistance, wherever it exists, comes from without. The German Ideology discusses this in an entertaining manner. A set of controls that produces wealth for the controller, by keeping people at the minimum viable quality of life, is sufficient for reproducing the culture. And this is essentially what we've got, the west is in a sort of managed decay where the average person's only real purpose is to keep the wheels spinning for Wal-Mart and all of its suppliers. There is no expectation that anything will get better except maybe on an individual level.

Skinner sees this, but he can't really address it. "The great problem is to arrange effective countercontrol and hence to bring some important consequences to bear on the behavior of the controller" (p. 163). But the only people who could practically implement this are the controllers, who we know aren't going to impose checks and balances on themselves.

Skinner's utopian novel, Walden Two, offers something like a concrete solution. I have not read it yet, but from what I understand those who live in Walden Two are encouraged to experiment at all times to make their lives and the community a better fit for its inhabitants. Their division, or maybe non-division of labour mirrors Marx perfectly in the German Ideology:

"...society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic."

The German Ideology, 1998 Prometheus Books edition, p. 53

In Walden Two people work four hours a day on whatever they want, and they get paid more for doing menial tasks. It is a lovely dream; I agree with Skinner that "freedom" as we understand it is meaningless nonsense, and even an inarticulate end like happiness is more worthwhile. But it's telling that Walden Two is a commune and not a world-spanning project.

He hits the same wall as so many others. Skinner goes straight to utopia, whereas with Engels you get the vague "withering away of the state" which gives way to glorious communism. Maybe both are just fantasies. It seems to me that revolutionaries deal with a more concrete problem: the desire to make society humane versus the tendency toward violence. The old regime never goes down without a fight.

Skinner actually grapples with this in the preface to Walden Two:

"China may be closer to the solutions I have been talking about, but a Communist revolution in America is hard to imagine. It would be a bloody affair, and there is always Lenin's question to be answered: How much suffering can one impose on those now living for the sake of those who will follow? And can we be sure that those who follow will be any better off?"

Walden Two, 1976 Hackett edition, pp. xv-xvi

He goes on to decry political action generally, and it seems like Skinner believes his utopia is possible if, on a small scale, people adopt a behaviourist approach to life until the state as we know it becomes unnecessary and withers away. It betrays his absolute faith in science--he thinks, like many of us did at one point or another, that the problems with society will become so glaringly obvious that they can't be ignored. For him the only undecided thing is what will take the system's place.

Values diverge from person to person, and class to class. The people who own the land where you might build your intentional community don't care if a bunch of people die from rising sea levels as long as their rental properties do well. They sure as shit aren't going to give you land for a community that won't turn a profit. If conditions ever reach the point where nobody is left to rent those properties, we've already lost. The Covid denialist movement is even more on the nose. You can tell people to trust their eyes or trust the science all day, but some won't. And why should they? The relationship between doctor and patient is adversarial in the U.S., and people's values come from their environment.

There is no way to make for-profit doctors or reactionary small business owners "automatically good". No levers are available, and no matter how much Skinner hates politics, the only way to change the environment is to seize the power to change the environment.

I think Skinner's writing has some valuable insights, but he suffers from engineer brain. He has the impulse to just 'get in there and fix it,' and while he possesses the tools, in the end he's forced to meet whatever spec the client gives him. In the last analysis, he has to run away and create a fantasy community. Skinner is definitely echoed in those lonely few people still assuring themselves that technology will fix everything.

The tools are powerful. Skinner is correct that the environment has a tremendous effect on behaviour, he's right that we ought to get over "the literature of freedom and dignity" as he calls it, and the fear of control [1]. But that fear exists for a reason. We are met with a labyrinth of control every day, and in most cases it wants to kill us: consider advertising, addictive junk food, gacha games, and many small design tactics in peoples' workplaces. This is without mentioning the specter of the big 20th century political projects, collectively called 'totalitarian' so you can throw the Nazis in with the Soviets for anticommunist rhetorical purposes. As we've all learned since October 2023, the Nazis won the war, so it's hard to trust any orthodox western or eastern history at this point.

Technology enables the stronger imposition of human values onto the world. Better police technology makes them scarier and more effective at putting down unrest, reinforcing the current situation as eternal and making change feel impossible. The video slot machine extracts money from vulnerable people at unprecedented rates, by engineering everything about the machine to induce play. The environment of the casino eliminates time and winds up space.

Atomic Habits is a lot less ambitious than Beyond Freedom & Dignity but it helped me understand something very basic: control is a technology. The techniques of behaviourism can't be unlearned or put back in the box, but the technology is not straightforwardly good or bad either.

So I came away from this book without much wisdom. I agree with Skinner about 80% but he ends up deferring to theoretical experts to shape good behaviour. If you give the most technically competent people all the power, they will successfully follow their rational economic interest straight to ruin--we've all heard the complaints about Google, and the state of its search engine is driven not by competence or incompetence, but the incentives of its AdSense business. In other words, Skinner's implementation plan is a fantasy even when the theory is sound.

In Skinner's excitement to see the human as just another animal, he finds no distinction between environment and worldview. He quickly ascribes our thoughts and feelings to the environment, ignoring that people are very good at creating virtual environments or world-images which reinforce their behaviour. The anxiety of entrepreneurs, their drive to compete, overcomes scarcity and the need for competition, without overcoming the impulse to compete. They change the world but not the image. They create a worldview where free market competition is freedom and reproduce it wherever they can, even as it leads to collapsing standards of life, collapsing biodiversity, and collapsing infrastructure.

The romance of revolution is shattering the dominant world-image with one decisive blow. A real movement which shows the old system for what it was: a bunch of trite magic tricks, and blockages to progress. Although I can poke holes in people's ideas all day, I struggle to see a real path toward a better world.

What I do know is that Skinner is basically right, that any program for the future involves intense and self-conscious control of the environment. But if this is done without any view of democracy (i.e. for the common good rather than narrow class interests) we are doomed with exactly what we have now, a human world that is anti-human, where many dream of retreating into the woods and mailing pipe bombs to college professors.

I guess I'm trying to rehabilitate Skinner in some way, but I didn't go into the book expecting a proto-communism. I've made some breaks with Marx lately, and I was never fully swayed by Lenin, and honestly Skinner has kind of brought me back. I guess I have a bit of engineer brain myself. I'll quote from Lenin to finish this off:

"The task is to learn from them and to help them to broaden their world-view on the basis of achievements in their particular field, always bearing in mind that the engineer's way to communism is different from that of the underground propagandist and the writer; he is guided along by the evidence of his own science, so that the agronomist, the forestry expert, etc., each have their own path to tread towards communism."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/feb/21.htm
The first part of the book is mostly an argument against viewing people as autonomous agents, but I found pp. 63-65 quite good.