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The editor at Ladies Home Journal must have been skeptical, because when the article was published, it had been given the title, “Baby in a Box.”¹¹⁵ Skinner found a manufacturer, who came up with a name for the product, the “Heir Conditioner.” It never took off.

Skinner must have had a proclivity for boxes. Some Japanese followers created a sleeping and music listening box for him which he installed in the basement office he had in his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from his work at Harvard University. A timer buzzed at 5.00am every morning, signaling that he had to start work.¹¹⁶

Skinner’s program was to demonstrate the spatial and object-oriented engineerability of animal activity, and by extension, human activity. He aimed to show the learnability of regularized behavior in controlled conditions. He demonstrated that meanings can be materially configured. Objects and spaces can be designed that make available options for activity, and offer prompts to action.

The Skinner box was a conditioning machine. “A hungry rat [can be seen] in an experimental space which contains a food dispenser; … any behavior on the part of the rat which depresses the lever is, as we say, ‘reinforced with food.’” Transferring this insight to schooling, “teaching is the arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement under which students learn … The application of operant conditioning to education is simple and direct.”¹¹⁷

Skinner invented a “teaching machine,” also neatly contained in a box, even if this time the child being conditioned was outside the box, literally though perhaps not metaphorically. A lone child was presented material, a question was posed by the machine as substitute teacher, the student gave an answer, and then she was judged right or wrong. If right, she could move on; if wrong she must answer again.¹¹⁸ This was behaviorism translated into mechanized practice. Ever the aspiring entrepreneur, Skinner filed a patent application, and the home appliance company Rheem licensed from him the right to create a product they called the “Didak.”¹¹⁹ In the market, it was no more successful than the Heir Conditioner.

Nor was Skinner reticent to articulate his philosophy of the human. The “autonomous man,” in control of his own actions, is no more than self-flattery.¹²⁰ Society was a series of engineered environmental controls, not the self-deluding cogito of “mentalistic accounts of thinking” where the subject is in control.¹²¹ Emotion is an illusion, its source not some inner cause, but environmental conditioning.¹²²

The consequences of the self-delusions of ego-directedness, Skinner said, produced the disasters of the modern world. “It is not difficult to demonstrate a connection between the unlimited right of the individual to pursue happiness and the catastrophes threatened by unchecked breeding, the unrestrained affluence which exhausts resources and pollutes the environment, and the imminence of nuclear war.”¹²³ At this late point in his career, Skinner was writing a manifesto for the application of behaviorist principles to the broadly socio-political regulation of behavior, his best-selling book Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

He wrote a novel that also became a best-seller, Walden Two (the first Walden was Thoreau’s), about an ideal community that had adopted the principles of behavioral engineering, where babies were raised communally in air cribs, property was held in common, and people earned labor credits rather than cash.¹²⁴ Among the many communal experiments of the 1960s, several tried to put into practice Skinner’s behaviorist principles to create a cooperative, non-competitive society. One was in Twin Oaks, Virginia; another was Los Horcones in Sonora, Mexico.¹²⁵

What did it mean to go beyond freedom and dignity? This strange and disturbing title had been suggested by Skinner’s editor at Knopf. In a time of social turmoil, it did manage to sell a lot of books. It also helped get him a scary cover on Time magazine, his picture surrounded by a rat in a box, a pigeon, a teaching machine, and an eerie pastoral scene. Under the masthead was the headline, “B.F. Skinner Says: We Can’t Afford Freedom.”¹²⁶

Sebastiano Timpanaro^§MS3e has a phrase that sums up the politics of behaviorism: “authoritarian technocratism.”¹²⁷

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¹¹⁵ B.F. Skinner, 1945, “Baby in a Box,” Ladies Home Journal.

¹¹⁶ Daniel W. Bjork, 1993, B.F. Skinner: A Life, New York, NY: Basic Books, plates before p. 177.

¹¹⁷ B.F. Skinner, 1968, The Technology of Teaching, New York, NY: Meredith Corporation, pp. 61–65.

¹¹⁸ B.F. Skinner, 1954 [1960], “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching,” pp. 99–113 in Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning, edited by A.A. Lumsdaine and R. Glaser, Washington, DC: National Education Association; B.F. Skinner, 1958a, “Teaching Machines,” Science 128(3330):969–77.

¹¹⁹ B.F. Skinner, 1958b. “Teaching Machine,” edited by U.S. Patent Office; Daniel W. Bjork, 1993, B.F. Skinner: A Life, New York, NY: Basic Books, pp. 179–80.

¹²⁰ B.F. Skinner, 1971, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 213.

¹²¹ B.F. Skinner, 1974, About Behaviorism, New York, NY: Vintage Books, p. 113.

¹²² B.F. Skinner, 1953, Science and Human Behavior, New York, NY: Free Press, p. 160.

¹²³ B.F. Skinner, 1971, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 213.

¹²⁴ B.F. Skinner, 1948 [1969], Walden Two, London, UK: Macmillan.

¹²⁵ Daniel W. Bjork, 1993, B.F. Skinner: A Life, New York, NY: Basic Books, pp. 160–64.

¹²⁶ Time Magazine, 1971, “Behavior: Skinner’s Utopia: Panacea, or Path to Hell?,” Time, September 20, p. 73.

¹²⁷ Sebastiano Timpanaro, 1970 [1975], On Materialism, translated by L. Garner, London, UK: New Left Books, p. 14.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 295–298. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

B.F. Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom” §MS3.1.2i