B.F. Skinner, Pro and Con

Sir: Professor B.F. Skinner [Sept. 20] has put himself on the side of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and offers us bread for our freedom. His ideas are terrifying because he has hit upon the nerve of truth; man always faces the temptation to sacrifice freedom for security. I for one will defy him and all he stands for to the end. Better death than a living death. He himself would not be tolerated in the world he conjures.

PAUL McHARNESs, O.S.B. Marvin, S. Dak.

Sir: Surely those who characterize Skinner's thesis as "philosophically distasteful and morally wrong" would have said the same about the theories of Galileo or Darwin. Just because an idea is revolutionary does not make it false. This is particularly true in science.

TIMOTHY BAL North Bergen, N.J.

Sir: Why on earth did you devote a feature story, thus lending a degree of credence, to a weirdo like B.F. Skinner?

He would have us paralyzed with conditioned minds, existing in a controlled environment that bears the most hideous aspects of Huxley's Brave New World. Skinner, presumably, would be World Controller, or at least Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, thus avoiding the consequences he would force upon the rest of us. Right now, a great many people are trying desperately in their loud or quiet, influential or meek ways to avoid exactly the kind of social-political disaster that Skinner advocates.

JAMES R. LEE San Francisco

Sir: Apparently the Freudians and the theologians have a talent for speaking about man's dignity and magnificence, which gives them an advantage over B.F. Skinner in capturing popular acceptance. But a tree is best judged by the fruit it bears. The psychoanalysts have had half a century to demonstrate the practical effectiveness of their formulations in solving human problems, and they have been dismal failures.

In the span of a few decades, Skinner's "behavioral technology" has repeatedly proved itself more fruitful than alternatives at improving the human condition. I suggest that the free-will and determinism positions be evaluated in terms of their tangible consequences.

JEFF BATH Galesburg, Ill.

Sir: B.F. Skinner is right, of course, provided that man was not created "a little less than the angels" but rather just a bit more than the insects.

FRANK G. RIVERA Los Angeles

Sir: Did your writers read Beyond Freedom and Dignity? That we "cannot afford freedom and it must be replaced with control over man" is beside the point. The message is that there is no such thing as freedom, and what we cannot afford is the continued self-delusion that it exists.

In this haphazard world we are killing ourselves and each other. It would be worth sacrificing the pleasant illusion of freedom if we could be assured that nobody would be using his "freedom" to kill other human beings who somehow couldn't manage the "freedom" to stay alive.

KAT GRIEBE Twin Oaks Community Louisa, Va.

Sir: Unfortunately many people like Theologian Rubenstein will respond in much the same manner as Galileo's contemporaries. If Rubenstein calls Professor Skinner's Utopian projection the blueprint for the theory and practice of hell, what does he consider war, poverty, racism, overpopulation and pollution to be? Heaven possibly?

It seems to me he may have his values confused! I for one would rather take a chance on Skinner's hell.

(MRS.) LESLIE GISCHEL Springfield, Ore.

Attica (Contd.)

Sir: How many more massacres like Attica must occur before reasonable Americans demand better solutions to such problems?

Massive, senseless violence on the part of our government officials at all levels is no solution to the violence of some of our citizens. Subsequent cloaking of such violence in official lies cannot be tolerated. It is time thinking Americans stop the proponents of violence whether they are convicts or prison guards. Murder, even official, will not keep America strong.

WILLIAM J. ROBERTS Kingston, Tenn.

Sir: Those men were put in prison because they were inhuman and brutal.

B.J. BEAUMONT Depew, N.Y.

Sir: It's a dirty shame that the pay is so low in the workhouse at Attica. If they get a raise, maybe I'll quit working for a bank and rob one instead.

BARBARA A. KNOWLES Edina, Minn.

Sir: Your writers show a sad lack of knowledge of black literature. The poem that you quoted in your Attica story, supposedly written by an inmate, is actually by Claude McKay, one of the first major Negro poets.

GRACE AMIGONE Buffalo

>In accepting the handwritten copy as the original work of a prisoner, TIME indeed erred badly.

Perspective on Memorials

Sir: With the ostentatious Kennedy memorial in Washington [Sept. 20] blighting the hallowed Lincoln and Jefferson monuments, let's call a halt to this pharaoh-like trend. With L.B.J.'s marble spread in Texas, and that 1,500-ft. spire Nixon is probably planning for San Clemente, this self-memorialization indulgence is an ominous one. In our democracy, historic perspective delegates memorialization to posterity, not to the whims and vanities of self-aggrandizement.

JOHN KETTLEWELL Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Sir: It is presumptuous for Leonard Bernstein to write about something he does not understand. It is irritating to one who knows and loves the Mass to have it misused and misinterpreted on such a grand and public scale. Bernstein should have given his work another name.

PAT MURPHY Evanston, Ill.

Missing Names

Sir: Reader Doris Brown's anti-Jewish distortions [Sept. 20] typify blind prejudice.

She has never heard and never will hear of a Jew desecrating a church or a private home, mugging, burning "Christian" stores, looting "Christian" property--in short, she has nothing to fear from the Jewish Defense League.

Jews are numbered quite conspicuously in science, medicine, the arts, entertainment. They are the middle-class or lower-middle-class retail merchants and manufacturers. Their names are not Morgan, Astor, Ford, Hunt, Rockefeller, Kennedy. MRS. S. SLATER Margate, N.J.

Running Mate

Sir: To prove that he meant what he said [Sept. 27], shouldn't President Nixon endorse the eminently well-qualified Senator Ed Brooke as his running mate? And what a smashing improvement he would be over the present officeholder!

ARTHUR BALLOU Lexington, Mass.

Sir: We hope and pray that Senator Brooke will not accept a place on a Nixon ticket should it be offered, since no good could come of such a trick to any underdog group in our distressed land, but only disillusionment and heartbreak.

KEN BELDIN Tenancingo, Mexico

Stick to Baseball

Sir: Isn't there a limit to American muddleheadedness on Asian policy [Sept. 27]? Your Government propped up Chiang and kept him going at a time when the decent thing would have been to accept the People's Republic of China. Now, when the need is to check China's growing influence on all countries surrounding Asia's only stable democracy, India, your Government is propping up a decaying regime in Pakistan and is getting ready to throw its own Chiang to the dragon, blaming it all on the Japanese, I suppose.

We Asians know you cannot play cricket, but Ping Pong is not your game either. Stick to baseball, Uncle Sam.

S.SIVANAYAGAM Colombo, Ceylon

Righteous Anger

Sir: Sweden's "embarrassment" over the Solzhenitsyn Nobel Prize [Sept. 13] testifies to the farcical nature of Sweden's "neutrality." One can imagine what sanctimonious rage might flow from Stockholm were the Nobel Prize awarded to, say, a Greek or Spanish writer, and his respective government responded to the honors a la the Kremlin's response to Solzhenitsyn. One hopes that, even in Sweden, enough righteous anger will be generated to force a more honest policy toward Russia's greatest living literary figure.

WILLIAM M. MARCEAU Whitesboro, N.Y.

Sir: This Solzhenitsyn, this once-in-ten-generations genius, who has suffered so much at the hands of his own government for the offense of producing masterpieces, has now suffered another humiliation, this time by the Swedish government, whose sniveling excuse is the protection of Swedish-Soviet relations.

I expect that the Swedish government's shabby treatment of a great literary figure will go unprotested by its own citizens: there is no Solzhenitsyn in Sweden. VANYA AVELINO Manila

Transamazonia

Sir: Your article "Transamazonia: The Last Frontier" [Sept. 13] might more aptly have been headed "Operation Genocide."

Faced with a famished population and refusing to adopt family planning, a government is about to take off the pressure of this seething mass by diverting it into Indian lands, these Indians to be exterminated within the next 20 to 30 years.

The U.N. will, of course, do nothing about this until the land has been cleared and turned into a desolate wasteland. Then a still famished population, with no further Indian tribal lands to occupy, will doubtless become an object of pity for the U.N., which will then be able to launch yet another Operation Begging Bowl.

K. VIGORS EARLE, M.D. Dublin

Staying Power

Sir: Facetious statements like "armadillos do have their uses: [they] are edible, and their shells can be used to make novelty items" [Sept. 13], are not worthy of your magazine. Armadillos certainly have their uses--as one of the most efficient predators of destructive insects, especially ants. Fortunately, they are hardy and adaptable animals. They were here long before man started to mess around, and they probably will stay on after the last of our species has left for the moon and beyond.

G. STUTZIN President National Committee for the Protection of Fauna and Flora Santiago, Chile

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.