The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  B. F. Skinner is especially important to this issue because he was one of the few midcentury practitioners of the social sciences to directly address the question of the relationship between science and individual freedom. Skinner, born in 1904, grew up in a town in central Pennsylvania where he had from an early age challenged conventional authorities, and he was always an independent thinker. In addition to being trained as an experimental behavioral psychologist, he was an inventor in the tradition of American tinkerers. In October 1945, Ladies’ Home Journal featured his “baby tender,” a climate-controlled box that he constructed for his own daughter to sleep in. His aim was to provide a safe environment for her that would also eliminate some of the burdens of parenting.5 In experimental psychology his most important invention was the “Skinner Box,” which was a mechanical device for automatically providing rewards to animals in order to reinforce their behavior as they were learning a task. Skinner was devoted to the stimulus-response model for understanding all learning, and he believed that the factors shaping human behavior and those shaping animal behavior differed only in complexity, not kind. People adopted behaviors that were positively reinforced, and they learned to avoid behaviors that were associated with unpleasant consequences or were negatively reinforced. As could be demonstrated with white rats in a Skinner Box, positive reinforcement worked better than punishments.

  Skinner, although a critic of traditional faiths, was a true believer himself. With an unshakeable trust in the natural scientific method as the savior of humanity, he projected his mechanistic stimulus-response methodology into an entire philosophy of human nature. He first became well known for his utopian novel Walden Two, published in 1948. The book, which described a model community shaped by behaviorist learning principles, was in one sense a bold challenge to the temper of the times. Totalitarianism was an ominous threat, and Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World had already become a canonical warning against mind control. Skinner nevertheless insisted that through the benevolent use of modern principles for controlling human behavior, people could be taught to live in idyllic harmony. From a consistently scientific viewpoint, he was fond of pointing out, each action or belief, including acts of will, must be determined by its antecedents. So the only real question, he argued, was whether we would continue to allow these external controls of human behavior to be accidental and haphazard, or should use our best knowledge to steer the controls in benevolent directions.6

  Though Skinner always had many critics, his immense faith in the benefits of mechanistic science fit well with aspects of the temper of the postwar era. For most Americans, one of the most conspicuous dimensions of the times was the degree to which technology might make life easier and more comfortable. Many people remembered the time before they had automobiles, electric lights, radios, moving pictures, and indoor plumbing. Television and air conditioning promised new revolutions. Modern medicine and understandings of nutrition had made incredible strides since the late nineteenth century, so that people were living longer and growing taller. Modern science had defeated many ancient diseases, and “miracle drugs” brought amazing new triumphs. At the same time, there was no denying that modern science and technology had an equally ominous side. Not only had science been horribly misused in totalitarian states as an excuse for genocide, but the bomb made it all too likely that humans might blow themselves off the face of the earth.

  Skinner acknowledged precisely these problems in his 1953 manifesto, Science and Human Behavior. “Man’s power appears to have increased out of all proportion to his wisdom,” he conceded. Man had “never been in a better position to build a healthy, happy, and productive world; yet things have perhaps never seemed so black.” Nevertheless, it would be a great mistake, he argued, to blame science for these human failings. It was not the scientific method that was at fault, only its applications. “The methods of science have been enormously successful wherever they have been tried,” he declared. “Let us apply them to human affairs.” Most importantly, science should be applied to understanding human nature. “If we can observe human behavior carefully from an objective point of view,” Skinner proclaimed with the self-confidence of an evangelist, “we may be able to adopt a more sensible course of action.”

  Skinner noted that many people resisted rigorous scientific objectivity in learning how to better control human behavior because they believed in a traditional concept of a free will that somehow “has the power of interfering with causal relationships and which makes the prediction and control of behavior impossible.” Yet many of these same people also accepted that much of human behavior, including the will, was controlled by the external environment. They accepted that common people might hold backward views, or engage in superstitious practices, because of impoverished social environments. Or they recognized that the behavior of primitive peoples was shaped by their cultures. They might also acknowledge that children reared in Muslim countries were likely to become Muslim, and that those reared in Christian countries were likely to become Christian. Yet they did not recognize that faith might be based on an accident of birth. More broadly, they believed that elite people such as themselves transcended the social and cultural factors that shaped them. Skinner concluded that civilization was in a transitional stage in which many people clung to a doctrine of a mystical will that controlled itself, even while they acknowledged that some of the most highly regarded aspects of human behavior were shaped by cultures and by psychological antecedents. Recognizing that all behavior had causes was the first step toward learning to control and reshape human activity for the better. So he affirmed, as though it were a grand millennial hope, that “it is possible that science has come to the rescue and that order will eventually be achieved in the field of human affairs.”

  As to the objection that human behavior and its causes might be so extraordinarily complex as to make prediction and control impossible, Skinner simply pointed out that scientists were only at the beginning of their quest to attain a systematic understanding of human nature and behavior. All that was needed was sufficient sustained attention to the problem. Science had come to understand much of what had formerly been thought of as being impossibly complex subjects. “Certainly no one is prepared to say now what a science of behavior can or cannot accomplish eventually,” he affirmed. People had repeatedly underestimated what science could eventually accomplish.

  According to Skinner, one of the things slowing down the progress of the science of human behavior was that people who could benevolently control others sometimes refused to do so. “The best example of this,” said Skinner, “comes from psychotherapy,” specifically from the views of Carl Rogers. Skinner quoted Rogers as saying basically that the therapist ought not to presume to control the client, because the client already has the means of control within. But whatever inner resources and inner will the person had, Skinner argued, had themselves already been controlled by external factors such as culture, ethical or religious training, education, government, and economic reinforcements, for good or for ill. So, in Skinner’s view, counselors who had the knowledge and ability to provide some additional external control for the good would be shirking their responsibilities if they allowed patients to continue to be shaped by a host of capricious and unguided external controls.7

  Carl Rogers’s views, including his belief that scientific understandings could enhance genuine individual freedom, were far more typical of mainstream American attitudes of the time than were Skinner’s. Rogers, born in 1902, had grown up in a strongly religious household in the Chicago suburbs; he had even studied for the ministry until he came to doubt his faith. By the World War II era, his work in what he came to call “client-centered therapy” had gained him a position at the University of Chicago. After the war he became the leading figure in the field as he caught the wave of the postwar popularity of psychological counseling and advice. “Professional interest in psychotherapy,” he noted in the opening sentence of his
influential Client-Centered Therapy in 1951, “is in all likelihood the most rapidly growing area in the social sciences today.” He himself pointed out that his technique of nondirective counseling reflected the American spirit of the times. Freudianism, which became widely popular in America in the 1920s, emphasized the dark interior side of humans as defensive, self-interested creatures who were often shaped by the influences of unconscious and mysterious repressed desires. Rogers’s client-centered approach, with its emphasis on bringing out the individual’s innate power to work toward self-actualization and growth, resonated with prevailing American optimism regarding human nature and the celebration of freedom as a preeminent value.8

  Rogers emphasized that client-centered therapy was thoroughly scientific. It had, he said, grown out of American psychology, “with its genius for operational definitions, for objective measurement, its insistence upon scientific method and the necessity of submitting all hypotheses to a process of objective verification or disproof.” Hence, the hypotheses on which nondirective counseling were based “are testable, are capable of disproof, and hence offer a hope of progress, rather than the stagnation of dogma.” So it was that psychotherapy was being “brought out of the realm of the mystical, the intuitive, the personal, the indefinable, into the full light of objective scrutiny.”9

  Skinner and Rogers thus became the prominent proponents of two sharply contrasting views of the implications of a scientific worldview for understanding human nature. Perhaps it was inevitable that they would clash, and indeed they eventually did. Rogers and Skinner aired their differences in a dialogue published in Science magazine in 1956. For his part, Rogers emphasized his agreement with Skinner that modern science could predict and control many aspects of human behavior. But the real issue, he said, was that of how human behavior should be controlled. Should the controls be consciously exercised from the outside, or should the goal be to develop “internal control”? Especially in the light of recent totalitarianism, Rogers believed, Skinner underestimated an important problem: that people corrupted by power might misuse external controls for evil purposes.

  Although Rogers expressed unwavering faith in a scientific understanding of humans, he argued that natural science always takes place in the subjective context of the goals that science is to serve. “This subjective value choice which brings the scientific endeavor into being must always lie outside of that endeavor and can never become part of the science involved in the endeavor.” Even as Rogers acknowledged that science could, of course, aid in refining the values that persons should seek, the actual selections of those values were subjective choices.

  Rogers expressed supreme optimism in the ability of most individuals to make beneficial subjective choices by which to guide their own lives. Humans, he believed, were products of evolutionary development, and they therefore had an inbuilt ability to adjust to new circumstances and to meet new challenges. Therapists should regard “man as a process of becoming, as a process of achieving worth and dignity through the development of his potentialities.” They should regard “the individual human being as a self-actualizing process, moving on to more challenging and enriching experiences.”

  Rogers’s own views were remarkably adapted to the fast pace of mid-twentieth-century mainstream culture, where all traditions and dogmas were in question and the challenge was to adjust to the ever-accelerating rate of change. The American attitude, in the spirit of the postwar era, was very much that individuals, especially if aided by intelligence and technique, should be able to take control of their own destinies. Rogers’s optimism resembled that of the great pragmatist and philosopher John Dewey when it came to his confidence in the ability of science to promote human advancement. Dewey, who also had a strongly religious background but had become secular, likewise preached a gospel of the human ability to use science to guide the evolutionary process so as to reach creativity and self-transcendence. “We find ourselves in fundamental agreement,” wrote Rogers, “with John Dewey’s statement: Science has made its way by releasing, not by suppressing, the elements of variation, of invention, and innovation, of novel creation in creatures.”

  Predictably, B. F. Skinner rejected Rogers’s emphasis on creating autonomous, self-actualizing, free individuals. Internalized self-control was not the same as being free. “Even a pigeon can be taught some measure of self-control!” he said. Well-designed reinforcement techniques—like those used in effective parental training of children—did of course result in internalizing of controls. But the question for humans was, “Self-actualization—for what? Inner control is no more a goal than external.” One had to determine the goals for which inner control would be used, and for that, science was needed. Ultimately, the goal had to be consistent with the evolutionary imperative of the “survival of mankind” or the “survival of my group.” Not all the scientific facts were yet in for determining what were the best traits for that purpose, but as “transitional” values, said Skinner, he was “betting on the group [of investigators] whose practices make for healthy, happy, secure, productive and creative people.” The important point for Skinner was that Rogers’s focus on internal self-actualizing controls failed to take into account the external factors that might have created unhealthy goals for the individual. Suppose, for instance, “the client chooses the goal of becoming a more accomplished liar or murdering his boss.” Either the factors that shaped the directions that self-actualization would take could be determined by an unregulated mix of traditions, practices, myths, ideals, and interests, or they could be intelligently regulated by the best scientific thinking.10

  As is often true of opponents in a given era, Skinner and Rogers had more in common than they had differences. Both saw humans and their cultures as rapidly evolving, and both were interested in directing adjustments to that change. Like those in the psychoanalytic tradition since Freud, neither had any regard for traditional authority, but instead had concluded that natural science was the supreme external authority. Psychological theories and therapies existed mainly to help people escape irrational controls from their past. Both Rogers and Skinner had immense optimism regarding human nature and in the malleability of human beings to be shaped or to shape themselves for the better.

  The debates over psychological theory provide a particularly sharp focus on the larger issues surrounding the relationship between science and the individual that were touching the lives of almost all Americans in very practical ways. The twentieth century had become the age of the expert, and that meant that people increasingly were looking to scientifically based knowledge for guidance on nearly every aspect of their lives. Ever-improving technologies freed people from lives of routine drudgery, but at the same time, those same people were becoming increasingly dependent on experts, to tell them not only how to use the technologies, but also how to use their freedom. Life was guided not so much by traditional moralities and mores but by learning how to cope with increasing numbers of choices among things to do, to enjoy, or to avoid. Experts, in turn, were fortified with the latest scientific knowledge. Science and technical reasoning were supposed to enhance the freedom of individuals by allowing them to make their choices more intelligently.

  The pervasiveness of new products, of new choices, and of expert advice on using them was multiplied by the commercial interests involved and the ever-present advertising. The classic case of how scientific authority might be mobilized to shape individual behavior was in cigarette advertising. In the early 1950s, the makers of Lucky Strike and Camel, two of the most popular brands, sent free samples to doctors and then vied with each other in their ads over which was preferred by the most physicians. So common were doctors in ads celebrating the health benefits of various brands that Old Gold, which tasted too strong to compete as healthful, countered with a long-standing ad: “If you want a Treat instead of a Treatment, smoke Old Gold.” Chesterfield provided an archetypical combination of American reverence for both science and personal choice
in its ads, depicting a scientist looking into a microscope while holding a cigarette in one hand: “SCIENCE discovered it. YOU can Prove it. No unpleasant after-taste.” By the latter part of the 1950s, when health claims were being questioned, Viceroy, which touted a scientifically developed filter, also played the popular nonconformity card, saying, in its 1958 ad, “The Man who Thinks for Himself Knows . . . Only Viceroy has a thinking Man’s Filter . . . a Smoking Man’s Taste.”

  Experts were helping to change sexual mores as well. As had been true of most societies, in the United States of the 1950s there was a large gap between the professed public standards of morality and the actual behavior of ordinary people. Since at least the 1920s, one of the functions of the scientific expert had been to challenge restrictive conventional moralities. Freudianism, for instance, had been widely interpreted as an attack on sexual repression. Standard anthropological texts, such as Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa or Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, helped relativize traditional Western assumptions about morality by showing that other societies thrived on very different views. In the postwar era, the most influential scientific studies reinforcing changing standards regarding sexuality were Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, together known as the Kinsey Reports. Both books, but especially the latter, because it discussed women, elicited a public outcry, a response that propelled the hefty volumes into becoming sensational best-sellers. The objections were not so much to the findings of the reports as to Kinsey’s stance as the dispassionate scientific observer of the behavior of the human animal (he was a professor of zoology at Indiana University). What was entirely lacking in the reports, the critics pointed out, was any moral consideration. Rather, Kinsey documented that premarital and extramarital sex were not only commonplace, but might also be associated with health and happiness.11