II:  B. F. Skinner on Walden II and Other Utopian Visions

D. A. Begelman , Ph.D.

Everywhere they plan to bring in Utopia by turning this gang out and putting that gang in. Everywhere they believe in wizards and messiahs.

--H. L. Mencken, Forum, September, 1930. 

Introduction

Several questions arise about the design of utopian communities like B. F. Skinner’s Walden II (Skinner, 1976). One pertains to whether their creation is desirable; a second to whether they can succeed on a continuing or indefinite basis.  Another is a question about what demarcates a “utopian” community from groups of individuals who are culturally segregated, albeit products of naturally evolving social structures based upon ethnic, economic, or religious insularities. What, after all, qualifies as a utopian community—over and above other categories of segregated groups who intentionally or otherwise develop their uniquely styled group life?

The first issue, the desirability of a planned community, may sometimes depend upon the resolution of the second, the issue of longevity. In a practical sense, it is redundant to ask whether a given social design is a desirable goal to achieve if its creation or continuation is not possible in the first place. On the other hand, some defenders of particular social designs might hold that there is something worthwhile about the creation of a utopia even if its existence is brief. For them, the prospect of being short-lived may not be a satisfactory yardstick by which to judge a social vision, however disappointing its permanence.  

Reasons for the shortened life of such schemes may vary. A particular planned community may not be feasible because it does not stand the test of time, eventually foundering on unforeseen consequences in the engineering, interpersonal, or economic spheres. Such a society may contain internal complications that are unexpected, and fated to affect its survival. Skinner’s Walden II utopia is no different in this regard, and were it not a fictional depiction of a planned community, it would likewise be subject to whatever factors ensure or negate its continuation over time. Perhaps most designed communities from the outset lack transparency when it comes to these determinations.

In the past, utopian efforts in this country have often faltered because of the vagaries of time, place, and history. For example, a decade after its development in the Wabash Valley of Indiana, the experimental community of Rappists decided to relocate back to Pennsylvania, in part because of the antagonism of outsiders in the Midwest region. The community was sold to Robert Owen in 1825. Like Skinner, Owen was committed to the belief that human patterns were almost entirely a product of environmental influences, and his enormous influence on nineteenth century ideas about cultural design drew the interest of such notables as President James Monroe. Like Karl Marx, Owen held that provisional governing bodies of the experimental polity would eventually wither away into a leaderless communism. However, Owen’s lecture tours took him to Europe, leaving a less than charismatic governance back home in its wake. This led to a deterioration of his New Harmony community, a decline not halted by his return to America to take charge. Despite several reorganizations of his society—including the expulsion of freeloaders and citizens who took advantage of commutarian largesse—its inherent complications eventually lead to Owens’ farewell to New Harmony in 1827.

In contrast to secularist societies like Owen’s and the Zoar Separatist Society founded in 1817 by Joseph Bimeler (Hinds, 1908), the New York Oneida colony of Perfectionists founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 was inspired by religious and theological concepts, albeit radical ones when it came to sexual morality. Noyes held that monogamous liaisons were contrary to the will of God, and that pentagamy, or the communal sharing of sexual favors and liaisons was a necessary aspect of perfectability, as was education under the control of commutarian, not parental, regulation. However, after thirty-five years of Noyes’s social experiment, the Oneida Community broke up after Noyes fled to Canada in the face of charges of sexual immorality (Hayden, 1976).

While most utopian communities in this country were founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were also societies that started in the seventeenth century, possibly because the promise of the New Land was one associated with throwing off the yoke of religious oppression common to emigrés from the European scene. The Pietist community of “Woman in the Wilderness” was founded in 1694, the Moravian community of “Irenia” in 1695, and “Bohemian Manor,” created by Labadists in 1683.  

Another issue arises for Walden II. This is the nature of the relationship between it and radical behaviorism, the underlying secular philosophy of science Skinner believed guided its development. The two are widely regarded as intertwined, the design of the utopia thought to spring from the application of principles enshrined in his philosophy of science. However, the necessary connection between the two is rarely examined as an issue in its own right. The same holds for alternative utopias based upon religious principles or philosophies. The present essay seeks to review this issue, since the concept of “deriving” behavioral applications like community design as well as therapeutic and educational modalities from alleged overriding philosophies is an unexplored area of inquiry.

 Skinner himself imagined that a society modeled along behavioristic principles would be very different from one modeled along more traditional lines. The conjecture is speculative and subject to empirical confirmation. Its falsification would amount to the development of a utopia just like Walden II, only constructed on the basis of an alternative system of concepts. Since Walden II is a fictional depiction of a utopian community, an immediate test of Skinner’s proposition about the dissimilarity of social structures inspired by contrasting philosophies cannot be made. We can at present only speak of future possibilities.      

Another way of framing the issue is to imagine a society precisely like Walden II, with the exception that its architects believe it to be inspired by religious principles. Is such a society nonetheless still modeled along behavioristic lines, despite the fact that no one consciously relied on them in developing it? Is it possible to apply behavioral principles unintentionally? Here, we might imagine the development of a community inspired by religious concepts, but whose architects go about setting up institutional structures and patterns that can be explained using the alternative concepts of behavior-theory. In what sense would such a hypothetical community not be classifiable as an application of behavioristic principles? When behaviorists design the same community relying self-consciously on principles like positive reinforcement, extinction, consequences of behavior, discriminative stimuli, operants, and so forth, what would such a group of applied scientists be doing that their counterparts in the parallel religious community were not doing? Or is a behavioral “derivation” more than just a matter of what individuals, behavioral engineers or otherwise, actually do?

If it is held that the hypothetical religious community, one incorporating mentalistic concepts as a feature of its guiding principles, could never approximate the structure of a utopia created through the application of behavioristic principles, imagine the following possibility. A group of behavioral engineers pledging allegiance to radical behaviorism designs a utopia modeled along Skinnerian lines. The society is set up and flourishes. Unexpectedly, all the citizens of this community suddenly undergo a conversion to a religious system of belief. The conversion is fairly sudden and dramatic, as in the case of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. The question is: in what sense would the converted citizenry be logically compelled to change the design of their utopia in order that it conform to a new driving philosophy? Here, we will ignore for the moment how the citizens alter their verbal behavior—in effect no longer paying lip-service to the aforementioned behavioristic concepts. Such argot obviously involves a rather different set of verbal practices than a newly appropriated lingo involving terms like salvation, the soul, good works, the after-life, or God’s work on earth. We are interested only in the structure of daily activities and patterns of societal behavior other than those in a verbal repertoire. What would be the necessary alterations of life-style the converted citizenry would be obliged to undertake in virtue of the conversion?

The use of mentalistic concepts is an aspect of the natural evolution of all world cultures. Yet one implication of B. F. Skinner’s ideas on the design of cultures as instanced in his novel or in briefer essays (Skinner, 1972a, 1981) is that a society constructed by applying principles of his philosophy of science would be an improvement over systems highjacked by mentalistic concepts. In Skinner’s view, such projects are inefficient at best, since their conceptual baggage would thwart the realization of professed social goals of whatever stripe. A reason he gives for this are the impediments imposed on effective action through reliance on notions of “freedom” or “autonomous man” in contrast to a functional analysis with a focus on the independent environmental variables of which behavior is a function. “Inefficient” here implies stumbling blocks to goals chartered by architects of whatever alternative philosophical persuasion prevails. Many of the latter have not been exempt from searching criticism by spokespersons of alternative creeds and persuasions. Historically, sundry philosophies have embraced utopian ideals that met with disapproval by other constituencies, depending upon the philosophical persuasion in question. Some disparaged versions of social engineering they felt approximated Orwellian nightmares, whereas others were critical of any kind of social engineering, holding that such efforts compromise ideals renouncing totalitarian control implicit in them. Others may deem social redesign as worthwhile pursuing, albeit difficult or impossible to achieve, while still others may be critical of designs they feel inferior to the ones they propose.

The issue of divergent social ideals aside, Skinner has been less than clear about precisely how traditional perspectives on social planning are diversions from an optimal path. Clarifying how behaviorism represents an improvement in the real world—as  opposed to its depiction in a fictional work like Walden Two—involves revealing the actual differences between naturally evolving social structures and those inspired by his philosophy of science, radical behaviorism.

Skinner seems to have wavered between two separate lines of argument in his critique of preexisting social structures. On the one hand, he has faulted social planning  not inspired by radical behavioristic principles, whereas on the other he felt the problem involves a traditional opposition to social engineering simpliciter. On the latter assumption, he indicated that a cultural antipathy to undertaking large-scale social design springs from a misplaced distrust of enterprises viewed as contrary to the “freedom” celebrated in “democratic” ideals or the notion of “autonomous man.” There is quite a difference between holding that the house that Jack built was a white elephant because he was ignorant of architectural principles, and insisting that the effort was misplaced because the house in question is not the kind of place Jack should inhabit in the first place. Let us explore the first of these two alternatives, namely, that past social planning is deficient because it has been disadvantaged by not appropriating the proper philosophy of science.

Conceive of the following hypothetical situation. Suppose mentalistic language and concepts, like those that are infiltrated by causal references to intentions, motives, desires, pleasures, feelings, hopes, aspirations, and the like were traditionally coupled with effective social planning in the realization of cultural goals. As a matter of historical fact, the majority of actual utopian communities flourishing in the past not only relied on mentalistic concepts inspiring their respective planners; they relied on spiritualistic or religious premises, to boot. Examples of such communities on the American scene have been created and continue to be developed, some standing the test of time, others disappearing for a variety of reasons.    

Skinner’s work has been widely regarded within psychology as the basis for a wide range of “applications” affecting the lives of particular target populations. Among these are techniques to change the plight of psychiatric and developmentally disabled populations, innovations in educational curricula of normal and disabled populations, and applications as far removed from human improvement as guided missiles of war (Skinner, 1972b). Contemporary research on compromised clinical populations has revealed a degree of overlap when it comes to the therapeutic efficacy of treatment procedures inspired by different theoretical orientations in psychology. Despite this, there are indications of the superiority of behavioral approaches when it comes to intellectually compromised individuals, pervasive developmental disorders and broad-spectrum autistic conditions, learning disabilities, depression, specific fears, panic disorder, speech dysfluencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and types of sexual dysfunction. All the same, the nature of the connection between behavior theory and its presumed applications—just like the connection between radical behaviorism and Walden II—has received little attention. Behavior therapists or applied behavior analysts often speak about their clinical armamentaria as “experimentally derived treatment techniques.” What sense of the term derived is operative here? The low visibility query underlying the rhetorical question is “What set of conceivable techniques would not be derivable from behavior theory if the latter is taken to be a set of principles explaining human behavior in the most general sense?”

In a study authored by Truax (1966), it was discovered that Rogerian therapy, in contrast to representing “unconditional positive regard, “ was actually selectively reinforcing clients’ verbal behavior. An impartial observer might conclude that what he or she was privy to was not Rogers’ professed approach, that of client-centered therapy, but another form of behavior therapy. One might elect to describe the therapeutic transaction as “disguised or unintended behavior therapy,” since the Rogerian psychotherapist was unaware of the selective nature of the approach. Had the therapeutic ministration been effective, its success could therefore be explained in behavioristic terms.

The epiphany is that the success of all forms of psychotherapy can be explained—or at least analyzed—in behavioristic terms. And no wonder. If the latter is presumed to explain or otherwise account for human behavior in general, professional therapeutic patterns naturally fall within its compass as a subclass of a subject matter. Since behavior-theory has a wide explanatory compass, is any therapeutic approach “derivations” of this framework if the latter can explain their success? The answer, it seems to the present author, is a simple one. “Derivations” are simply those applications practiced by professionals who self-consciously use a special vocabulary and inventory of concepts to explain their efficacy.

Considering the wide compass of behavior-theory, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision how it might fail to “explain” the success of all treatment techniques. Ironically, it can also explain their failures. In the Truax sudy, the client-centered interventions turned out to be the selective reinforcements of verbal behavior. Yet if “unconditional positive regard” remained true to form, it could be analyzed as “non-contingent reinforcement of verbal behavior.” This insight should prompt us to recast our previous formulation. Is not as though Rogers’ client-centered therapy was ineffective because it was not as a modality derivable from behavioristic principles; it was ineffective because it was employing the technique of non-contingent, rather than contingent, reinforcement of verbal operants. In other words, Rogers’ techniques can as easily be recast as a mismanaged behavioristic approach, were it not for the fact that the Rogerian therapist did not play the behavioristic language-game. Because of this, client-centered therapy is routinely conceived as an approach that is a theoretical alternative to one inspired by behavioristic principles!

The alleged failure of behavioristically oriented experiments like Walden II, or actual utopias in Virginia and Mexico hardly documents a failure of applied behaviorism or its philosophy of science, radical behaviorism; it only documents at best a misappropriation or misapplication of concepts like positive reinforcement, aversive control, stimulus control, or extinction. These concepts are more advantageously viewed as explanatory principles embracing the widest categories of human behavior, rather than as names for specific and particularized interventions in parochial armamentaria. Theoretical orientations in psychology, including radical behaviorism, are not roadmaps and blueprints for discrete therapeutic techniques deducible from them, but only inventories of protean concepts and principles embracing whatever applications are in fact developed. That the opposite viewpoint has enjoyed popularity is more a matter of antiquarian interest than it is of logical significance.       

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