Word: utopianism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Unfortunately many people like Theologian Rubenstein will respond in much the same manner as Galileo's contemporaries. If Rubenstein calls Professor Skinner's Utopian projection the blueprint for the theory and practice of hell, what does he consider war, poverty, racism, overpopulation and pollution to be? Heaven possibly...
That may be an accurate description of society's dilemma, but Skinner's solution seems equally frightening. To Theologian Rubenstein, Beyond Freedom and Dignity is an important but "terrifying" book. Skinner's "utopian projection," he says, "is less likely to be a blueprint for the Golden Age than for the theory and practice of hell...
...speaker is T.E. Frazier, a character in Walden Two and the fictional founder of the Utopian community described in that novel. He is also an alter ego of the author, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who is both a psychology professor and an institution at Harvard. Skinner is the most influential of living American psychologists, and the most controversial contemporary figure in the science of human behavior, adored as a messiah and abhorred as a menace. As leader of the "behavioristic" psychologists, who liken man to a machine, Skinner is vigorously opposed both by humanists and by Freudian psychoanalysts. Next week that...
...people lounge on hammocks, reading and engaging in serious discussions. The smell of farm-fresh cooking is everywhere. The resemblance to Walden Two is more than superficial. Twin Oaks, a 123-acre farm commune nestled in the foothills of Virginia's Piedmont, is a remarkable attempt to create a Utopian community governed by Skinner's laws of social engineering...
...Utopian ventures of the early and mid-19th century?from Indiana's New Harmony on the Wabash River to Massachusetts' famed Brook Farm?eventually foundered, and Twin Oaks, too, has its problems. The major one appears to be financial. "Skinner never wrote about a poor community," laments Gabe Sinclair. "He wrote about a rich one." After starting with only $35,000, Twin Oaks, four years later, still finds survival a struggle. The farm brings more emotional than monetary rewards; members would find it cheaper to work at other jobs and buy their food at the market. The community's chief...