Obligations of Antigone

When a law says you'll die, but you still can't comply, That's Humanity!

Antigone owed her brothers decent funeral rites due to blood and custom; without the ritual, their spirits would forever roam the land and never cross to the afterworld.

Illustration by Bianca Stone from Anne Carson’s Antigonick

But she owed the kingdom allegiance to its laws, one of which was a decree that made burying her brother Polyneices, the brother who took up arms against Thebes, a crime — and so when she did her family duty and performed those honors, she also betrayed the kingdom, and for that, she had to die.

The GREATEST version of Sophocles’ play is Antigonick, Anne Carson’s translation in the hardcover illustrated by Bianca Stone. It’s out of print, but it’s worth hunting for a used copy. The hand-written text and the Stone’s illustrations make this particular edition a full multifaceted reading experience, comparable to seeing the play in performance. Anne Carson’s translation could not be more ALIVE.

I’m thinking about Antigone because I’m teaching (and therefore re-reading) BF Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia Walden Two, which describes a world in which people are blissfully unbothered by such problems because their environment has been planned and designed according to a single consistent worldview so that desired behavior and expected behavior are one.

It’s a world of positively-reinforcing nudges, social currents directed by carefully placed sluices and fish-ladders, encouraging everyone to flow in the direction of harmony, but also training them to nudge others towards harmoniousness too. In this world, it’s not enough for me to be content; I must behave. And I must also behave in a way that influences you to behave in a way that will influence others to behave.

Skinner’s Walden Two is like a perpetual-motion machine in which careful planning crafts people into Very Happy Cogs who unwittingly reinforce the good in their fellows and help extinguish the bad.

A good example of this in more popular fiction would be the futuristic world of Demolition Man (1993); a good example from real life would include the crowd-engineering of Disney World. But those examples only stand out because they are distinct enough from our daily experience. What about the examples closer to our skin? In our habits? In our homes?

In Skinner’s imagined Utopia, Antigone’s pickle is unthinkable. No one would face two conflicting value systems drawing their behavior in two different directions — they’d face no value systems at all, and no choices of consequential action. They may have to choose between tea and coffee, but if the choice actually matters, there will be a clear path beaten for all the human “parts” in the direction most suitable for the community “whole.”

And this might be the most upsetting part of Skinner’s dream, because there’s a reason stories like Antigone’s can resonate for thousands of years among readers who never have to bury a brother against the dictates of the state. No human wants to be caught in Antigone’s dilemma, but all humans recognize that dilemmas like hers are the potential cost of being human — of having overlapping loyalties, contrary connections, bonds with one who hates another whom you have a bond with too.

Skinner’s dream for mankind is that we give up the part of ourselves such stories speak to by resigning from the drama of our lives and conspiring among our fellows to eliminate the plot. Since one rogue (or bored) actor could ruin everything, we’ll need quite a stern director and a very distracting script.

You would be like the “innies” in Severance, who may not know much about the world above the endless blank-white walls of their rat-maze dungeon, but they do know they have a (mysterious and important) job to do, and they know that if they do their jobs they get rewards, avoid punishment, and maybe feel the glow of purpose.

In response to a story like Severance, or Antigone, Skinner thinks we should (at most) be puzzled — but not overly so. We should brush it off as something silly and strange and think of it no more as we go on about our more productive business.

In his novel Skinner wrote several examples of “blissfully ignorant” Walden Two inhabitants laughing merrily as they failed to comprehend some unpleasantness of the outside world. Several times it’s a helpful Mrs. Meyerson who can’t follow conversations about the world she lives in:

“Fraze!” said Mrs. Meyerson, her voice pitched very high. ‘What on earth are you saying?”
“Simply that we’re no freer of economic law than the magician’s lovely assistant is free of the law of gravitation. But we enjoy seeming to be free. Leisure’s our levitation.”
“Oh, you are beyond me,” said Mrs. Meyerson with a musical laugh. She started to move away. “Coming, Fraze?”

In a later chapter we meet another woman whose concept of jealousy had been extinguished after her parents brought her to Walden Two as a child:

“What do you do about the green-eyed monster?”
Mrs. Nash was puzzled.
“Jealousy. Envy,” Castle elaborated. “Don’t the children who stay home ever feel unhappy about it?”
“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Nash.
“And I hope you won’t try,” said Frazier, with a smile. “I’m afraid we must be moving along.”

How nice it would be, to never be bothered by jealousy, to never be caught between admiring what another has attained and wishing you had it for yourself. On the other hand, Mrs. Nash and Mrs. Meyerson seem to us like little fools in little glass bottles: undignified and unfree.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity was of course Skinner’s “nonfiction version of Walden Two” — that’s how it’s described in its pre-publication September 1971 TIME Magazine cover story, anyway — and that book argues that we are all little fools in little glass bottles and we should shake off any illusions of being dignified or free.

In teaching AI in Fiction, I have encountered many students who have fully accepted this view. Every semester I meet lovely, intelligent young people who tell me that free will is an illusion, and that humans are “meat machines.” I don’t argue with them, because I’m not sure that they’re wrong, but I do want to interrogate the idea.

Skinner would say, “humanity will be better off” without conflicting directives, but to many of us, navigating various values in tension is the defining experience of being human. Can I recognize a population of humans for whom jealousy is meaningless, metaphors are “beyond them,” and Antigone is a pigeon in a poorly crafted bottle? Can I connect with them? What can they mean to me?

Joseph Henrich’s W.E.I.R.D.est People in the World explains how what is considered acceptable behavior among most humans is very distinct from what is considered acceptable within the “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” sphere.

One of the strange things he describes is how W.E.I.R.D. people will very often enforce the impersonal rules of a society, even at cost to themselves — meaning both financial cost and physical danger. This is not something normal people tend to do. Normal people only put themselves out for close relatives and reciprocating friends, or for clear material gain. But if you are breaking rules — even committing a crime! — a normal person stays out of it, unless you are directly harming them.

Thinking about how “weird” W.E.I.R.D. people are helps us realize that we “W.E.I.R.D.-o’s” do already live in a kind of “Walden Two,” a village paved with paths of least resistance and variably reinforcing prizes. We have been trained to help nudge others off the grass and onto the path, scold their mess-making and hush their too-loud parties. I’ve known people who will pull in front of speeders in traffic and slow themselves to exactly the speed-limit, forcing others to comply with the posted law — this is a remarkable choice that incurs great risk of injury and even death.

But the fact is, from the W.E.I.R.D. (and somewhat Walden-Two-y) point of view, others’ behavior is our concern. If we want to live in a society where everyone plays by the rules — which we have deemed a benefit to all of us — then all of us have to pitch in to enforce those rules, through social nudges, if not police action.

One of my students proposed as a thought experiment, “what if there was a real Walden Two right here in town…” he concluded we’d think they were all weird and want nothing to do with them. Well, I suggested, what if the people down the road see our university as a kind of ‘Walden Two’? A university is a strange world of weird customs to the uninitiated, a behavior-reinforcing prizeoreum that people contort themselves to get into, and, once admitted, allow themselves to be shaped by the culture there. They dress certain ways, follow strange rules, participate in bizarre rituals, all while giving over huge sums of money to the institution in return for a four-year experience, and, if they comply with all that’s asked of them, “good marks.”

To someone who is not acculturated to university life, this might seem very strange indeed — even “cult-like.” They might “think we’re weird” and “want nothing to do with us.” And in fact, that’s what you see in many neighborhoods that host a university — the university is regarded as “weird” and “apart.” The people in the university want to reach out to the neighborhood and have good relations, but the neighborhood people can only go so far, because the university is full of weirdos.

It’s then I started thinking back on Henrich’s book: how all of “Western” (WEIRD) culture is really one big “Walden Two” of codes and rules and nudges and rewards. Skinner wanted to perfect the system, but he was working with a system that already existed. He also wanted to extinguish the last vestiges of the “normal” human system.

And that part might be more disturbing than the cultivation of more sophisticated social controls. Because if we live with one foot in and one foot out of an impersonal social reinforcement machine — and with the other foot planted in self-interested tribalism, interpersonal complexity, and an attitude that goes beyond “live and let live” straight on into “let them go to Hell if they want to” — then what happens in that impersonal circle is a subject for detached public discussion and debate, and perhaps there are many better ways to organize these realms of life.

But what happens outside of that impersonal circle, what happens in the freer wilds of our not-quite-un-social and not-quite-anti-social, but differently-social, inter-personal, more-human and less-trained selves — in our secret and private spaces, in our intimate and un-shared relationships, in the times and places where we forget the big society-wide rules in favor of family and close accomplices? These parts of us are not up for detached public discussion. And perhaps that is why BF Skinner wanted to utterly destroy those realms.

Skinner’s only really scandalous chapters in Walden Two are those that address the raising of children in laboratories, kept in aquarium-like boxes and subjected to endless (benevolent!) experimentation and training. To accomplish this, in Skinner’s fantasy, parents married but lived apart, and visited their children in the lab from time to time. In this vision, the community is the “family” of the child, of all children, and all adults are as good a role model as any other. (Mrs. Meyerson’s son calls her “Rachel” like anyone else.) And Skinner describes a program that eliminates formal schooling, but this is so that all of life can be shaped by consciously-manipulated contingencies, training individuals into group-serving compliance.

In other words, the children never go home from school. If they came “home” from their training this would “confuse” them; they would develop family loyalties, learn family customs, and those might be contrary to their training. And so the experimental test subjects must never leave the box; instead the box must expand to take the place of the world.

To Skinner, these two things — improving public social life and eliminating the private interpersonal one — were the same program: use detached rationality and a scientific, experimental method to improve behavior in the public sphere by eliminating the place where everyone’s planted their second foot.

Of course people in Walden Two have as much privacy as they want: plenty of time alone for rest and thought and self-care. And they have all the public life they want: time in society, playing music or dancing or creating meals.

But they have no interpersonal alliances at all. Their children call them by their first names. Their spouses are friends they had kids with. There is no us vs. the world.

And I suppose that’s the point, isn’t it? To create a society whose members never fracture and align, even with their own families. This is the thing that creates the harmony, and yet this is also the thing that’s monstrous.

Skinner’s greatest lie was that the training was happening anyway, that we are not and were never free, and that all he wanted to do was make our programming more reasonable and beneficial. But he wanted to make our programming more consistent by eliminating one entire realm of “training” — the normal, human one — in favor of the other — the W.E.I.R.D. one.

We have always faced choices — painful choices — because we move (freely?) between at least two realms of human society: one where are expected to follow the im-personal rules of the established order, and another where we navigate complex networks of inter-personal allegiances. What we call “dignity” is facing and owning the consequences of these hard choices: Antigone argues her position, but then she accepts her punishment. In Severance, Mark S. is at his best when he’s insisting on being the one to go to the “break room” (where they break you), rather than someone else; and the severed employees, the “innies,” attain dignity, if not their freedom, when they conspire together against their handlers.

At bottom, Skinner’s world-view is an elitist perspective in which some people are better than others. Skinner’s “planners” and “managers” certainly know that they are extinguishing jealousy, even if Mrs. Nash is confused by the word.

I don’t think it’s random that Skinner shows us only women in this “confused” position. Because readers, especially male readers, have traditionally identified with male characters and viewed female characters as objects, it would be easier for him and his readers to accept the “people are programmed meat machines” paradigm if we never actually see a MAN deprived of his freedom and dignity and made to look like a bird-brain in a box. Instead, the readers see themselves as the aware-and-in-on-it planners and managers, and others as the un-free meat machines living in “blissful ignorance.”

What we have to ask ourselves is what happens to people — not others, but us — who are cut off from the human part of themselves, who have only solitude and society, but no interpersonal alliances and conspiracies. I suspect they descend into deep depression and profound anxiety. I suspect there is a devastating consequence for this choice, of giving up the entire human world in favor of the WEIRD one; just as there would be devastating consequences for giving up the WEIRD impersonal protections of politeness and the Rule of Law in favor of human tribalism and selfish indulgence.