It has been said that no man is better than his worst ideas. And B.F. Skinner has come up with some real lulus, or so his critics (and they're abundant) claim. They are adjectives like "evil", "fantastic" and "dangerous" when describing him. Their machine gun attacks would probably render most men impotent. They say that his psychology is "vacuous," "unscientific," "irresponsible," "without a psyche" and that it "necessitates an atrophy of consciousness." And many of them are distinguished figures: Noam Chomsky, Thomas Szasz, Rollo May, Carl Rogers and Stephen Spender--to name a few.

Skinner's deterministic philosophy of radical behaviorism allows no room for free will, and that's downright threatening to most of us who adhere to the notion of an inner experience of choice. He insists that behavior is controlled by one's environment, particularly by, "contingencies of reinforcement" that bring about more of one kind of behavior and less of another. For Skinner, the autonomy of inner man is a myth. "There is no place," he writes, "in the scientific position for a self as a true originator or initiator of action." He sees emotion as a matter of the probability of engaging in certain kinds of behavior as defined by certain consequences: anger is a heightened probability of attack: fear is a heightened probability of running away; love is a heightened probability of positively reinforcing a loved person. Feelings are never an initiating cause of behavior.

But above all, the key to the Skinnerian doctrine is "operant conditioning," or the selection of behavior by its consequences. According to Skinner, behavior can be controlled by controlling the environment through behavioral technology--though it is not clear just who would control that technology. Survival, he says, is really the only value worth upholding.

But Burrhus Frederic Skinner is not, as his work or his opponents might imply, a cold-hearted man whose body bears the wings and feathers of the pigeons he has used in research. Rather, he is the writer who, during his senior year at Hamilton College, sent off his short stories to Robert Frost, who thought that Skinner's prose was the best he had read the whole year. He is the poet who composes love sonnets and witty verse. He is the actor who devotes time to his play-reading group. He is the educator who invented the teaching machine and programmed instruction. He is the father who only "positively reinforced" his two daughters after one of them explained to him that punishment did no good. He is the husband who is always dependable (according to his wife). B.F. Skinner is all of these. Yet how could such a humanistic man have developed ideas that are reprehensible to so many people?

Just as he would like us to believe, to understand Skinner is to understand his past history and reinforcement contingencies. Born in the railroad town of Susquehanna, pa., Fred Skinner was "taught to fear God, the police and what people will think." Skinner writes, "My mother was quick to take alarm if I showed any deviation from what was 'right'... I can easily recall the consternation in my family when in second grade I brought home a report card on which under 'Deportment,' the phrase 'Annoys others' had been checked. Many things which were not 'right' still haunt me."

Whether a direct result of his childhood experience or not, Skinner has undeniably developed his own sense of what is 'right' through his psychological epistemology. "I really don't think I'm particularly brilliant," he said last week on his 71st birthday. "I think I've been stubborn. I think I've held to a given point of view every doggedly--and that's paid off. I think it's right. I wouldn't be holding it if I didn't think so."

A casual analysis linking his past history and present behavior might seem unjustified. But Skinner himself writes, "perhaps I have answered my mother's question 'what will people think?' by proving that they do not think at all." In much the same way, Skinner says that behaviorism has helped him to "resolve [his] early fear of theological ghosts," which his grandmother instilled in him by equating the concept of hell with the glowing bed of coals in his parlor stove. One might, the young liberty bound-selling boy scout lay awake all night "in an agony of fear" after seeing a travelling magician's show that featured a devil "complete with horns and barbed tall." Perhaps as a result of this aversive conditioning, Skinner now views God as a "fraud" and "never would think of praying."

Of his father, he writes, "He was desperately hungry for praise, and many people thought him conceited; but he secretly--and bitterly-considered himself a failure."

Like his father, Skinner places a tremendous amount of emphasis on his own brand of praise--positive reinforcement. He may not have inherited his father's conceitedness, but he appears exceedingly arrogant to many of his critics. And whether or not this arrogance conceals his own secret sense of failure is something that only he can know.

Rollo May once unknowingly pointed out a fundamental aspect of Skinner's personality by criticizing his work: "I have never found any place in Skinner's system for the rebel. Yet the capacity to rebel is of the essence in a constructive society." Skinner was something of a rebel during his college career and still is--perhaps a reason for his never starting a community along the lines of the one in his novel, Walden Two. After developing an aversion to Hamilton College("I was not good at sports and suffered acutely as...better players bounced basketballs off my cranium..."), he openly began to revolt as best he could.

"I don't know why I did it," he chuckles. We protested something, but not in an effective way. Today, we would be protesting what we were asked to do, what we were required to, what our teachers were not doing. But I pulled this Charlie Chaplin hoax my senior year and announced a lecture in the chapel by the famous comedian Charles Chaplin. The poster we made up announced that the lecture was arranged by this professor, the man we were gunning for, who was a great name-dropper in the field of theater. Hundreds of cars came. It was a mess and got totally out of hand. They said they would throw out the students who did it. I knew the dean very well and I told him I did it and he told me to keep my mouth shut."

"I was in charge of class day ceremonies and at that time I was painting in a studio," he remembers. "I did a lot of charcoal caricatures of the faculty. Well, we put those on the walls and had a fake commencement with a Chinese student giving the salutatory address in Chinese instead of Latin."

Skinner would probably attribute his need to revolt to environmental circumstances, but at least those circumstances gave him the freedom to revolt. If he hadn't had the chance to rebel, even in the most immature sense, who knows? The Skinner box, operant conditioning, behavior modification programs or the Aircrib (a large, glass-walled enclosure in which he raised one of his daughters for two and a half years and in which his two grand-children were raised) might just not exist. Maybe he would never have been attracted to the notions of John Watson, the father of behaviorism, and instead would have done the "right" thing--taken over his father's law practice just as his father had hoped he might do.

After receiving his Ph. D. in psychology from Harvard, Skinner spent five years doing postdoctoral research in a "subterranean laboratory" at the same time Frankling Roosevelt and his braintrust were advocating the New Deal. In 1936, Skinner married Yvonne Blue, an English major at the University of Chicago, who now says. "Fred told me he was a genius when we were first seeing each other. But I told him that he couldn't be a genius if he wanted to marry me."

Yvonne Skinner, a robust and affable woman from her rhinestone-studded glasses to her brand-new blue sneakers, is the main reason, Skinner says, that he never started a Walden Two of his own. "I don't like the idea of Walden Two," she says, "I like my privacy, I like collecting stuff, I like to travel, And I like my home."