The book is controversial because its characters speak of a rejection of free will,[3] including a rejection of the proposition that human behavior is controlled by a non-corporeal entity, such as a spirit or a soul.[4] It embraces the proposition that the behavior of organisms, including humans, is determined by environmental variables,[5] and that systematically altering environmental variables can generate a sociocultural system that very closely approximates utopia.[6]
Synopsis
The first-person narrator and protagonist, Professor Burris, is a university instructor of psychology, who is approached by two young men (one a former student) in the late 1940s. The young men are recent veterans of World War II and, intrigued by utopianism, express interest in an old acquaintance of Burris, named T. E. Frazier, who in the 1930s started an intentional community that still thrives. Burris contacts Frazier, who invites them all to stay for several days to experience life in the supposedly utopian community. Venturing to the community, named Walden Two, the young men bring their girlfriends, and Professor Burris brings along his colleague Professor Castle, who teaches philosophy and ethics.
Walden Two operates using a flexible design, by continually experimenting with the most successful, evidence-based strategies to organize the community. Praising Walden Two's decision-making system for not being authoritarian, anarchic, or even democratic, Frazier argues that Walden Two thus avoids the way that most societies collapse or grow dysfunctional: by remaining dogmatically rigid in their politics and social structure. Except for a small fluctuating group of community Planners (temporarily including Frazier), Walden Two has no real governing body or power to exercise violent force over its citizens. Each member is apparently self-motivated, with an amazingly relaxed work schedule of only four average hours of work a day. Any labor performed supports the common good and is accompanied by the freedom to select a fresh new place to work each day. Members then use their remaining free time to engage in creative, intellectual, or recreational activities of their own choosing, while automatically receiving ample food and sleep. The only currency is a simple system of points that buys greater leisure periods in exchange for less desirable forms of work. Certain radically unusual customs of Walden Two include: children raised communally, families being non-nuclear, free love, and personal expressions of thanks regarded as taboo. Such behavior is mandated by the community's individually self-enforced "Walden Code", a guideline that encourages members to credit all individual and other achievements to the larger community. Community counselors are also available to assist with better understanding and following the Code. A rigorous program of "behavioral engineering" is begun at birth and completed during childhood, yet the adults of Walden Two indeed appear to be legitimately peaceful, productive, happy, well-rounded, and self-directed people.
Excitedly, two of the young visitors sign up and are soon admitted as permanent members. Castle, though, has fostered a growing hunch that Frazier is somehow presenting a sham society or is in fact, secretly, a dictator. Defending the virtues of American-style democracy, he finally confronts Frazier directly, accusing him of despotism, though he has no definitive proof. Frazier rebuts, on the contrary, that the vision for Walden Two is as a place safe from all forms of despotism, even the "despotism of democracy". Frazier and Burris have pleasant talks in private, with Frazier revealing that other communities loosely associated with Walden Two have now cropped up. Although enticed by Walden Two's obvious success as a peaceful community, Burris finds it difficult to look past Frazier's irritating pride and boastfulness about the community. Frazier admits his pride but argues that his personality should not influence Burris's opinion of Walden Two and Burris's own observations. By the end of their stay, the remaining visitors leave the community in a mostly impressed state of wonder, except for Castle, who has stubbornly settled on the idea that, somehow, Frazier is a scoundrel and the community is fraudulent.
During the visitors' return to the university, Burris ultimately decides in an inspired moment that he wishes to fully embrace the Walden Two lifestyle. Quickly abandoning his professorial post, Burris travels back in a long and spiritually satisfying journey on foot; he is welcomed once again to Walden Two with open arms.
The community
The novel describes "an experimental community called Walden Two".[7][8] The community is located in a rural area and "has nearly a thousand members".[9] The community encourages its members "to view every habit and custom with an eye to possible improvement" and to have "a constantly experimental attitude toward everything".[10] The culture of Walden Two can be changed if experimental evidence favors proposed changes. The community emulates (on a communal scale) the simple living and self-sufficiency that Henry David Thoreau practiced (on an individual scale) at Walden Pond, as described in his 1854 book Walden. Walden Two engages in behavioral engineering of young children that aims toward cooperative relationships and the erasure of competitive sentiments. The community has also dissolved the nuclear family through placing the responsibility of child-rearing in the hands of the larger community and not just the child's parents or immediate family.
Community governance
Walden Two consists of four loose classes or groupings of people by occupation (though they are not akin to strict economic classes): Planners, Managers, Workers, and Scientists. WaldenTwo has a constitution that provides for a "Board of Planners", which is WaldenTwo's "only government",[11] though the power they wield only amounts to that, approximately, of community organizers. The "Board of Planners" was conceived of while WaldenTwo was still in its earliest theoretical stages, and there are "six Planners, usually three men and three women",[11] who are "charged with the success of the community. They make policies, review the work of the Managers (heads of each area of labor), keep an eye on the state of the nation in general. They also have certain judicial functions."[11] A Planner "may serve for ten years, but no longer."[11] A vacancy on the Board of Planners is filled by the Board "from a pair of names supplied by the Managers".[11] Furthermore, the WaldenTwo constitution "can be changed by a unanimous vote of the Planners and a two-thirds vote of the Managers".[12]
Frazier and five other people constitute the current Board of Planners during Burris's visit to WaldenTwo. Planners hold office in staggered, limited terms. They do not rule with any kind of force and are so extremely opposed to creating a cult of personality, system of favoritism, or other possibilities for corruption going against the common good that they do not even publicly announce their office, and, likewise, most of the community members do not bother to know the Planners' identities. Due to this and also as a result of this, the Planners live as modestly as the other members of the community; ostentatious displays of wealth and status simply have no opportunity to arise from WaldenTwo's egalitarian cultural structure.
Managers, meanwhile, are "specialists in charge of the divisions and services of WaldenTwo".[11] A member of the community can "work up to be a Manager – through intermediate positions which carry a good deal of responsibility and provide the necessary apprenticeship".[13] The Managers are not elected by the members of Walden Two in any kind of democratic process.[13] The method of selecting Managers is not specified, though they are likely appointed by the Board of Planners.
The regular community members are known (though only for official reasons) as Workers, and they have the flexible option of changing their field and location of employment every single day, so as not to grow bored or stagnant during the week with their four-on-average daily hours of work. Available work often includes the necessary physical labor that goes into maintaining a community, such as basic building or repairing projects, cleaning duties, or agricultural work. Labor in WaldenTwo operates using a simple point system of units called "credits", in which more menial or unpleasant jobs (such as waste management) earn a Worker a higher number of credits than more relaxing or interesting jobs, ultimately allowing more free time for that Worker.
The final grouping within WaldenTwo is the Scientists, who conduct experiments "in plant and animal breeding, the control of infant behavior, educational processes of several sorts, and the use of some of [Walden Two's] raw materials".[14] Scientists are the least discussed group in the novel; little is said about the selection, total number, specific duties, or methods of the Scientists, though they presumably carry out the ongoing social experiments that help determine the most beneficial social strategies for the community.
Thoreau's Walden
WaldenTwo's title is a direct reference to Henry David Thoreau's book Walden. In the novel, the WaldenTwo Community is mentioned as having the benefits of living in a place like Thoreau's Walden, but "with company". It is, as the book says, 'Walden for two'—meaning a place for achieving personal self-actualization, but within a vibrant community, rather than in a place of solitude. Originally, Skinner indicated that he wanted to title it The Sun is but a Morning Star, a quote of the last sentence of Thoreau's Walden,[citation needed] but the publishers suggested the current title as an alternative.[citation needed]
In theory and in practice, Thoreau's Walden Pond experiment and the fictive WaldenTwo experiment were far different from one another. For instance, Thoreau's book Walden espouses the virtues of self-reliance at the individual level, while WaldenTwo espouses
the virtues of self-reliance at the community level, and
Skinner's underlying premise that free will of the individual is weak compared to how environmental conditions shape behavior.
The cover of some editions of Walden Two shows the 'O' filled with yellow ink, with yellow lines radiating from the center of the 'O'. That Sun-like 'O' is an allusion to the proposition that The sun is but a morning star.[15]
News From Nowhere, 1984
Skinner published a follow-up to Walden Two in an essay titled News From Nowhere, 1984. It details the discovery of Eric Blair in the community who seeks out and meets Burris, confessing his true identity as George Orwell. Blair seeks out Frazier as the 'leader' and the two have discussions which comprise the essay. Blair was impressed by Walden Two's "lack of any institutionalized government, religion, or economic system", a state of affairs that embodied "the dream of nineteenth-century anarchism".[16]
Real-world efforts
Many efforts to create a Walden Two in real life are detailed in Hilke Kuhlmann's Living Walden Two[17] and in Daniel W. Bjork's B.F. Skinner.[18]
Some of these efforts include:
1953: In Lincoln, Massachusetts, a group of families from the MIT community, led by Ranulf (Rany) Gras and his wife Ann and inspired by Skinner's book, formed a corporation and built 23 homes on a 40-acre (16ha) lot in what became known as the Brown's Wood neighborhood.[19]
1955: In New Haven, Connecticut, a group led by Arthur Gladstone tried to start a community.
1966: The Waldenwoods conference was held in Hartland, Michigan, comprising 83 adults and 4 children, coordinated through the Breiland list (a list of interested people who wrote to Skinner and were referred to Jim Breiland).
1966: Matthew Israel formed the Association for Social Design (ASD), to promote a Walden Two,[20] which soon found chapters in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Washington, D.C.
1970: Walden 7, a 1,000-inhabitant community west of Barcelona (Spain), was created as a social and architectural experiment based on Walden Two, living in a building designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill.
1971: Mary Louise Strum and David Nord started an experimental Jewish faith-based commune named "Jubilee Community" in Westphalia, Texas, based on Skinner's Walden Two utopian ideals.
1972: Sunflower House 11 was (re)born in Lawrence, Kansas, from the previous experiment.
Twin Oaks is detailed in Kat Kinkade's book, A Walden Two experiment: The first five years of Twin Oaks Community.[28] Originally started as a Walden Two community, it has since rejected its Walden Two position, however it still uses its modified Planner-Manager system as well as a system of labor credits based on the book.
Los Horcones does not use the Planner-Manager governance system described in Walden Two. They refer to their governance system as a "personocracy".[29] This system has been "developed through ongoing experimentation".[30] In contrast to Twin Oaks, Los Horcones "has remained strongly committed to an experimental science of human behavior and has described itself as the only true Walden Two community in existence."[31] In 1989, B. F. Skinner said that Los Horcones "comes closest to the idea of the 'engineered utopia' that he put forth in Walden Two".[32]
Cultural engineering
Skinner wrote about cultural engineering in at least two books, devoting a chapter to it in both Science and Human Behavior and Beyond Freedom and Dignity. In Science and Human Behavior[33] a chapter is titled "Designing a Culture" and expands on this position as well as in other documents. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity there are many indirect references to Walden Two when describing other cultural designs.
Hilke Kuhlmann's Living Walden Two possesses many subtle and not-so-subtle criticisms of the original Walden Two which are related to the actual efforts that arose from the novel. One criticism is that many of the founders of real-life Walden Twos identified with, or wanted to emulate, Frazier, the uncharismatic and implicitly despotic founder of the community.
In a critique of Walden Two, Harvey L. Gamble, Jr. asserted that Skinner's "fundamental thesis is that individual traits are shaped from above, by social forces that create the environment", and that Skinner's goal "is to create a frictionless society where individuals are properly socialized to function with others as a unit", and to thus "make the community [Walden Two] into a perfectly efficient anthill".[34] Gamble writes, "We find at the end of Walden Two that Frazier [a founding member of Walden Two]... has sole control over the political system and its policies. It is he who regulates food, work, education, and sleep, and who sets the moral and economic agenda."
There are several varieties of behaviorism, but only Skinner's radical behaviorism has proposed to redesign society. The relevant principles were expounded at length two decades later in Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
Walden Two was criticized in John Staddon's The New Behaviorism.[35] Skinner thought Walden Two an accomplishment comparable to two science-fiction classics: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He assigned all three in his Nat Sci 114 introductory psychology course at Harvard. There is some irony in Skinner's choice, because Orwell's and Huxley's novels are both dystopias. They portray not the supposed benefits of a technological approach to human society, but the evil consequences of either coercive (Nineteen Eighty-Four) or stealthy (Brave New World) efforts to control or gentle human beings. On the contrary, Walden Two is supposed to light the technological path to utopia.
Skinner's Walden proposal is in a tradition that goes back to Plato's philosopher king: a 'legislator' (monarch) and a set of guardians who are wiser than the common people. The guardians "are to be a class apart, like the Jesuits in old Paraguay, the ecclesiastics in the States of the Church until 1870 and the Communist Party in the U.S.S.R. at the present day," wrote Bertrand Russell, one of Skinner's heroes, in 1946. Not too different from Walden Two's Managers and Planners, and Frazier, Skinner's avatar and leader of the community. Skinner was quite explicit about the need for technocratic rule: "We must delegate control of the population as a whole to specialists – to police, priests, teachers, therapies, and so on, with their specialized reinforcers and their codified contingencies."[36]
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, is a learning process where voluntary behaviors are modified by association with the addition of reward or aversive stimuli. The frequency or duration of the behavior may increase through reinforcement or decrease through punishment or extinction.
An operant conditioning chamber is a laboratory apparatus used to study animal behavior. The operant conditioning chamber was created by B. F. Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. The chamber can be used to study both operant conditioning and classical conditioning.
Radical behaviorism is a "philosophy of the science of behavior" developed by B. F. Skinner. It refers to the philosophy behind behavior analysis, and is to be distinguished from methodological behaviorism—which has an intense emphasis on observable behaviors—by its inclusion of thinking, feeling, and other private events in the analysis of human and animal psychology. The research in behavior analysis is called the experimental analysis of behavior and the application of the field is called applied behavior analysis (ABA), which was originally termed "behavior modification."
Walden is a book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon the author's simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.
The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization. A central method was the examination of functional relations between environment and behavior, as opposed to hypothetico-deductive learning theory that had grown up in the comparative psychology of the 1920–1950 period. Skinner's approach was characterized by observation of measurable behavior which could be predicted and controlled. It owed its early success to the effectiveness of Skinner's procedures of operant conditioning, both in the laboratory and in behavior therapy.
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events. The cognitive revolution of the late 20th century largely replaced behaviorism as an explanatory theory with cognitive psychology, which unlike behaviorism examines internal mental states.
Verbal Behavior is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with terminology invented for the analysis - echoics, mands, tacts, autoclitics and others - as well as carefully defined uses of ordinary terms such as audience.
The psychology of learning refers to theories and research on how individuals learn. There are many theories of learning. Some take on a more behaviorist approach which focuses on inputs and reinforcements. Other approaches, such as neuroscience and social cognition, focus more on how the brain's organization and structure influence learning. Some psychological approaches, such as social constructivism, focus more on one's interaction with the environment and with others. Other theories, such as those related to motivation, like the growth mindset, focus more on individuals' perceptions of ability.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity is a 1971 book by American psychologist B. F. Skinner. Skinner argues that entrenched belief in free will and the moral autonomy of the individual hinders the prospect of using scientific methods to modify behavior for the purpose of building a happier and better-organized society.
The Nashoba Community was an experimental project of Frances "Fanny" Wright, initiated in 1825 to educate and emancipate slaves. It was located in a 2,000-acre (8 km2) woodland on the side of present-day Germantown, Tennessee, a Memphis suburb, along the Wolf River. It was a small-scale test of her full-compensation emancipation plan in which no slaveholders would lose money for emancipating slaves. Instead, Wright proposed that, through a system of unified labor, the slaves would buy their freedom and then be transported to Haiti or the settlements which would become Liberia.
In psychology, mentalism refers to those branches of study that concentrate on perception and thought processes, for example: mental imagery, consciousness and cognition, as in cognitive psychology. The term mentalism has been used primarily by behaviorists who believe that scientific psychology should focus on the structure of causal relationships to reflexes and operant responses or on the functions of behavior.
Los Horcones is an intentional community located about 40 miles from Hermosillo, Mexico which has been described by members "as the only true Walden Two community in existence". The members of Los Horcones use techniques based on behavioral science to shape their own and each other's behaviors. They use those behavior-shaping techniques in politically coordinated ways and they do so in order to continuously improve themselves and their culture. They are striving to build a culture "based on cooperation, sharing, non-violence, equality and ecological sustainability".
In psychology, a stimulus is any object or event that elicits a sensory or behavioral response in an organism. In this context, a distinction is made between the distal stimulus and the proximal stimulus.
James "Jim" A. Dinsmoor was an American experimental psychologist who published work in the field of the experimental analysis of behavior.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.
Theoretical behaviorism is a framework for psychology proposed by J. E. R. Staddon as an extension of experimental psychologist B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism. It originated at Harvard in the early 1960s.
Matthew Israel is a controversial American behavioral psychologist who is known for founding the Judge Rotenberg Center and inventing the Graduated Electronic Decelerator, a device used by the center on disabled students, and condemned as torture by advocacy groups and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.
References
↑ Skinner, B.F. (1986). "Some Thoughts About the Future". Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 45(2), p. 229. "What the protagonist in Walden Two called a behavioral technology was at the time still science fiction, but it soon moved into the real world."
↑ Skinner, B.F. (1948). Walden Two. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Revised 1976 edition, page vi. ISBN0-87220-779-X. "The 'behavioral engineering' I had so frequently mentioned in the book was, at the time, little more than science fiction".
↑ Aschner, Mary Jane McCue (1965). "The Planned Man: Skinner". The Educated Man: Studies in the History of Educational Thought. Paul Nash, Andreas M. Kazamias, and Henry J. Perkinson (Editors). John Wiley & Sons, pp. 389–421. "Public reaction to Walden Two, with its proposal for planned man, was initially slow. But eventually Skinner found himself at the storm center of a controversy that has scarcely abated to this day. Philosophers and psychologists charged into the latest jousting match in the perennial tourney between proponents of determinism and defenders of free will". p. 402.
↑ Ivie, Stanley D. (2006). "Models and Metaphors". Journal of Philosophy and History of Education56, pp. 82–92. Retrieved August 23, 2012. "Skinner's system does not provide for a God or a human soul". p. 88.
↑ Skinner, B. F. (1985). "News From Nowhere, 1984". The Behavior Analyst,8(1), pp. 5–14. "My name is Burris. I live in an experimental community called Walden Two". p. 5.
↑ Sanguinetti, Angela (2012). "The Design of Intentional Communities: A Recycled Perspective on Sustainable Neighborhoods"Archived 2012-11-24 at the Wayback Machine . Behavior and Social Issues, 21, pp. 5–25. "The Walden Two-inspired community of Los Horcones in Sonora, Mexico, proclaims an egalitarian system of governance developed through ongoing experimentation, called 'Personocracy' (Los Horcones), which they describe as equitable and unrestricted access to power, participation, and responsibility." p. 20.
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