Here and There and Back Again

by Denis Larrivee

Nostalgic recollections from 1960’s communal utopias often focus on the iconic imagery of peace symbols and hippie lovefests meant, thereby, to illustrate a liberating eruption in a social fabric closed to the personal and unitive. Communal utopias, in the vision of hippie philosopher Steve Gaskin, offered an ideal of ‘absolute’ love, responsibility, and community where dropping out became a distinctively anti-modern impulse meant to embrace higher levels of existential fraternity. Reactions against modernist constraints focused on the ossified forms of hierarchical institutionalism and materialist consumerism that, it was claimed, deadened intuited needs for liberating wholeness. Writing in 1966, Alan Ginsberg lamented in his ‘Public Solitude’ the building of a technological tower of Babel that stifled the lived and experienced Spirit, creating a mental slavery to a material universe. Ginsberg and the anti-culture proposed, instead, an already sensed communal essence that would restore a grounding altruism and breach the constraints of an impersonal and rationalist science. Against this backdrop, use of psychedelics merely opened ‘doors’ breaking down barriers to liminal consciousness and unitive togetherness that forged the commune and retrieved the spirits of its ‘transcendental predecessors’, wraiths of Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau.

Albert Hofmann, father of the discovery and a proponent of the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), however, situated what was more widely perceived as a drug and social dystopia to a psychotherapeutic and empirical level, where an intended medical product had been pirated to further a counterfeit social, cultural, and spiritual ‘infinity’. For Hofmann, the cavalier use of the psychedelic ‘shifted the focus from what should have been the essential issue.’ In his view, LSD apostles like Timothy Leary had propagated its use among juveniles overlooking and dismissing the patent and potentially lethal consequences of unrestrained consumption, subverting its otherwise potentially beneficial and scientific application for cognitive health. In fact, use of psychedelics voided, in the opinion of a number of cognoscenti, the very altruism the anti-culture intended to promote on grounds that intentional acts were set aside for an emotionally forged kubbitz.

Hofmann’s late retelling at the onset of the millennium, of the inversion of psychedelic retooling to cultural and hedonistic ends in the 60’s, appears to have itself been the stimulus for a recent antimodern defense of 60’s motivation hidden by the conflicting passions of an earlier era. In a recent article of the Journal of the Preternatural, Morgan Shipley, professor at Pennsylvania State University, claims that in the mire of the then rationalist and acrimonious debate – and not disfigured by the narcissistic and the self-indulgent – lay an apparently bona fide spiritual impulse among the truly initiate for a higher existence. What counted, and counts still, according to Shipley, was not the intercessory modality activated by theistic programs, but the revelatory character of a shared experience of ‘perennial truths’, serviced by Eastern meditative enlightenment. Coming more than 50 years after Leary’s brazen and heedless indoctrination of youthful adulants Shipley’s article has the tone of a panegyric, meant more to grace historical coffers of the disaffected rather than inspire and impel a following. Burdell Mansion, one of the last communes, closed its doors back in the 70's, and there has been little social clamor to revivify the listless Spirit since. After all, even the perennial truths of Eastern mindfulness that lay beyond psychedelic doors have been tamed to a neuroscientific ordering in an all pervasive neutral monism.

What seems odd about Shipley’s article is not the sort of vapid adulation that marks sentimental recollections of more imagined and pristine origins, that on the surface impelled communal idealization, but apparently the instigation by the scientific and sanitized, iconic, LSD retelling that charged the anti-culture with a value-less transference of a valued, empiricist program of -- in its revised retelling -- a value-neutral, value shorn, materialist order. Odd the resurfacing of action and reaction, framed by traditional passions and arguments. Why the need? Why the cycle?

Similar play and counterplay seems also to have marked the raison d’etre for the prolific output of one of the 20th century’s intellectual elites, Aldous Huxley, who, incidentally, seems to have himself been the inspiration for several expressed modes of psychedelic culture a mere decade or two in advance of its full flowering. Huxley, perhaps moreso than his English literary and socialist confreres, and perhaps even more than the technocratically vaccinated communal membership, emerged from an intensely personal, familial, and intellectually entitled scientific gentry. His grandfather, Darwin’s bulldog, proselytized the positivist bible chastening Anglican clergymen with accounts of their simian forebears and creating a nouvelle English aristocracy to challenge the revelation elites.

Provocation by such intense, impersonalist, and value-neutral anti-faith, strewn amidst Johanine insights, seems to have created a lifelong obsession for a realist account of that otherwise oxymoronic, a personalist monism. Beginning in the 1920’s and traversing uncharted sequelae of Brave New World, forging lagoons universally titled to a faithful and literalist  agnosticism, he tacked a metaphysical course from shore to sea and back again. At bottom, but amplified in successive rovings, appears a quintessentially English, youthful chapel experience, exposing the midlevel, patent logical contrary between his family’s professed materialist origins and a rational but personalist order. Speaking in the late 1950’s, and about a decade following publication of The Perennial Philosophy, when he had tacked well beyond Eastern Shangri-las, Huxley made his overarching metaphysical proclamation “The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to nature, and to our fellow man.”

Strikingly, perhaps, Huxley’s proclamation barely percolated into the social eruption that emerged from the culture’s metaphysical fissure not a decade later, that instead motored the more explicit but by then trail blazed roadways yearned for in recent nostalgias. With luminous reflectors along transcendental roadways, metaphysical superficialities seem to have charted a mind numbing, low-resistance route, cycling over and on... Comte, for all his positivist pandering, appears himself to have fallen into the cycle, becoming high priest not only for empiricist minions, but for a personalist and doleful eulogizing of his wife’s passing, from hers to his own.

So where the cycle's beginning? Comte’s rabid pursuit of terre nouvelle and the usual French penchant for the avant garde in philosophy, and much thinking elsewhere, highlights a festering and bard-like image that stirring the pot more than likely was connived in a Parisian fetish. Theologian Jean Luc Marion, for one, no stranger to French luminary innovations, credits that oft-cited, oft-maligned, but never wearied metaphysical entrepreneur Descartes for having taken a Ferrari style, Greek/Italian synthesis and abstracting out an ‘ego cogitans’ from its material shadow. Hence, since, the yin and the yang Nietzsche felt so beholden to; so also our dystopic utopias; so also our technocratic Babels.

And stopping? By petulant yearning over a substance free, relational metaphysic? By alchemies of nature that make marvels of material form, but pluck the heart out of meaning? By, perhaps, an intrepid English dinghy quietly toiling toward safer shores?