“Tripping On Utopia”: A good book on mad scientists and their impact on culture

Hubris is an impressive poison, capable of making the government of the most powerful nation in the world hand over its resources to a bunch of drug addicts.

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This year, an interesting book was released: Tripping On Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, written by the American historian Benjamin Breen.

Part of the book’s charm is that Breen tries to convince us that the utopia of drugs belongs to past that is more remote than we could imagine, and that what we take for its beginning is actually its end. Before studying the subject, we tend to believe that the that enthusiasm for drugs is a thing of young people in the 60s and 70s. In reality, however, the 60s are the beginning of the end of a trip of scientists who have worked for U.S. intelligence since World War II. More specifically, of anthropologists, or, even more specifically, of Margaret Mead.

Ever since she decided to dedicate herself to the nascent science of cultural anthropology, that is, in the 1920s, Mead had the firm belief that it was up to anthropologists to rescue the knowledge accumulated by cultures on the verge of extinction. As Breen explains: “The priceless knowledge of thousands of generations, thousands of distinct cultures, was being lost, [Ruth] Benedict [, Mead’s lover and mentor] said. Entire cultures were being mowed down by the violence of colonial empires and flattened further by the homogeneity of modern life. Every day that passed was a day in which an ancient language or unique artistic tradition might disappear. Cultural anthropology was not about collecting dead relics to gather dust in museums. It was about salvaging the distilled knowledge of millions of lives—hard-won lessons that might one day help shape humanity’s collective future” (P. 28).

In this purpose, two things draw our attention: the objectivity of knowledge in cultural anthropology and its high scientific status. Nowadays, cultural anthropologists tend to throw objectivity out the window, considering that modern science is nothing but another social construction of “white” culture, with no intrinsic superiority that makes it worth more than witchcraft or meditation. In young Mead’s time, however, all cultures had discovered a facet of a real and objective truth, and that is precisely why traditional cultures had to be studied. It was necessary, for example, to go to Mexico to study the cacti used in trance rituals in order to lead science to investigate them, thus discovering the chemical compound called mescaline. The origin of the fetish for cures considered oriental or natural is this.

As for the public recognition of a cultural anthropologist as a scientist, Breen convinces us that it was much greater than we could ever imagine today: “A case could be made that with Einstein’s death in 1955, Mead became the world’s best-known living scientist. In that year (by one measure) her name appeared in print more frequently than that of any other scientist alive at the time. Among dead ones, remarkably, she was within shooting distance of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. Even science-fiction novels were not free of her. In Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), the book’s orphaned protagonist is mentored by a space anthropologist named ‘Doctor Margaret Mader’ who teaches him how to navigate the cultural shifts he faces as he skips from ship to ship, planet to planet. What drove Mead’s popularity was her ability to wed an urgent call to action—humanity needed to expand its “awareness,” its collective consciousness, in order to survive—with an implicit optimism. A young Carl Sagan was among Mead’s avid readers […], he became fascinated with the ways her work ‘gave you a view of the arbitrariness of cultural mores, cultural systems.’ Sagan was drawn to the ‘tremendous optimism’ of ‘the idea that you weren’t jostled about by the winds of the world. That you could do something’ to change the future” (p. 174).

So I think, to myself, that the abstraction that anthropologists make of culture is a double-edged sword. Because if they manage to divorce nature and nurture, either they try to deny nature completely, or they envision the possibility of discarding all pre-existing cultures to reach the only reality, which is in nature. Nowadays, the mainstream of humanities tends towards the denial of nature and the affirmation of culture as absolute, going so far as to determine that being a woman is a social construction independent of biological sex. In Mead’s day, however, it was the opposite. Culture was a kind of Maya’s veil to be uncovered so that the Real could be revealed, which would be reduced to the natural, understood as physical-chemical. The Indian ritual with the peyote cactus, for example, would be nothing more than a veil prior to the discovery of mescaline, the possession of which would increase the capabilities of the human mind. Culture would be a rainbow that leads to a very material and objective – literally, natural – pot of gold.

In this context, Carl Sagan’s optimism makes sense: it is based on amazement at science, which is capable of knowing the completeness of the real world. And Carl Sagan was a pioneer in the profession of pop prophet of scientism, a type that we saw multiply in the pandemic with the figure of the “scientific popularizer”. Sagan himself did not have important contributions to science and dedicated himself a lot to the fruitless research of extraterrestrial life, but he still used his authority as a scientist to grow in pop culture and preach the word of scientism. Mead was only a media phenomenon because, in a certain way, she embodied the spirit of her time.

In the 1920s, Mead was already a darling of the press. During World War II, Mead also became the government’s darling. In 1942, the U.S. created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA, and Mead recommended hiring her English husband, Gregory Bateson, also an anthropologist. As Breen explains, one of the organization’s passions was to discover techniques to “reprogram” Japanese and German soldiers, transforming them into U.S. agents, or forcing them to tell the truth. The aim was to obtain a truth serum, or hypnosis. For this, there was nothing like studying the artifices of other cultures.

Breen then explains that, after the end of World War II, other cultures should serve to give science the means of creating world peace; of curing, whether on a social or individual level, the causes of human bellicosity. By this time, U.S. scientists had already learned about other synthetic drugs, the most important being LSD, invented in Switzerland during the war.

It is little wonder, then, that scientists dispensed culture, and, given all this optimism, they started to carry out all types of experiments with LSD – even because they themselves were using it, becoming addicted to it and didn’t want to stop using it. In the beginning, LSD was used on guinea pigs to induce a state similar to schizophrenia and then test medicines for this illness. It was later used by scientists as a treatment for schizophrenia itself. It was in the midst of this delirium of scientists that MKUltra occurred. (Mead herself, however, did not use LSD, probably for fear of revealing, while under the influence of the drug, that she was in a lesbian relationship.) In the 1950s, LSD was an excellent therapy for middle-aged housewives who had experienced some trauma, like conservative Clare Boothe Luce. As her husband was an editor at Time, there was a lot of scientific articles about the benefits of this new substance. When the winds changed, the same Time would publish articles about the danger of drugs.

But, reading Breen’s book, we get the impression that the peak of scientists’ collective delirium was when John C. Lilly, in 1963, managed to convince NASA to finance his project that aimed to teach dolphins to speak English. In fact, he managed to train some dolphins to make some noises that he translated himself. At some point, his attempts to expand dolphins’ minds involved injections of LSD. The choice for the animal shows the dimension of faith in science: dolphins, being intelligent, were the beings most similar to the ETs that NASA expected to find. Therefore, it would be useful to train with dolphins to teach English to ETs. Still, Lilly was incredibly enthusiastic about this species, and wanted the UN to nominate a dolphin to represent the Cetacean Nation. Sagan, as expected, was very excited about Lilly’s dolphins.

The high point of “psychedelic science” would have been the Macy Conferences of the 1950s, in which Mead participated. The decline begins in the 1960s, when the FDA prohibits drugged scientists from continuing to buy LSD, and the names of some of them, such as Timothy Leary and “Ram Dass”, emerge as “spiritual” leaders after losing their jobs. It’s an ironic ending: after supporting their faith in the most radical materialism, scientists end up becoming spiritual leaders.

We finish reading, then, with the feeling that hybris is an impressive poison, capable of making the government of the most powerful nation in the world hand over its resources to a bunch of drug addicts. And I get the impression that the same fundamental mistake – namely, faith in science caused by the divorce between nature and nurture – continues to guide Western morality. After all, as Breen explains, LSD was rejected when some scientists noticed its effects on serotonin receptors, and this is the origin of the most popular antidepressants, SSRIs. The explanation for depression becomes a “chemical imbalance”, which can be cured with the regulation of serotonin. By choosing this route, the grandiloquent promises of LSD were abandoned. But everything is still resolved through a physical-chemical way. The drug utopia has a more ancient past than we imagined, but it did not end in the 70s.

Original article: “Tripping On Utopia”: A good book on mad scientists and their impact on culture — Strategic Culture (strategic-culture.su)