Walden Two at Fifty

In 1948, for just three dollars you could buy a hardback copy of a novel by B. F. Skinner, a professor of psychology. Hardly anyone did. Sales were slow until the 1960s, when the book became popular, with two million copies sold by 1979.[2] I was one of the 1960s readers, and I have always regarded the novel with a certain affectionate embarrassment—the same feeling I have for many artifacts of those years when utopia seemed forthcoming. Walden Two describes a community where 1000 people live in harmony and plenty through the deliberate practice of behavioral engineering. Skinner's earlier work, The Behavior of Organisms (1938), had shied away from extrapolating from the science of animal behavior to that of humans. But in Walden Two he makes this leap from laboratory findings to a larger social application, and the implication that humans are animals' close counterparts was cause for alarm among readers. The novel is an outgrowth of Skinner's beliefs about a failing political, economic, and social system: "What is needed is not a new political leader or a new kind of government but further knowledge about human behavior and new ways of applying that knowledge to the design of cultural practices."

In the novel, two university professors (Dr. Burris, psychology, and Dr. Castle, philosophy) and two recent veterans of World War II and their girlfriends visit an experimental community where behaviorist principles of reinforcement are applied to daily life. A graduate school classmate of Burris's, Frazier, conducts the six visitors through a four-day tour of the community. Frazier explains at length the changes he has made from mainstream society. Restructuring of labor and consumption has reduced each person's work day to around four hours. Group care of children and an altered family ideology have allowed a scientific method of raising charming, independent, and self-controlled children. Meanwhile, parents as well as the child-free enjoy the children and act as role models, while unfettered alliances between married couples lead to lengthy partnerships, negligible dalliance, and a low number of divorces, all discreet and stormless. New kinds of personal incentive have done away with professional jealousy, power plays, elitism, favoritism, selfishness, and workaholism (except perhaps in Frazier's case). All members place the best interests of the community before personal aggrandizement. Even the sheep behave well, and in a final tax on the imagination, all the women are beautiful.

What drama there is in this happy valley is provided by two plots: the journeys toward conversion made by Dr. Burris and the four young people (Steve, Mary, Rodge, and Barbara), and the intellectual strife between Burris (the B in B. F. Skinner is the homonym Burrhus), Frazier, and Castle. Clashing with Frazier, Castle represents an old-guard academic, whose jejune arguments for the glories of free will, on one hand, and on the other the nastiness of human nature, call into question his rigorous philosophical training. The fact that his interlocutors admit him as a worthy opponent casts similar doubts on Frazier and Burris. Burris's role is milder: he is the open-minded but unschooled straight man. His understanding of psychological principles assists him in overcoming his bourgeois prejudices. In the end, Burris, symbolizing the enlightened intellectual, and the amiably vapid couple Steve and Mary, representing the salt of the earth, decide to join Walden Two. Declining the invitation are Castle, enmired in atavistic thought, and Rodge, also an intellectual but reluctantly enslaved by the charms of his vain and shallow Barbara (who seems to view the whole trip as a series of bad hair days). These three return to the restless squalor of life under the old regime.

What did the world make of this novel, smacking of venerable science yet pungent with irreverence toward the virtues of individualism, nuclear families, democratic politics, and the church? For the book-buying public, not much, since the book's sales did not top 10,000 until 1962. (In his 1976 foreword to the re-issued novel, Skinner claimed that it made no splash until the world became ready for its progressive ideas. Certainly, the targets of irreverence in Walden Two were shared by iconoclasts of the 1960s and 1970s, the book's heyday.) Reviewers tended to point out that the novel was boring,[3] a problem quite common among utopian fictions. The purpose of such literature often seems to require lengthy monologues by a choragus figure who explains how the perfect society functions to an audience of visitors from outside. This form does not lend itself to exciting plot development, and indeed Walden Two was rejected by Appleton-Century and Houghton Mifflin before being accepted by Macmillan (partly, it seems, in hopes that Skinner would write an introductory college text for them, which he eventually did).

Several contemporary reviews, as in our own time, make one wonder whether the reviewers had bothered to read the book at all: Forum called it "a delightful fictionalized discourse" in which Utopia is "airily discussed,"[4] reminding me of the description of Macbeth on our cablevision guide: "The story of a Scottish king and his wife." The same Forum reviewer reported that only three people visited the community—Burris and the two young veterans. The NewYorker reviewer counted the characters correctly but claimed that five of the six decided to join the community (instead of three).[5] Much later, Peter Wolfe wrote of Skinner's style in the novel, "His keen ear and apt phrasing also bring a lightening glow,"[6] a sentence no other commentator would have dared commit to paper, most of them agreeing on the clunky style of the novel.

Walden Two did inspire serious discussion by some highly esteemed writers and thinkers, including Joseph Wood Krutch, Carl Rogers, Lewis Mumford, and Northrop Frye. Mumford stated that "every utopia is, almost by definition, a sterile desert, unfit for human occupation," suggesting that the sterility lies in the domination of abstract intelligence,

 
Specifically, Mumford wrote, "The sugared concept of scientific control, which B. F. Skinner insinuates into his Walden Two, is another name for arrested development."[7] With more vigor in one sentence than in the whole of the novel, Northrop Frye fumed, "Skinner's book shows how to develop children's will power by hanging lollipops around their necks and giving them rewards for not eating them: its Philistine vulgarity makes it a caricature of the pedantry of social science."[8]

Joseph Wood Krutch's The Measure of Man, which won the 1954 National Book Award for nonfiction, devotes a whole chapter to "Ignoble Utopias," mostly Skinner's Utopia. Krutch argued that Skinner's Walden demonstrates the inherent paradox of utopian thinking. Frazier, the mastermind, is not a product of the system he creates, but instead a product of the random and unplanned gamut of reinforcement contingencies that produced his set of behaviors. (Frazier himself talks about this issue several times in the novel: he even explains his own crankiness and arrogance by the fact that he is not a native Walden Two-er.) Even if we allow for the nonexistence of a "human nature" which would somehow naturally rebel against such regimentation, the perfectly controlled community would be a closed loop, precluding "the unexpected and unplanned" sources of renewal.

Furthermore, Krutch pointed out, Walden Two's community, luckily, just happens to be designed by a man who desires a tranquil and plentiful life for all. There is nothing within radical behaviorism that guarantees such goals, and nothing within the principles of mind control that ensures its use for the common good. Krutch called forth the specters of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as dystopic exemplars.

Krutch's arguments are linked with Carl Rogers's in his concern about the agenda of the controller. Skinner and Rogers debated the use of scientific knowledge in molding human behavior at the American Psychological Association convention in 1956. Skinner deplored the timidity of psychologists about using their power actively to control human behavior. Rogers urged caution. Rogers further developed his thoughts on the matter during the next year and wrote out his reflections in two parts, which appear as the last two chapters in his book, On Becoming a Person. The first of these, "The Growing Power of the Behavioral Sciences," surveys the relatively newfound capabilities of psychologists to predict and control behavior. The second, "The Place of the Individual in the New World of the Behavioral Sciences," explores questions of subjectivity, values, and goals in scientific pursuits, with particular reference to social engineering as in Walden Two. Like Krutch, Rogers asserted that scientific questions are asked and answered by human beings, who act upon their personal subjectivity. Frazier's choice of goals is a community where people are happy, self-controlled, and productive. Like most commentators, Rogers did not see the full range of humanity in these adjectives. In fact, most of Walden Two's critics objected at heart to the diminishing of the human spirit that they perceived in the planned community. However, Rogers pointed out that the choice of goals and the values that inform them are matters outside of science, to be decided by humans with, he hoped, some wisdom and explicitness. "Can science discover the methods by which man can most readily become a continually developing and self-transcending process, in his behavior, his thinking, his knowlege?" If questions like this one informed scientific inquiry, Rogers wrote, we would not have to fear its advances.

Today, fifty years after the publication of Walden Two, we know that the advances of behavioral engineering were not pernicious. They did not result in widespread dehumanization or draining of society's creative energies. Strict behaviorism was abandoned by most social scientists due to developments in cognitive psychology within the next ten years after 1948, including Noam Chomsky's argument that language could not be described within the stimulus-response model and other evidence of complex cognitive structures undreamed of in Skinner's philosophy. However, in the form of behavior modification, Skinnerian procedures are successfully used in schools of all kinds, in mental institutions, for helping psychotic and retarded people to be self-sufficient, and of course in training animals.[9] Operant conditioning plays a large role in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, in which people learn to alter the reinforcement patterns in their own lives through experimenting with new ways of acting and thinking. The effectiveness of this type of psychotherapy is the most empirically supported when compared with all other kinds of counseling interventions. So, the successes of Skinner's techniques are inarguable. However, these successes are all within limited settings, applied to small groups or to individuals. Their applicability to a whole society has not been tested, but we can view Walden Two retrospectively and speculate on its nature and its fate.

So, how does the Walden Two society look at 50? Although Skinner kept the community's technology on a domestic level (innovative dishware and bassinets), probably in order to avoid humorous obsolescence in the future, did his social system also avoid obsolescence? What would a modern social philosopher or psychologist say? Given what we know now, is Walden Two feasible? Desirable?

For one thing, feminists would never stand for it. The world of Walden Two, and the novel itself, are blatantly sexist, exemplifying what psychologist Sandra Bem labels "nonconscious ideology," a set of ideas so ubiquitous that they seem invisible to those that hold them, as natural as water to the fish that swim in it.[10] Several times in Walden Two, Frazier mentions that equality between the sexes has been achieved ("You may have noticed the complete equality of men and women among us" ), yet we see it nowhere. Women appear in the novel dusting, chatting, bringing out food hampers, supervising the nursery, overseeing children's birthday parties, and whisking off the female visitors to view food preparation, weaving, and fashion design—"things of interest to the ladies," as Frazier calls them. As I mentioned earlier, the utopian life is praised for enhancing all the women's attractiveness, but no similar claim is made for the handsomeness of the Walden Two men; clearly, differential importance is placed on the quality.

It is assumed that all females want to breed and will, early and often, if they are able, since the burden of sole child caretaker has been removed. The idea that a woman might choose to be child-free or might not desire the company of children, or sexual activity with males, is beyond the pale. In the continual serious conversations that make up the book, women are never active participants. Married women still change their last names, a practice publicly deplored as sexist one hundred years before Walden Two was written. At the 1848 Women's Rights Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that "a woman's dignity is equally involved in a life-long name, to mark her individuality" as an escaped slave's, who "at once takes a name as the first step in liberty—the first assertion of individual identity."[11] I dwell on these points to emphasize that the first waves of feminism had already occurred in 1948, yet a highly educated and socially conscientious man like Skinner was blinkered to what the implications of their message would be in a truly egalitarian society.

Skinner did not, at the time of writing, have access to research concerning the effects of using the generic male: Frazier is fond of sweeping pronouncements like, "Live in Walden Two a month or so and you will get a fresh point of view. You will shake off the pessimism which fills the abysmal depths to which we've sunk, and you will begin to see the potentialities of man. You will begin to expect great things of men, and see the chance of getting them, too." We now have experimental evidence that such use of the generic male builds a psychological picture of the male as the norm in boys' and girls' minds, and in fact is not generic at all.[12] Such gendered usage, rampant in Frazier's discourse, is likely to ensure that little Walden girls know that the "great things" will not be expected of them.

Just as the import of imbalance between the sexes is largely unheeded in Walden Two, so are other group differences passed over. The fact that everyone is of the same economic status has eliminated class bias in the utopia. The fact that everyone, seemingly, is white,[13] heterosexual, and physically mobile eliminates many problems of inter-group prejudice and stereotyping that would doubtless rock the boat. Yet, can a modern social philosopher, psychologist, or geneticist claim that such homogenization is the ideal state? Probably not, even if it were achievable outside of fiction. Furthermore, could a modern social psychologist find credible a society in which there are no distinct groups or social hierarchies at all? Again, probably not. In the absence of major visible differences, people still form groups based on interpersonal attraction, similarities of intelligence and talent, age, and so forth. Inevitably, in-groups identify out-groups and begin to stereotype the out-groups based on selective attention to their characteristics. This stereotyping serves group cohesiveness and self-definition, and on an individual level it enhances each member's self-image. It also creates social problems due to prejudice and rejection. In the view of social psychologists Linville, Salovey, and Fischer, stereotyping arises "from basic cognitive categorization processes, . . . basic learning processes involving generalization and discrimination."[14] In Walden Two, Skinner claims that a combination of contingencies including childhood training in "escape from the petty emotions," a ban on competitive sports, and a prohibition against gossip can subvert these basic learning processes. However, in light of social psychology, it is quite unlikely that basic categorization and self-affirmation processes could be eliminated so handily. Even the abolition of gossip seems improbable, partly because of the difficulty in operationalizing the definition of the term.

In reading Walden Two, I was struck by the absence of any stable groups of friends or even close dyadic friendships, which do have the effect of shutting someone out while enclosing the friends.[15] At Walden Two, groups form to speak French or play music, but not on the basis of preferring each other's company over other people's. In fact, twice Frazier points out the interchangeability of the Walden Two women as being a nice advantage for a suitor who may not get his first choice! (No parallel claim is made for disappointed women.) The forming of distinct groups and pairs through mutual attraction is a fundamental feature of social interaction, even among many animals, and seems to be another process not so easily subverted. The process assumes differentiation among individuals.

Indeed, the Walden Two system produces one type of adult, lyrically described by Burris:

 
The children of Walden Two are similarly pleasing:

 
Much is made in Walden Two of the careful program of behavioral conditioning that produces such relentless delightfulness, including the lollipop experience that so vexed Northrop Frye. This is an exercise in delayed gratification applied to children at age three or four, in which they learn ways to distract themselves from the thought of a lollipop that they possess but which must not be eaten till later. As children get older, they perform other exercises teaching them self-control in "a system of gradually increasing annoyances and frustrations" until at the age of six, all ethical training is complete, needing only occasional bolstering by self-help pamphlets (the author, Frazier). The children grow up free of jealousy, resentment, irritability, aggression, selfishness—in short, delightful.

From a modern point of view, such extreme environmental lawfulness would have to be rejected. The Walden Two children all respond similarly—or close enough—to the conditioning program, which is what makes it work when they grow up. If the community had to deal with social deviance at any meaningful level, it would falter. Peter Wolfe phrases the problem strongly:

 
The fact is, we now know, children are born into the world with more variability than Skinner allows for, and that variability sticks with them throughout life. The threat of cookie-cutter people, or programmed robots, which Skinner's critics found so ghastly, is quite illusory. Researchers in the famous Minnesota twin study would think the homogeneity of Walden Two-raised progeny laughable: they found that "common rearing enhances familial resemblance during adulthood only slightly and on relatively few behavioral dimensions." In fact, these scientists would speculate that the unregimented, free-choice system of education and activity that prevails for children over six at Walden Two is likely to produce more various adults than less:

 
Genetic differences make different people react differently to the same reinforcements; genetic differences also make people seek out different experiences, which alter their learning histories. In other words, some kid at a real Walden Two is going to throw a cat off a building to see how it lands; another is going to spend hours alone at a computer console; another is going to invite his cousin under the lilac bushes to play doctor. They are not all going to turn out delightful—or even happy, self-controlled, and productive, all of which are now suspected to have strong genetic components (anxiety, thrill-seeking, and happiness level[17] all appear genetically driven). Though Skinner always included genetics in his formula for predicting behavior, today's science has proven that he never gave it as much weight as it merits.

Instrumentation, experiments, and techniques unknown to the 1948 psychologist provide other insights that challenge premises of Walden Two. It may be, for example, that at the ages of three to six children's frontal lobes are insufficiently developed for the behavioral programming of ethics to be fruitful into adulthood.[18] Through brain imaging and neuropsychological assessment advances, scientists have determined that frontal lobe myelinization is important in operations related to conscience, social consequences, social judgment, and fairness, for example. There are some lessons that children cannot learn until a certain level of brain development has been achieved.

More examples: at Walden Two the desire for cigarettes and liquor falls naturally away from all members. These desires are seen as products of the bad old world: "You need your cocktail to counteract the fatigue and boredom of a mismanaged society. Here we need no antidotes. No opiates." Today, the pursuit of altered consciousness is considered a much more complex biological and social phenomenon than Frazier's explanation allows.[19] Proneness to addiction is genetically influenced, and the desire to experiment with one's inner states is not only a reaction to fatigue and boredom. In some people, nicotine and alcohol act to bring their neurotransmitters into what's considered a normal balance. Similarly, Frazier's explanation for psychopathology would be rejected. Throughout the novel, Frazier asserts that failure of contingency management creates neurosis: "You will find your insecure child in the care of an overworked or emotional mother, or living with quarrelsome parents, or sent to school unprepared for needed adjustments, or left to get along with children from different cultural levels." Beyond the sexism and elitism of such a statement, modern psychologists would object to such blanket environmentalism, pointing out genetic predispositions to react in various ways to such situations. Finally, the Walden Two philosophy that children left to their own devices in a stimulating environment will procure themselves an education sounds positively quaint in today's world of the video game, a pleasure lever that some will press until exhaustion like cocaine-happy rats.

Children left to their own devices, too, are practically guaranteed not to speak a foreign language fluently, play a musical instrument with the finest, or achieve a level of expert performance in anything. Study of the psychology of expert performance suggests that a child's talent in a domain must be recognized early and followed with early instruction and the intense involvement of adults, including parental support and ten years of planned, deliberate practice supervised by master teachers and coaches, with competitive situations providing criteria for evaluating performance. Researchers on exceptional performance K. Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness believe that all the other factors listed are more important than innate talent.[20] Frazier, in contrast, believes that the right conditions for producing a great age of art and music are available at Walden Two: leisure and audiences. Both are available in the utopian community; absent are the adults who take the responsibility for fostering the child's art, which means often insisting that the child do boring, repetitive practice activities when both adult and child would rather do something else. Frazier has done nothing, meanwhile, to assure that the community has the maximal complement of expert teachers and coaches, and most competitions are banned. In light of modern research, Walden Two would not grow the elite performers in any field.

"But why should it?" Frazier would answer if I were to argue this. A real sticking point for many of Walden Two's critics, including the character Castle, is the existential one: What is the meaning of life when strife, heroism, fame, triumphant accomplishments are devalued? Frazier's summation of the common citizen has raised many a hackle:

 
Any existentialist worth her salt will think that Walden Two, with its pressure toward conformity, its lack of passion, its leisure hours, its embrace of ultimate meaninglessness, looks less like an English country weekend and more like an endless Chekhov play. Skinner simply dismisses the question of angst (being one of many dubious internal constructs), but many would say that it is too much of a "pervasive and profound phenomenon in the twentieth century"[21] to ignore. A potential way out of the problem in the novel would be to have Walden Two citizens experience an existential leap of faith, with the long-range program of the community as its object rather than a traditional religion; however, Frazier insists that most of the citizens by far are quite uninterested in the governance and abstract goals of their society.

Despite these faults, I doubt that today's commentators would express the sincere abhorrence toward the world of Walden Two embodied in earlier days, when even a sophisticated academic publication, the Journal of Philosophy, called the book's utopia "horrible" and Walden members "contented nonpolitical robots."[22] It could be that we have simply lived longer with Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Madison Avenue and are less shocked by the idea that we are not free. It could be that "science and technology" in 1948 called forth the A-bomb, while "science and technology" in 1998 call forth the Internet and a cure for cancer. It could be that the image of our nation's inner cities puts us more in touch with the real horrors of scarcity and misery, against which happiness, self-control, and productivity look just fine as goals for humanity. And against displays of rapacious arrogance, wealth and power, more equal division of fewer goods looks sensible as an economic goal.

It could be that when the news comes from Brookfield Zoo that a gorilla saved the life of a three-year-old human boy who fell 20 feet into her compound, being creatures just like animals makes us feel not diminished, but hopeful.

NOTES

1. In 1963, Science published a now-classic article by Skinner, "Behaviorism at 50."

2. R. D. Ramsey, Morning Star: The Values-Communication of Skinner's Walden Two (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1980).

3. [Review of Walden Two], Booklist 44 (1948), 330-331; M. J. V., [Review of Walden Two], Sociology and Social Research 33 (1948), 81-2. Ramsey, who did his doctoral dissertation on Walden Two, visited Skinner and read Skinner's extensive collection of contemporary reviews of the novel. Many of these, especially newspaper reviews from around the nation, were not accessible to me, so I must trust Ramsey's account that many of them characterized the novel as boring.

4. [Review of Walden Two], Forum 110 (1948), 94.

5. [Review of Walden Two], New Yorker 24 (12 June 1948), 94-5.

6. P. Wolfe, "Walden Two 25 years later: A retrospective look," Studies in the LiteraryImagination 6;2 (1973), 11-26.

7. L. Mumford, "Utopia, the city and the machine," in F. E. Manuel (ed.), Utopiasand Utopian Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 10.

8. N. Frye, "Varieties of literary utopias," in F. E. Manuel (ed.), Utopiasand Utopian Thought, 32.

9. R. D. Nye, The Legacy of B. F. Skinner (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks-Cole, 1992).

10. S. Bem, The Lenses of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

11. J. Penfield, "Surnaming: The struggle for personal identity," in J. Penfield (ed.), Women and Language in Transition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 117-29.

12. M. C. Hamilton, "Using masculine generics: Does generic he increase male bias in the user's imagery?" Sex Roles 19 (1988), 785-99. J. S. Hyde, "Children's understanding of sexist language," Developmental Psychology 20 (1984), 697-706; J. Schneider and S. Hacker, "Sex role imagery and the use of the generic 'man' in introductory texts," American Sociologist 8 (1973), 12-18.

13. Skinner asserts that a chapter on "how the problem of race was treated" was one of the two he removed when shortening the book for publication. I think it likely that he made this choice partly because the thorniness of the issue was difficult to fit into the Walden Two Weltanshauung. I also think we don't need to call in Freud to interpret Skinner's parenthetical comment on the fate of the excised material: "(The chapters were inadvertently thrown away.)" The Shaping of a Behaviorist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 330.

14. P. W. Linville, P. Salovey, and G. W. Fischer, "Stereotyping and perceived distributions of social characteristics: An application to ingroup-outgroup perception," in J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (eds.), Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism (Orlando, FL: Academic Press 1986), 202. See also S. Fein and S. J. Spencer, "Prejudice as self-image maintenance: Affirming the self through derogating others," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997), 31-44.

15. Walden Two is also remarkable for its sexlessness, avoiding another source of interpersonal intensity, exclusivity, and rivalry. Adolescents are encouraged to marry and breed early, but this could only be because their hormone surges will prevail against the libido-numbing jollity of wholesome social life at Walden Two. Barbara, the voice of a decadent system, is the only character who exhibits sexuality, and Skinner implies that it is Barbara's siren song that draws the other wise noble Rodge away from Walden Two.

16. T. J. Bouchard, D. T. Lykken, M. McGue, N. L. Segal, and A. Tellegen, "Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnestoa study of twins reared apart," Science 250 (1990), 227.

17. D. G. Myers and E. Diener, "The new scientific pursuit of happiness," HarvardMental Health Letter 14:2 (1997), 4-7.

18. G. W. Hynd, Neuropsychological Assessment in Clinical Child Psychology (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988).

19. A. Weil, The Natural Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

20. K. A. Ericsson and N. Charness, "Expert performance: Its structure and acquisition," American Psychologist, 49 (1994), 725-47.

21. R. May, The Meaning of Anxiety (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950/1977).

22. H. A. L., [Review of Walden Two], Journal of Philosophy 46(1949), 654-55.