The Ludovico technique

Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess, writes Dalrymple, was

a social and cultural prophet.

Burgess dealt also, Dalrymple notes,

with the question of the origin and nature of good and evil.

In the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, the Ludovico technique that Alex undergoes in prison as a means of turning him into a model citizen in exchange for his release is

a form of conditioning. Injected with a drug that induces nausea, Alex must watch films of the kind of violence that he committed, his head and eyelids held so that he cannot escape the images by looking away — this to the piped-in accompaniment of the classical music that he loves. Before long, such violence, either in imagery or in reality, as well as the sound of classical music, causes him nausea and vomiting even without the injection, as a conditioned response. Alex learns to turn the other cheek, as a Christian should: when he is insulted, threatened, or struck, he does not retaliate. After the treatment — at least, until he suffers his head injury — he can do no other. Two scientists, Drs. Branom and Brodsky, are in charge of the ‘treatment’.

The Minister of the Interior,

responsible for cutting crime in a society besieged by youth culture, says: ‘The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories . . . . Common criminals . . . can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.’ A criminal or violent act is no different from the act of a rat in a cage, which presses a lever to obtain a pellet of food. If you shock the rat with electricity when it presses the lever instead of rewarding it with food, it will soon cease to press the lever. Criminality can be dealt with, or ‘cured’, in the same way.

Dalrymple points out that at the time that Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange, doctors

were trying to ‘cure’ homosexuals by injecting them with apomorphine, a nausea-inducing drug, while showing them pictures of male nudes. The dominant school of psychology at the time was the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. His was a black box psychology: scientists measured stimulus and response but exhibited no interest in what happened between the two, as being immeasurable and unknowable. While Skinner might have quibbled about the details of the Ludovico technique (for example, that Alex got the injection at the wrong time in relation to the violent films that he had to watch), he would not have rejected its scientific — or rather, scientistic — philosophy.

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Skinner

sneered at the possibility that reflection upon our personal experience and on history might be a valuable source of guidance in our attempts to govern our lives. ‘What we need,’ he wrote, ‘is a technology of behaviour.’ One was at hand. ‘A technology of operant behavior is . . . already well advanced, and it may prove commensurate with our problems. Scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame [for a man’s behaviour] to the environment.’ What goes on in a man’s mind is irrelevant; mind is an ‘explanatory fiction’.

For Skinner,

being good is behaving well; and whether a man behaves well or badly depends upon the schedule of reinforcement that he has experienced, not upon anything that goes on in his mind. There is no new situation in a man’s life that requires conscious reflection if he is to resolve the dilemma or make the choices that the new situation poses, for everything is a replay of the past, generalised to meet the new situation.

The Ludovico technique

was not a far-fetched invention of Burgess’s but a simplified version — a reductio ad nauseam — of the technique for solving all human problems that the dominant school of psychology at the time suggested.

Dalrymple points out that Burgess

was a lapsed Catholic, but he remained deeply influenced by Catholic thought.

The Skinnerian view of man appalled Burgess, who

thought that a human being whose behaviour was simply the expression of conditioned responses was not fully human but an automaton. If he did the right thing merely in the way that Pavlov’s dog salivated at the sound of a bell, he could not be a good man: if all his behaviour was determined in the same way, he was hardly a man at all. A good man, in Burgess’s view, had to have the ability to do evil as well as good, an ability that he would voluntarily restrain, at whatever disadvantage to himself.

However, says Dalrymple,

being a novelist rather than an essayist, and a man of many equivocations, Burgess put these thoughts in A Clockwork Orange into the mouth of a ridiculous figure, the prison chaplain, who objects to the Ludovico technique — but not enough to resign his position, for he is eager to advance in what Alex calls ‘prison religion’. Burgess puts the defence of the traditional view of morality as requiring the exercise of free will — the view that there is no good act without the possibility of a bad one — into the mouth of a careerist.