05.22.2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31
LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:
It was a most peculiar book, one worth reading in a most peculiar time.
The book? Beyond Freedom and Dignity, written way back in 1971 by B.F. Skinner. He’s not necessarily front-of-mind for most of us these days, but Skinner’s name is worth knowing. Buhrrus Fredric Skinner was the father of behavioral psychology, an experimentalist who explored how and why certain patterns of behavior are formed and created.
Meaning, he spent a whole bunch of time with rats. Skinner’s essential view was this: living things avoid pain, and seek reinforcement. That’s why they make decisions. In fact, it’s the only reason living things select a course of action. If it gives a reward, they do it. If it causes discomfort, they avoid it. Nothing more, nothing less.
To test this, Skinner called an operant conditioning chamber. It’s simple, really.
You get a rat. Or a chicken. Or some other animal that people don’t feel particularly attached to. Then you put it in a box. That box has a button. You teach the creature that if it presses a button it will get a reward, something that feeds it. So it will press that button. Yay! Snack!
Or you have a section of the operant conditioning chamber that’s electrified, because, well, that’s how Skinner rolled. Whenever the subject creature engages in a particular behavior, you run a little current through the floor of the chamber. Zap! Amazingly enough, the subject will eventually stop doing the thing that causes them to get a shock. Ah, the insights of science.
Operant conditioning chambers are now called “Skinner Boxes.”
As far as Skinner was concerned, there was no real difference between humans and animals, and therefore, the best way to view human behavior was through the lenses of reinforcement and avoidance. We are just machines, conditioned to respond in certain ways to certain inputs.
That, in fact, was the point of Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner viewed those concepts as antithetical to human progress. If what we really are is nothing more than conditionable meat machines, then the idea of moral agency must be abandoned. Liberty and freedom are just, Skinner argued for two hundred pages, illusions. And dignity? That just assumes that our actions give us value as persons, that our choices make us good people. But if choice is an illusion, then integrity, dignity, and moral value are meaningless, and assuming they exist just gets in the way of progress.
I’m not the biggest fan of Skinner. But he’s worth reading, in the way that it’s worth knowing in detail precisely what it is you disagree with.
Because Skinner’s vision of a choiceless, mechanistic world prangs darkly off of the assumptions we hear from the Book of Proverbs today.
In Proverbs, as in the rest of the Bible, Wisdom literature has to do with the way we function in the universe. What actions are likely to create a positive outcome? What actions are likely to cause us shame or harm? Wisdom is fundamentally practical.
As it manifests in the book of Proverbs, that practicality is expressed in several ways. First, the familiar pithy little nuggets of moral guidance, taut little sayings and maxims and aphorisms, all of which point in the general direction of how to live a life that’s less messed up. If you do this, then you will do well. If you do that, well, things won’t go so good. These sayings don’t provide any guarantees, but what they do is this: they make it much more likely that you will not fail.
And second, wisdom expresses itself through poetry and song, as we hear in this excerpt from chapter 8. Here, Wisdom is both described and personified. The voice we hear is of Lady Wisdom, the wise woman. That’s a consistent theme throughout Proverbs, but here, her identity is more clearly defined. She’s not just your smart friend.
She’s expressed as part of the world, as an essential part of both the creation and purpose of everything that is. However the universe is crafted, she is a part of it.
Within ancient Wisdom literature, there are a number of core themes, all of which play around a sane and appropriate use of the world around you. The wise do not seek wealth above all other things, because wealth is not the goal. The wise know that the hunger to possess destroys. The wise listen to criticism and concern, and adjust accordingly. The wise know that God loves the poor and the rich equally, and that when wealth is created on the suffering backs of the poor, God will hold the powerful to account.
Wisdom looks at the world, and carefully considers every action. The wise know--more than anything else--that chasing after the desire of the now can compromise the life you hope to live tomorrow. Because nothing is more foolish--in the Biblical definition of foolishness--than being so blinded by one’s own hungers and self-justification that you can’t see the harm you’re about to inflict on yourself and others.
Wisdom and foolishness are the two poles of Proverbs, and the dynamic between the two of them is the essence of the human moral struggle. It’s also viewed as grounded in the real, in the now, in the meat and flesh and life of creation.
In that, it bears a strange similarity to Skinner’s behaviorism. Reinforcement and aversion are, Skinner would argue, just the way the universe guides life, the way we are shaped and formed in response to our environment.
Wisdom, however, goes deeper. It looks not at the immediate gratification of reinforcement, that hit of pleasure that comes in a moment, but at the long arc of a life. It’s not about immediate mechanics, but grounded in the larger purpose of a life. That purpose is something chosen, something that requires us to step back and look more deeply at the consequences of our action and engagement.
And that’s important to keep in mind now, now in particular.
Why? Because Skinner’s behaviorism is at play in our lives like never before, in ways that are worth being aware of. How? I’d suggest that the entire business model of social media is just one giant operant conditioning chamber. It exists to mold behavior.
I say this as someone who’s been in the deep of that world for a decade. I’m in that box, but that doesn’t mean I’m unaware of it.
What is the business model of Facebook? To make you spend more time on Facebook. That’s the reason for Twitter and Snapchat and Pinterest and Instagram. I’m not sure about Google Plus. Does anyone really use Google Plus?
How does it work? You know how it works. Put up a post. People “like” it. People share it. You get followers. Your SnapChat score goes up, whatever the heck that means.
Press the button. Out comes the reward. Human beings are social creatures, and social media provides us with that little burst of seratonin we get knowing that we’ve been noticed.
That’s the whole point, and it’s why it’s so easy to fall into patterns of repetitious behavior that border on compulsion. It’s a medium that thrives on reward, that reinforces a way of living just as surely as a
But it does not, for the most part, encourage reflection. It does not call us to have a long view. It is just the moment, just the he
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment