as caught up in phantasmal representations of both world and beyond but as spiritual animals endowed with a brain that, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, could connect to a metaphysical truth concealed by everyday neurochemistry.2
In his reverent self-experimentation with hallucinogens, Huxley believed to have found what, in his Perennial Philosophy (2004/1944), he had previously described as the transhistorical and transcultural core of all religions, the ultimate reason for human existence: firsthand knowledge of the one divine Reality underlying the phenomenal multiplicity of the world, traditionally achieved by way of strenuous and at times physically harmful spiritual exercises (from prolonged fasting to violent self-flagellation). Now this knowledge was readily and safely available to everybody through modern pharmaceuticals. In Huxley’s eyes, this religious interpretation of hallucinogen action was not at odds with scientific investigation. In fact, the claims to universality of the philosophia perennis matched the universalism of brain science. Mystics reported the same experiences across history because “we have fairly good reasons for supposing that there have been no considerable changes in the size and conformation of human brains for a good many thousands of years” (Huxley 2004/1944: 16–17). The fictive society described in Island even established a scientific discipline to study the relationship between physiology and spirituality, for which Huxley invented the word neurotheology (Huxley 1962: 94, 144; Horgan 2003: 74)—half a century after philosopher and psychologist William James used nitrous oxide to introspectively explore religious ecstasies and three decades before neurotheology came to designate the quest for the neural correlates of a universal spiritual experience by way of neuroimaging studies of meditating Buddhist monks and praying Carmelite nuns (Newberg et al. 2001; Beauregard and Paquette 2006).
As more and more people came to try out hallucinogens from the late 1950s onward, Huxley’s writings provided a vocabulary and interpretive framework shaping the drug experiences of his numerous readers in the decades to come. Understood against the background of this worldview, further elaborated by Timothy Leary and his coworkers, the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs were conceptualized as “the psychedelic experience” and soon came to inform a whole subculture known as psychedelia. In the course of the 1960s, Huxley’s Island became one of the most influential books in the so-called counterculture rebelling against the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1992/1920): a utopian blueprint for a psychedelically enlightened society (Stevens 1987: 184). Among the hippies, Island inspired experiments in living set up in opposition to the lifestyle of the “plastic people” staffing the “Establishment,” including their use of drugs to improve professional efficiency and to stabilize bourgeois family life (Miller 1991: 23–50).
Ironically, central elements of the hippies’ social critique also entered into the discourse of conservative bioethicists such as Leon Kass. Both Kass and the hippies rejected an alleged dehumanization pervading technological society in general and expressed contempt for middle-class drug use for the purpose of self-optimization. Like the youthful rebels of the sixties, the self-identified “old-fashioned humanist” defended the notion of an authentic human existence (Miller 1991: 30; Kass 2002: 3–4, 15–17). In The Making of a Counter Culture, the historian Theodore Roszak described the movement named after his book primarily as an opposition to “technocratic society” that called into question the validity of the “conventional scientific world view.”3 As a sympathetic observer, Roszak (1968: xiii) adopted this antimodern concern and predicted, “If the resistance of the counter culture fails, I think there will be nothing in store for us but what anti-utopians like Huxley and Orwell have forecast.” Likewise, Kass (2002: 29–53) identified technology as the greatest problem of modern society and warned against its dehumanizing powers, which, especially when used to intervene in the human body and mind, would make Huxley’s dystopian vision come true.
But, despite their convergent diagnoses, Kass and the flower children could not have differed more profoundly on how to prevent their debauched American society from sliding down the slippery slope toward the realization of Brave New World. While Kass (2002: 277–297) saw the solution in a restrictive biopolitics guarding the natural limits of humanness against their biotechnological transgression, many hippies put their hopes on overcoming the confines of the human mind with the help of consciousness-expanding drugs. If the spiritual is the universal part of every human being, Kass sought to protect it against external intervention, whereas the hippies had hoped to advance it through neuropsychopharmacology as spiritual technology (see Rabinow 1999: 11, 179). Unlike Kass, they did not conceive of human nature as an unchanging moral landmark but as a vast realm of unexplored potential. Even though they were against pharmacological self-optimization for the sake of the “growling machinery” of capitalism, they did not object to facilitating human flourishing with the help of drugs, as a realization of novel and more fulfilling forms of life (Miller 1991: 34–50).4
Just like the “straight” majority of white middle-class Americans, the hippies were children of the psychopharmacological revolution, which had produced not only Miltown but also LSD. They, too, believed in the power of drugs. Like their prim and proper fellow citizens, they distinguished between good drugs and bad drugs—except that they largely reversed the psychopharmacological order of things. Alcohol, legally available stimulants, and sleeping pills were conceived of as detrimental. Propagating contemplative mind expansion, the so-called heads also disapproved of heroin and stimulants (the former being popular among veterans of the fiercely rejected Vietnam War; the latter among the so-called freaks, that is, hippies more interested in hedonistic kicks than in spiritual insights). Although illegal, these despised substances allegedly only enabled their consumers to bear “cheap, neon, plastic, ugly Amerika [sic—the German spelling emphasized the fascist character attributed to the United States]” (Miller 1991: 46). The good drugs collectively referred to as “dope” comprised marijuana and psychedelics. They were meant to give rise to authenticity, human warmth, and a spiritual life. This put them at the center of a counterculture modeled on Island rather than Brave New World (Davis and Munoz 1968; Miller 1991).
This social conflict, as well as growing concerns over drug safety in general, eventually led to the prohibition of hallucinogens in the late 1960s. Legal impediments in combination with more subtle mechanisms, such as restrictions of funding or the curtailment of career advancement, created major obstacles to the scientific investigation of psychedelic drugs. By the 1970s, all hopes that research in this area would allow scientists to push “human consciousness beyond its present limitations and on towards capacities not yet realized and perhaps undreamed of” (Masters and Houston 1966: 316) were shattered. At the same time, the use of hallucinogens for model psychosis research received a second, purely scientific blow as the newly introduced dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia discredited the modeling of psychoses with a class of drugs primarily affecting the serotonergic and the glutamatergic neurotransmitter systems. Consequently, from 1970 to 1990, academic hallucinogen research broke down.
In the last decade of the twentieth century, however, a new generation of scientists reanimated the field in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, Spain, and Russia. They reinscribed their endeavors into the inherited conceptual matrix opening up between experimental psychosis and experimental mysticism. Both paradigms gained traction again as more complex neurochemical conceptions of schizophrenia emerged in the 1980s and novel neuroimaging technologies made the search for the cerebral “God spot” front-page news in popular magazines. Even though a closer historical and ethnographic look will reveal the conceptions of model psychosis research and neurotheology not to be mutually exclusive, the tension between them continued to polarize the field. It is striking, however, that all major players renounced the countercultural struggle against the Establishment. Instead they sought to integrate hallucinogenic drugs into mainstream science and society. Thereby, they constructed an intellectual and political framework for nonmedical drug use beyond both the gloomy vision of Brave New World and the conviction that a better world was only possible on a remote Island. Did these efforts help to fulfill the unrealized potential of the first episode of psychedelic science in the age of Prozac and Ritalin? Could contemporary neuropsychopharmacology refashion psychedelics into spiritual technologies fostering the good life?
