Recent (partial) reads

Living Walden Two : B.F. Skinner's Behaviorist Utopia and Experimental Communities, by Hilke Kuhlmann.

Skinner is, of course, best known for his advocacy of behaviorism, a theory of psychology which proposes that, given the right combination of rewards and other stimuli, the behavior of humans and other living beings can (and should) be shaped according to predictable patterns. Walden Two, his only work of fiction, proposes a kind of communal utopia which has been carefully organized for the purpose of guiding its inhabitants into socially harmonious and usefully productive patterns of behavior.

Unfortunately, real-world attempts to create such Utopian communities, from the 1960s to the present day, have rarely succeeded. Motivating people to do useful and necessary work has been a recurrent problem. Furthermore, as the book jacket points out, "Among the real-world communities, a recurrent problem in moving past the planning stages was the nearly ubiquitous desire among members to be gentle guides, coupled with strong resistance to being guided."

Kuhlmann in this book briefly surveys a selection of Walden Two-inspired communes which have failed or dissolved, and then focuses on two which have survived to the present day. Twin Oaks, in Virginia, began as a deliberate attempt to follow Skinner's template. It has, according to Kuhlman, slowly but surely morphed away from that initial vision in the succeeding decades. Twin Oaks' relatively open membership requirements and their labor-credit system for requiring/motivating useful work are examined in some detail, but not as much so as in the various books and other writings of Twin Oaks co-founder Kat Kinkaid. The other community studied, Los Horcones in Mexico, seems to be a far more closed system made up primarily of members of two or three closely-related families. Despite its founders' overt insistence that all members be trained behaviorists, Los Horcones seems more akin to a close-knit extended family than to the kind of intellectually-organized community described by Skinner. Unfortunately, Kuhlman apparently had little access to interviews with current members of Los Horcones, and this section of the book is somewhat more sketchy than the discussion of Twin Oaks.

Sadly, Skinner himself seems to have had little interest in attempts to bring his visions to life. His sole contribution to the 1966 Waldenwoods conference, in which people inspired by his book sought to thrash out ideas for intentionally-designed communes based on similar principles, was a taped message. Somehow this seems highly, but unfortunately, appropriate to his intellectually ambitious but emotionally and spiritually cold view of humanity.