The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  For a time, “dropping out” became an act of religious affirmation, Robert Fuller says in his history of drug use in American religious life. Several short-lived churches emerged that used drugs as the focus of their otherwise indeterminate theologies, such as the Shiva Fellowship Church, the Psychedelic Venus Church, the Fellowship of the Clear Light and the American Council of Internal Divinity. One follow-up study found that only about half a dozen of these lasted into the 1990s, with minuscule attendance.

  Leary, meanwhile, made a case for not needing to be attached to any kind of formal religion at all. A real religious experience, he maintained, is “the ecstatic, incontrovertibly certain, subjective discovery of answers to four basic spiritual questions: What is the ultimate power of the universe? What is life—why and where did it start? Whence did humans come and where are we going? What am I—what is my place in the grander plan?”

  And for a time at least, it appeared that a “fourth great awakening,” as the historian William McLoughlin termed it, had occurred in American religious life. The four major themes of this spiritual reorientation were: (1) a shift from mainline to nonconformist churches; (2) a rediscovery of natural rather than revealed religion; (3) a new appreciation of Eastern religious thought; and (4) a new Romanticism that accords spiritual importance to certain nonrational modes of thought and perception. “In general, this represented a shift from seeking God in the church to seeking God in the depths of nature (including the depths of our own psychological nature). . . . And although this new mode of awareness gave rise to insights that were ineffable upon return to the normal waking state, it nonetheless left the lasting impression that the world is surrounded by a higher order of being.”24

  “MUSIC AND DRUGS WORK WONDERS”

  Although at times it might have seemed that LSD was the only game in town, that was far from being so. In the mid-sixties, says Torgoff, “there seemed to be more potential pot smokers on American campuses than ever before. They were easy to identify—rebels, die-hard nonconformists, egghead intellectuals, abstract painters, blue-jeaned folk musicians, jazz disciples, leotarded modern dancers, vegetarians. ‘You wore sandals,’ said one, ‘you went to poetry readings. . . . We got stoned on the peace march. You were chosen, man!’”

  But the defining moment, the transitional moment in American history, was the emergence of the civil rights movement. “By and large, white people felt completely trumped by black people at the time, who went out and set this incredibly courageous moral example by putting their lives on the line. And I think that those of us who were not actively involved with freedom marches in the South were pressed to come up with an identity and self-image of equal integrity or at the very least didn’t want to participate in a culture which produced that kind of racism. . . . [T]here was this growing desire to create this other realm, imagine yourself into it and act it out—and one of the tools that would soon materialize to prize yourself out of that box was psychedelics.”25

  It was about this time that Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (in which the patients really do take over the asylum, if only for a day), got together with Hunter S. Thompson and the Hells Angels, “the rottenest motorcycle gang in the history of Christendom,” to conceive the first psychedelic bus; the time when Tom Wolfe wrote his perceptive Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (without ever attending a session of acid-taking, or taking it himself), and when Augustus Owsley Stanley III (Owsley to most, Bear to a few) manufactured four kinds of LSD.

  No one knows how much LSD Owsley produced before the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs arrested him in 1969, but he was famous for “never raising the price of a hit above two dollars because he believed that acid for the masses would be the engine that would save the world.”26 (Leary called him “God’s secret agent.”) Partly because LSD could be obtained so cheaply, a number of “acid tests,” or rock-and-drug events, took place, with bands such as the Grateful Dead and performers like B. B. King taking part. There, “religious” experiences and epiphanies continued to occur. Tom Wolfe covered much of this in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At that point, the drug was still legal.

  In Los Angeles, Paul Rothchild, a record producer, was supervising Jim Morrison and the Doors in one of the first albums, if not the first, to be produced either on or about LSD. Rothchild thought that one particular session was “one of the most important moments in recorded rock and roll.” Morrison had “imbibed” the influences of Blake, Rimbaud, Poe, Joyce, Brecht, Weil, Artaud and Nietzsche, plus notions of shamanism and Dionysus, “[o]nly here it was being filtered through a new LSD-enhanced state of reality—or non-reality, however you looked at it.”

  Rothchild himself was no stranger to drugs. He had smoked marijuana since he was seventeen, then switched to peyote. He considered that the drug experience had taught him new ways of “talking, thinking, being,” and “the landscape of drugs” had shaped his creativity as a record producer. Marijuana, he believed, had allowed him to “crawl deeply” inside the music of Bach, for example, and understand the composer’s love of Christ—“an experience I might never have allowed myself as a Jew unless I had gotten high and opened my synapses enough to truly experience the gestalt of the music.” Then came peyote and, he said, all his thoughts turned to “the oneness of mankind. . . . From that moment on I believed it was possible to find your way to God through psychedelics! . . . At that time getting high was never just about getting high. It was about our willingness to accept change and visualize another world—what later became known as ‘grokking.’ . . . To deepen understanding.” Rothchild had cut his teeth in the music world at the Kettle of Fish bar and the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, smoking pot. When acid began to “trickle in,” he says, he witnessed an immediate impact on music.

  For him, it happened one night when he visited the Woodstock home of Albert Grossman when Bob Dylan was there after a tour of New England colleges. They opened the refrigerator to find sugar cubes with little gold dots on them, wrapped in aluminum foil. They took the acid, and from that moment, Rothchild remembers, Dylan’s music changed “[f]rom simple but powerful songs of social observation and protest and moral conscience to those elusive compositions of no single message or ultimate meaning. . . . The experience of drugs seemed to splinter Dylan’s mind into brilliant kaleidoscopic flashes of poetry; the result was strange, mystical, beautiful compositions like ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’”

  In the early weeks of 1967, Rothchild adds, something seemed to give way, and the Beatles personified it. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in May, was everywhere, and more than anything else it validated the new culture: it was regarded as a “masterpiece” of the psychedelic age, thereby confirming that the Beatles had “incorporated the sensibility of consciousness-altering substances into every aspect of its creation.” At the Monterey International Pop Festival, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas would remark, “Now there was an album that proved to the masses what musicians had believed for years: that music and drugs work wonders together.”

  “OUR GODLESS CIVILIZATION APPROACHING THE ZERO POINT”

  The psychedelic spring was followed by the summer of love.

  Amphetamine was the perfect ego drug for the 1960s: Torgoff depicts it as having to do with being bigger, better, stronger, smarter and quicker. Or, as Andy Warhol observed, “Amphetamine doesn’t give you peace of mind, but it makes not having it very amusing.” The people who used the drug as a way of life “believed in throwing themselves into every extreme—sing until you choke, dance until you drop, brush your hair till you sprain your arm.”27

  “The whole Catholic church is gone, and Greenwich Village is in its place,” said Pope Ondine, actually Robert Olivo, an actor who appeared in several films by Warhol. In Chelsea Girls, in what he called his papal bull, he said: “My flock consists of homosexuals, perverts of any kind, thieves, criminals of any sort—the rejected by society, that’s who I’m po
pe for.” Chelsea Girls, made in 1966, showed shooting up on-screen, more than a little violence, and was described in a review as portraying “Our Godless Civilization approaching the zero point.” The New York Times called it “a travelogue of hell, a grotesque menagerie of lost souls whimpering in a psychedelic moonscape.” Despite its commercial and cult success, conjuring up perverse images of peace and love, it famously concluded with the shooting of Warhol by Valerie Solanas, in June 1968.28

  Peter Coyote, sometime actor, founder of the Diggers, an anarchist group who supplied free food, housing and medical aid to runaways turning up to sample San Francisco, wrote: “Drugs became the experiment to extend the edges of the envelope to find the limits in the personality, what had really been ground into you by social conditioning before you had the opportunity really to question it. . . . Everywhere the sacrament of LSD was being consumed.” There was a new generation of seekers willing to proclaim the holiness of everything and elevate the whole planet with their vibrations. Leary urged people to start their own religions based on the sacramental use of marijuana and psychedelics.29

  On August 15, 1969, roughly half a million people gathered in Bethel, New York, for “the greatest party of the twentieth century.” The Woodstock festival was the ultimate be-in of the era. “Psychedelic drugs not only turned Woodstock into an acid-drenched holy quagmire but also shaped its soundtrack.” Woodstock quickly passed into myth and became the ultimate affirmation of the alternative values of a generation—peace, love, freedom, spirituality, sex, drugs and rock and roll—all of which had fused into an entity called the counterculture. “Before long it was being considered in religious terms—the people were seekers, the rock stars their prophets and drugs pretty much their staff of life,” as a reporter wrote in Life magazine.30

  The 1970s would become a golden age of marijuana, which was for many a benign substance with great spiritual, medicinal as well as commercial potential. Cocaine was another hidden secret thing. “Most of the San Francisco bands sailed headlong into cocaine”—and Johnny Cash recorded “Cocaine Blues” in 1969. But it was primarily a sexual stimulant and rarely brought with it any notion of metaphysical properties.

  The passing of the psychedelic era came with Hunter S. Thompson’s “Gonzo epic,” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Far from stressing the metaphysical qualities of drugs, Thompson saw them as the “pharmacological equivalent of nitroglycerin.” As one observer wrote, “[Fear and Loathing] sounded the death knell for the whole self-conscious, pious Timothy Leary approach to psychedelics, of sitting on a Persian rug and listening to Indian music. There was nothing about taking LSD and seeing God here; it was a matter of survival, dealing with madness, about how sometimes you took drugs and you were hopeless, dangerously fucked up—the dark side of psychedelics that people did not want to talk about.”31

  The last decades of the twentieth century saw a further change in drug use among the predominantly young—toward drugs that promote collective intimacy. These included Prozac and empathogens such as MDMA (Ecstasy), evocatively described as “penicillin for the soul,” creating not so much a sense of “oneness” as of connection with nature and with other people, including complete strangers. Fueled by MDMA, people went to mass “raves” and reported being changed by the experience, described as equal parts therapy, mass catharsis and tribal bonding. “Ecstasy had become the vehicle for a generation’s attempt to set itself apart from the world and find its own place where it could Let Love Rule.” Or, as Terence McKenna put it, “there is better living through chemistry.”32

  AESTHETICS AND MORALS

  Theodore Roszak remained throughout an acerbic observer, and the problem for him was that psychedelics did not remain a mere attempt to access new forms of knowledge and experience. Rather, drugs became an end in themselves, an obsession that took people away from the search. They may have offered a new way of life—“Ecstatic Living,” in Timothy Leary’s words—but that life was too often unreflective. Nor should we entirely overlook Nicholas von Hoffman’s remark that psychedelics were “the biggest crime story since prohibition.”

  In rounding out his analysis of the counterculture, Roszak referred to the “visionary sociology” of Paul Goodman, in particular his idea that the criterion of psychological health is a moral-aesthetic one, that the aim of a life should be to achieve a “moral-aesthetic comfortableness” similar to that natural aptitude in children, primitives, artists and lovers, “those who can lose themselves in the splendor of the moment.” Goodman imagined a kind of utopian communitarianism in which communities are “decentralized and elastic” to allow for the inevitable fallibilities of men and women, but in which we can each share in the beautiful achievements of others, the objective being to remove “mass or collective loneliness.”

  A last element in the countercultural way forward lay in what Roszak called “the myth of objective consciousness,” or the exploration of “non-intellective consciousness.” This idea drew support from recent (“postmodern”) developments in science and philosophy, which argued that there is no such thing as objectivity, because no one—not even scientists or philosophers—can step outside the human condition. Even in hard science we move ahead by agreement rather than by some “outside” or “superior” knowledge. By the same token, consciousness is not an objective entity but an arbitrarily agreed construct “in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.”33

  Here, Roszak is moving toward a more phenomenological way of approaching the world. He quotes Maslow: “Organizing experience into meaningful patterns implies that experience itself has no meaningfulness . . . that it is a gift from the knower to the known. In other words, ‘meaningfulness’ of this kind is of the realm of classification and abstraction rather than of experience.” He refers back to Bergson’s understanding of time as a “vital flow” that has been “arbitrarily segmented,” so that “to experience time in any other way becomes ‘mystical’ or ‘mad.’”

  To question this scientific way is, says Roszak, “to insist that the primary purpose of human existence is not to devise ways of piling up ever greater heaps of knowledge, but to discover ways to live from day to day that integrate the whole of our nature. . . . What is important, therefore, is that our lives should be as big as possible, capable of embracing the vastness of those experiences which, though yielding no articulate, demonstrable propositions, nevertheless awaken in us a sense of the world’s majesty. . . . What is at issue is the size of a man’s life. We must insist that a culture which negates or subordinates or degrades visionary experience commits the sin of diminishing our existence.”

  The scientific consciousness, Roszak claims, depreciates our capacity for wonder “by progressively estranging us from the magic of the environment. . . . The scientist studies, sums up, and has done with his puzzle; the painter paints the same landscape, the same vase of flowers, the same person over and over again, content to re-experience the inexhaustible power of his presence interminably. . . . What he has seen . . . is not improved upon by being pressed into the form of knowledge.”34

  His point, ultimately, is that there are no experts in life (much as G. E. Moore said; see chapter 2), that literature—both sacred and secular—is full of individuals undergoing “turning points” in their lives. “What befalls us then is an experience of the personality suddenly swelling beyond all that we had once thought to be ‘real,’ swelling to become a greater and nobler identity than we have previously believed possible.”35

  ENCOUNTER GROUPS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  Roszak returned to the matter a few years later in Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society. Here he argued that the religious sensibilities in our culture had been systematically repressed “over the past few centuries,” but that the loss of “transcendent energies” had not been felt as a loss but as a “gain in maturity.” By then, however, there w
as a new radicalism abroad, “which refuses to respect the conventions of secular thought and value, which insists on making the visionary powers a central point of political reference. This book is written against a background of significant, if as yet amorphous, religious renewal in the western world.” And here the crucial element was the idea of transcendence, or rather its absence: this was the “negative achievement” of the scientific approach.

  In this new world, he imagined, “Encounter grouping will become a national ritual practiced from the White House on down as a means of fulfilling the existential vacuum with instant intimacy and push-button friendship—on conveniently short-term arrangements. Sexual gratification, once ideally inseparable from love and a personal commitment to the beloved, will be available in a variety of erotic participations by way of the avant-garde theater, the mate swap, the group grope party, the weekly love-in at the local park.”36