Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
principles at the heart of America’s political identity. In this world of mere appearances, cognitive performance was improved by Ritalin, but the results were not the subject’s own achievements. Prozac made people feel “better than well,” but their happiness was false and shallow, and so on.
Following the philosopher Michael Sandel (2002), yet another member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Kass (2003, 2008a), a practicing Jew, advocated the development of a “religious sensibility” resonating “beyond religion” and acknowledging the giftedness of life. “Respect for a being created in God’s image means respecting everything about him, not just his freedom or his reason but also his blood,” Kass (2002: 21) wrote. Any attempt to overcome the limits and burdens imposed on the individual by God or nature was supposed to entail a loss of humanity and human dignity. Human nature was to be protected against its biotechnological transgression and deformation. Consequently, nonmedical interventions into body and mind would lead us onto a slippery slope, to Huxley’s Brave New World, as understood by these neoconservative thinkers. To forestall this development, Kass called for “a new bioethics and a new biology: a richer ethic of bios tied to a richer logos of bios, an ethical account of human flourishing based on a biological account of human life as lived, not just physically, but psychically, socially and spiritually. In the absence of such an account we shall not be able to meet the dehumanizing challenges of the brave new biology” (21).
The second peculiarity in Kass’s and Fukuyama’s frequent references to Huxley’s work was their omission of the fact that Huxley had written not only a dystopian but also a utopian novel in which drug use figures equally large. In contrast to Brave New World, Island presents a spatialized, not a temporalized, utopia (Koselleck 2002). It conjures up a contemporary alternative rather than a foreshadowing of sociotechnical developments to come, located on a faraway island instead of a distant future. Thereby Huxley suggested that, in principle, the idyllic society of Pala was already possible without any science-fiction technologies. The islanders’ use of the drug moksha (named after the Hindu term for liberation from the cycle of death and reincarnation) for spiritual purposes was modeled on Huxley’s (2009/1954) own experiences with the hallucinogens mescaline and LSD, as described in his essays The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Unlike soma, moksha neither serves escapism nor does it rob its users’ lives of authenticity, quite the contrary. In an initiation ceremony, the drug is administered to young people with the goal of “ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact,” as one inhabitant of Pala puts it (Huxley 1962: 173). The insights gained under the influence of the drug help them obtain true happiness. Whereas the superficial cheerfulness induced by soma is the outcome of a “holiday from the facts” (Huxley 1932: 280), a purely subjective sense of happiness ignoring the subject’s actual situation of repression and alienation, the happiness and insight provided by moksha are presented as genuine. Their truthfulness consists in a correspondence with both the paradisiacal social life described in Island as well as with a spiritual reality transcending individual psychology. A Palanese explains to the European protagonist of the novel that his people do not dismiss their drug experiences as mere hallucinations because they presuppose a different neurology:
You’re assuming that the brain produces consciousness. I’m assuming that it transmits consciousness. . . . You say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name “mystical experience.” I say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large “M” to flow into your mind with a small “m.” (Huxley 1962: 140–141)
Thus, moksha does not provide quick fixes. Instead the drug initiates a lasting spiritual transformation. It is a “drug for life,” but not for everyday life (see Dumit 2002). To be effective it does not have to be taken continuously like soma. The Palanese use moksha once or twice a year. But the resulting mystical experiences of unity with the cosmic mind and of boundless compassion pervade their whole worldview and way of living.
Island responded to a diagnosis of the state of society similar to, but not identical with, that of Kass and Fukuyama. Since the discovery of a multitude of new mind drugs in the 1950s, the consumption of performance-enhancing and euphoriant amphetamines, as well as tranquilizers alleviating anxiety, had spread rapidly in the American population. The anxiolytic Miltown, for example, first helped businessmen cope with job-related stress and then soothed exhausted housewives (Pieters and Snelders 2007; Rasmussen 2008; Tone 2008; Herzberg 2009). The nontherapeutic employments of psychopharmaceuticals by the white middle class could be described as cognitive enhancement and cosmetic psychopharmacology avant la lettre. When Huxley (1959) saw the societal consequences of this so-called psychopharmacological revolution, he believed that Brave New World had become a reality much sooner than he had expected. Looking for a way out, he found inspiration in cultural anthropology. Analogous to Margaret Mead’s (1928) ethnographic account of Samoa as a society of noble savages, Huxley dreamt up another halcyon island where psychedelic drugs were used in the service of an enlightened primitivism. “Pala,” noted literary scholar Jerome Meckier (1978: 78), “is the utopia one might build if evils were merely the product of imperfect social conditions, as Mead maintained.” By contrast, Fukuyama and Kass did not blame social conditions but the emergence of new biotechologies that required stricter regulations. Distrusting the utopian potential of primitivism, Meckier pointed out that Island, even though forward-looking, was “an exercise in nostalgia for an ideal whose day is already over before Huxley gets it right” (80).
In Island, Huxley gave literary form to a reconceptualization of hallucinogenic drugs, which he himself had helped to initiate. Since the 1920s, these substances had been used to model schizophrenia in healthy human subjects. In this context, the drugs were called psychotogens or psychotomimetics: drugs producing or mimicking psychoses. One of the key figures in this research was the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. It was through him that Huxley got the chance to try mescaline in 1953. Since the publication of Brave New World two decades earlier, Huxley had undergone a conversion from cynical British intellectual to committed Californian mystic. In light of his new worldview, he described his first encounter with mescaline as a mystical experience and felt that pathologizing terms such as hallucinogen or psychotomimetic did not do justice to the effects of the drug (Huxley 2009/1954). In dialogue with Osmond (1957: 429), Huxley (1980: 107) invented a new name for this class of pharmaceuticals: psychedelics, that is, mind-manifesting drugs. As the passage from Island quoted above indicates, the mind that was supposed to manifest itself in these experiences was not that of the person taking the drugs (as in contemporaneous psychoanalytic or “psycholytic” applications) but a cosmic mind, which the more confined individual psyche was then able to commune with. Instead of deluding the subject, psychedelics were meant to open up the brain to dimensions of reality usually hidden from human perception for lack of immediate survival value but beneficial to spiritual life. Hence, the term implied a neurology and an anthropology very different from those underlying model psychosis research. Here, human beings did not appear 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