Nurture, Nature, Zen
My father was a pioneer in the scientific analysis of the effect of drugs and pollutants on behavior. He trained pigeons and rats to perform complicated routines—pecking at buttons and running in mazes—then gave them all sorts of toxic chemicals to see how these changed the way they acted. At the time—1950s and 60s—his lab at the University of Rochester was one of only a few in this field. Back then there was a widespread interest in whether toxic substances caused cancer or birth defects, but not in whether chemicals did something so minor as to change behavior.
Over at Harvard, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were kicked off the faculty in 1963 for leading student experiments with LSD. Those dismissals were supposedly a response to the anecdotal unscientific nature of the “experiments”—but also revealed the unease of mainstream academia with the notion that drugs were a valid area for theoretical, psychological investigation. My father told me years later that he’d always felt partly to blame for Dick Alpert’s academic troubles, since they’d been members of the same fraternity at Tufts in the 1940s. At a time when Alpert had felt uncertain about his chosen study of history—to be followed perhaps by a law or medicine degree (as his wealthy and powerful father was urging)—my dad suggested Alpert try psychology. In the decade following his Harvard debacle, Richard Alpert had lived in India, returning to reinvent himself as Baba Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now, guru of modified Hinduism to the 60s youth generation. Over the years Ram Dass became an inspiration to several generations of truth-seekers, offering a philosophy of living to be helpful.
My dad stuck with the scientific method, aspiring to bring psychology into the proud company of the “hard sciences”—physics and chemistry—and out of the “soft sciences” ghetto where psychology was keeping company with the other social sciences: sociology and anthropology. He and his lifelong colleague Bernie Weiss performed influential, replicable experiments carefully documenting the behavioral effects of caffeine, marijuana, nicotine, barbiturates, amphetamines, and many other drugs. In working exclusively with animals, they avoided the trap of unintentionally documenting culturally determined behavior. Their lab eventually came to specialize in the study of environmental pollutants like carbon monoxide, methylmercury, and PCBs. They served for decades on National Institutes of Health panels, advising the government on acceptable pollution limits. They advocated far stricter pollution controls than other scientists, since the effects they considered significant were behavioral—such as increased risk of attention deficit disorder in children—while other policy-advisors thought you had to see cancer before a pollution level was too high.
My father told me when I was a child that he believed it would one day be proven many of the learning problems and violent behaviors of inner-city urban youth were behavioral side-effects of severe exposure to lead, a toxic chemical ubiquitous in the paint and plumbing of decayed slum housing.
***
My father’s scientific approach relied on the methodical investigative techniques developed by the brilliant and controversial psychologist B.F. Skinner. While my father had started college with hopes of becoming a writer, his English professor had informed him that his writing showed he didn’t understand people, so he should take a psychology course. A few years later he discovered to his delight that an identical experience had led Skinner to psychology two decades previously: a discouraging writing professor suggested a semester of psychology to help the young Skinner understand people. My father embraced radical behaviorism in the early 1950s, after reading Skinner’s opus, Science and Human Behavior.
Since the time of the Ancient Greek philosophers, the “nature versus nurture” debate has been at the core of how western societies define themselves.
The rise of Darwin’s theory of random variation and natural selection—and its subsequent misinterpretation as directly applicable to human society—led to the horrific theory of Social Darwinism: the idea that “survival of the fittest” meant poor people and other social outcasts were by definition born to be inferior. Those years—1870 to 1945—were a period when believers in “nature”—inborn personality, inborn intelligence, inborn behavioral tendencies—were ascendent. Social Darwinism was the perfect ideology for racists, imperialists, monopoly capitalists, and the ruling class in general. But the post-World-War II revelations of Hitler’s atrocities—his murder of six million Jews was driven by a Social Darwinist desire to “purify” the “Aryan race”—led to a backlash against theories of inborn, fixed behavior and personality. The pendulum swung hard toward “nurture”—the idea that people’s personalities and behaviors are inherently malleable and highly responsive to experiences during their lives.
Behaviorism argued that when an organism—person or animal—acted in the world, some actions resulted in consequences favorable to that organism, some actions resulted in punishment, and some actions brought little result. So, people varied their behaviors randomly—and some behaviors were “selected” by the environment as being the behaviors that yielded best outcomes. If an environment were set up ahead of time, in preparation for the arrival of an organism—an animal or a person—that environment could contain pre-set responses to actions this organism might try.
For instance, when you use a computer learning game, the software is all set up to respond to your actions—with rewards, or by ignoring you. (Behaviorists don’t like punishment—they prefer “extinction,” which means essentially ignoring an incorrect response with a phrase like “Try again, please.”) Creating such a pre-set environment for use by an organism is called doing operant conditioning. The action is the operant that is conditioned.
Radical behaviorism was a step beyond ordinary behaviorism. While Ivan Pavlov and John Watson had “established” that an organism’s behavior could be systematically modified through the use of rewards, extinction and punishment, B.F. Skinner proposed a full-scale philosophy for behaviorism—deriving his ideas from the logical positivism of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was this comprehensive, sweeping assertion that behaviorism’s technical methodology actually derived its validity from a full-scale positivist explanation of the world that attracted my father. He was a young man searching for a big answer and he found it in radical behaviorism.
My father tried to explain radical behaviorism to me when I was a kid, but I didn’t understand it. I read what my father said was Skinner’s most accessible essay, “On ‘Having’ a Poem,” but Skinner’s implication that there aren’t really any “poets” who “write” poems seemed baffling and insulting. Skinner said every so-called “poet” was merely the current, instantaneous sum of every influence that had ever fed into “him,” extending back in time. Therefore, the poem was in truth just an outcome of the sum of those same influences that had yielded the poet. There seemed to be no room in such an explanation for what I would normally think of as a creative individual human mind.
And in fact, there is no greater heresy among radical behaviorists than to attribute action to what is derisively referred to as a mythical “mentate state.” That is, in radical behaviorism, “mind” and “thinking” are superstitious explanations for events in the world enacted by organisms. Really, there are no minds, and there is no thinking.
Radical behaviorism is a form of “strong environmentalism.” While everyone agrees that to a greater or lesser extent an organism’s environment determines how it will act, radical behaviorists believe that the environment COMPLETELY determines how an organism will act. Their definition of “environment” however is extremely broad, encompassing all the history of the universe that can possibly have influenced the present life of the organism. “Environment” therefore INCLUDES the entire history of the evolution of the organism’s species and its genetic inheritance. “Strong environmentalism” is co-ordinate with classical philosophical determinism. This is where it links up with Plato and Wittgenstein.
Radical behaviorism was at its most popular by the late 1960s and my father became the executive editor of the two leading journals in the field: Journal for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, and Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis.
Skinner thought the radical behaviorist ideas could be applied in extremely practical ways. His educational theories have had enormous influence, especially his programmed learning concept, which led directly to the rise of educational computer software.
Skinner was also a straightforward utopian. When I was ten years old, my father’s colleague Bernie Weiss, his wife Mary Sojourner-Weiss and a bunch of graduate students (with my childhood friend Tom Weiss) formed a collective in some on-campus housing. It was modeled after the community in B.F. Skinner’s book Walden Two: a utopia supervised by psychologists. At their boring weekly meetings, the collective’s members wrestled with questions like who wasn’t vacuuming or washing dishes when they were supposed to.
It was usually lively and fun over at the collective, but I was always relieved to return to the privacy of my house after a sleepover at Tom’s.
Around this time, Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity came out, which attempted explaining to the general public the radical behaviorist philosophy first set out twenty years before in Science and Human Behavior. Inside the psychology world Skinner’s stock was very high, but the general public was learning to loathe him. Skinner’s ideas were classed with Communism by people who didn’t understand their grounding in scientific method.
I certainly didn’t know this. I was busy memorizing the highly technical and often obscure methods of professional operant conditioning through a careful reading of a series of comic books I picked up at the American Psychological Association convention in Montreal, in the summer of 1972. They featured Captain Contingency Management. I remember a comic where someone named Brad is trying to quit smoking. He goes to a party, and lots of people are smoking. Someone offers him a cigarette. He is sorely tempted. At this moment, who should appear but Captain Contingency Management! He urges Brad to remember what he’s learned. This situation calls for substitution of an incompatible activity. There’s Dora over there: ask her to dance! You can’t smoke while you’re dancing! Brad asks Dora to dance, and chalk up another win for Captain Contingency Management! This nonsensical scenario demonstrated to me the reasoning behind my father’s dislike of clinical psychology. He never studied people. He felt instinctively that methods of managing animal behavior weren’t simplistically applicable to the alteration of human behavior. My father was quite hands-off during my childhood; not judgmental or insistent. His main approach to child-rearing was to buy us any books we wanted, and to take us to bookstores frequently. He told me years later that where shaping human behavior was concerned, he believed in the power of suggestion. And that the way he trained animals at the lab was completely different from the sort of behavior therapy approach practiced by clinical psychologists.
Shaping animal behavior involved waiting patiently until the animal randomly demonstrated the behavior the psychologist wished to see more of. The psychologist would immediately “reinforce” this random action, perhaps by providing a pellet of food. The animal might not then produce that “desired” action again for some time—but when it eventually did, the psychologist would immediately “reinforce.” The animal would begin to engage in the desired action more and more frequently, receiving the reinforcer each time. That is, at no point did the psychologist initiate his intervention by setting down with the animal WHAT desired behavior was being sought. Rather, the animal ALWAYS initiated the activity on its own, through normal random variation of its actions. The psychologist merely became a part of the animal’s environment, reinforcing that certain action.
Our educational establishment with its curricula and its tests has profoundly misinterpreted behaviorism. False behaviorism has driven most children AWAY from the desire to study and learn during their years in school. The truly powerful approach of a teacher who 1) waits until a child shows interest in something the teacher deems important, and only upon this demonstration of interest, 2) offers encouragement and assistance to this autonomously interested child, is the best method of instruction for deep learning. To ensure that the child DOES express some interest in a line of study the teacher would like to nurture, the teacher must casually suggest that line of study, and the suggestion must be indirect. The correct method is for the teacher to engage personally and with their full attention in this study, on their own. A child who realizes that an adult is engaged in some activity with pleasure and focus will generally AUTONOMOUSLY feel a curiosity about what the adult is doing. That is, the adult has suggested that this area of study is of interest. When the child then expresses that curiosity: this is the moment for the teacher to reinforce the child’s interest. The child’s interest, having been UNEXPECTEDLY rewarded, becomes somewhat more intense. Soon, the child has begun to TEACH HIMSELF merely by watching the adult and asking for guidance if he so desires.
***
As the decades passed, with the fading of Hitler’s World War II genocide from current memory, the “nature” explanation for human behavior made a comeback. Studies of twins separated at birth showed clearly that there ARE all sorts of inborn behavioral biases that have little to do with lifetime environmental influences. Noam Chomsky led the anti-behaviorist charge with his theories of inborn linguistic mental structures; his disciple Steven Pinker is now the leading voice of anti-behaviorism, which calls itself cognitive science.
Radical behaviorists responded to Chomsky and Pinker by insisting there was no disagreement. “All behavior is the product of environmental influences” referred to the whole history of evolution as PART of the use of the word “environment.” “Nature” was INCLUDED inside “nurture.”
This was confusing for most people. Taking advantage of this confusion, cognitive scientists pronounced the radical behaviorists’ ideas nonsensical—unworthy of debate. Especially during conservative political periods like the 1980s and 1990s, Social Darwinism and heredity-based explanations of human behavior will always be popular. They provide a guilt-free way for people to celebrate their successes, explain away their failings, and relax into personal indolence. “I was born this way. You were born that way. All’s right with the world. Sit down and shut up and do as you’re told.”
But the work my father and his colleagues had done yielded a shocking result. Some classes of drugs turned out to have remarkably subtle impacts on what had been considered intractable, inborn personality traits—such as depression or social anxiety. Prozac and other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) like Zoloft and Paxil, as well as many other psychoactive medications commonly used by people who forty years ago would have been considered incurably neurotic, were developed by students trained by my father and his colleagues, relying on the radical behaviorist philosophy and techniques of B.F. Skinner. Patients, psychiatrists and psychotherapists could attack B.F. Skinner’s “no-mind” ideas to their heart’s content, but his techniques of methodical investigation of animal behavior were the ones that had led to the drugs now helping them take control of “inborn, innate” supposedly-intractable day-to-day clinical problems. The truth was, everyone’s problems WERE responsive to environmental modification, since DRUGS constituted a key part of the environment of depressed or disturbed people. Before the arrival of the behaviorists studying the subtle impact of drugs on behavior, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and sugar were the only legally available behavior-modifying drugs, and they were used in massive quantities. But, during an era of draconian suppression of mind-altering substances like the THC of marijuana or the lysergic acid of LSD, the behaviorists’ work resulted in the formulation and legalization of dozens of OTHER mind-altering drugs now in use by millions of people who would otherwise have had access only to alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and sugar. Cognitive science’s insistent focus on the inevitable hereditary nature of mind obscured the fact that mind IS ONLY a product of environment in the largest possible sense. “We” are each a fully interdependent moment-by-moment outcome of the history of the cosmos.
For his part, Skinner never gave an inch on the subject of the ultimate impossibility of any absolute, condensed, independent “mind.” Despite the enormous advances in genetic assessment of the heritable aspects of behavior, Skinner continued to insist that the “cognitive science” that was coalescing around these genetic studies was fictive and anecdotal, since it relied on the erroneous notion of “individuals” who could be considered independently from the historical environmental influences that had shaped both the evolution of their species’ pasts and the evolution of their own typical behaviors during their own lifetimes.
At the age of ninety-two, Skinner gave his final talk to a packed lecture hall at the American Psychological Association convention. Over half those present were cognitive psychologists—the kind of psychologist that regards spoken descriptions of peoples’ subjective feelings and inner thoughts as valid evidence admissible into supposedly replicable, falsifiable scientific research.
Cognitive psychologists: almost certainly the majority of psychologists the readers of this essay have ever heard of or encountered, since they dominate the field of clinical psychology, working with patients like us.
Everyone in the room expected Skinner to use what they all knew would very likely be his final lecture to unify the field of psychology, encouraging the two sides—cognitive scientists with their molecular-genetics-based “nature” explanations and behaviorists with their environmental-historical “nurture” theories—to join hands and fashion a new synthesis.
Instead, Skinner began his talk with the inflammatory sentence, “Cognitive science is the creationism of psychology.” This phrase damns believers in “mind” as promoters of superstition in the name of science.
He died a week later. The old man went down fighting.
***
Standard, currently accepted ideas about what people are like and how they develop have always been popular offshoots of main ideas at the center of culture on the nature of what it means to be human. In our period, education and psychology have become technical fields with highly specialized training. Most working educators and psychologists don’t spend much time thinking about the core philosophical ideas under-pinning their daily professional practices. This focus on day-to-day application of specialized practice obscures the fact that we happen to be alive right now and are participating in this particular period’s assemblage of big ideas. But we should be under no compulsion to believe that the set of big ideas popular right now in our own culture is “correct.” In fact, a look at their own history demonstrates that these ideas are just the current ones, and that over the next several decades they will almost certainly be supplanted by a completely new assemblage of “most popular big ideas.” Since we know that many fields’ currently popular ideas will be bent out of shape beyond recognition, why must we feel bound to honor them right now?
People have stunning flexibility. Much more flexibility that our theories give them credit for. Our culture has much less flexibility. For this reason, people are constantly under enormous pressure to constrain themselves to the strictures of the culture. But although our culture does enforce significant codes, we are probably the most free-wheeling, open culture in the world. And this significantly accounts for our current economic success. People who decide not to pay attention to the social code can actually function and do well, whereas in other cultures they are prevented from acting. Therefore, since this approach works with mavericks who can’t help themselves—like me—why not get explicit about it, and encourage a higher degree of creativity in everyone? Wouldn’t this be the best way to ensure our society’s continued well-being?
We already rely heavily on the mechanisms of adult self-instruction—how-to books, self-help courses—and yet in schools we do not teach our children “how to teach yourself anything you want,” nor do we nurture in students the self-confidence that they can in fact learn to do anything they care to learn. But our schools should stimulate auto-didacticism in children, since with the average person expected to have three completely different careers during their lives, curricula currently being taught children will not be useful when they are working adults.
Children NEED strong skills in self-instruction—and we adults all NEED our children to acquire these skills.
***
October, 2001
Dear Dad,
I’ve found it extremely hard to learn to accept my own dependence—on you, and on anything/anybody. I don’t really know why—did I powerfully internalize the American story of Individualism as Greatest Good? Certainly, I carry a lot of contradictory assumptions around with me which I’ve had a hard time untangling.
One of the things I’ve been puzzling over these past few years, and where I feel I'm making some headway, is this question of the structure of human reality. For a long time, I've operated on the assumption that I can't have any knowledge—that no one can. I thought I'd come up with this idea myself!
I read a philosophy book recently—”History of Skepticism”—which traces these kinds of denial-of-knowability ideas from the Greeks to the 1700s. One of the things I hadn't known was that there is a stunningly elaborate tradition of puzzlement over the issues of knowability. Socrates said, “I can't know anything.” So, it's right at the basis of Western Ideas! And I thought he'd pushed the Search for Knowledge! I guess he was a chokepoint for both approaches. Aristotle believed that the world was Knowable. Sextus Empiricus argued that not only don't we know anything, we can't even know if we don't know anything. And then down through the next two thousand years these two positions have resulted in all sorts of different theories of Right Ways of Living.
The most common response, among full-blown skeptics, to the problem of How to Live, without concrete, secure bases for knowledge, is a Go Along with the Prevailing Traditions approach. Montaigne was the greatest exponent of this sort of skepticism. The essay was a literary form that he invented—and because he developed the form, and directly set the tone for all later essayists, in some ways some of the very structure of later thinking was an outgrowth of the kind of opportunities for exposition provided by the essay form. It IS a skeptical form—in that it is a setting for a discursive discussion about something that isn't clear and requires critical thinking. As opposed, say, to a sermon, which starts out Knowing All.
I've been reading a lot of Mahayana Buddhism over the last few months—I was quite startled to discover that the skepticism/knowability debate raged for many centuries in India, between 200 B.C. and 900 A.D. in particular. There were a number of Buddhist monasteries with 25,000 students each in India—around 700 A.D.—where the course of study was mostly Buddhist Philosophy. The students had to develop incredible rhetorical skills attacking and defending the ideas of the numerous sects of Buddhism. One of the principal areas of contention was the Nature of Knowledge.
The Mahayana Buddhists came up with a different solution to the How to Live in a World Where There's No Absolute Basis for Knowledge question. The Indian philosopher best known for its exposition is Nagarjuna—but a lot of different texts deal with the issue. The Lotus Blossom Sutra was the most popular book on this subject—Nagarjuna is very abstract reading.
You might say Nagarjuna is a precursor to Wittgenstein. But unlike the British Empiricists of the 20th century, the Buddhists who were working over this territory found a further step. This further step matches the most current ideas in the new mathematics of complexity.
The Mahayanists say 1) All dharmas are empty. A dharma is any physical object, any idea, any doctrine, any structure, any form, any ideal, any system. Empty means none of these “things” have an independent existence. None can stand “alone.” Just as you can't remove anything from the Universe, you can't separate any “dharma” from its historical creation, its inter-relation with other entities. That is, all “dharmas” are dependent on their causes—and therefore you can't REALLY speak of any “dharma”—form or content, object or structure or system—as being “itself, of itself.” Therefore its “selfness” is called empty.
The goal of meditation is to “empty” the world—to come to a perception of the world that sees the “dependence” of “dharmas”—so when you look at any object, you see through it to its whole history of causes. Of course, these causes of any specific object are infinitely branching.
Then, after acknowledging the idea of Dependent Origination, or Interdependence of All Things—that is, the idea of Emptiness—the Mahayanists say there's a second step, which is that Emptiness therefore must itself be Empty. Since it's a system/thought-approach/dharma itself!
This is parallel to Sextus Empiricus' idea that not only can't we know anything, we can't even know if we can't know anything.
But the interesting thing about the Mahayanists is that then they insist on a Step 3 that is different than the Skeptics' (and Montaigne's) idea of Just Accepting the Traditions of Your Time and Place—which for Montaigne meant just being a good Catholic.
The Mahayanists attach a set of emotions to the debate. They say that in enacting Step 1—seeing through all dharmas to their dependent origination—one is seeing through the world of delusion (called samsara). Taking samsara seriously and literally—via desire—causes suffering. If you really succeed in seeing through the material/systemic world to the emptiness that more correctly describes it, you can't very well experience the sort of unattainable, unsatisfiable desires that lead to suffering.
Thus, the Buddhists have a reason to carry through their philosophical thinking—which is to help people escape suffering. The skeptics didn't see their ideas as having a goal of this sort.
So—anyway, the Buddhists argue that after acknowledging the emptiness of dharmas (nothing is really itself by itself) and then the emptiness of emptiness (the IDEA that nothing is really itself is paradoxical since THAT IDEA is a something!)—the next move is a “Return to the Provisional”—meaning, for all practical purposes, the world exists and we live in it.
Again, unlike Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne, though, in keeping with the Buddhist focus on suffering, the Mahayana Buddhists argued that the only REASON to return to the provisional—that is, live in the ordinary world, fully, involved (not withdrawn at a monastery)—is to alleviate the suffering of living beings.
Naturally, you can do this, if you've 1) Seen through the world that has triggered your own desires, thereby extinguishing your own suffering, 2) Realized that the opposite position of nothing existing is also a “position” and therefore a source of suffering (nihilistic misery) and 3) Returned to the world with a provisional view of it. Now you can help other people escape suffering through leading them to a similar realization, insofar as they're capable of this escape.
When you occupy this “provisional” position, in viewing the world, you're attempting to maintain a sort of in-between awareness of reality. You don't accept the world's “dharmas,” but you also don't state that they don't exist—in fact you interact fully with them. It's the maintenance of this particular type of suspended disbelief that's then called the middle way by the Mahayanists.
This particular view of reality is exactly the same espoused by the complexity theorists, like Murray Gell-Mann—who use the ideas of “coarse graining” and “emergence” to describe the transition between the physical description of the world and the chemical description of the world and the biological description of the world, and the ecological description of the world. All are “true” descriptions insofar as they are HELPFUL and USEFUL. But only that far.
And also, fascinatingly, the Buddhist idea that one's big goal is to cease suffering resonates quite strongly with the contemporary uses of psychology and psychiatry—which from a practical standpoint also aim to cure depression and assist people in achieving mental balance—essentially, to cease suffering and accept the world fully as a place they can live.
It's because Mahayana Buddhist ideas bear such a resemblance to modern psychology that if you look in the Buddhism section of a bookstore, you'll find that the phrase Buddhist psychology is in current common parlance.
YOUR school in particular—radical behaviorism—which of course is an outgrowth of British Empiricism, which itself is an outgrowth of skepticism in its enlightenment form as expounded by Mersenne—is fundamentally a theory of dependent origination.
You call “dependent causes” “contingencies.” You don't have an “emptiness” theory because behaviorism skips directly from Step 1 of the Mahayana to Step 3—you decide to agree that all “behaviors” are the outcomes of “contingencies” and then you don't waste time saying that therefore the “behaviors” don't really exist in and of themselves as entities. But you DO believe this.
You come immediately to Step 3, resolved to alleviate suffering that comes from the behaviors (which are of course “dharmas,” being “structures” of activity). Your system of alleviating the suffering involves exposing the person you're helping to the “unreality of the dharma”—that is, to the way the behavior is actually conditional, and has bases which can be altered.
In fact, Skinner was sometimes called “Zen” by people trying to pigeonhole his ideas. Certainly, his insistence that “he” wasn't really writing the things he wrote, and that you couldn't really talk about his “self” matches the Mahayana perspective exactly. (Zen is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism, the most philosophically systematic version known in the west.) So, while you won't find any work in the behaviorist canon stating the no-self doctrine, Skinner himself evidently adhered to it.
I AM finally beginning to get my mind free of the dharmas of absolute individuality, absolute independence, and absolute free will that are so hard to escape in this culture. But it's quite a process.
Love,
Andy
