BF Skinner and the Depravity of Man

When I was studying to be an English teacher at Wright State University, the work of American psychologist BF Skinner was all the rage in the Education Department, especially in the matter of classroom management. Skinner believed that human behavior is regulated by external stimuli, so much so that if you could control all the external stimuli of an organism (even an organism as complex as a human being), you could control that organism’s behavior.

Skinner believed that there is no such thing as human nature; he thought that free will is an illusion. We are blank slates, and our behavior is shaped not by inward forces but by outward stimuli.

He believed that every behavioral decision we make is ultimately a matter of creaturely self-interest. Even apparently noble motives like self-sacrificial love are motivated by crass self-regard: I am kind and patient not because kindness is morally superior to cruelty but because it makes me feel good to be kind and it makes me feel bad to be cruel.

Skinner was no theologian, and his perspective may seem cynical, but his belief that we always act in our own best interest helps explain the oft-misunderstood doctrine of the depravity of man.

When we use the word “depraved” in normal conversation, we envision the worst sorts of people, but the doctrine doesn’t propose that we are all as bad as we could possibly be. The doctrine of the depravity of man is what Skinner understood. Even when we are at our best, we are unceasingly self-absorbed.

This deep pessimism about human nature is a consistent pattern in Judeo-Christian thought.

It was hundreds of years before Christ that the Hebrew prophets saw our problem: we are not sinners because we commit sin, we sin because our hearts are warped by sinful desires. Isaiah observed that even our finest and most virtuous intentions are shot through with wickedness, and “all our righteousness is like filthy rags” (Isa 64:6).

Later, Jeremiah said that our hearts are “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jer 17:9, KJV). Our problem is not only our individual sins (our behaviors) but our sin, what the Hebrew Scripture calls iniquity, the entangling inward bent toward evil that infects every human heart.

Centuries later, in His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus astutely observed that the difference between malice and murder is a difference not in kind but in degree: the man or woman harboring malicious thoughts against another has the same heart as the murderer, regardless of whether or how he or she expresses that malice.

In the late twentieth century, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw the same corrupt dynamic in human nature. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and historian who spent years in Soviet prison camps. After seeing human behavior at its worst in the camps, he famously observed that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart.”

There is, then, in both Jewish and Christian thought a deep pessimism about human nature.

Our hearts have been deformed by sin and are therefore irredeemable. Any attempt to manage our sin by behavior modification is doomed from the start because Skinner was right: we are motivated by a deep and irreversible self-interest. All our behavior is colored by that self-interest. We are, as Paul put it, “slaves to sin.”

That profound brokenness is what theologians call our depravity.
 
Because we are depraved, we are, as Skinner observed, incapable of acting out of purely unselfish motives. Our problem is insoluble: we need some sort of outside intervention to address our fatal inward bent.

This is why we need the Gospel, the Good News about Jesus, which the late Tim Keller described so elegantly: “I was so broken that Jesus had to die for me, but He loved me so much that He was glad to die for me.”

Skinner was right: we are a race of self-absorbed creatures whose only hope lies beyond our capacities. If we ever hope to cultivate genuine virtue, we must be changed on the inside by an outside force.

In Christ we are given what Christian theology calls the “alien righteousness” of Christ, an inward quality that we could never manufacture or discover on our own. And that’s not all: once we repent and believe the Gospel, the Spirit undertakes His sanctifying work of transforming our ruined nature – our broken moral instincts – to make us more like our Savior, less self-absorbed and more compassionate.

GK Chesterton observed that the depravity of man was the one Christian doctrine abundantly confirmed by empirical evidence. And it’s not just the news cycle that testifies to our brokenness; our own hearts say it as well. We desperately need Good News.

Paul’s words to the church in Rome acknowledge our depravity and then celebrate the victory God has given us in Christ: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!“ (Rom 7:24-25).

Persevere.