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Reality Engages The Banana

Michael Matthews’ analysis of language as a primary behavior in itself will serve as an illustration of the holes in rat psychology. His subject is the simple banana.⁸ Contrary to the religion of behaviorism, we don’t experience bananas as soft, yellowish, mildly fibrous sense impressions. Instead, reality engages the banana in drama: "Food!", "Good for you!", "Swallow it down or I’ll beat you into jelly!" We learn rules about bananas (Don’t rub them in the carpet), futurity (Let’s have bananas again tomorrow), and value (These damn bananas cost an arm and a leg!). And we learn these things through words.

When behaviorism pontificates that children should all "learn from experience," with the implication that books and intellectual concepts count for little, it exposes its own poverty. Behaviorism provides no way to quantify the overwhelming presence of language as the major experience of modern life for everyone, rich and poor. Behaviorism has to pretend words don’t really matter, only "behavior" (as it defines the term).

To maintain that all knowledge is exclusively sense experience is actually not to say much at all, since sense experience is continuous and unstoppable as long as we are alive. That is like saying you need to breathe to stay alive or eat to prevent hunger. Who disagrees? The fascinating aspect of this psychological shell game lies in the self-understanding of behavioral experts that they have nothing much to sell their clientele that a dog trainer wouldn’t peddle for pennies. The low instinct of this poor relative of philosophy has always been to preempt common knowledge and learning ways, translate the operations into argot, process them into an institutional form, then find customers to buy the result.

There is no purpose down deep in any of these empty-child systems except the jigsaw puzzle addict’s purpose of making every piece FIT. Why don’t children learn to read in schools? Because it doesn’t matter in a behavioral universe. This goes far beyond a contest of many methods; it’s a contest of perspectives. Why should they read? We have too many smart people as it is. Only a few have any work worth doing. Only the logic of machinery and systems protects your girl and boy when you send them off to behavioral laboratories on the yellow behaviorist bus. Should systems care? They aren’t Mom and Dad, you know.

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