Walden Two

Following the post on Skinner (of behaviourism) at reference 1, I have now read his Utopian novel ‘Walden Two’ of reference 4, neatly bracketed in time by Aldous Huxley’s two ventures into Utopia, ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Island’ – of which I remember rather more of the first than the second and both of which I probably first read when I was far too young. But then, Huxley was the hero of my mother’s early adulthood, running to a collected edition in blue from Chatto & Windus in her bedroom bookcase. A collected edition which is still to be found on ebay. 

The present book is a nicely produced paperback from 2005, from the Hackett Publishing Company of Indianapolis, which includes a new preface by the author from 1976. 16 pages of preface then 300 pages of text organised into 36 short chapters. Written when Skinner was in his mid-forties, during a short gap between his university job in Minnesota and that in Indiana which followed.

Walden Two is a fairly self-contained fictional community of around 1,000 people – men, women and children – trying to live on better lines than the rest of us manage in places like the US and the UK. A Utopia, very much part of the rich US tradition of both fictional and real communities trying for a new and better way of living. Maybe it helps to have lots of space. In this case, better lives informed by psychological knowledge, in particular behavioural psychology.

A community in which the role of the nuclear family is weakened in favour of the community at large, a community in which there is not much personal property, rank or status. Raising children is as much a matter for the community at large as their biological parents. People do not get on, and certainly do not get on by making use of or otherwise exploiting others. But there is little tension and they do get on with each other. 

The book is framed by a visit of a small group of outsiders to the Walden Two community, with a lot of the text taking the form of discussions led by Walden Two’s founder, one Frazier. The narrator of the novel is the lead outsider, a university professor called Burris who had once known Frazier slightly at graduate school. As with some of Huxley’s writing, a rather thin narrative ploy to give Skinner a pulpit. A clever and able, but rather tiresome colleague of the narrator’s called Castle, takes the role of devil’s advocate.

Burris and two of the other visitors end up joining the community. Burris is also more or less the given name of the author, Burrhus Frederik Skinner.

Some general comments

I was reminded of the kibbutz of Palestine in the first instance and now of Israel. Skinner’s Utopia seems to have much in common with what I remember of the kibbutz movement from the mid-1960s, when quite a lot of young people from the UK went to work on one for a while. I was surprised to find from reference 6 that the movement is still alive and well, although I dare say it has moved on from when I knew about it. Presently in the news for a very bad reason.

A rather anti-democratic tone to the book. It is enough to have a few well-meaning bosses – particularly the planners in the jargon of Walden Two – who are not motivated by greed for money or status and who are turned over at regular intervals. Everyone else is content to get on with their lives and not bother themselves about what goes on in the upper reaches. 

Very much part of the strong millenarian streak in the US, with little communities popping up there all over the place, some of them rather unpleasant and some of them coming to unpleasant ends. There is also a sense that like many other such schemes, this one might work well enough for a while, at a small scale, but it is unlikely to last more than, say, 50 years, and it unlikely to be possible to scale it up. At least, neither thing has happened to my knowledge. Maybe the Amish are a counter example. How long will they last?

Unlike Brave New World, which does not, as far as I can remember, bother about the environment at all (although Huxley does in some of his later writings), there is a strong push towards less consumption, towards less goods. A less possessions orientated society. Which, given the warming pickle that the world now finds itself in, would be no bad thing.

There is a bit of a down on alcohol, tobacco and drugs, along with this down on excessive consumption generally. Symptoms of a society in trouble. Another down on fancy clothes.

Young people are encouraged to have their families very young by our standards, starting perhaps at fifteen and finishing a few years later. There is lots of community space and people have private rooms rather than private houses – with most married couples preferring two rooms rather than one, certainly after having their families. One advantage of all this is that those who do not have children for one reason or another are much less excluded. I associate to a friend who very much resented the way our world was dominated by couples with children.

Walden’s inhabitants get enough done working around half time. They work for credits, with the credit per hour rate being adjusted for the different occupations to make sure that all the occupations are adequately filled. With the idea being that everyone clocks up a reasonable number of credits every week. No money changes hands and no-one get rich, but if you do unpopular, high credit labour your reward is a very short working week. Leaving the rest free for leisure activities of sone sort or another. Efficiency goes into reducing the working week, not in reducing the number of workers. And it is all very flexible, with people not being so tied to occupations in the way that is common, certainly in the west. I would worry about all those people who like the structure of a long working week, who are not that keen on lots of leisure.

I also worry about balance of payments. A more or less agricultural community can grow itself enough food, maybe even produce clothing and housing, but in order to have a reasonable life, quite a lot of stuff has to be bought in from outside. Refrigerators, motor cars, tools, computers and the like. Possibly fuel of one sort or another. And this has to be paid for by selling stuff to the outside world. So what does the community have that the outside world wants? One answer, which is the answer at Walden Two, is to sell labour. Have some of the community work out in the big wide world. It would be interesting to know how the Amish communities manage this one.

Some odds and ends

Two other influential Utopias get mentioned and are to be found at references 7 and 8. Maybe I will get around to them.

Veblen’s amusing take on the function of the suburban lawn gets mentioned and is to be found at reference 10. Something else that I probably read when I was too young.

Walden is into rammed earth. A material which I believe Arts & Crafts types here in the UK were keen on, perhaps between the wars. Wikipedia knows all about it, explaining that it might be thought of as a low grade form of concrete, to which end it may involve binders like cement or lime. Widely used across the world.

Walden is very down on competition. Competitive team sports are out, although chess and tennis are OK. All part of not making hay at someone else’s expense. There is a point here, but there is, to my mind, plenty going for competitive sports and games – and there are plenty of them about – even if I do not partake myself. Can’t see them going away.

Furthermore, even granted that a lot, perhaps even most, crime can be put down to bad upbringing, it seems a bit improbable that you are going to be able to do entirely without policemen, bars and handcuffs any time soon, even in a small community like this one. And then, what about people with special needs, not to say the severely handicapped, hard to accommodate in a small community?

Along the way we also get a pop at university lecturers and their stagey methods, their performances. Particularly when one is talking about lectures to hundreds of students at a time. Maybe Skinner rather resents the time he has to spend lecturing.

Some tension is visible between the rather deterministic flavour of behaviourism and the desire of most humans to have a bit of free will. An issue which is still alive and well for some today. 

Conclusions

Perhaps the book of a man who is well fitted for, but occasionally tires of the academic rat-race.

An interesting, easy read. And there are perhaps lessons to be learned, pointers about how we might move to a world in which we did less, consumed less – and felt ourselves to be all the better for it – not abstinence or deprivation at all.

PS: the much newer preface ends on a rather pessimistic note. We have done wonders in the west with things material, but we have not made much progress with things social. Society remains, in many ways, a terrible mess.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/09/skinner.html. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner. Born 1904.

Reference 3: Brave new World – Aldous Huxley – 1932.

Reference 4: Walden Two – B F Skinner – 1948.

Reference 5: Island – Aldous Huxley – 1962.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz. 

Reference 7: Erewhon: or, Over the Range – Samuel Butler – 1872. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon.

Reference 8: Walden Pond, or Life in the Woods – Henry Thoreau – 1854. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden. The Walden for which Walden Two is named. Described in Wikipedia, inter alia, a transcendentalist, for which see the next reference.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism. ‘Transcendentalism is one of the first philosophical currents that emerged in the United States; it is therefore a key early point in the history of American philosophy. Emphasizing subjective intuition over objective empiricism, its adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters. It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time. The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related…’.

Reference 10: The Theory of the Leisure Class: an Economic Study of Institutions – Thorstein Veblen – 1899. http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/theoryleisureclass.pdf. ‘… For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some cases today – where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances bars out any imputation of thrift – the idyl of the dolicho-blond is rehabilitated in the introduction of a cow into a lawn or private ground. In such cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a standing objection to the decorative use of this animal…’.