Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
it came to designate the singular historical breaks that have come to serve as the hallmark of modernity (Leary 1965: 84–89; Koselleck 2004: 46).
Despite this neurotheological agitation, Leary’s agenda was ostensibly apolitical. He followed the worldview underlying Huxley’s Island that all evils were the product of imperfect social relations and not of human nature. Leary’s anthropological optimism was—like Huxley’s—religious, not political, assuming that even within a bad society happiness was possible by turning inward and seeking mystical revelations (Meckier 1978). “The choice is between being rebellious and being religious,” Leary declared (quoted in Greenfield 2006: 303). “Don’t vote. Don’t politic. Don’t petition. You can’t do anything about America politically” (Leary 1965: 6). He was convinced that militant opposition as practiced by student activists (whom he mocked as “young men with menopausal minds”) (quoted in Greenfield 2006: 303) only led to further subjection to the alienating and oppressive “games” of society. He told an audience in San Francisco, “My advice to people in America today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out” (Leary 1965: 133). And taking LSD—short for “Let the State Disintegrate!” (quoted in Greenfield 2006: 303)—appeared to be the fastest way of reaching this goal. Like early Christians, Leary invoked spiritual transcendence to distance himself from and passively resist the political powers that be (Adam 2006).
Of course, this kind of theology represented a political stance of its own right. At least in Bruno Latour’s (1993) somewhat idiosyncratic reading, the historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) have shown how Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, in response to decades of religious civil war in seventeenth-century Britain, established the political ontology of modernity, dividing the world into nature and society while removing God from both realms. To preserve peace, the “crossed-out God” was deprived of all agency by simultaneously locking Him out into infinite transcendence and locking Him into men’s heart of hearts. Leary and the psychedelic counterculture challenged this modern cosmological order by invoking a direct drug-mediated experience of the divine, bringing the kind of religious enthusiasm, which had politically destabilized early modern Europe, to twentieth-century America.
In the United States, the political turbulence of the 1960s went hand in hand with a far-reaching reconfiguration of the religious landscape. This decade marked the beginning of the so-called Fourth Great Awakening in American history. In contrast to the previous three revitalizations of religious life, which were dominated by asceticism and subordination to biblical authority, this latest revival has been described as a turn toward unusual experiences taken as instances of direct and personal contact with the divine. It affected mainline churches and gave rise to contemporary evangelical movements. But it also led to the emergence of alternative forms of spirituality, syncretically combining the appreciation of Eastern religious thought, a rediscovery of natural rather than revealed religion, and the mystical illuminations induced by psychedelic drugs (McLoughlin 1978: 179–216; Fuller 2000: 84–89; Luhrmann 2005). These developments challenged the established political system from different directions.
The emergence of psychedelic enthusiasm did not fail to provoke resistance. The mixture of “psychotropic hedonism” and “instant mysticism” associated with the use of hallucinogens conflicted with the widespread attitude of “pharmacological Calvinism,” which rejected the use of drugs to achieve pleasure or enlightenment. The term pharmacological Calvinism was coined in 1972 by the psychiatrist Gerald Klerman. Since the nineteenth century, Calvinism had come to be associated with “un-American” tendencies such as the oppression of freedom of thought, religious intolerance, fatalism, and so on (Davis 1996). Thus Klerman’s use of the term was not purely analytic but also served a polemical purpose. He criticized the underprescription of psychiatric drugs by physicians and psychotherapists who relied instead solely on the therapeutic effects of verbal insight (Klerman 1972; Healy 1997: 226–231, 1998: 535). Even though biological psychiatry was already on the rise and pharmacotherapy was quickly gaining support, Klerman identified the youth culture of the early 1970s as the most serious challenge to Puritan reservations about drugs. It seems questionable whether the moral rejection of medical and nonmedical drug applications can be accurately described as Calvinist. But this label is suitable for conceptualizing the opposition to drug mysticism insofar as Calvin was convinced that spiritual experiences were illusionary: faith was not to be proven by mere feelings but through “good works.” The this-worldly orientation of Calvinism entailed a spiritual dignification of mundane activities, including the pursuit of economic gain, which, according to Max Weber’s (1992/1920) famous if contested thesis, eventually inspired the development of capitalism. Pharmacological Calvinism is part of the Protestant work ethic in that it rejects drug use as a means to experiencing pleasure or religious ecstasy and advocates more industrious routes to salvation.
The opposition of pharmacological Calvinism and psychedelic pharmacospirituality mirrors Weber’s distinction between two ideal types of religious ethic: asceticism and mysticism. According to Weber, the asceticism characteristic of the Protestant ethic played a particularly important role in the formation of American capitalism. Through work, this ethic seeks to master the original depravity of man, transforming the quest for salvation into a worldly business. Mysticism, on the other hand, aims at contemplation and ecstasy. Progress in the inner life requires detachment from narrow materialistic pursuits. Following Weber, it cultivates a “world-denying love” at odds with the unbrotherly spirit of capitalism. Mysticism conceives of the hustle and bustle of working life not as the way to heaven, but as a soteriological obstacle. The contrast to the asceticism of the Protestant work ethic could not be any starker (Weber 1958/1919; Bellah 1999).
Already in the 1960s, sociologically informed observers and self-reflexive members of the American counterculture described that culture’s drug mysticism against the background of Weber’s work. For example, the Stanford psychologist Richard Blum (1964: 283) noted, “For the user [of LSD] who does move in the direction of contemplative mysticism, there is a fleeing from the world and the re-establishment of the ethic of brotherhood, symbolized in becoming more loving.” And the countercultural activist Jerry Rubin explained: “Drug use signifies the total end of the Protestant ethic: screw work, we want to know ourselves. But of course the goal is to free oneself from American society’s sick notion of work, success, reward, and status and to find oneself through one’s own discipline, hard work, and introspection” (quoted in Jonnes 1996: 239). This blend of drug mysticism and the desire for self-knowledge was articulated in opposition to what was imagined as the Protestant spirit of capitalism (Davis and Munoz 1968).
Representatives of the psychedelic movement presented their conflict with the so-called Establishment as a fight over religious values. This framing enabled them to defend the use of “sacramental biochemicals like LSD” (Leary 1970: 18) by claiming their constitutional right of religious liberty. In a Senate hearing, one of them even warned against a “religious civil war” that would break out if Leary was arrested for drug possession (Greenfield 2006: 274). In the course of the 1960s, the struggle over hallucinogens became a political struggle over the spiritual foundations of America’s social and economic order. Soon, Leary’s political neurotheology became so influential that the Nixon administration came to see him as public enemy number one in its “War on Drugs”—even though the opponents of the counterculture preferred to present the situation as a moral threat and a public health crisis rather than a religious conflict (Davenport-Hines 2002: 265; Greenfield 2006: 343). The attribution of a political neurotheology to Leary and the psychedelic movement evokes not only the late Huxley’s sense of biospirituality but also Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (2005), originally published in 1922. Of course, politically and theologically, the far-right Catholic jurist from Germany and the libertarian high priest of the American psychedelic movement could not have been further apart. Schmitt’s famous dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (36) led him to embrace authoritarianism. In his eyes, Hitler restored a dimension of political transcendence by reoccupying a position of sovereignty above the law—analogous to the omnipotent God of theist theology.
Leary, on the other hand, drew from an antistatist tradition equally inherent in Christianity. Here,