THE SOUL OF REASON

The material presented here is taken from a working paper titled The Soul of Reason:  An Argument for a New Post-Modern Realism in Social Theory and Philosophy.  (D. H. Bowles 2020)

VIII.  ‘Counter-Culture’ Consciousness

The laboratory, of course, is where the modern story–the 20th century story– all begins, at least in a manner of speaking.  Albert Hoffman, working for the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, synthesized LSD from ergot alkaloids in 1938.  Mescaline had already been isolated and derived from peyote in 1897 and synthesized in 1918; Hoffman subsequently isolated and produced psilocybin from the psylocibe mushrooms in 1959.

Pollan recounts the mysterious career of Al Hubbard (164-85), a shadowy, legendary, almost apocryphal figure, sometimes known as “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD.”  Hubbard was reputed to have clandestine connections with the CIA; throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, he reportedly travelled the around the world with a suitcase full of vials of pure Sandoz LSD (probably equivalent to hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of effective doses), a diploma-mill Ph.D., and an investigator’s permit from the FDA, on a mission “to liberate human consciousness.” (167)  Hubbard’s philosophy, however, remained to some degree consonant with the requirement for the support of social hierarchy:  Pollan reports that Hubbard “believed in working from the top down, choosing as his subjects leading figures in business, government, the arts, religion, and technology.”  (168)

Such was certainly not the case with what eventually emerged as the two geographic poles of counter-cultural ‘consciousness’:  Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (formerly of the Harvard University Department of Psychology, 1959-63) on the east coast, and Ken Kesey, originally a literary phenomenon (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962) nurtured at Stanford University, on the west.

Leary’s ‘conversion experience’ occurred with psilocybin on a visit to Mexico in the summer of 1960.  He returned to Harvard that fall, recruited his junior colleague Richard Alpert to the cause, and launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project, selling it to the mandarins of the department as “squarely in the tradition of William James, the department’s presiding deity”[1] (Pollan, 188).   But within a couple of years, the Psilocybin Project disintegrated in a swirl of controversy related to its relatively cavalier methodological standards, and both Leary and Alpert were eventually dismissed.  Leary proceeded to become a flamboyant, counter-cultural prophet of psychedelic consciousness for the masses, but his high profile also earned him the relentless attention and harassment of the authorities and–once psychedelics were legally banned–a fair amount of prison time as well.  Alpert, in marked contrast, embarked on a spiritual odyssey to India, where he adopted the identity of an acetic yogi and devotee of an Indian spiritual teacher, eventually returning to the U.S. with a new name to match his new identity.  As Ram Dass, he wrote and published the story of his Harvard adventures with Leary and his Indian spiritual odyssey in Be Here Now (1971), which would become one of the seminal texts of the New Age spiritual movement in the U.S.

On the west coast, also in 1960, Ken Kesey volunteered for a CIA-sponsored research project on the effects of LSD, conducted at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital.  But, as Pollan points out, “with Ken Kesey, the CIA had turned on exactly the wrong guy.” (206)  Kesey went on to lead his motely band of devotees, who called themselves The Merry Pranksters, in what he called “the revolt of the guinea pigs.”  The definitive (and fascinating) story of how Kesey’s explicit, self-conscious campaign to promote the experience of psychedelically-induced altered states for the masses came to constitute the epicenter of the San Francisco counter-culture is told by Tom Wolfe (1968) in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

It’s clear enough, looking backward, that the essence, the gestalt, the zeitgeist of the 1960s counter-culture was the illicit experience of altered states of consciousness.  Direct, unmediated, uncontrolled access for the masses to the anti-hierarchical, not-self, right-brain consciousness–in a mainstream culture predicated on radical individuality–made possible by the widespread accessibility of pure, powerful, synthetic psychedelic substances was inevitably regarded with alarm as dangerous to both individuals and to society; it threatened the ‘establishment’ in intolerable ways, resulting in a predictably ferocious backlash and draconian prohibition of the offending agents.

Footnotes

[1] This, of course–as can be readily seen in the quote at the beginning of the previous section–was absolutely true.

IX.  The Renaissance

Table of Contents

Conceptual Schematic of the Argument

Abstract

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