Indeed, Bateson’s interest in what Breen calls “pushing the boundaries of science to prevent feedback loops of conflict” was prefigured by Huxley, who imagined that the part of morality that “consists in keeping out of mischief” might be promoted by drugs: “A man under the influence of mescaline quietly minds his own business.”
Toward the end of The Doors of Perception, Huxley suggests that humanistic study should be if not abandoned at least seriously reduced in favor of a program of drug-based mental therapy. Otherwise, he says, education will continue to interpose a disfiguring scrim of language between humans and the world, since “all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do.” Given his own enormous learning, Huxley’s contempt for scholarship is amusing, although the largess he describes will not be familiar to contemporary scholars: “A catalog, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versifier’s ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes — any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support.” (If only!) But “when it comes to any form of nonverbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it.”
The drug-taking of Alpert, Leary, and their Harvard students was meant to be a corrective to this situation: respectable people at a respectable university working to become, as Huxley put it, “more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill.” Unfortunately the university was not impressed. Alpert was fired for continuing to give students drugs after being told not to; Leary was fired after he stopped showing up for class one semester.
In recent years, as our Tom Bartlett wrote about last year, there has been a resurgence of serious medical interest in the therapeutic value of hallucinogens. But no one, as far as I know, has revived Huxley’s suggestion that mescaline or similar drugs might have a role in formal education. For entrepreneurs in the humanities looking for ways to reverse declining enrollments, perhaps there’s an opening.
