About Behaviorism By B. F. Skinner Knopf, 288 pp., $6.95
B. F. Skinner, the Harvard psychologist and inventor of the “Skinner box” for infants, has written yet another book. It is a tribute to Mr. Skinner’s obduracy, if not to his wisdom, that the intellectual hubris saturating the pages of Walden 11 (1948) and the appropriately entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) remains unabated in this latest volume, despite the efforts of numerous thoughtful critics over the years to expose the fallacies of his particular version of the idea of social engineering. Thus, Skinner declares in the conclusion of About Behaviorism: “In the behavioristic view, man can now control his own destiny because he [and we are not left in doubt as to who “he” really is] knows what must be done and how to do it.” It requires a scotosis (Lonergan’s term for intellectual blindness) of the first order to make that statement in any age, given the ineluctable vagaries of the conditio humana, but it seems particularly astonishing in an era marked by political terrorism, ecological crisis, runaway inflation, and the resignation of an American President. Rather than controlling things, things seem today to be more than ever in the saddle.
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