So now we have a young man swept up in the ‘counterculture’ fashionable during 60s and 70s. What were the circumstances that allowed such a rich alternative to flourish? First, the economic post war boom provided plenty of unskilled jobs whose wages were protected by strong unions, secure professional positions and consequently a solid tax base for governments. It’s worth noting this boom was partly based on the actual manufacture of products as opposed to the explosion in financial services today which benefit a few. Second, there was bipartisan support for Keynesian welfare state with free tertiary education. So, the establishment had secured for the youth of the day not only freedom from totalitarianism but also protections from the vicissitudes of the business cycle and the opportunities to prosper. Instead of being grateful they had the temerity to march against the continuing fight for freedom and the American Way in Vietnam. These two socio-economic components allowed middle class youth to indulge in a virulent critique of mainstream politics and culture. Also, as Ian Shapiro pointed out in one of his lectures on The Moral Foundations of Politics at Yale, the welfare state is capitalists’ best friend because it makes sure workers have a stake in the existing order, so they will never reach the stage of having nothing to lose but their chains. Continental European Marxists opposed piecemeal welfare measures as likely to dilute worker militancy without changing anything fundamental about the distribution of wealth and power. It was only after World War II, when they abandoned Marxism (in 1959 in West Germany, for example), that continental European socialist parties and unions fully accepted the welfare state as their ultimate goal. (Robert Paxton reviewing a book on Vichey France in NYT book review)
The strand of zeitgeist that caught my imagination didn’t pop out of nowhere; it had been percolating throughout the 1950s. That strand had two components, both of which originated in America: the quest for a mystical core outside religion and the use of LSD to facilitate a profound spiritual experience. Scientism and a dead God might have propelled the Western zeitgeist of the late 19th century through to the 1930s but by the 1940s the Vedanta Society had become a popular movement concerned with Hinduism and mysticism in the US. Furthermore, A.N. Whitehead, a well-respected mathematician and philosopher, gave spirituality or god-without-religion academic heft by concentrating on a metaphysics, which re-evaluated religion as a means to relating the individual to the universe.
The second component grew out of collaboration between Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. The focus of their collaboration was use of LSD to achieve a spiritual experience. Leary enthusiastically endorsed Huxley’s famous account of a mescaline trip in 1954, the Doors of Perception, in 1960. Ironically it was the very establishment CIA and the military that were conducting LSD experiments as a truth serum in the 1950s. LSD at the time was legal and was also being used by psychologists to cure alcoholism. A drug they shared in common with Beat writers like Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac whose books were mandatory reading for me. As an illustration of just how accepted the drug was, the pillar of academia, Harvard, embraced the use of LSD for spiritual research purposes in its 1962 Good Friday Experiment, which aimed to find out if drugs could achieve a transcendent experience. Half of a group of students were given LSD and the other half a placebo in a basement chapel with the live audio of a Good Friday service piped down to them. The conclusions seem pretty obvious to me. Namely, given that all participants were divinity students and the experiment was conducted on a very religiously important day they are all likely to experience some level of connection to the transcendental and those that took the psilocybin are likely to attach a mystical interpretation to the very real alterations buzzing around their perceptual field. One of the organizers and participants of the experiment was Huston Smith who was very influential in America’s quest for a breakthrough in consciousness. Although Smith achieved a powerful mystical experience, he was sceptical of Westerners popping a pill to gain enlightenment.
Then, to further authenticate the nexus between drugs and Eastern religion, Leary and Richard Alpert wrote the Psychedelic Experience in 1964, which used the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a guidebook for an LSD trip. This book was another of the counter cultural canon I eagerly devoured. Not as early as 1964 though, I would have waited until the Beatles had bestowed their imprimatur by going to India in 1968. In that same year Carlos Castaneda tapped into indigenous Mexican shamanism to advocate the use of Peyote as a key to unlock another perceptual door in his 1968 book The Teachings of Don Juan. It was also widely read by me and my peers. One other book that critiqued Western society’s ego-bound, ecology destroying trajectory offered an amalgam of Zen Buddhism with psychedelic drugs to remedy said trajectory, was The Joyous Cosmology published in 1962 by Alan Watts. Identifying the ‘delusion of ego-alienation’ or recognizing the domination of the ‘cognitive experience’ may have been Watts’s professed intention, but for me the book provided yet another pathway to interiority which ultimately lead to a totally inadequate relationship with the need to earn a living in the exterior world.
This one was influenced by Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds, 1998. I was teaching popular culture for HSC students at the time.
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