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Beyond Freedom and Dignity
By B. F. Skinner
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. 225 pp. $6.95.

The Human Agenda
By Roderic Gorney
New York, Simon and Schuster, 1972. 698 pp. $12.95.

Skinner's essay is a bomb already exploded and heard round the world, but Gorney's is a new sound in the uproar. The uproar, I mean, about whether the genetic and mind controls men are able to exert on themselves will take us up to new heights or down to new depths. In these two books, we have an impressive confrontation between the behaviorist and the analyst, one rather Pavlovian and the other rather Freudian. They meet but do not cross swords.

In an urbane and uncombative fashion, Skinner sums up the case for his years of work at Harvard on behavior control by means of psychological or "operant" conditioning. He does not advocate physical control of the mind by surgery, chemistry, or electricity, as Jose Delgado does. Gorney's book is a witty, erudite, and warmly human account of man's psycho-biological evolution and prospects. Skinner is a psychologist, Gorney (at UCLA) a psychiatrist, but both are clinicians as well as theoreticians.

I should acknowledge at once that I find Skinner's book far more significant and important, Gorney's far more engaging and informative. Skinner's is tight and takes great pains to be succinct and essential; Gorney's is loose, its cosmic perspective lending it nobility and a certain awesomeness. Skinner's scant and laconic style will please some; others will prefer Gorney's style, which is highly personalized and sometimes somewhat obscure if not actually illogical. just compare the length of the two. Skinner's is already out in paperback; Gorney's can never be.

Skinner's thesis is headachy and anxiety laden. It is fairly familiar in intellectual circles although never so well expressed before, not even in its left-handed form as Skinner's novel which all college students have been reading, Walden Two. It is, therefore, no disrespect to put his thesis in this capsule form, a paraphrase: "You give me the values and morals and ethics you would like people to live by, and by operant conditioning, I will program them into people and they will conduct themselves accordingly." To this end both clinical and institutional methods would be used, but especially the schools.

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The meaning of his proposal is that we have to scrap the notion that authentic freedom is a private, individual choice of whether or not to be "good." Skinner himself makes a lot of this conceptual substrate in the discussion; it is not just my understanding of him. When Thomas Huxley was barnstorming in Darwin's defense, be once asked an audience if they would want to be like moral clocks, wound up to do the right thing predictably? No band was raised in favor of it, but be raised his. Now, a century later, the technology of behavior is here; if we decide to use it, we can. Skinner raises his hand, too, and the question is no longer academic or hypothetical.

Skinner is clear on the substantive ethical issue; he replies, "No" to the question, "Is genuine righteousness something that requires struggle? Is virtue impossible apart from vice?" The logic of Skinner's thesis is that motive is not important in ethics. If it were important how could a right motive have any importance if the will had no alternative? I am reminded of a neglected little book by the English moral theologian Kirk, The Threshold of Ethics. Kirk distinguished between "praiseworthy" moral agents, who act virtuously in spite of being disposed to vice, and "Saintly" types, who act virtuously because they are predisposed to it. Skinner wants us all to be saints.

What Skinner is vague and inconclusive about are the determinative questions. Whose values are to be chosen for the technology of conditioning? How are they to be chosen; by an educational or political elite, or by popular referendum? How real would any nose-counted consensus be, at either level? Why is social conformity better than individual liberty? Is law and order all that precious? Does the greatest good of the greatest number, even in an increasingly interdependent social order, require what Weber called the routinization of conduct? Pragmatically, which is better in the public interest, punishment of offenders or their elimination?

Churches, schools, parents, and police have always done what they could to condition us, by both straightforward and hidden agendas of good conduct. But they have also always brought up short of built-in good deportment. Can a good case be made for crossing the line? Skinner has never provided a strong case. He is better at showing that it can be done and maybe that it ought to be done in some specific matters of human cussedness, but for all his calm reasoning, be falls far short of showing that the "autonomous" man is either a phantom or ought to be done away with.

Gorney's thesis, on the other band, is comforting and somewhat (not fully) reassuring. He builds on the familiar heritage of biology and democratic humanism; for Gorney there is no call to make a radical departure from what we have only very slowly come to mean by personal freedom and dignity-qualities which are individual and self-directed, not programmed into a set of predispositions. He holds that both virtues should be preserved; dignity requires freedom, and freedom requires the option of choosing to

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misbehave in both interpersonal and social life. The key to success on this line lies in progressively increased personal maturity, social cooperativeness, and a loving concern for others. His basic stance is very much like Fromm's in The Art of Loving, even though very differently put together.

To show how far he is from Skinner's outlook, Gorney has not a single mention of him or of the emergence of "behavior modification" along neuropsychological lines. To be blunt and not mince words, this is a shocking hole in his map of the human agenda. It is true that on two pages (307-308) out of 698 be refers to conditioning and concludes, as in a summary court martial, that it threatens humanity with "steptoe tyranny" and brainwashing. This arbitrary Pilate-like disposal of a thorny and crucial first-order issue on the human agenda is itself very close to being brainwashing, in reverse. Could I be forgiven if I suspect that Gorney, bless his good heart, finds Skinner "too much" and starts whistling like the boy walking past the graveyard at night under a full moon?

If it is not a misuse of the terms, reading Skinner and Gorney together is a spiritual exercise. Gorney is so wise and human in the familiar way, as well as being fabulously well informed; Skinner is so disturbing. But the fact is that Skinner is confronting Gorney with questions in personal and social ethics, value analysis, and policy forming, demanding that we reexamine all of our practiced assumptions about the human agenda-especially the rock-bottom question, what is man, what is it to be human, what is humanness? Most of us, Gorney included, just do not cope.

Anthony Burgess' novel, A Clockwork Orange, is a futuristic allegory of the policy Skinner proposes and Gorney opposes, turning stinkers into good fellows by conditioning. They turned Alex, the vandal-killer, into a "clockwork" angel, using a Reclamation Treatment which seems to combine Skinner and Delgado. The prison chaplain asked, "Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?" The warden said, "We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime." The individualist agin-the-guvment rebel said, "A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man."

In Burgess' other sophisticated dystopia, The Wanting Seed, be failed for some reason or other to have the behavior technologists obviate a revolt by programming the people to like the rigors of a world being throttled by overpopulation. But A Clockwork Orange poses the problem in a most dramatic form, and Stanley Kubrik does it justice in his movie version.

There are two really "Big" questions for us in these times, both of them arising on the biological front. The first is whether we should pre-program our bodies by using the controls of the new genetics, and the second is whether (and how much) we should use mind or behavior control. In terms of immediate pressures,

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philosophical significance, and ultimate destiny, the behavior-control question is arguably the bigger one. Are we and ought we to be ready to go beyond freedom and dignity? Merely to ask the question, as Skinner has, is an event of unprecedented audacity.

Joseph Fletcher
The University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia