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Clinton,
Bush, Skinner and Social Determinism
Richard W. Malott1
Behavior Analysis Program
Department of Psychology
Western Michigan University
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Warning: This essay includes gratuitous, inflammatory political commentary.
My Favorite Peckerwood
The peckerwood pecked on the school house door.
Pecked so hard ‘til his pecker got sore.
From the old Folkways LP, Prison Songs, collected in the
Mississippi prisons by the late Allan Lomax. Unfortunately the Sanitation
Department removed it from the CD reissue, which I discovered when
I was entertaining the fantasy of compiling a personal CD called Peckerwood
Blues, because I have the collector’s pathological compulsion
not only to categorized but also to subcategorize, and I had to have
a subcategory of the blues for white folks singing the blues. Peckerwood is an old, pejorative, southern African-American term for white
trash.
I also have the pathological compulsion to Googleize every archaic
term I fall in love with. But the only relevant citation I could find
was a description of Bill Clinton as a peckerwood. And Clinton is
absolutely my favorite Peckerwood president, if not my favorite president
period. He impresses me for several reasons:
First, he so dramatically illustrates that men’s brains are
in their penises. Can you imagine risking the presidency and world
security, not to mention marriage to one of the world’s smartest,
most articulate women, for fellatio by a skank like Monica Lewinsky?
Marilyn Monroe, a favorite of other presidents, might be more understandable,
but Monica Lewinsky?!
Now, it’s easy to rationalize that Clinton is just a white-trash
aberration and not representative of everyman. But before you make
a desperate grab for that straw, consider some old research by David
Barlow, where he hooked up a representative sample of red-blooded,
freedom defending, American men by their manhood to a mechanical strain
gauge, a penometer, one that could measure penile tumescence from
a subliminal 1% to an outrageous 100%. Then he showed them slides
of nude females from the ages of adulthood to the age of four. And
there was no age so young that the image of the nude female did not
evoke significant movement on that penometer, thereby revealing that
all American men are latent pedophiles.
The Clinton case study and the Barlow experimental research also suggests
to me that there is no such thing as a non-sexual, platonic relationship
between a red-blooded American man and any female. For further elaboration
on this suggestion, check out the CDs and DVDs of the standup routines
(not the movies) of our country’s most perceptive social analyst
under the age of 67, Chris Rock—really.
Second, Clinton impresses me because he kept on trucking in spite
of the greatest presidential humiliation since Watergate, not only
was his judgment called into question but so was his taste. Any other
person would have crawled under the sheets and hid there for a year.
As former SNL social analyst, Denis Miller, pointed out, Clinton must
have cahones the size of watermelons. What a man.
Third, ever since childhood I’ve been turned off by ALL politicians,
because of their histrionic, hypocritical, chest-thumping hyperbola
(aka BS). But Clinton is so straight, so sincere, so well-reasoned
that I’d rather be lied to by Clinton than told the truth to
by Bush, not that the later event has ever happened.
(And, to digress briefly, when I see a crowd of yahoos desecrating
our American flag by enthusiastically waving little replicas of that
great flag during one of Bush’s swaggeringly vacuous speeches,
I become depressed thinking that we have become a nation of yahoos;
and am inclined to agree with the ancient wisdom that, in a democracy,
the people get the president they deserve. But the president we deserve
may not be the president the whole world deserves.)
(And a little digression on the digression: I wonder if there has
ever been a president of the United State whom so many people have
hated so intensely. Maybe not the majority of our citizens, but a
large and rabid minority. There’s little as reinforcing as a
good hate. And the reinforcing power of the emotional rush resulting
from sharing that Bush hate in person, commentaries, articles, books,
cartoons, and email jokes is suggested not only by the frequency of
that behavior but especially by its intensity, its vehemence. It’s
almost as if we Bush haters hope he performs even greater atrocities
on humankind, so we can get an even more reinforcing emotional rush,
by being even more outraged.)
And finally, Clinton impresses me because he illustrates the extremely
rare Abraham Lincoln ability to rise from white-trash, peckerwood
obscurity to one of the 100 most powerful positions in this US of
A, president of the USA, without having been born into the Harvard-Yale-Princeton
power elite ala Bush and so many other presidents, but having worked
his way into it, a blow for our side in the nature-nurture debate
so recently activated by Richard Herrnstein.
Social Determinism
Herrnstein (1971), wrote an extremely interesting, thoughtful, insightful
article on meritocracy in the USA. This was long before he dishonored
the field of behavior analysis with his biological-deterministic The
Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), wherein he justified the right-wing,
establishment’s view of the appropriateness of the status quo,
the current, extreme inequities in wealth and power, by saying those
inequities resulted from the genetic inferiority of poor people and
of people of color.
In the earlier article, Herrnstein argued that our society is a meritocracy
where not only does the cream rise to the top, but it starts near
the top from day one. (It was not until The Bell Curve that
he argued this social determinism was, in turn, biologically determined.)
And, today in search of the soul of Skinner’s 100th birthday,
as I jogged through Harvard Square and the Harvard Commons, I reflected
on the elite nature of Harvard, the intellectual home of both Herrnstein
and Skinner. In truth, if you stacked all the IQ points in Cambridge
end to end, they would reach from here to the other side of the universe,
or at least to the moon.
In other words, Cambridge, MA may contain the world’s greatest
collection of extremely well-honed, effective repertoires (the professors)
and effective repertoires in the honing (the students), at least the
greatest per capita. Jogging through Harvard’s commons (the
park in the center of the university) and Harvard’s square (the
shopping district on the edge of the university), I didn’t need
no Dorothy to tell me that Toto and I were no longer in Kalamazoo
and that the bookstore window I was staring through wasn’t part
of the Barnes and Noble chain.
The loser, mediocre, elite continuum fascinates me. What’s the
difference between Skinner and you and me? How’d he become Skinner,
and why didn’t we? What’s the difference between us and
the world’s greatest experts? Skinner’s peer group wasn’t
the members of ABA. We ABA members worship him, as well we should.
But his peer group wasn’t us; it was his world-class colleagues
at Harvard. There are two different worlds, the one these world-class
experts inhabit and the one we inhabit.
So how do you get to be a world-class expert? By working your butt
off, according to the brilliant cognitive psychologist, Anders Ericsson
(e.g., Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Rèomer, 1993). Ten thousand
hours of deliberate, well focused, thoughtful practice will turn you
into a world-class expert, whether that expertise is in music, sports,
dance, chess, science, or politics. And Ericsson’s research
suggests you can only do about 20 hours of this intense work per week.
Therefore most world-class experts start when they’re little
kids, a few hours a week. By the time they’re in their early
20’s they’ve upped it to 20 per week and accumulated their
10,000. But it ain’t easy. Many children (maybe most) burn out
along the way, because their parents didn’t manage to program
the deliberate practice humanely enough or to inculcate the Jewish-mother
values needed to maintain such a rigorous regimen. And, yes, the parent’s
and other caretaker-trainers are crucial. Kids don’t embark
on 10,000 hours of hard, deliberate practice on their own. And even
if they did, they’d need expert coaches and trainers along the
way, whether those experts were parents or professionals or, more
typically, a combination of parents and professionals. Ericsson says
that at least one of the parents must devote their life to nurturing
the budding expert, and I would add: nurturing with wisdom, thoughtfulness,
and high, demanding, guilt-inducing Jewish-mother intensity, though
not so much that the kid burns out and rebels.
But that’s asking a lot of the parents. They must have the resources
to afford the luxury of nurturing a budding genius. But poor folks
don’t have that luxury and equally bad, they don’t have
the skills. The problem is that, contrary, to what we romantic, liberal,
democracy-loving Americans would like to believe, everything positive
is correlated with wealth; the wealthier you are, the healthier you
are, the smarter you are, the less likely you are to get into spousal
abuse or child neglect, the less likely you are to be obese, smoke
cigarettes, not floss your teeth, not buckle up etc.
Of course, what we’d like to say is that them poor folks just
don’t have the resources immediately available that we rich
and semi-rich folks have. But it’s worse than that. When the
resources are available, the poor folks don’t make good use
of them. You can fill a peckerwood’s medicine cabinet with dental
floss, and he still ain’t going to floss. At the university,
we provide all sorts of extra support for students in academic difficulty
(e.g., we provide tutorials); and who shows up for the tutorials,
the academic-probation kids from the trailer park? No, the high-IQ,
high-GPA rich kids from the suburbs, who’s Jewish mothers have
filled them with the fear that, if they don’t proactively grab
every opportunity for self-improvement, they themselves will end up
in the trailer park or in a van down by the river, and worse yet,
be a humiliation to their Jewish mothers who have sacrificed so much
for them. The problem is that not only do the poor folks not have
the resources, they also don’t have the Jewish-mother-induced
self-management skills needed to make the extra effort to use those
resources.
So it’s a vicious spiral, the rich get smarter, then they get
richer, then they get smarter, etc. And the poor get flushed down
the toilet. The smart rich kids go to Harvard and become still smarter
and richer. And even if we don’t live in a trailer park in Kalamazoo,
Michigan, even if we live in the middle-class suburbs of Kzoo, we
don’t live in Cambridge and we never will. Though we deny it,
the United States is a highly stratified, social-class society.
Another way to put it is that the rich are richer than the rest of
us, because they are smarter and they work harder. And how hard you
work isn’t just measured in terms of the number of hours you
log in, but also the quality of the work. To work carefully, thoughtfully,
strategically, in a continuous-quality-improvement, self-improvement
mode is many times harder than just logging in the hours doing the
job. But when the world-class experts work, it’s that thoughtful,
high quality work that they do.
And when they aren’t working, world-class experts are still
working: When I drive from Kzoo to ABA in Boston, most of my head
time is devoted to ruminations about my latest social disaster, as,
like so many of us mediocre people, I’m easily susceptible to
the distracting seduction of the emotional reinforcers of self-pity.
But, if one of them world-class experts were driving from Harvard
to Kzoo, he’d be head-writing his next Psych Review article, or maybe his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. And that’s
the difference between WMU and Harvard.
Exceptions
But for me, exceptions don’t prove the rule; they just force
more nuanced applications of the rule. How is it that Bill Clinton
was Abraham-Lincolned from his little Arkansas, peckerwood shack,
through a Rhodes Scholarship, to elitist Oxford to a law degree from
elitist Yale (where he worked two or three jobs at a time to pay the
bills), to President of these United States of America. (Note that
I put the preceding sentence in passive voice, to suggest that Clinton’s
amazing rise to the presidency did not result form his innate qualities,
but rather the rise was done to him, by an amazing set of behavioral
contingencies that gave him the repertoire and values that caused
him to rise to the presidency.) I don’t know what those contingencies
were, but I wish I did, and I’m sure they were there.
Skinner was another exception. His amazing rise was from a middle-class
home in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to a PhD from elitist Harvard,
to a professorship at elitist Harvard, and to the creation of behavior
analysis, the most important, most valuable, most right-on school
of thought in the history of psychology. Maybe not as amazing as Clinton’s
trip, but amazing enough for me. Again, I don’t know what those
contingencies were, but I wish I did, and I’m sure they were
there. (Unfortunately, his autobiography didn’t reveal those
contingencies, at least not to me.)
And Bush was still another exception. His was a descent from a rich,
politically successful family in New Haven, Connecticut, through a
prep school where his greatest accomplishment was to be head cheerleader
for the intramural stickball league, to a mediocre performance at
elitist Yale, where his admission was no doubt facilitated by the
fact that both his father and grandfather had attended there, to an
MBA from elitist Harvard, to the presidency of the USA, of which it
has been said blaming Bush for the national and world-wide disasters
his presidency has created is like blaming Mickey Mouse for problems
at Disney Land, of which it has also been said that Bush would make
a great president, a president of a fraternity where he would decide
who should go out for another keg of beer.
Clinton and Skinner’s rise to world-class prominence is amazing
because it contradicts the social determinism that prevents extreme
upper mobility for most of the rest of us. And Bush’s decent
to trailer-trash, chest-thumping, inarticulate bulling is amazing
because it contradicts the social determinism that prevents extreme
downward mobility for most of the rest of us. In other words, our
social class determines (or at least is correlated with) the skills
and values we acquire. And those skills and values rarely allow us
to move more than a level or two, in either direction from the social
class where we acquired them.
Molecular Analysis
I’ve known many of the most productive scholars in ABA and all
thirty presidents of ABA. And, by and large, they blow me away. They
greatly impress me with their intellectual and behavior-analytic skills
and their consistent industriousness. And I bow before them. They
are great and our membership is great. But there ain’t no Skinners
among us. ABA’s full of member’s trying to go beyond Skinner.
And many members, including me, spend time trying to correct a few
details we think Skinner got wrong. But there ain’t no Skinners
among us.
To use a cliché, Skinner produced a paradigm shift in psychology.
Yeah, of course, he had his progenitors, but it was Skinner who built
on their works to produce the paradigm shift. It was Skinner who produced
this whole new, powerful world view, this intellectual framework that
allows us to ask and have a fighting chance of answering all the questions
about the nature of man.
Now here’s my question, here’s the point of this meandering
essay: What was the nature of Skinner that allowed (caused) him to
create this marvelous world view? What was his genius? What was his
world-class repertoire and values? What made him so different from
you and me?
I understand that he was more or less always on task, always working,
always jotting down intellectual notes which he’d file and then
later retrieve when needed. And constant note taking is a mildly effortful
pain in the butt, just enough of a pain to prevent most of us from
doing it, even in cases of extremely obvious need, let alone as a
routine, intellectual-management activity.
And I understand that the aging Skinner complained that he could no
longer outline an entire book in his head. While I don’t have
much sympathy for him, because I can’t even outline a postcard
in my head, I think we should all be intrigued by the question of
what is a molecular analysis of the skills or repertoire involved
in covertly outlining a whole book. And once we’ve done a task
analysis, how could we explicitly teach it. And once we succeed in
formally teaching these wonderful head skills, how did Skinner and
other intellectual giants like him acquire those head skills in their
natural environment, in hick villages like Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.
Behavior analysis is wonderful. And we’ve made wonderful progress,
since Skinner’s Behavior of Organisms (1938). But we’ve
barely cracked the surface. We haven’t really gotten into Skinner’s
head. We haven’t really gotten into anybody’s head. We
have barely begun to do a molecular behavior analysis of functional
intellectual repertoires. We have barely begun to make our behaviorism
Skinner’s radical behaviorism. Let’s get cracking; maybe
the 20th century was the century of behaviorism; so maybe we can make
the 21st century the century of radical behaviorism.
Caveat
Of course, all of this is just my humble opinion. And I might be wrong;
but probably not.
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References
Ericsson K. A., Krampe R. Th., & Tesch-Rèomer C. (1993)
The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance, Psychological Review, 100, 363-406.
Herrnstein, R. J. (1971, September) I.Q. in the Meritocracy, The
Atlantic Monthly. 43-64.
Herrnstein, R. J. & Murray, C. (1994) The bell curve: intelligence
and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press.
Skinner, B.F. (1938) The behavior of organisms: An experimental
analysis, New York: Appleton-Century
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