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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (8859)	1/12/2007 6:01:05 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 36921

The following is indicative of the approach used by the lab coat clerics. "It is futile to ask by what means and through what agencies the culture (i. e., the behavior) of birdbrained creatures can accomplish such a feat, because here we are obviously dealing with a standard requirement of mysticism: Mr. Skinner is establishing an opportunity for the high priesthood to "hear voices" - not the voice of God or of the people, but the voice of the culture inducing them to act. But the culture "induces" a great many people to different courses of action, including the people who paint prophecies of doom on rocks by the side of highways. How are the culture-designers (and the rest of us) to know that theirs is the true voice of the culture? No answer. One must assume that they feel it. Now we come to the grand cashing-in on the book's basic equivocation. Mr. Skinner keeps stressing that mankind needs ,"more controls, not less"; in a polemical passage, he quotes his critics asking: "Who is to control?" - and answers them as follows: "The relation between the controller and the controlled is reciprocal. The scientist in the laboratory, studying the behavior of a pigeon, designs contingencies and observes their effects. His apparatus exerts a conspicuous control on the pigeon, but we must not overlook the control exerted by the pigeon. The behavior of the pigeon has determined the design of the apparatus and the procedures in which it is used. Some such reciprocal control is characteristic of all science. . . . [Here I omit one sentence, which is an unconscionable misuse of a famous statement.] The scientist who designs a cyclotron is under the control of the particles he is studying. The behavior with which a parent controls his child, either aversively or through positive reinforcement, is shaped and maintained by the child's responses. A psychotherapist changes the behavior of his patient in ways which have been shaped and maintained by his success in changing that behavior. A government or religion prescribes and imposes sanctions selected by their effectiveness in controlling citizen or communicant. An employer induces his employees to work industriously and carefully with wage systems determined by their effects on behavior. The classroom practices of the teacher are shaped and maintained by the effects on his students. In a very real sense, then, the slave controls the slave driver, the child the parent, the patient the therapist, the citizen the government, the communicant the priest, the employee the employer, and the student the teacher." (P. 169.) To this, I shall add just one more example: the victim controls the torturer, because if the victim screams very loudly at a particular method of torture, this is the method the torturer will select to use." evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com