God is a Variable Interval

Harvard. Brick sidewalks. Old cemeteries. Black picket fences. Traffic jams. Granite. Money. Umbrellas. Two Halloween pumpkins on a Victorian porch. John Kenneth Galbraith reading the paper while getting a shoe shine at the valeteria. Paul Revere. Longfellow. Freaks with beards in country overalls. Professors with ties and raincoats, hair short and gray. Political posters. Student centers. Memorial plaques. Bicyclists wearing safety vests of Day-Glo orange. A lighted window. A face bent over a book.

My feet are slow and stealthy as I limp along those dark and rainy streets. I am cold. I am worried. I have been sent to do a guy named B. F. Skinner. Mister 1984. The Brainwasher. The Pigeon Man. The guy who wants to do away with our freedom and our dignity. Professor of psychology, author of ten books, inventor of the air crib, designer of the teaching machine, architect of communes, recipient of 15 honorary degrees, visiting lecturer, high on the best-seller list, darling of the talk shows, winner of a hatful of awards, grants and fellowships. He has already been attacked by the church, by Time, by the Freudians, humanists and existentialists, by Spiro Agnew and the New York Times Book Review. Now it's my turn.

• • •

Psychology. The great pseudo science. A few phenomena explained, a few theories advanced. But no predictions. Because nobody really knows. The tool has not yet been invented that enables scientists to peer into the mind, the personality, the brain, the soul or whatever it is that makes us tick. Until the microscope was invented, man could only speculate about the nature of disease. Until the telescope, we knew nothing of the universe. And until their fantastic gadget does come along, psychologists will remain, in effect, witch doctors.

We have had Freud, whose frame of reference was the past; Adler, who dealt with the present; Jung, who looked to the mystic future. The psychoanthropologists believe man is the product of his evolutionary instincts. Piaget thinks it is all a matter of development. As for therapy, there has been psychoanalysis, electric shock, surgery, drugs, ice packs, hypnosis, sexual tutoring, psychodrama, group confession, electrodes implanted in the brain, dream interpretation, massage, touch exercises and marathon encounters. Carl Rogers says the only thing that counts is the self. Rollo May says a cause-and-effect science cannot be applied to human psychology. R. D. Laing says we should all go crazy in order to become sane. Thomas Szasz says there's no such thing as crazy.

And then there is B. F. Skinner. He denies the very existence of the mind. Since it cannot be measured, it cannot scientifically exist. Only behavior itself can be observed and measured, only behavior can be modified. Skinner is a determinist. He is an empiricist. He is an atheist. To him, all meaningful behavior is a unique, personal set of responses that are contingent upon the individual's environment. The rest is pretension and vanity. The idea of an autonomous inner man with a free, responsible soul is merely old superstition. Skinner assumes that human behavior is orderly. To control human behavior by controlling man's environment is what Skinnerism is all about.

And this would be the key to (continued on page 86) God is A variable Interval (continued from page 81) our salvation, a means to circumvent the cycles of wars and personal aggressions, the competitions, the struggles for territory and status, the constant, dark anxieties about security. These are not inevitable, inborn traits but are merely responses to the various contingencies to which man has been traditionally exposed.

Skinner would thus set us free from ourselves. At the negligible cost of our ancient delusion of self-sovereignty, we could gain an eternal guarantee of universal community, a denial of the evils of jealousy and vicious gossip, a world of harmony, of meaningful work, of joyous certainty in having enough food, enough clean air and water, a removal of the nuclear overcast. There would be culture. There would be peace. And there would be love.

He is emphatically insistent on the one basic point, that human behavior is not an insoluble mystery and it is not too complex to be studied as a science. It can be measured. It can be studied and formulated. It can be modified and even controlled to prescription.

In his current best seller, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he goes further. The human species is now headed for its own destruction, atomic and polluted. We must learn to control ourselves. We must learn to behave. But the necessary technical knowledge for a true science of human behavior is not yet complete and it is being thwarted and blocked by our own hang-ups, the traditional concepts of personal freedom, of personal blame and credit, of personal responsibility. We must give up these archaic notions, so that the scientists can get on with the job. And we must do it now, because there isn't much time.

It all came from the Skinner box (a term that others coined and which he himself hates), a laboratory invention that enabled him to study the behavior of rats and pigeons. The animal moves or pecks at a button and food drops into a cup. But then you adjust the mechanism and it gets fed every other time or every fifth time or every ninth, 11th and 33rd time. Or it must hit the button, wait and hit it again. Or it must hit the button twice when the red light goes on without the green light. By changing the environment, that is, the conditions of the box, you can change the behavior. You can make it happy or crazy. You can even make it refuse to respond at all.

And it works. In ten minutes Skinner can teach an ordinary domestic pigeon to dance a figure-eight pattern. In just five minutes he can teach an ordinary dog to walk across the room and put his nose against the leg of a chair. Any leg of any chair, any dog. And he will never touch the dog.

Even more important, he will never punish the dog. His system is one of rewards only. The old-fashioned technique of aversive control for desirable social behavior is not good enough. It never works very well and often doesn't work at all. What we need is something utterly new and much more efficient, a grand design of control by benevolent reinforcement. In other words, we must accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.

So Skinner's proposal is very simple. Let's be scientific. Let's redesign the whole social order. No more punishment, only rewards. Money. Food. Security. Whatever you like. The whole world will be a grand Skinner box planned for the maximum benefit of all. What if you don't want to get into that box? You'll want to. You'll like it.

Yes. But what guarantee is there that some Big Brother may not get hold of this "operant conditioning" and make brainwashed zombis of us all? Atomic energy was originally designed for peace. DDT was designed to get rid of insects, detergents to get rid of dirt, heroin to relieve pain. The whole phenomenon of the lobotomy procedure from inception to disgrace lasted only five years. There are human vegetables tucked away in institutions everywhere. Yet the guy who started it all was given the Nobel Prize.

• • •

Skinner's house. Quiet street. Shade trees. Pleasant, modern and unpretentious. The house is light, small, neutral in color, impeccable, air conditioned, comfortable. The slate flagstones in the foyer are waxed to a hard glow. There is a clavichord with Bach music on the stand. The wall behind the Steinway piano is solid books. His wife is apologetic about the missing sofa, which has gone off to be reupholstered.

There is little eye contact between us at first. I suspect he is embarrassed by my over-the-collar hair, love beads and shark's tooth. Maybe not. There are plenty of freaks at Harvard. But his fragile, 68-year-old mannerisms, his erudition and vocabulary certainly intimidate me. I feel obligated to confess that this assignment might be a little bit over my head. Not only am I not a specialist in psychology but I dropped out of high school when I was 15. On the other hand, I think I know a little something about freedom and about dignity. Skinner looks at me, briefly, then looks away. I feel like something chalked up on the blackboard that has just been erased.

He is a perfect image of the country WASP grandfather. He gets up at five to write and later walks two miles to his Harvard office. He doesn't tolerate much nonsense. He says it's not true that he rails against sex; it's just that the hippie idea of lying around having sex all the time is simply not productive. For their own sense of integrity, he believes people on welfare should be given some kind of work to do. Except for certain preachers, Skinner is the only man I ever heard who uses the word sloth.

Yvonne Skinner is a handsome woman of 60, smiling, warm, pleasant and quite liberated. She makes it clear that she doesn't like the concept of communal living, described in her husband's book Walden Two. She likes her privacy and she likes to cook for a small group. She also likes to travel, having just returned from a trip to East Africa.

For eight years they were both chess friends. Lousy losers, they yelled at each other and kept careful records of wins, draws and losses, and then went right back at it every night as soon as dinner was over. They read chess books and belonged to chess clubs, memorized defenses and gambits, made excuses to each other about losing. They finally gave it up in exhaustion.

I find Skinner to be talkative but distant and shy. A perfect academic, he has always been isolated from the street and the market place. That means he is conscious of rank, intellectually snobbish, competitive. He does have a sense of humor, but it is genteel and restrained. Me, I like people who laugh from the ground up. Somehow, I can't imagine him enjoying the sense of touch or smell. Yet he is a nice, pleasant old guy, charming and cordial. And then, too, he has another kind of passion, the deep, smoldering devotion of the laboratory, the love of fact, statistic, insight and thesis. And I have to remember that he labored for decades with no public recognition. Now he is overwhelmed by violent personal attacks.

We move to his office downstairs, a very plain workroom, full of files and shelves and stacks of manuscripts. There is a framed photograph of his famous experiment with two pigeons, teaching them to play ping-pong. Skinner considers it a mere classroom demonstration of the principles of competition, nothing very complicated. They batted the ball back and forth across a miniature table. When one pigeon got it past his opponent and into the opposite slot, his food cup was filled. And those pigeons really went to work, developing spins and English and furious volleys. Another photograph shows an example of cooperation. Two pigeons were in adjacent cages, sharing a common wall of glass. Each had a food cup and each had a vertical series of buttons. In order to get fed, each pigeon had to peck at each button in the same sequence at precisely the same time.

In the rest of the basement, he has a workshop with all sorts of hand and power tools. In another room, he has (continued on page 170) God is a Variable Interval(continued from page 86) some of his old, primitive teaching machines. He also has a mock-up of the warhead of a missile he was trying to perfect during World War Two. It was to be guided by three pigeons pecking at control disks whenever the target moved off the cross hairs of an aiming device. The experiment was called Project Pelican. It was a failure. The detecting and steering mechanisms were so large there was no room for explosives.

We talk about the rebellion at Attica, which is in the news. He says the biggest problem of the convict is total boredom. He should be given positive reasons for behaving well and positive skills for use outside. Attica was a signal flag of warning. But improvements shouldn't be merely physical. Life should be given a pattern by redesigning the contingencies of reinforcement.

I haven't mastered the jargon of Skinnerese, but that comes through loud and clear. I ask him about gambling. He says all casino games have a variable ratio schedule. Experiments have already proved how the gambler is rendered broke and a compulsive psychopath at the same time. But the systems in use are very crude. Skinner could achieve both ends much more efficiently, but he won't discuss how, afraid the Las Vegas interests would use it immediately. He doesn't approve of gambling nor of state lotteries.

The publicity director of Alfred Knopf, his publisher, calls. He has fallen from third to sixth place on the list. He asks that question that all writers have agonized over, "How can you have a best seller if there are no books to sell?" He is assured that a new printing is on order.

Skinner goes on, speaking rapidly and well, every semicolon neatly in place. It has all been thought out and written and memorized many years ago. He can recall names and details and quotes very easily. With wit and disdain, he puts down a few more of his critics with a volley of references to philosophers, theologians and scientists, citing books and tracts and essays, poems, plays and papers.

There is no question I can ask that has not already been asked and arch-asked. Skinner has a polished answer for everything. I begin to get bored by the erudition, all this dusty wit and profundity, hopelessly overwhelmed by those smooth, incomprehensible words, every third one of which ends in istic, ology or ism.

Skinner is tired. It is four O'clock. His doctor has advised him to get more rest. He lends me a book to study and a cassette he is eager for me to hear.

• • •

Room 514. Holiday Inn. Cambridge. I am floating in the emotional nothingness of any hotel room where there is no association or memory. I listen to the tape of Skinner's appearance on William F. Buckley's show. He said he was not yet ready to design a new culture, but he is "ready to interpret certain features of our present culture in the light of laboratory practices." He admitted that Walden Two was very theoretical, but problems in certain areas of society can be solved now, particularly in schools and in production labor.

Suddenly I realize how I got this job. I was chosen as the quintessential opposite of B. F. Skinner. Me--Joe Gorilla. Mr. Competition. Individualist. Thief. Hunter. Nose puncher. Muscle and hardon, laughter, anger, wild-crazy. And now they've made me a journalistic pigeon, locked away in an editor box labeled #514--Cambridge, pecking away like mad whenever I see a light flashing in my head. If I get the right answer, I will be given a positive reinforcement. I will respond to my program. My writer schedule will be fulfilled. They will accept this article and I will get paid. I will eat. My kids will eat. I will survive to be reprogrammed and put into yet another box.

I go on with my studies, trying not to listen to the song of Bacardi, listening instead to Skinner's lecture On Having a Poem, which opened with a skillful dismantling of some of his critics. The audience loved it. He went on to deny credit to creative people. Does a hen lay an egg or does an egg hatch a hen? Does a woman really deserve credit for having a healthy baby? She is merely the stage for a creative process. She neither originates nor creates nor adds but simply bears the congenital product. Inventors are merely the happy recipients of the fruits of serendipity and a poem is merely the result of a poet's environment. There is a great variety of living things on this earth, but "they make a contribution to the world only by mediating contributions of the past."

I go back to Walden Two, Skinner's design for an ideal social unit--an actual prototype for present-day communes. Families as we know them would not exist. Children would be raised by the group at large. But he doesn't mention sex. The book was written 24 years ago, but he still stands behind it, admitting, however, that all the discussions about drinking tea do seem a bit square today. But the squareness is a great deal deeper than that. Skinner reveals himself to be a reactionary of the left. He wants to use futuristic techniques in order to return to the safe familiarity of the agricultural past.

Classed as a novel, it is really a running dialog except for a few interruptions, spasmodic and in voluntary, like taking deep breaths. As a novel, it is terrible. As a blueprint for a perfect community, it is wildly inadequate. But as a futuristic position paper it may be something else.

I reward myself with an oatmeal cookie, and think about a world without competition, without violence or deprivation. No acquisition of property? No rank or promotion? No rich and no poor? No big, no little? And Skinner even tells us what to do with our spare time. We can either stay in our private little rooms (where we are even allowed to be untidy if we like) or take up painting, sculpture, listen to classical music or join a string quartet.

Another cookie. I'm trying hard to groove on this trip, but it sounds like the credo of one of the acid-freak revolutionary tribes. It also sounds like the voice of the Angel Moroni back in New York State when he talked to Joseph Smith. Skinner comes from the same neck of the woods.

Another cookie. How could a crusty old psychopath like me survive in a neat, cozy little neighborhood like this? Separate rooms for spouses? The babies all in air cribs? No family? No territory?

Nowhere, at any time, does Skinner tell us exactly how all this is going to be brought about. Nor does he tell us who is going to do the job. And yet others have been pure theorists--Marx, Einstein. What's wrong with stating the principles and letting others design the details?

I start to doze off, catch myself and go on reading. Then I give up, put out the light and roll over, listening to the clicks of the radiator and thinking about the one thing I have learned for sure. In Greek, Utopia means nowhere. And Erehwon is the same place, only backward.

• • •

Skinner's office. Phone ringing. Secretary typing. The sun is beating fiercely through the sealed windows. Skinner is sorting stacks of fan mail, hate mail, business mail. Occasionally he turns on a Dictaphone machine for another terse letter. He tells me to go right ahead and interrupt whenever I think of a question. I try hard to think of one. It does seem to me that he could have avoided a lot of controversy by not meeting the freedom-and-dignity theme head on. Instead, why not speak of the need to circumvent man's destructive instincts?

His answer is quick and glib. It is not just a matter of semantics. The English vocabulary for the concept of freedom is so limited, all of it entirely mentalistic and leading to overreactions. He goes on. I pretend to be taking notes, but actually I am writing down what he is wearing--brown shoes, blue oxford shirt with buttondown collar, tweed jacket, red knit tie. He has short hair that is blondish-gray. He is thin, with an old man's paunch. There are liver spots on the backs of his hands.

On the wall over his desk is a chart of the sales of Walden Two. The graph curve has gone straight up, approaching 1,000,000. He shows me one of his letters. What about this business that children should not be raised in the home? Sounds Communistic. This is what the Cubans are doing. Aren't they Communistic?

There are files, books, prints on the walls. There is a special Harvard chair, black with varnished armrests. On the back is the university seal, the word truth in Latin, which comes in three syllables, separately superimposed over the open pages of three tiny books all emblazoned in gold leaf. And I am thinking; thinking that Truth is also a liquid precipitated out of chaos, most often condensed on the side of a cold glass of booze.

Skinner tells me about John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism back in 1913, who was thrown out of Johns Hopkins University because he was caught having an affair with his secretary. He sold rubber boots in Louisiana for a year and then went to work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He died in 1958, extremely bitter about the field of psychology.

I tell Skinner I am especially interested in prison therapy, since I am an ex-con myself. Skinner says, "Oh," and goes on to tell me he once got an intelligent letter from a guy on death row in San Quentin who had organized a study group of behavioral science. Continuing to sort letters into "answer" and "no answer," he tells me about the seven numbered form letters he uses for various queries. He jokes about the ultimate letter: "B. F. Skinner is no longer practicing psychology and regrets being unable to answer your communication." Actually, he feels he is near the end of his career. He would like to quit. Three more years, perhaps. One more novel, maybe. A few more papers.

The phone rings. Some guy is doing a TV documentary "on the future." He says, "I understand you've done some work with behavior." Skinner laughs afterward and says it's like telling Freud he's done some work with dreams.

A group of teachers had sent him a blank cassette, asking him for "a few words." He grumbles. They had included return postage. He decides to be "softhearted" and will transfer a taped lecture he has at home. The phone rings. Skinner throws up his hands.

"This is the life of a scholar?"

Skinner is in the process of writing his biography. He gives me a copy of a mimeographed outline called "Sketch for an Autobiography." He has a stack of them, which he gives to interviewers. He also lends me a copy of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. Skinner's back is hurting him. His secretary calls him a taxi and he goes home.

• • •

The hallway. Persistent clicking sounds. The squawk of a crow. Strong smells. Sacks of Purina Laboratory Chow piled outside. Inside the lab, I am introduced to Mrs. Kitty Papp, dressed in white and wearing a surgical mask, sticking a vacuum-cleaner nozzle into a pigeon cage to clean up the molted feathers and scattered feed. She shuts it off, unmasks and reveals herself to be an elderly woman, robust, hearty and competent. She has worked in Skinner's labs for 18 years as a caretaker, but she knows the jargon of operant conditioning as well as any student and can rattle on about direct and variable ratios and intervals, positive reinforcements and aversive controls. Not unkindly, she puts me through my paces, graciously accepting my confession of total ignorance as she continues with her work, sliding a shit-covered piece of cardboard out of a cage while simultaneously slipping a clean one in. Dropping a handful into a large, sealable, disposable, sanitized paper bag, Mrs. Papp briefs me on the whole operation.

There are approximately 300 pigeons and 150 rats in the current experimental lab, but Skinner himself hasn't done any lab work since 1964. Mrs. Papp is especially proud of her rats, a special breed, Harvard's very own. "I have a beautiful stud in here. He's gorgeous." She plucks one out of a cage and coos over it, letting it ride on her shoulder. He is a dark, chocolate brown, with soft, glittering eyes.

The crow is now a pet freeloader who has lived here three years after his experimental work was done, the others dead from internal parasites. Crows are an exception. Most laboratory animals are very healthy. One particular pigeon has been working here 19 years.

I study a poster fastened to a door. There is a picture of a pigeon facing red, green and blue lights. "Learning--(1) in basic reflexes (2) reinforcement (3) conditioned reaction (4) recognition (5) association (6) discrimination." Beyond is the control room, a nightmare of wires, timing devices, cumulative recorders, controls, counters, relays, perforated signal tapes hanging in loops on plastic pulleys, colored lights, coded connections with snap-on leads, rolls of graph paper with squiggles of red ink. And then I learn that each of those hundreds of constant clicks is the amplified sound of a pigeon pecking away in its own Skinner box hidden inside another soundproofed wooden container. They are wired, heated, lighted and ventilated. The connections are altered to change the program, to provide a different schedule of reinforcements. Every peck is recorded, the interval and the number. They have a computer now that tabulates the raw data. An instant rapidly chattering print-out gives the number of pecks to the left and to the right, the change-overs, the session times in seconds, the number of reinforcements used and the final number of food pellets left.

In another room, Mrs. Papp shows me some big boxes of raw plywood. One is tagged Box #46. Inside is a pigeon who has been in absolute solitary for three months. When the box is opened once a week for cleaning, the lights in the room are put out first. Again, always, that nervously clicking sound. Deep inside that plywood cell, a life is existing, pecking away, striving, responding. I put my hand on the box, trying to feel the pulse of that ultimate twitch that unites us all. My fingers tremble as I remember those long days and nights that I have spent in the Box, doing time on the chain gang, starving, sweating, shivering, shitting in a bucket, drinking water from a tomato can and listening for the sounds of the outside world that were only the sounds of other convicts, their leg irons rattling, their voices counting off through the gate. I look at number 46's water glass and plastic tube, his graph, his air pump, his power cable, his hinges, his handle and his latch, and I think to myself, "Yes, brother. Yes."

But I am being an anthropomorphic sissy. A pigeon is not a man. A pigeon may not even need sleep, except for dozes that last only a second or two at a time. And old number 46 has actually gained weight while in solitary. Nothing bothers him, as long as he gets his feed. A pigeon doesn't think like a man. He doesn't respond like a man. He doesn't have the same memory, the values, the dreams, the sex drive nor the aggressiveness. But if this is true, how can findings based on the behavior of pigeons be applied to that of men?

Mrs. Papp replaces her mask and turns on the vacuum cleaner. I wander around a bit, alone, smelling, listening, reading instruction notes. I study the breeding cages. I think about the infinitely complicated programs that are being tested to research every possible contingency. Another lab worker passes by, carrying a pigeon in the crook of her arm. "If this one gets away, it takes a half hour to catch him. He's the fastest one we own."

• • •

Back to the Holiday Inn to sort out my notes about Skinner's background. I have scraps of information from his wife, from his writings, things he himself told me, things felt, things guessed, things understood. And I am reading his autobiographical sketch, 27 pages, single-spaced, in elite type. Five pages deal with his boyhood and family. The rest covers the details of his academic career. On page 17 he describes the meeting and the courtship of his wife in the following two sentences:

"My renewed interest in literature was encouraged by my marriage in 1936 to Yvonne Blue. She had majored in English at the University of Chicago, where she had taken a course in English composition with Thornton Wilder."

Skinner was born in a small town in northern Pennsylvania, his family devout Presbyterians, respectful of authority and concerned with neighborhood opinion. He never experienced any problems with money. His father was a lawyer, ambitious but frustrated, his mother a prim and righteous music teacher. He graduated from the same high school his parents did and lived in the house he was born in until he went to college. He was a brief rebel at college, trying his best to sabotage debating teams and commencement exercises with hoaxes, editorials, parodies and caricatures.

His first vocation was that of a frustrated writer. Given encouragement by Robert Frost at Breadloaf, he spent six months in Greenwich Village playing the bohemian game before he concluded he had nothing to write about.

At Harvard he got his Ph.D. in psychology. He spent five years in an experimental laboratory. He got married. He taught at Minnesota for nine years and then at Indiana for three years. He returned to Harvard and has been there ever since, supported now by a career grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

He was always a bookworm, a musician and a tinkerer, playing around with any number of gadgets and inventions. He didn't like sports and games, unlike his conformist younger brother, who was much more popular, who was preferred by the family and who teased him about his sissified interests. They were entirely different kids. They got along, but only superficially. When Fred Skinner was about 19, this same brother dropped dead from a stroke. It was on Easter Sunday. His parents were in church. Fred had to go in to tell them. His mother refused to go into that church ever again. But she remained very religious and fully expected to meet her younger son in heaven after she died.

In his written autobiography Skinner says he "was not much moved" by the tragedy but he "probably felt guilty" about not being moved.

He was punished physically only once. His mother washed his mouth out with soap for saying a bad word. But his father gave him a tour of the local jail and he was taken to a slide lecture about Sing Sing so he would never be tempted by a life of crime. His grandmother taught him about hell by showing him the coals inside the stove. He is still haunted by the taboos of what people will think and even now catches himself thinking in accordance with the family rules.

Today he preaches the ethic of hard work and stands opposed to unproductive sex, sensual pleasures, "foods which continue to reinforce even when one is not hungry, drugs like alcohol, marijuana or heroin, which happen to be reinforcing for irrelevant reasons, or massage." He very much believes in the small community. "Ethical control may survive in small groups, but the control of the population as a whole must be delegated to specialists--to police, priests, owners, teachers, therapists, and so on."

Hick. Square. Fossil. Above all, a lousy writer. He couldn't really mean to include owners among his social specialists. He couldn't possibly wish to include massage with heroin.

More cookies. Skinner got his ambition and his thirst for power from his father. He got his gentility and his stubbornness from his mother. As a postgraduate student at Harvard he got up at six and went to bed at nine, studying and attending classes all day, with only 15 unscheduled minutes. He habitually laughs at the end of a statement, which he himself says is a defense against criticism and which he described in his own book Verbal Behavior. In Walden Two, the community founder, Frazier, lets himself go in a wild, emotional moment, pleading, "You think I'm conceited, aggressive, tactless, selfish." And then, "You can't see in me any of the personal warmth or the straightforward natural strength which are responsible for the success of Walden Two." And again, "'But goddamn it, Burris!' he cried, timing the 'damn' to coincide with the crash of the tile. 'Can't you see? I'm--not--a--product--of--Walden--Two!'" And yet again, "Must the doctor share the health of his patient? Must the ichthyologist swim like a fish?"

This section is the only melodramatic moment in the book. Skinner admits that Frazier and Burris were extensions of two parts of his own personality, although he was not aware of it at the time of writing. Ordinarily, he writes very slowly. But Walden Two was a work of quick inspiration. This particular section was written "in white heat."

• • •

I rent a car and take Skinner to Worcester to deliver a lecture to the Massachusetts Psychological Association. Skinner doesn't like to drive. It is my chance to be alone with him, to get him away to a neutral environment. But he is terribly concerned about something he said when we first met. He feels it was indiscreet and could be construed as ungrateful by people who once gave him support. He doesn't mean to censor my piece but would appreciate it if I didn't mention the incident. I give him my word. The trouble is, he doesn't believe me.

We find the Yankee Drummer Inn, the place mobbed with bearded, side-burned, long-haired and granny-dressed students. It looks like the same crowd that listened to Freud when he introduced his theories to America in 1909 at Clark University, which is not far away.

Skinner begins. He presents a litany of the problems of today's youth, how they leave home, get dirty, become rebellious and unproductive, how they steal and condone stealing, refuse to serve in the Army, defect to other countries and otherwise exhibit symptoms of being disturbed. The audience is nervous. Eyes flicker back and forth. Maxiskirts are smoothed, high-button shoes shifted. The mustaches twitch, the Afros nod, the Jewish natürlich friz and kink. "Science is the religion of the 20th Century. It has its priests and acolytes and communicants. It also has an apocalyptic vision." In this case it is nuclear halocaust.

Skinner puts down Freud. He admits he made big discoveries about the causes and effects of human behavior, but unfortunately he had to invent a complex mentalistic system based on the typical Victorian-age, middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. This has not stood up to scientific investigation. The benefits of psychoanalysis cannot be demonstrated.

Skinner speaks of Government waste. He speaks of the work week, which will soon be four short days. But what do we do with our leisure? We turn to alcohol and drugs and gambling. We attend spectacular blood sports and watch real life on television, which has become the great reinforcer. He regrets the passing of the old college liberal education. He is concerned with the worship of the individual and his "rights"--emotions follow the act, not the other way around; environment must induce leaders to rule benevolently, the survival of a culture is its only judgment----

Some of the questions from the floor get hot and heavy. Tape-recorder microphones are held up in outstretched arms like marshal batons in massed salute. "Don't you think some of these matters are better left up to philosophy?" No, he doesn't think so. Scientists are as qualified as anyone. Politicians can't be trusted. He favors escape from punitive control, but American kids are not concerned with the future like the Chinese kids. They are unwilling to work, to eat simple foods and wear simple clothes. Our culture is not giving us enough support and meaning. "Alienation is not a state of mind but a state of the contingencies of reinforcement."

In other words, kiddies: Ask not what is wrong with you. Ask what is wrong with your country.

Skinner is somehow hung up on the idea of China. He mentions it in almost every television appearance and lecture, every interview, somehow convinced that we are essentially decadent and only the Chinese are strong and progressive, capable of personal sacrifice.

After the lecture we load up. Skinner immediately fastens his seat belt, surprised when I admit I never use mine. We get onto the Massachusetts Turnpike and head east. Skinner is very tired. His back hurts. There are long silences. We discuss the Spanish Inquisition, the crude brainwashing techniques of the Chinese and how easily they could be improved. There are more silences. I am intimidated. I can't find the precise, scientific words with which to frame a pertinent question. But his humor is good. He speaks softly and fast, as polite and as benevolent as ever.

He begins a story about being on a speaker's platform when a Catholic bishop started in with some classic religious cant. Skinner mimics ever so slightly, "I have been among the wounded and I have seen----"

I interrupt. I am excited, for once tuned in on Skinner's frequency. "What can you do with those preachers and politicians when they begin that singsong music? It's only a medicine man's chant to go with the tom-toms. But what can you possibly say to them?"

"Just say: Bullshit!"

I almost fall out of the car. Skinner is so flabbergasted at himself he almost falls out the other side.

"Yeah. Right on. That's what the kids are saying. They're fed up with the graft, the organizations, the political machines. All that religion and military crap. Do you really agree with them? Do you really think this is the final answer? To just yell out, 'Bullshit'?"

But Skinner doesn't answer. It is over. The gorilla and the guru have found their common language. But it is only one word. And it isn't a nice word. It calls for soap. He knows damn well I am going to have to quote him now. And what will people think?

It is quiet in the car. I try to concentrate on driving, wanting to say bullshit a few more times, to recite it, project it, arrange it into a song. I want to freeze the decibels in nitrogen, fossilize them, hang them around our necks like beads. But I am silent, feeling Skinner's terrible pain in the darkness beside me as we swoosh through the drizzle and the homeward-bound Boston traffic. I glance at the rearview mirror. I signal and change lanes.

• • •

It is cold and wet, the tower looming all white and modern out of the gray William James Hall, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, 15 stories high. The silhouette of the end of the building resembles an abstraction of Buddha. It is the Center for the Behavioral Sciences.

Prowl. Spook a few offices. Ride up and down the elevators. Go up and down the stairs. Check the bulletin boards. Lectures. Movies. Notices. Stereos for sale. Papers typed. Subjects needed for interviews. Read the graffiti. Watch the gestures. Listen to the talk.

On the 14th floor there are children's toys scattered on the carpet in a waiting room. On the 15th floor there is a lounge with picture windows, where you can attend a sherry party for a buck and mingle with the students and look at the panoramic view of Harvard Yard, the skyscrapers and the steeples of Cambridge and Boston and the Charles River.

There is a social-relations library on the ground floor.

On the 13th floor there is a computing center. On the eighth floor there is a machine shop. There are offices everywhere. Study centers. Labs. Files. Lecture rooms. Bookshelves. Notices.

And on the ninth floor there is Stevens.

S. S. Stevens. Harvard has granted 267 Ph.D.s in psychology. Skinner's is number 97. Stevens' is number 108. They have known each other 40 years. They have contrary points of view about everything and sit on opposite ends of that old seesaw nature versus nurture. But they are friends. They are even getting sentimental about each other in their old age and Stevens has a photograph of Skinner in his office.

Stevens heads the small department of psychophysics. A tough old bear, he wears a plaid shirt over a white shirt, both collars open, his hair and beard pure white. He looks straight at you for long moments before speaking in a deep, smooth and measured voice, stroking a sleek, fat black cat curled up in his lap. Then he looks out the window for another pause. From that window he can look down on Irving Street and see William James's old house.

Stevens says you can't change people. He's been trying very, very hard to change Skinner for 40 years and hasn't done it yet. He points out another building, where he studied and worked with Skinner as a graduate student in 1931. That was where Skinner invented his cumulative recording device, making the first model out of an old bicycle wheel, because "he was too lazy to feed his rats."

Stevens was the co-author of Varieties of Human Physique, which presented the theory of the body type; the mesomorph, the ectomorph and the endomorph. These are congenital inheritances, each set of attributes developed from a different layer of the embryo. Long before any of us is born, our personality is set. People who are born to be fat simply cannot lose too much weight. They will get sick. The skinny ones can't gain bone and muscle, no matter what.

People are what people are. You can't teach a dummy anything. But there was nothing in Sir Isaac Newton's ancestry to indicate he would become a genius of first rank. And Einstein's problem was that his teachers kept flunking him out and trying to stop him from doing what he had to do.

Stevens believes that 98 percent of human traits are inherited. He'll give two percent to the environment. "You can only do what you can do. You have to do your own thing." Nevertheless, the American Government pours millions into remedial education and slum removal. "But it won't work. It can't work."

Stevens has the oldest continuous Government research grant, which started in 1940. He is now working on the problem of noise pollution, which he says doesn't really exist. It is more a case of "pollution of exaggeration." Next thing you know, they'll be worried about the glare pollution that comes from the snow.

He does admit the world is going to hell in a basket. But if behavior modification is not the answer, what is? Stevens gives me a long look. "It's very simple," he says. I lean forward. I tense. At last I have it, the answer to those forlorn clicks telegraphed from the depths of those boxes. Stevens strokes his cat. He look at me. I look steadily back at him.

"Selective breeding."

No blinks allowed. No sagging jaws. No squints. No frowns. Very, very carefully, I suggest there are people who might suppose this to be a Hitlerian approach. Stevens says no. Except for a few wild weekends between storm troopers and Aryan volunteers, Hitler did just the opposite. He killed off all his best people. But Stevens isn't talking about killing anyone. And I'm not a racist." It would mean that overcrowding could be checked, births with congenital defects could be avoided, diabetes, stupidity, inherited insanity, abnormal size or any other undesirable traits kept out of the population by the simple device of regulated breeding permits.

(Oh, shit. Think of the booming black market in stolen breeding permits, people becoming parents under assumed names. There will be a new illegitimacy. Bastard will come to mean someone born under the auspices of a counterfeit birth permit, his physical and mental fitness forever suspect.)

Already there is a rise in voluntary limits on family size. Vasectomies are so popular the medical profession has raised the price from $25 to $125. But only the best people are having them, the intelligent ones, the planners. Stevens says the whole egalitarian concept of democracy and communism is ridiculous. It is not true that every child will learn equally from an equal education. The idea that people will be able to compete equally if given an equal opportunity is scientifically false.

Quickly, he draws a sketch with a pencil. It is the classic bell-shaped curve of distribution, in this case of intelligence, a major consideration in an age of increasing technology and complexity of life. It has been a well-known fact for many years that the black race averages only 85 on the standard I.Q. tests. Nobody knows why. Perhaps it is prenatal protein starvation. Perhaps it is something else. Until Jensen let the cat out of the bag at Berkeley two years ago, nobody had the guts to say it. If people with an I.Q. of less than 85 were prevented from having children, half the black population would be disqualified. Reaching for a slide rule, doodling a few seconds, Stevens concluded that 27,000,000 whites would also be refused. The disproportion between blacks and whites could be easily worked out. He looks at me with his clear, steady eyes. I wait.

"Intermarriage."

As I am leaving, Stevens says, "Writers are all athletes, aren't they?" I am stunned. Nobody is supposed to know that. We are supposed to be bookworms with thick glasses and sunken chests, absent-minded and slow. He strokes his cat and muses. He says I am a mesomorph-ectomorph, a perfect example of the flaw in the theory of behavior. I survived and then conquered the criminal and prison environment of my past because of my inherited instincts of survival, strength and intelligence.

The last thing he says is, "Keep your muscles working."

• • •

Across the street and up one block is another Harvard institution, Memorial Hall, a low, sprawling thing of dirty brick and granite and slate, of geometric designs, a crenelated tower, battlements, gargoyles, sculpted names and busts of thinkers of antiquity. Blackened with grime and marred by pigeon shit are the stone words Humanitas, Virtus, Pietas. Ivy grows up the walls pierced by stained-glass windows and stone lacework protected by dirty mesh screens. The place broods. It threatens damnation. From a certain perspective and at just the right distance, the two buildings seem to oppose each other over the gap of 100 years.

Memorial Hall is a monument to the Harvard men killed in the Civil War. Years ago. B. F. Skinner had his animal laboratory in the basement, where S. S. Stevens also had his Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory.

Inside is a huge hall with domes and arches, tablets on the walls inscribed with the names of the dead listed under the various schools and departments. A choir is practicing in the theater, a cappella hymns resounding through the dim, filtered light among the Latin inscriptions, the chandeliers, the marble and stained glass, the dark panels of ancient wood.

I am tense. My head is vibrating with song, with voices, with the theories and the statistics, the contradictions and the educated words of the past 11 days. I go to the men's room. Depressed by the burden of this assignment, in despair, confused, humiliated, obsolete, I stand in front of the urinal, shake and squeeze, zip up and turn toward the sink. Looking for a towel, my hands wet and dripping. I see that the door built into the opposite wall is made of steel. There is a handle and a combination dial. It is a safe. A safe? Here? In the john?

The choir sings to me of former glories, those dead days when I was a bad guy and all I had to do was make my getaway from the good guys, my trembling fingers held up in supplication, yearning for the hard, solid feel of a torch, a vial, a drill, a punch, a hammer----

I approach, my walk transformed into an instant slink. I touch the handle. Looking over my shoulder, my knees are immediately weak, my eyes squinted with pain, realizing the profound extent of my life role of wisdom-thief and the banal nature of my late-late-rerun career. With great delicacy, I touch the dial, fingering that fabulous ring of numbers with their infinity of possibilities.

I move away. Worried about the matter of fingerprints, I tremble with my wonder and with my manifold guilts. Am I an incorrigible predator? Am I fulfilling my obligations as a journalist? What is there inside, really? Spare toilet paper? Or have I found a secret stash for Government documents? A trove of research material? The radioactivating, remagnetic, laser-induced fragment of a lost tablet of knowledge?

I peer into the hallway. The coast is clear. Again I look back, infatuated, feeling the ache of that terrible question. What truth is locked away behind that inscrutable door? What priceless insight into the nature of man is being guarded here inside the keester of the pete in the sanctuary of Harvard's john?