Concerning his recent book, How to Change Your Mind, which touts the value and potential of psychedelics.
As I wrote earlier, I am not convinced that taking a trip inside your head is a useful way to expand your mind. Think of our culture as something like a vast archaeological mound. When they are excavating a site where humans have lived for thousands of years, you know how at the top layer they find the artifacts of the most recent inhabitants, and below that are those of inhabitants from a couple hundred years before, and so on, all the way down?
Well, all of humanity has this enormous mound. It’s unfathomably big, and getting bigger all the time (think of all the YouTube videos that are being posted while you’re reading this.)
There are so many ways to explore the mound. You could be like Tyler, and travel the world, reading books, walking through various cities and villages, sampling the street food. Or you could develop deep knowledge about a sport or a craft.
With all those ways to delve into the mound and explore it, I can’t get excited about using a drug that takes some of your sensory experiences and memories and plays them back to you in “shuffle” mode.
As for searching for meaning, I have a joke. There are people who struggle with the existential problems of finding purpose and meaning in their lives. We can label them “seekers.” There are other people for whom such problems are not salient. We can label them “grandparents.”
The grandparents that I know seem to have found peace of mind. There is something very calming about having descendants that you can look forward to watching and maybe guiding a bit as they find their way in the world.
There seems to be a trend toward greater social anxiety and more people expressing political hostility. There could be many reasons for this, but I wonder if part of it is a decline in the proportion of people who are counting on grandchildren.
“With all those ways to delve into the mound and explore it, I can’t get excited about using a drug that takes some of your sensory experiences and memories and plays them back to you in “shuffle” mode.”
If you planned a trip where you would travel to France, then Germany, then China, then Japan, then Australia, then Iraq, then Egypt, then Brazil and finally Mexico, do you think that trip would be identical to going to all the same countries but in reverse order? Is it identical to going to those same countries but in random order? Is there no value to experiencing each of those trips?
Caveat: I have not read the book, only Arnold’s comments.
1. In my understanding, psychedelics allow people to view the world freshly, by removing their preconceived biases and understanding from their perceptual filter. Most people act incapable of viewing the world from a fresh perspective, and in practice rarely do so. If these assertions are true, most people would gain a better understanding of the world after using appropriate psychedelics.
2. Arnold, you have an inordinate ability to view both sides of an issue without preconceived biases. So perhaps psychedelics would offer you little or no increased understanding.
3. That said, in this instance you appear to be dismissing the possibility of positive effects of psychedelics without knowing what the experience is. That seems akin to saying, “I know people who have tried Tylenol to treat headaches say it’s effective, but I prefer my body unpolluted by chemicals.”
I love your blog. Thank you for producing it.
One way to think about entheogenic drugs is that they peel back the layers of your mind to its more ‘primordial’ elements — they provide a glimpse of how our ancient ancestors who roamed the plains perceived the earth (confusing, mystical, too large to be seen, full of strange threats and wonders). I agree with you that this isn’t necessarily better than exploring the world or learning a craft, but occasional psychedelic use doesn’t preclude these things — and frequent psychedelic use can either *be* a craft in itself (or facilitate an existing craft, like writing a book) or be a reason to travel, for instance, traveling to an Ayahuasca retreat.
It is true that I do not have grandchildren.
No. Entheogenic drugs do not “peel back the layers of the mind” any more than getting off the Interstate and wandering around on back roads “peels back the layers of the country.” The mind is not composed of unchanging layers upon which new layers are laid over the course of evolutionary history. Nothing you do can make you feel and perceive like an Australopithecus or a Homo erectus.
Trips. Been there, done that. Listening to people talk about their drug experiences is no different than listening them to talk about bowel movements. No thank you.
Thanks for that image 🙂 I would have made the analogy to people talking about their dreams (significant to them, but meaningless to me), but yours produces more impact I think.
Don’t overlook the fact that taking psychedelic drugs is just plain [i]fun[/i].
Use a “less than” (shirt + comma) and a “greater than” (shift + period) symbol rather than brackets for italics, etc.
Your comment about anxiety and grandparents rings true to me. It also reminded me of this post, which may be of interest. It discusses what it means for the culture war if liberals win all the arguments but conservatives have most of the children.
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2018/06/28/think-i-better-wait-for-tomorrow/
The post ends:
The culture war is perhaps most centrally about who is born and who is not, about who becomes parents and who does not. Freedom from parenthood is in some ways a source of cultural strength these days- there’s a reason pretty much all the heads of state running Western Europe right now don’t have any kids- but the future as is often said belongs to those who show up.
It’s interesting to note that many prominent intellectuals report similarly moving and even life-changing, real-or-quasi ‘conversion’ experiences, not necessarily from drugs, but from aesthetic experiences, in monumental cathedrals, or in certain powerfully evocative natural settings. Two quick examples come to mind, Rod Dreher at Chartres and former AEI President Arthur Brooks at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but those are tiny tips of a very large iceberg. There are also people who have, for lack of a better term, ‘traumatic epiphanies’ when contemplating some enormity, such as Jordan Peterson apparently did when reflecting on the murderous catastrophes of the 20th century, which is also how he explains his penchant for collecting pieces of Soviet visual propaganda.
All of these are ‘sober’ experiences in the sense of not involving ingestion of psychoactive substances, though then again, perhaps not in the sense of not being under the influence of extraordinary levels of chemicals originating from their own brain or body and the release of which was triggered by these special situations.
My hunch is that these are kind of the same things of the drug-enabled experiences about which Pollan is writing.
The word ‘trauma’ obviously has a very negative connotation, but I’m grasping for a more neutral and general term of a certain kind of ‘learning’ that is enabled by the psychological state of some extreme experience impacting one’s psyche deeply and durably, increasing ‘neuroplasticity’ for a short while, writing down some new emotionally-reinforced rule or heuristic or reflect or insight, and then de-plasticizing so it stays hard-coded going forward.
At the end of the day, such a thing may not be possible, but the propsect of being able to self re-code one’s habits, reflexes, disciplines, etc. to reinforce the positive and suppress the negative, is one that could produce very large decrease in self-destructive or anti-social human dysfunction and potentially significant improvements in human welfare. My guess is that the best we can do at the moment is “social technology” instead of “psychiatric technology” (pharmacological or otherwise), but that may not hold forever if the field is able to make some progress along this line of investigation.
But I get the point.
I visited a friends garden today. Unbelievable. She really has created a fantastic and peaceful place. No psychedelics required.
I wont repeat my previous comments on this subject except to say sometimes all this “insight” mumbo jumbo is simply an excuse to get high.
No grandchildren we get a pension stampede? Once the kiddies reach the mid 20s, mom and dad know they might not need grandparents. So they plot to retire early, abscond and para vivir en la playa.