The case against psychedelics

Part II - Why haven't psychedelics inspired more great art?

Read Part I here.

I have little to disagree with in John Pistelli’s review of Tao Lin’s Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation and Change, which I found it to be a real bummer after Taipei had blown my mind.¹ I’d only note that Lin, McKenna, Pinchbeck and Narby do not adequately represent the rich varieties of psychedelic experience, which deserve at least as much humanistic interest as tarot, astrology and manifesting.

Mike Jay explores the far-reaching effects of personal experimentation with various chemicals in his book Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind. In perhaps his most compelling example, Jay claims that the artists inspired by the insights that Williams James and others gleaned from their experiments with laughing gas have profoundly influenced how we reflect on our own conscious experience:²

Through James and many other sources, the model of mind and reality sparked by the anaesthetic revelation flowed into the wider stream of influences that redefined consciousness in the twentieth century. The modernist art and culture of the generation to come, with its fractured and unfamiliar perspectives, dedicated itself to breaking through the veil of everyday reality to a world of pure experience. The ether-induced mindscapes of Jean Lorrain, haunted by their masked figures and doppelgängers looked forward to the interior monologues of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the uncanny stream-of-consciousness narratives of Arthur Schnitzler and the impossible juxtapositions of the surrealists. During the 1880s, artists such as Georges Seurat began to experiment with divisionism and pointillism, shifting the focus of vision from the external world to the eye and mind of the beholder; Paul Cézanne and the Cubists gave visual expression to James’s worldview, combining multiple perspectives of the same object in a single cavas. The rigid boundaries of time and space were loosened by the new technologies of phonograph and cinema that froze transient moments and perceptions into material objects. When Wassily Kadinsky broke through into abstract art in 1910 — painting the soul, as he conceived it — he drew inspiration from the unseen regions he visualised trough meditating on Theosophical thought-forms.

Nevertheless, I’ve been troubled by the paradox of why the widespread use of psychedelics, which certainly make a lot of people feel more creative, have coincided with decades of cultural stagnation, ever since I heard Tyler Cowen pose these questions to Michael Pollan:

COWEN: Anecdotally, if I look at the history of popular music, I see Donovan, Jefferson Airplane, the early Byrds as possibly having benefited from psychedelics.

POLLAN: Grateful Dead.

COWEN: Grateful Dead. I find it harder to find examples from the history of painting. It even seems to me psychedelics might make bad poets worse. Do you agree?

POLLAN: [laughs] I think it makes bad painters worse. I can say that with some confidence. In general, if you just search psychedelic art online, you’ll see some real crap. [laughs] I don’t know why. I think it’s very hard to do.

In terms of poets, that’s a good question. A lot of it depends on your opinion of Allen Ginsberg.

COWEN: Sure. That’s what I was referring to.

In this post, I’ll be looking at some explanations, from benign to more troubling, for the apparent lack of great art inspired by psychedelics. I’ll consider broader social, political and spiritual impacts in future posts.

You had to be there!

The first explanation is that psychedelic experiences are by nature subjective and ineffable and therefore cannot be easily conveyed to others.

The psychiatrist Scott Alexander provides a plausible explanation of the effects of psychedelics:

In my model of psychedelics, they artificially stimulate your insight system the same way heroin artificially stimulates your happiness system. This leads to all those stories where people feel like they discovered the secret of the universe, but when they recover their faculties, they find it was only some inane triviality. This sounds very likely to produce people who think their psychedelic experience has changed everything and solved all their problems, which means we should discount these impressions as evidence that psychedelics really do change everything and solve all your problems. Granted, feeling like you truly understand the universe may itself help with depression, but I worry this is not a very lasting effect.

This chimes with my lived experience, although I’d quibble with the “artificially stimulate” bit. Although misfirings do happen, many of the insights that I’ve had under the influence may be mundane, but that doesn’t make them trivial: appreciating the significance of my death and therefore of my life; recognising how beliefs that I no longer hold on a rational level nevertheless continue to shape my perception of the world; and realising the possibility of shifting my perspective on things.³

Seasoned psychedelic practitioners with a sense of irony and humour, like Jennifer Soldini, distinguish between the experience and the story about the experience. This is what is so difficult to convey to the unpscychedelicised: however lame the story sounds, the subjective experience could have been truly profound.

There is a huge difference between having a near death experience and having one described to you. Even accomplished writers are often mocked for writing awkwardly about sex, but nobody doubts that the experience of having sex can be genuinely meaningful (among other things).

This perspective might also help explain why musicians appear to be best equipped to convey such experiences, since music moves one in a similar non-rational way.

Psychedelics are not performance-enhancing drugs

The case is put bluntly by this shape rotator:

I’ve yet to hear of any sort of improvement in creativity or even a single interesting idea anyone has ever brought back from psychedelics. Amphetamines have a vastly better track record of being useful stimulants for creativity; the last half of Paul Erdos career was fueled by benzedrine as have countless musicians, engineers and writers. There are many people who claim dropping acid made them more creative. But none of the people who make this claim are observably more creative than people who didn’t drop acid, and 99.9% of them are more mush-headed and self-regarding, which does seem to be a cognitive side effect of these drugs.

As John likes to point out, when it comes to great artists, it is lonely at the top. The ability to produce even mediocre art is quite rare. I certainly feel that psychedelics have deepened my appreciation for art, but I’m under no illusions that it has boosted my artistic talent.

Furthermore, the feelings of oneness that often accompany the use of psychedelics could mitigate against the artist’s desire to create something singular and beautiful, as Stanley Kubrick appears to have said:

I believe that drugs are basically of more use to the audience than to the artist. I think that the illusion of oneness with the universe, and absorption with the significance of every object in your environment, and the pervasive aura of peace and contentment is not the ideal state for an artist. It tranquilizes the creative personality, which thrives on conflict and on the clash and ferment of ideas. The artist's transcendence must be within his own work; he should not impose any artificial barriers between himself and the mainspring of his subconscious. One of the things that's turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear so in the state of universal bliss the drug induces on a good trip. They seem to completely lose their critical faculties and disengage themselves from some of the most stimulating areas of life. Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.

In a similar vein, although the mock secret society Le Club des Haschichins described in Psychonauts is claimed to have included some of the most famous names in French literature (Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire, Honoré de Balzac, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud), they were hardly a bunch of stoners. Even bad boy Baudelaire, who wrote a poem dedicated to hashish, only appears to have tried it once or twice himself.

Although I’d like to think that the complete loss of critical faculties is not an inevitable consequence of psychedelics, they can certainly dampen one’s sublunar ambitions. If one believes, as John claims, that “art is worth everything”, then losing one’s drive to create art is certainly a tragedy. But not everyone shares this prioritisation of values. In an interview late in his life, Aldous Huxley admitted to losing interest in much of literature and criticised Joyce for thinking that “words are omnipotent”. If you have a Buddhist conception of art as a finger pointing at the moon, once you have seen the moon, you no longer need the finger.

Excessive self-regard is not helpful

I recently came across this amusing diss of psychoanalysis by Werner Herzog:

I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens here. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will become uninhabitable . . . I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis – along with quite a few other mistakes – that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

I was therefore unsurprised to learn that Herzog is also not a fan of psychedelics:

I simply don’t like the culture of drugs. I never liked the hippies for it. I think it was a mistake to be all the time stoned and on weed. It didn’t look right and it doesn’t look right today either and the damage drugs have done to civilizations are too enormous. And besides, I don’t need any drug to step out of myself. I don’t want them and I do not need them. And you may not believe this, big-eyed as you sit here now, but I’ve not even taken a puff of weed in my life.

I have always been envious of those souls described by William James as having a sky-blue tint, who naturally feel at home in the world, or at least view life as a struggle against the wills of others, rather than an internal civil war. There are those of us that cannot avoid self-examination, but one has to guard against this becoming self-obsession.⁴ Certainly psychedelics aren’t solely to blame for our culture of self-deification, but I can’t deny that they have probably contributed to it. And true artists have to be able to look outside of themselves.

Deconstruct me, baby

Another sad truth about psychedelics is that they can help you make new connections between the stuff in your head, but they can’t put new stuff in there.⁵ This appears to be the main problem with writers like Lin, as John points out in his review:

Lin writes that he hadn’t understood anything of history (“a subject in school involving wars and treaties and generals”) before finding, through McKenna, the New Age anthropologists who finally provided him a satisfying explanation of the cosmos and his place in it.

It’s one thing to have your mind blown when it is filled with knowledge that you can re-examine with a new perspective. If, however, your mind is already made up of a collection of random thoughts and images with no internal coherence, it is hard to see what good a further blitzing of this mess would do, apart from creating a culture of endless reboots and remixes.⁶

I also wonder to what extent the culture that has developed around psychedelics has contributed to the deconstruction craze in the arts and the humanities. The effect on the broader culture seems to parallel the individual experience that Aella describes in her fascinating reflection on taking over a hundred of doses of acid:

The Journey In was a slow process of whittling away the beliefs I was subject to, and watching the remaining beliefs contort themselves in attempt to maintain the idea that they corresponded to something outside myself. As my island of self got smaller and smaller, my experience of reality – and my ability to function – got weirder and quieter.

It can be wonderfully liberating to feel like time has started afresh, that the past is just a fiction you can safely ignore. But you cannot hope to create something rich and new without the materials of the old. It’s a great shame that psychedelic culture seems to have contributed to the replacement of a critical but nuanced engagement with history for empty wishful thinking. I think it is especially harmful when it comes to metaphysics, which I’ll turn to in my next post.

1. Alhough I am growing a tad weary of the line that any encouragement of norm-breaking is probably a government psyop (much as I enjoyed the image of the man in the black suit in Major Arcana).

2. Jay quotes James’s own reflections:

Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

3. Of course there are other ways to achieve such insights, but the ability of psychedelics to lower one’s usual psychic defences definitely helps. There is a major difference between knowing you are going to die on some theoretical level and knowing it with your whole being. Whether this leads one to make lasting changes in one’s life is another matter, but isn’t that always the problem?

4. I personally like the work of Caveh Zahedi, but I understand that some people find it insufferable.

5. Assuming that that they don’t actually allow you to channel spirits from other dimensions.

6. In his review, John refers to the Internet as “perhaps the ultimate psychedelic”.