Lost in Skinner's Box
Stumbling down College Ave. in the midst of a debilitating spiritual malaise- nothing sounds good, overwhelming blah the response to any stimuli, I stumbled into Pendragon and found this, in Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet: “You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.” What do you do when all the right things, the rational things, the things you are supposed to do, fall flat, with only that vague yearning, teasing, urging, and prodding, that never quite comes clean? Surrounded by so much talk, so many answers, so much certainty, and so much disappointment. The soul wants what it wants, and the crowd frowns. Wags its collective finger. Gathers to agree on the rightness of its evaluation, and then judges. In the meantime, reason cowers, acquiesces, admits its weakness, and then agrees to the proper judgments. And yet, return to Sammler: “How very heavy human life was here, in forms of bourgeois solidity. Attempted permanence was sad.” The weight of bourgeois expectations, the terror of defiance, the shame of oblivion and its requisite manifestations.. When the constant barrage of arguments, sounds, images, chatter, and white noise leaves you numb, incapable of thought or feeling, knowing that the only thing that might make you feel alive is a fist through a window that will only lead to waking up, washing off your hand, wiping up the pieces and going out into the world subdued, well, even hootch can’t quash that mother. It’s a bitch sometimes. A bumper sticker. A stacked, clichéd set of emotional responses that only B.F. Skinner could love. One little box, pulling on that same old lever, getting that pellet that just don’t do it anymore. Bring on the new conditioning, or make freedom a living reality. Sammler again: “And of course no one knew when to quit. No one made sober decent terms with death.” If only we could find the terms, and take full responsibility for them. Such a short time really, and for some of us, a good chunk is past. What to make of what’s left, and how to commit to it without worrying about being right- that’s today’s question.