One of the great ideological paradoxes of our time is the idea that people are governed by genes, instincts, or 'human nature' while it is simultaneously asserted that people possess and exercise 'free will.' Many of those who assert that humans are autonomous free agents able to make choices and determine their own 'destinies' also claim that humans are governed by phylogenic 'drives' and 'traits,' that there is a 'natural order of life.' However, if people are indeed governed by immutable instincts then it could be argued that such biological determinism refutes autonomy, perhaps even individual responsibility.* One of the ways this contradiction is surmounted by proponents of these dual claims is by noting that there are countless combinations of genes (or 'traits') which evince individuality and that these countless combinations are unknown by science as well as those whom they affect. Such a claim permits determination (but only) outside the realm of human ken and intervention, which suggests that if people do not realize that they are subject to determining events, then they act freely. This line of reasoning has been described by Wittgenstein:
If Moore and I play chess or roulette and someone else could predict what was going to happen (telling us), we would just give up playing roulette. Suppose someone said: 'This is no game of chance at all. What makes us think it is a game of chance is only our ignorance,' I could contradict this and say: 'No. It is a game of chance now that we are ignorant; if in the future we were no longer it would no longer be a game of chance.'(1)
To act freely is not necessarily the same as acting with choice, however:
You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: 'Now I want to go this way.' I say: 'Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.' That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.(2)
Prevailing Ideology
Prevailing ideology asserts that humans, although guided by biological determinants, are free from environmental constraints. With behaviorism on the wane (in ideologically ascendant circles), popular culture has made claims such as 'happiness is 80 percent heritable---it depends little on wealth, achievement or marital status.'(3) Although it may be easily seen that attributing human behavior to genes, etc. is ideologically useful to disarm those who advocate policy changes (or other such environmental approaches to changing human behavior) because 'people need to change themselves,' it is less easily seen why those who enlist the authority of 'human nature' to refute environmental influence would jeopardize traditional concepts of autonomy and responsibility with an authority far more unyielding than environmental determinism. According to Newsweek (reviewing Judith Rich Harris' book The Nurture Assumption, which claims that children are immune to parental influence), 'the idea that actions have consequences, that behavior matters and that there is such a thing as personal responsibility to those who trust you is fighting for its life.'(4)
Responsibility is one of the ideological prizes sought by those who argue against the claims of behaviorism. If the central premise of behaviorism---that all human behavior can, and someday will, be accounted for by a thorough analysis of environmental variables---is incorrect, then it can be adduced that humans can---and should---be held accountable for their actions. The ideological implications should be apparent, but I shall sketch a few of them that pertain to current policy debates. If people are accountable for their actions (because the social environment has no or minimal impact), then, conceivably, all social services (such as job training, aid to mothers with dependent children, etc.) are pointless and should be discontinued. This line of reasoning also logically applies in discrediting the idea that children strongly require the presence of their parents (attachment theory), thus minimizes concerns parents might have regarding inflexible work hours or placing children in day care centers for long periods of time. Furthermore, if the influence of environmental variables are, as opponents of behaviorism insist, nonexistent or minimal, then institutions dedicated to shaping human behavior---such as education and reform---are also to be called in question. As any American is aware, these three issues have been under serious political and economic attack since behaviorism was 'discredited' in the 1980s ('Reagan era').
The Appeal to 'Internal' Agents
Replacing environmental determinism with biological determinism, although fraught with contradiction for those who simultaneously assert the existence of individual responsibility, has certain advantages to those who wish to promote these claims. One advantage is that the reliance upon an 'internal' agent in explaining human behavior resists verification. Such an agent has been called, variously, 'drives,' Freudian 'mechanisms,' or 'the personality.' Skinner described them thus:
Mentalistic or psychic explanations of human behavior almost certainly originated in primitive animism. When a man dreamed of being at a distant place in spite of incontrovertible evidence that he stayed in his bed, it was easy to conclude that some part of him has actually left his body. A particularly vivid memory or a hallucination could be explained in the same way. The theory of an invisible, detachable self eventually proved useful for other purposes. It seemed to explain unexpected or abnormal episodes, even to the person behaving in an exceptional way because he was thus 'possessed.' It also served to explain the inexplicable. An organism as complex as man often seems to behave capriciously. It is tempting to attribute the visible behavior to another organism inside---to a little man or homunculus. The wishes of the little man become the acts of the man observed by his fellows. Inner feelings find outward expression. The explanation is successful, of course, only so long as the behavior of the homunculus can be neglected.(5)
As Skinner pointed out, 'internal' agents can be readily used to explain what is unexplained. This promotes a reliance upon interpretation, either by the individual who experiences the private information or by an expert versed in explicating such private information; of course, the lack of empirical data necessitates such interpretation. The similarity between an unverifiable private experience such as the 'subconscious' and the religious professions of subjective faith is apparent. However, there is another advantage in placing human behavior within humans, thus excluding environmental factors from an account of human behavior, as Marc Richelle has pointed out:
Correctly internalized, the threat of eternal hell is no less efficient than torture inflicted by the inquisitor, and the superego advantageously replaces the physical punishment imparted by the parents. Advantageously, at least, from the point of view of the authority that has been transferred to within the subject. Those who really hold the power draw a twofold benefit from that change: charges and risks are alleviated (tyrants risk overthrow if their subjects rise up against them, but not if they are fighting their own conscience); and secondly those in power maintain the belief in their own freedom and responsibility in their subjects (if they emerge victorious from their inner struggle they will credit their own will; if they come out defeated they will blame their own weakness.(6)
Utopia 2000 submits that such 'internal' agents as 'subconscious drives,' 'cognitive storage retrieval,' and 'language acquisition devices' are but new 'creation science' explanatory fictions attempting to block a vigorous account of human behavior in the environment (the only place it can only be measured). Utopia 2000 maintains that human behavior is shaped through exposure to many various (and, hence, individual**) contingencies and schedules of reinforcement. (This is to propose that thinking is behavior and, as Wittgenstein put it, '[t]he idea of thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, gives [the philosopher] something occult.'(7))
The Appeal to 'Human Nature'
The appeal to 'human nature' rests on the 'final authority' of scientific law much in the manner that reigning ideologues once appealed to religious authorities to substantiate their claims. For example, the disparities between peasants and aristocrats were explained by 'God's will' (which 'works in mysterious ways'); presently, disparities between the poor and the upper class are explained by 'good gene pools' ('Bell Curve' argument)---both disparities are presented as 'fair' simply because they are unalterable. What is sought in the latter case, however, is the prestige of science without the usual scientific confidence that scientific method can modify the subject of its study. The appeal to 'human nature' (as a latter-day God) asserts that so-called unalterable states of affairs (attributing disproportionate incomes to 'biological destiny,' for example), being unalterable, ends the quest of idealists and reformers to alter states of affairs in human discourse (such as disproportionate incomes).
If it is readily apparent why ideologues would wish to promote demotic notions of individual autonomy and free will (while controlling the social conditions under which these notions occur), it is less obvious why they would appeal to an inflexible authority that is highly interpretative to constrain any potential challenges to prevailing ideology (and the actual power relations it represents) that individual autonomy and free will could engender. After all, if it can be said that 'the natural order of life is competition and inequality,' without proffering tangible evidence to back such a far-reaching claim, then it can also be said (in return) that 'the natural order of life is cooperation and equality' (and both disputants may have many examples to choose from to state their disparate claims without achieving exhaustiveness). The only readily apparent reason that an authority based upon speculation would be of use would be its ideological tensibility; however, this is its very weakness, for whoever controls the ideological apparatus of society may assume the 'expertise' of interpretation. One logical conclusion would be that such an interpretative agency is necessary because there is, in actuality, no empirical 'authority' (as of yet) to decide what is (or is not) 'human nature.' This would again suggest that there may not necessarily be a fixed 'natural order of things' in all aspects of social relations---which would again assert behaviorism's central premise that much (certainly not all) of what is called 'human nature' is culturally evolved and sustained.
The Appropriation of Determinism
Lenin once wrote that '[r]ecent philosophy is as partisan as was philosophy two thousand years ago,'(8) and to this it may be added that science has been equally partisan. Darwin's theory of species selection once challenged the foundations of Christianity but, in the hands of Spencer, 'evolution' assumed Christianity's former role of substantiating inequity and hierarchy. Later, Freud's assertions of fixed human aggression was found compatible with the notion of 'innate' susceptibility to 'sin,' while his studies of unconscious behavior would provide behaviorism with the useful observation that humans often act independently of intention. Skinner's case for 'selection by consequences' challenged the Spencerian interpretations of Darwinism while placing the Freudian mechanisms (and other internal events) outside the body into the environment where they were observed---and altered. Behaviorism advocated changing the environment, not people, and such an emphasis proved ultimately dangerous to various economic institutions. 'Cognitive' psychology has supplanted behaviorism as the ascendant academic paradigm, again emphasizing changing people, not environments. The centuries-old mentalist insistence upon autonomous individuals who exercise free will while whole societies are circumscribed by unalterable 'nature' has been renewed.
If it is one of the great ideological paradoxes of our time that people, as it is claimed, are governed by 'human nature' while they simultaneously possess and exercise 'free will,' then it is one of the great ironies of our age that those who appropriate biological determinism have discredited behaviorism because of its (environmental) determinism. As behaviorists have stated, cultural evolution is accessible to study and accessible to alteration; because of this, humans can control their destiny. (Such utopian experiments as < a href=http://www.loshorcones.org.mx>Los Horcones attest to this belief.) On the other hand, if biology is destiny and genes determine human behavior, then determinism (until gene manipulation is developed) is absolute, and not relative (as behaviorists have averred). Absolute (biological) determinism, Utopia 2000 submits, is simply the fatalism of superstitious eras, whereas relative (environmental) determinism is the call to make social relations what they can be, what they may be, and what people (if granted the opportunity to participate in the evolution of their own cultural development) think they should be.
* For example, Alan Greenspan has asserted that '[t]he way people respond to incentives and rewards...suggest[s] a deeply embedded set of stabilities in human nature.' This 'embedded set of stabilities' attributed to inviolate human nature, according to Greenspan, explains the failure of socialist command economies (they 'go against the grain' of 'human nature') as well as provides him with the authority to deduce that 'only free market systems exhibit the flexibility and robustness to accommodate human nature.' ('Market Capitalism,' Vital Speeches of the Day, 1 May 1998, p. 419.) Such a reliance upon the alleged intractableness of 'nature' recalls Freud's classic argument against socialism when he asserted that 'the human love of aggression' was an 'ineffaceable feature of human nature' and could not be mitigated by the abolition of private property or any other social measures. (Civilization and Its Discontents, Hogarth, 1939, pp. 88-89.) One may note that such 'innate' aggressions have never been ideologically justified or legally permitted when their expression threatens private property.** It has been asserted that behaviorism denies, or intends to negate individuality, when it fact it is the intention of the experimental analysis of behavior to understand and promote individuality. Skinner: 'The uniqueness of the human fingerprint once came as a surprise and, because, of its practical usefulness, is still a familiar symbol of individuality. But the body which each man derives from his genetic history is a vast system of unique structures of which the whorls on the ball of the thumb are a ridiculously trivial example. Equally idiosyncratic are all those characteristics which a man derives from his environment. It is true that certain scientific practices are simplified when these sources are minimized, but there is nothing in scientific practice or theory which threatens individuality or questions the possibility that some collocations of variables arising from these sources will have the outstanding results we attribute to talent or genius.' ('Man' [1964] Cumulative Record, 3rd edition, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972, p. 57.)
Notes:
1. Wittgenstein, 'Lectures on Freedom of the Will' [1939], Philosophical Occasions (Hackett, 1993), p. 443.
2. Ibid., p. 434.
3. George Howe Colt & Anne Hollister, 'Were You Born That Way?,' Life, April 1998, p. 40.
4. Sharon Begley, 'The Parent Trap,' Newsweek, p. 59.
5. Skinner, 'Behaviorism at Fifty' [1963], Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 221-22.
6. Richelle, B.F. Skinner: A Reappraisal (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993), p. 207.
7. Wittgenstein, Zettel (Blackwell, 1967), § 606.
8. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Foreign Languages, undated), p. 374.
