The Limits of Psychedelia - The Non-Revolution of the Leary Set

Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties (2009)

Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner Interviewed and Edited By Gary Bravo 

The ghost at the centre of this invaluable testimony about the early days of consciousness studies surrounding drugs that alter mental states is, of course, the late Dr. Timothy Leary. This is the well edited transcript of a conversation, mediated by Gary Bravo, between Leary's two main associates in the experimentation that took place, first at Harvard, then at various experimental locations and finally at the Millbrook Commune, between 1960 and 1966 - Richard Alpert (here in his later ego as Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner.

Both Dass and Metzner moved on from psychedelic studies to Eastern Tradition spiritual and West Coast consciousness studies respectively, while Leary became part of something that might be called part cultural phenomenon and part resistance movement against authority that has overshadowed the scientific, intellectual and finally artistic work that took place in those critical years. The interviews are also interspersed with contributions from other, less central but still important figures involved in this period, including a strong contribution from a number of women involved in the experiments and the commune.

There are also facsimiles of key documents and leaflets and a generous supply of photographs in a well designed and attractive book from Synergetic Press. It is highly recommended to those interested in the origins of modern radical consciousness studies and of North American culture. Why this book is so useful is that it moves the centre of our attention away from Leary as icon and cultural guru, a frenetic ambiguous character whose judgement was often poor but who was clearly an important figure in the transformation of Western culture in the 1960s.

Instead it gives us a more rounded picture that starts with a group of young middle class nerdish Harvard academics - straight out of Big Bang Theory – and watches them change as they come across the standard problem of peers and superiors failing to ‘get’ their paradigm, so they go out on a limb and do their own thing. They were moving into territory - consciousness studies – that threatened to undermine both of the prevailing controlling psychological paradigms of the day: psychoanalysis (which plays no role in this story) and behaviourism.

Leary never quite abandoned his behavioural mentality during this period. A common thread and ambiguity is the degree to which Leary and his team struggle with the controlling, experimental instincts of science and the liberatory anarchic aspects of the experience. Often this would appear to have degenerated in the later stages into games-playing (the best example of this has nothing to do with Leary but represents Ram Dass’ connection with the equally charismatic and manipulative R. D . Laing in Scotland), into ‘mind-fucks’ and into experimentation for experimentation’s sake.

The degeneration was logical when such people were effectively not given the chance to challenge prevailing paradigms within the existing system yet themselves had been raised within the prevailing paradigm’s neurotic demands for order and logic. Ram Dass’ own secretive (at the time) homosexuality is not analysed within the text yet it is clear that psychic liberation under the influence of drugs was often more illusory than real or else he might have behaved differently himself. This more negative conclusion is arrived by implication by the two protagonists themselves towards the end but is perhaps a theme throughout the book.

Everything happens within a bare six years and none of the protagonists were mature enough (as they seem to recognize later) to understand how they should deal with establishment rejection and then its overt and aggressive hostility, while a wider revolution, of which they were part, unfolded around them. In short, they were young and confused. In retrospect, not only were they hobbled by the behaviourist and analytical mentality within which they conducted their initial experiments but by the lack of any political or social scientific component to their work.

There was no real understanding of the structures of power (they would have benefited from the cynicism and nihilism of the Foucauldians at this point) nor of what would happen when ‘closed system’ ideas reached out to the masses. The ‘games theory’ aspect of their work did not help them understand that they were children playing in an adult’s world.

There is a class element in this. These were broadly middle class elite kids whose links to the less well off were either as subjects (in prisons or as patients) or as marginal figures dealing in drugs or bumming around happily enough in the New York world as musicians and artists. Ram Dass was of wealthy background while Millbrook was a large house and estate that was granted by admirers for a dollar a year. Leary and the others faced off the establishment on credit and what amounted to cultural busking. This attitude to money is important because it helps to link the attitude of the ‘me’ generation to their eventual nemesis in the credit crunch of 2008.

They discovered credit cards and patrons – no working class or hard-working middle class family could live like that easily in the 1960s. Dass simply told his colleagues (page 120): “oh, you just use credit cards and you just pay a little bit every month … It opened a whole world of possibilities that had never occurred to me (he adds).” From easy grants within a mothering university system (that ultimately owed its scale to the patronage of State and finance capital), the team moved from serious investigation of consciousness to an experiential approach that was still within the bounds of learning (which is where the paradigm should really have challenged the official system).

But from there, the story degenerates into a briefly tedious soap opera involving beautiful models and the New York scene through to a last phase where the academics became, in effect, entertainers on a hand-to-mouth artistic-cultural ‘wannabe’ circuit, eventually breaking up and taking their separate routes like a rock band that had spent too much time together on the road. Meanwhile, what became a somewhat hapless crew were being besieged from the Right by an increasingly dark and nasty authoritarian State (which is largely off-stage in this story except when it actively intervenes with a bit of thuggery and skull-duggery) and from the ‘Left’ by the populist approach to ‘acid’ of Ken Kesey and his anarcho-libertarian Pranksters.

Everyone then gets seduced by this huge cultural phenomenon we now call ‘the Sixties’. We are by now a long way from the serious academic and quasi-spiritual (and rather conservative) model of informed intellectuals exploring consciousness studies and using it to expand traditional freedoms against the State and mass society, the approach that we see in the earnest Aldous Huxley. Within six years, serious studies had imploded and a new form of counter-cultural mass society took on the mass of the population (which remained conservative about sexuality, consciousness and authority) in a straight fight and lost. They should have spent more time with Sun Tzu and less with Buddha.

Liberals castigate themselves for Altamont and Manson but this misses the point. The shattering naivete was not only about human nature which many still do not ‘get’ (the problem that a psychopath on drugs remains a psychopath but with heightened awareness) but the fact that consciousness studies brought nothing to the party for people struggling to build a material life, working very long hours and trying to hold their families together.

The net result was a lot of entertaining stuff and major cultural change as the masses, business and authority adapted to the desires unleashed by the 1960s but we still have an expensive, vicious and counter-productive war on drugs, serious research on psychedelics has only been permitted again this century and there has been no effective change in the actual structures of power within the US. Indeed, the mass of the population continues to get poorer while the economy apparently grows.

This may seem like a curmudgeonly view of the Harvard team. It is unfair to criticise politically naïve young people for not having a command of their situation under the conditions of the time. Blame should perhaps be more appropriately attached to the provocations of the Pranksters. But far more good than bad was done by opening up consciousness studies despite the new age nonsense, the blocking of research by repression, the political and economic failures, the Mansons, ‘bad trips’ and bad art.

Given the original asinine decision of Harvard (which must count as a perfect example of the very clever not being very wise) to work against the new research, the team had the courage to keep going and provide a massive amount of material, much of it perhaps negative but still useful, about psychedelics and their uses. They were also an ‘iconic’ example of the will to freedom and, for that, we must be truly grateful. By doing this, they made sure that the authorities had to take note of a genie that had been let out of the bottle.

The self-defeating response of the Establishment is now coming home to roost as drug culture has degenerated (as did alcohol production under prohibition) into the creation not of a merely cultural force that challenged the State but something far more serious – a physical criminal force with large accumulations of capital and the willingness to use guns and terror to extend its empire.  We see the state of Mexico today and in it maybe we see the state of a depressed America tomorrow – and all because small-minded frightened conservative ideologues could not keep scientific experimentation and the desire of the human spirit to discover new things within their capitalist fold.

There are also useful descriptions in this book of the experience of taking psychedelics though. Beautiful and consciousness-changing as they were 'at the moment', what also comes across is that they change much less than has been claimed by many. These are very limited tools, way stations in personal development perhaps or of use in extreme situations (as Huxley took LSD in his dying moments). Similarly, this was not a particularly intellectually broad community. Their limitations have perhaps guided the subsequent community of followers down some very limited paths. These were scientists and perhaps artists but they were not intellectuals within their own tradition. This alone meant that they had difficulty communicating with the mainstream in the West.

The texts on which their creative work was based seemed to be limited to those of the Eastern Traditions (based on the initial central role of the Tibetan Book of the Dead) and to Hermann Hesse (whose Glass Bead Game was seen to approximate the personal development journey of the psychedelic adept). There is little engagement with public intellectuals in science or public policy or continental philosophy or debate with the religious West or the conservative mythographers. Given the rich intellectual heritage offered via Huxley and the chance to challenge psychoanalysis on its own ground, the palette for Millbrook appears to have been strangely circumscribed, salted with the occasional enthusiasm for some guru or other.

All in all, this book is highly recommended . Almost every page has some insight into the relationship between freedom, politics, religion, sexuality and science in the period – a world half way between the world of ‘Mad Men’ and the political turmoil in the years before Jimmy Carter took the American throne.  But where next? A full economic cycle has passed since then. The experiments started a full fifty years ago. We know that the war on drugs has failed and the population of the US is no longer fully conservative – if not a majority, a very very large minority are social libertarian. Young scientists no longer consider experimentation in altered states to be career-ending and most don’t care any way.

The authorities, if not in America then in the UK, are now beginning tentatively to be interested in applications as part of a much wider interest in understanding consciousness and decision-making, if for possibly their own manipulative reasons. The internet now spreads radical ideas even if the law stops the easy spread of the drugs themselves although it seems unable to halt the spread of heroin from Afghanistan or cocaine from South America.  Leary, Watts, McKenna, Anton Wilson, Crowley are just some of the radical libertarians now easily accessible on the internet. Some new compact is in the air – perhaps in Europe before America and despite being held back by American official protests.

Perhaps we will see the eventual slow decriminalisation of drugs (after the successful experiment in Portugal) to enable mind-altering substances to be integrated into the State system in order to provide revenue and concentrate resources on protecting the vulnerable. A situation where 13 year olds are being supplied heroin in a small English town like ours indicates just how out of control things are. From this point, serious research can start again, research that can set the social conditions of use that return to Leary’s original insight (which was lost under the pressure of history) that psychedelic use as therapy or personal development requires careful assessment and management of ‘set’ (the needs and personality of the individual) and ‘setting’ (the conditions of use).

Once regulated to ensure responsible use, society might integrate psychedelics into healing, pain control, psychotherapy under trained specialists – much as Ayahuasca and Peyote are used in a religious setting.  We are still a long way from such a wise and common sense approach (I write as someone with little or no interest in taking psychedelics myself), one which starts to treat altered states as normal and even vital for some (vert few probably) but which equally treats them seriously as a social and healthcare phenomenon with potential harms. Within a generation, society might then come to be more at one with itself even if, on balance, very few will be changed as radically as the gurus of psychedelia might claim. The necessary changes to the power structures in society which the narcissistic generation of the sixties evaded and avoided, however, will require something a bit harder than losing yourself to the flow …