'We are living in a material world,' or so goes Madonna's pop refrain. It would perhaps be better said that we are living in a Newtonian world. The Newtonian metaphor of a clockwork universe moved by the tug of material objects crosses over quite qell to the image of folks punching time clocks, propelled as if by the gravity of material things. Economics, marketing, and even common sense hinge on the psychic pull of objects or objectified events that when obtained relay their charms to more distant beacons, as if passing a baton to another alluring object in the material firmament.
Yet, for the preponderance of our lives, we are never at where we want to be but merely in anticipation of it. Ninety nine percent of life is spent getting there, or worse, merely waiting. Not a good prospect for a happy life if things are all we need. So we look forward to things, which suffices. We leave it to our imaginations to model the delights of the future, whether they are food, sex, power, or simply a night's slumber. Imagination renders the future and passes the time, but what if a future rendering did not delight because of what we anticipated, but how we anticipated it? That is, what if how we observe our world makes for what we value, and is truly the thing we most value?
The things we value ultimately are measured on how they delight and satisfy our senses. We denominate them into modalities of touch, sight, taste, smell, and hearing. Our appetities from food to sex are modulated by these five senses, with perhaps a nod to a sixth, drawn in hope that an unseen sense exists to give us an added intuition, psychic or not. But psychology has of recent revealed a seventh sense. It is ubiquitous, invisible, and known by a thousand names, but until now is unknown in its essense. It reflects an exquisitie sensitivity to a mere abstraction, a delight in the mere shading of information. It's the perspective that counts, as if regarding an object like a tower in Pisa as pleasurable, but only if it was tilted just so. So what is this abstraction? It is called discrepancy, a seeking response, or a unified reinforcement principle. It is at th eroot of every incentive that moves us. It is the culmination of psychology and the scientific perspective that defines it. It is the redeeming child of behaviorism.
Behaviorism? Isn't it quite dead, dying or at least derided into obscurity? Well certainly, but only if you think Humpty Dumpty was an unerring sage. As a character in 'Alice in Wonderland', Humpty was the fellow who said that things were that they were because that's what he said they were. Meaning was easy, if of course you believe that it is all relative to the lexicon of a giant talking head. In the real world, talking eggheads give us myriad definitions, all contradictory and all incomplete. But if they are perched high enough, people tend to listen, until of course the egghead falls, toppled off its ledge by the wobble of the spin it give to the words of the world. And needless to say, academic eggheads have got behaviorism wrong. .
Behaviorism is coextensive with the philosophy of science shared by the physical and biological sciences. It merely demands a uniform metaphorical language for all experience from the phenomenological to the behavioral to the cellular; a way of testing data to determine if it is true, and relatively accessible and easy ways to test that data. In other words, behaviorism is science, a true science of psychology. Now, 'thems fightin' words' to those who are brought up with the idea that cognitive, evolutionary, or analytic psychologists have actually got a handle on things, with behaviorism idling in the corner like an unloved wallflower. But they don't, and that's what I'll be attempting to demonstrate. Indeed, what behaviorism truly means and what its modern findings entail are entirely the opposite of the mechanistic Orwellian philosophy so long imprinted into the popular and academic imagination. In fact, its downright Christian, if I were to put it rather non-behavioristically. To accomplish that metaphorical 'shift' in the perspective on behaviorism is the purpose of this little book. To show that behaviorism ironically leads to Utopian futures of kindness and compassion, I will be ornery, ironic, and rude about it. And as for the essentials of behaviorism, its present and its future implications, it begins with a cat in the hat and ends with a deus ex machina, or God arriving to save us all, but riding an ungainly contraption of humanly devise. A tease of an ending for a prologue, but again, the lure of science is the tease of pending knowledge. So dear reader, bear with me, and read on.
