I was an undergraduate from 1968 to 1972. It was a time when if you worked through the summers, took part-time jobs during the school year, and qualified for a small scholarship, you could put yourself through college and graduate without debt.
One of my many jobs was checking out books from the main research library on campus. It was an enjoyable occupation, not least because of the wide variety of people I met there. Unless there was a line, I usually asked people about the books they were checking out. The resulting lectures—scholars being obsessive creatures, happy to explain their obsessions in detail—were a different education from the one I was receiving in my classes. But it was an education, and a good one, if necessarily eclectic.
I learned how ignorant I was of the wide world, and how many scholarly fields I hadn’t realized existed. I learned that no matter how long I lived or how hard I studied, I couldn’t know it all. The research library held 3.5 million books and was part of a system that contained an estimated 20 million documents.
I realized I never would be adequately educated, no matter how many diplomas I accumulated. Mastering one field or another might get me a paycheck, but the Big Picture, as it were, would never be anything I could claim to understand.
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One evening at the check-out desk I was approached by an emeritus professor of philosophy (his library card designated him as such) who wanted to check out a small book titled Free Will or Determinism? I took the book from his shaking hands, and then gave it back after I had stamped the due date and recorded his card number.
“Hasn’t this already been decided by B. F. Skinner?” I asked him. At the time, Skinner was on campus, teaching his deeply didactic behaviorism, which denied free will altogether. He was not popular with the more liberal members of the faculty.
He shook his head. “Professor Skinner has found the answer, only to lose sight of the question. He’s become trapped in his own conceptual Skinner Box,” he said, referring to the devices Skinnerians used to condition the animals—some of them humans—they used to test their theories.
I had an idea what a Skinner Box did, having seen one in my high school psychology textbook, but at that point a conceptual Skinner Box was beyond my understanding. I wasn’t about to ask the professor to explain it to me, because I wasn’t sure he would live to the book’s due date.
He was 95 if he was a day. The bridge of his glasses had sunk deep into the bridge of his nose. His eyes were only visible because they remained bright and intelligent, peering out from wrinkles and folds of sagging flesh. What little hair he had left on his head looked like cobwebs. He wore a worn suit with a white shirt and a bow tie, which meant the world he was living in hadn’t yet experienced the Sixties. I wasn’t sure if it had experienced the 20th century.
He hefted the book. “It’s a question that was worn out before I was born,” he said. “It won’t ever be solved. But I’ve been thinking about personal responsibility lately. You get old and you worry whether you’ve done the right thing with your life, and whether your sense of purpose had anything to do with it. Unless you’re B. F. Skinner, of course.”
He said it with a sudden dark flash of worn teeth. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not.
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Now, fifty-odd (very odd) years later, I know that if I reach 95 and am coming up with phrases like “conceptual Skinner Box,” I’ll be smiling. It will mean that I would still have my wits about me and could use them to describe—and thus stand outside of—the traps the human mind can invent for itself. That would be cause for cheer long before the 90s, or maybe even the 80s. Maybe even now.
Most of my college classmates fell into the trap of thinking that receiving their diploma meant they were educated. I escaped that trap by discovering I hadn’t been trained for any of the jobs I took on in the decade after college. Work-study had been better preparation for these than anything I had learned in the classroom.
I ducked other obvious conceptual prisons. I didn’t see the world through the eyes of a profession, because I never committed to a profession. I didn’t succumb to conspiracy theories because they presupposed conspiracists who weren’t lazy, stupid, or incompetent. I was skeptical of religious authorities for the same reason.
Any idea that rewards you for thinking about it is a trap, and I’m certain this is what the old professor was talking about when he referred to conceptual Skinner Boxes. If you’re literal-minded, you put the pigeon, dog, or small human child in a box, and when they do what you want them to do (press a bar, salivate, use a toilet instead of pooping on the kindergarten floor), they receive food, praise, or a small hit of Ritalin. To paraphrase the Stacked-Turtles-Theory-of-the-Universe, it’s dopamine all the way down.
But if you’re conceptually minded, you dispense with the hardware and let the brain supply its own reward. You do something to increase your chances of survival in a Darwinian world, and you get rewarded by the dopamine-oozing neurons in your substantia nigra. So you do it again, only this time with more enthusiasm.
The scary thing about these dopamine hits—and the scary thing about a Darwinian world—is that neither one needs to be good for you to feel good. Gambling can feel good. Overeating can feel good. If you get born into the wrong family, pain can feel good. Cocaine can feel really good, even as it’s turning you into an addicted asshole. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori can feel good, even as it’s making you go up and over the top into machine-gun fire.
A Darwinian world is a world of learned reflex, and a Skinner Box creates reflexes, and reflexes create a Darwinian world. It’s a solipsistic trap, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s constructed of wood and metal or the wispy electrical patterns rocketing around your skull. It transforms the world into itself.
B. F. Skinner really had imprisoned himself in his own construction. Every time a pigeon pressed a bar in a Skinner Box, Skinner himself got a shot of dopamine.
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My work-study jobs, in addition to checking out books, included mopping floors at 5 a.m. in the freshman dining hall, searching for misfiled books in the library stacks, guarding the library doors when campus radicals were threatening to set it on fire, tutoring faculty children, and going through bequeathed books in the library’s Resources and Acquisitions department.
The latter was like a treasure hunt without the treasure. Heirs and other interested parties had made sure anything with Darwinian survival value had been diverted to a higher purpose before it got to us. No first editions or hundred-dollar bills as bookmarks, in other words.
The best work-study job I had was transferring tons and tons of early 19th century newspapers (one of them was The Mormon, published in upstate New York by the early followers of Joseph Smith) from one of the college’s warehouses to another. It was hard labor, as the newspaper folios weighed fifty pounds apiece. We would load twenty of them on a trolley, take them out to a loading dock, load them into a box truck, drive them a couple of miles, and unload them into an identical building, with identical shelves.
It was hot, dirty work, performed in clouds of paper dust, drippings of toxic ink particles, the foul tannery odors of poorly-cured leather bindings, and for all I knew, invisible hosts of fungal and bacterial spores. It wasn’t until much later in life, when I learned that classical and medieval scholars occasionally get deathly ill from anthrax spores stuck to ancient vellum manuscripts, that I realized work-study could have been fatal.
Instead, I learned that a long, unpleasant job could be endured, and even enjoyed if you could get dopaminergic neurons involved. I read copies of The Mormon during breaks. At the time, I was madly in love with a Mormon girl back home, and I searched the crumbling, yellowed words of the young church for esoteric secrets. Even though I never found the secrets I was looking for (the girl I loved married someone else and became a Darwinian success story), I still remember that job with a kind of perverse pleasure. I imagine shifting 20 million documents from one building to another, a lifetime of lifting, truck driving, trolley trundling, reclassifications, reshelvings, Cipro prescriptions, all with an erotic undertone inspired by dreams of Darwinian success.
I learned that the tedium of repetitive work—correcting a set of English Composition papers, say—could be softened by remembering that I had experienced a similar tedium mopping a dining hall floor, and I had survived and come to enjoy that.
My native Idahoan provincialism was cured by a semester of checking out books to people I’d never seen and would probably never see again. Tutoring faculty children turned into a teaching career. Guarding the doors of the library taught me a library was a sacred place, and that the people who threatened it didn’t just worship the Void, they were the Void. The boxes of faded books in Resources and Acquisitions reminded me that the poet of Ecclesiastes was right, that there is a time for reading and writing and a time to get the hell out of a windowless room and out into the sunshine, no matter the weather.
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One turns 70, then 71, then 72. Now 73. One looks at one’s life, and the question comes up with increasing frequency: Did I do all this on purpose?
The answer: No. Not a chance.
Still, the universe isn’t a great Skinner Box. It isn’t even a great Darwinian box, considering I didn’t marry that wonderfully fertile Mormon girl. The genes I’m carrying will die with me, so they haven’t dictated much of my life’s purpose. And determinism only seems to be applicable once the results are in.
Other things conspire against free will. Selfish genes and B. F. Skinner look a bit ineffectual when you put them up against Life As a Pinball in a Pinball Machine, My Friend Mr. Dumb Luck, My Other Friend the Law of Unintended Consequences, and Quantum-Level Spasms in Consciousness-Generating Neural Networks. Various combinations of those are what seem to have dictated the turning points in my life.
Those things and work-study. Work-study, 50 years out, has somehow invested the grit and grime and pain of my world with lasting moments of interest and pleasure.
As Freud noted, life can now and then seem to be a perverse business.
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We are about to enter 2024, a new year on the calendar. I’m determined to live it as though I have free will. There is ditch to dig, and there are dead trees to fall and cut into blocks that will fit in the wood stove. Fence to fix. Blogs to write. Books to read. Mountains to climb. I hope they’ll all be good uses of the free time I’ve got left.