You might remember having studied about Harry Harlow back in college. Harlow was a Harvard psychologist who experimented with young monkeys. He subjected them to stresses, and showed that monkeys in their cages would have a preference for a terry-cloth surrogate mother monkey instead of a cold, hard, metal one. The monkeys obviously felt safer and more nourished by the softer of the two mother-replicas. This was considered a breakthrough discovery.
[EDITORIAL NOTE FOR SOME WIDER CONTEXT: I don’t know about other species of monkeys, but chimpanzees spend the first five years of their lives basically clinging to their mothers and subsisting on mother’s milk. The first five years!!! That kind of creature comfort is VERY important to the developmental life of chimps. And people too.]
Harlow was severely criticized a generation late, for brutalizing his test subjects, by people who had sympathy for other-than-human mammalian life forms. He of course had done exactly that — and in so doing irreparably ruined his young monkeys’ lives.
But rather few people thought in these modern terms at the time. In fact, Harlow was specifically attempting to show people that young life forms need love and nurturing connection, at a time when a good portion of the American psychological establishment — and especially followers of the Behaviorist theories of John B. Watson (1878-1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) — did not possess that concept.
You may also have read about Mr. Watson; he was chairman of the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University. Skinner’s own illustrious academic history includes having taught at Minnesota University; after that he was chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University; and after that he joined the teaching staff at Harvard.
Behaviorism believes in stimuli and observable behaviors — essentially, Pavlov’s classical conditioning — but not in anything else. Certainly not in attempts to understand thoughts, perceptions, needs, and feelings. Indeed, it makes no allowance for emotions, introspection, the life of the mind or the soul, or anything that cannot be directly observed and measured. According to the Behaviorists if it cannot be measured it isn’t “real”; only observable behaviors are considered “real”. Consequently all the things that make life worth living — the life of the spirit, the mind, the soul, the imagination, sympathy, creativity, empathy, beauty, love, and the intuition — are not real and not worth our serious attention. Neither are feelings of uncertainty, fear, anger, confusion, inspiration, attraction, revulsion, moral repugnance, admiration, respect, playfulness, and gratitude real. It’s perfectly all right to ignore these entirely.
It’s like the mindset of the society depicted by George Orwell in 1984, the tale of a dystopian futuristic society in which all but the most basic words necessary for communication had been deleted from the language. Entire categories of human concepts and possibilities disappeared. The entirety of moral, ethical, emotional, and both meditative and interpersonal human thought were basically eliminated and replaced with basic pragmatic thought. Everything was reduced to the meager and superficial spectrum of:
“double-plus good”,
“plus good”,
“good”,
“ungood”,
“plus ungood”, and
“double-plus ungood”. Can you imagine theatre, literature, poetry, fiction, biography, etc. using such words? Or even any intimate, honest, and intelligent conversation? Any meaningful sense of emotional thought, ethical thought, critical thought, rational thought, or even just plain old human drama will have ceased to exist.
NOTE: George Orwell was British and evidently prescient. He also wrote Animal Farm (in 1943-44), which is a tale about a very rigid and authoritarian society in which all animals were equal but some were more equal than others. He was actually writing about the Soviet Union back in those days; he saw it for the brutal dictatorship, cult of personality, and reign of terror that it was . . . at a time when the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem. Well, Orwell had the clearer vision. And his timing was good: this book gained popularity because it was published just as the Cold War began and everyone began to dislike and fear the Russians.
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But we were talking about Behaviorism. In its heyday (and specifically as regarded the rearing of young people) Behaviorism suggested a casual and businesslike relationship between mother and child that was predicated on “technologies of behavior” — precisely the rewarding of desired behaviors and giving negative reinforcement for undesirable ones — exactly as one does with laboratory rats and monkeys — instead of supporting parental attitudes and behaviors of attachment, warmth, love, kindness, moral sense, and affection. Watson is known for having promoted the idea that picking up a crying baby and attending to its needs was a bad thing to do; the infant “needed” to be conditioned to behave like a reasonable adult.
Skinner himself was heavily influenced by Watson, and held attitudes in opposition to those of humanistic psychology during his entire career. Putting it in a nutshell, Skinner thought of behavior as a function of environmental histories of one’s having had reinforcing consequences (you know, what we’d call programming, conditioning, and reinforcing) and nothing more. His thinking denied that people possessed freedom and dignity and, like Watson, he instead promoted “behavioral engineering” through which people were — and needed to be — controlled through the systematic allocation of external rewards. Basically, Skinner didn’t see that people were any different from rats or trained seals. No, I’m not kidding.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Can you imagine someone being “trained” to be a cook whose food is worth seeking out? Or to be an artist whose stuff is worth buying? Or to think mathematically, like any of the mathematicians who come to mind? Or to be a writer whose stuff is worth reading? Or to be a good mother or father? Or to be a good teacher? Or to be a good athlete? Or to have a good sense of humor? I mean, you can train people to be Republicans, or good consumers of goods, soldiers, C.E.O.s, etc. . . . but none of these are exactly creative occupations. They’re managers of sorts, who problem-solve on the level of the things that they have been assigned to manage. “Operant conditioning” does not recognize the world or imagination, nor the world of authentic feelings.
Both Watson and Skinner were influenced by the “operant conditioning” work of Ivan Pavlov — the man who got dogs to salivate upon hearing the sound of a bell. More than Pavlov, however, Watson and Skinner influenced a great deal of the psychological thinking of the mid-twentieth century, and particularly as it applied to the rearing of children. These men did incalculable harm to millions of people . . . many of whom, incidentally, are now running our institutions and our country.
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While Skinner lived out his life as a tenured professor at Harvard, Watson capped his career by taking his expertise at classical conditioning away from the pursuit of trying to control children’s development via a “scientifically approved” system of rewards and punishments, and into the world of manipulating adult behaviors — through advertising. Watson went to work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he eventually became wealthy from persuading (i.e., classically conditioning) consumers to buy Pond’s cold cream, Maxwell House coffee, and other such products.
As far as marketing coffee is concerned, Watson is credited with having invented the coffee break: our reason for buying and drinking lots of coffee. Right: you drink as much coffee as you do, and Starbucks is as successful as it is, because of John Watson. But his legacy — as well Skinner’s — also includes being responsible for untold numbers of mothers of that generation buying into being impersonal toward their infants, under the pernicious fantasy that abandoning their children emotionally is good for them; or, at least, that a child’s feelings about being abandoned are irrelevant to anything and should be dismissed. As I said, these men did incalculable harm to millions of people. I hope they’re in a place where they need 2,500-power sunblock.
I’m not making any of this up. If you think I might be, please read up on Watson, Skinner, and Behaviorism – if only on Wikipedia. But getting back to Harry Harlow, this is a lot of what he was trying to offset, disprove, and counteract in his work. Parenthetically, from what I’ve read, both Watson and Skinner had shitty childhoods that featured quite a bit of abandonment. Neither one of them ever examined their own emotional roots, but instead simply ran with how they themselves had been conditioned . . . aided by the boost that they received from being respected and prominent academicians — and, in Watson’s case, a successful businessman. Talk about reward and reinforcement!!! It brings to mind former vice-president Dick Cheney’s habit of ONLY listening to Fox news and forbidding liberal journalists from joining his entourages. I mean, who needs to listen to both sides of a question, right?
Finally, Harlow wasn’t exactly a paragon of sensitivity either; from what I’ve read, he was a gruff, abusive, and extraordinarily unpleasant person to be around. Go figure. It seems to me that, given the dominant modes of thought about parenting that were universally acted out in those generations, no one was brought up feeling appreciated as though they were valuable by themselves (I know that my own parents weren’t brought up like that . . . and because of that neither was I). For anyone interested in an account of society’s parenting styles of those generations — and of how Skinner, Watson, and Harlow were undoubtedly parented — sit down and read For Your Own Good, The Drama of the Gifted Child, and/or Thou Shalt Not Be Aware by psychoanalyst Alice Miller.
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