Word: walden
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...Skinner's Walden...
...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...
...society in which men of good will can work, love and live in security and in harmony. For mankind he wants enough to eat, a clean environment, and safety from nuclear cataclysm. He longs for a worldwide culture based on the principles of his famous didactic novel, Walden Two. Those principles include: communal ownership of land and buildings, egalitarian relationships between men and women, devotion to art, music and literature, liberal rewards for constructive behavior, freedom from jealousy, gossip, and?astonishingly?from the ideal of freedom. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in fact, is really a nonfiction version of Walden...
Skinner rises at 5 a.m., writes for three hours, then walks to his Harvard office, sometimes memorizing poetry (Shakespeare or Baudelaire) on the way. There he charts the sales of Walden Two on a graph over his desk; the total should reach the million mark sometime in 1972. In the course of the day, he gives an occasional lecture and records his ideas in notebooks that he has always at hand. "He thinks of himself as an event in the history of man, and he wants to be damned sure the record is straight," a colleague observes...
That sort of unhappiness wells from deep personal sources. Yet it is also related to his more universal concerns. Skinner worries about the fact that, as Walden Two's Frazier put it, "our civilization is running away like a frightened horse. As she runs, her speed and her panic increase together. As for your politicians, your professors, your writers?let them wave their arms and shout as wildly as they will...