This review is by Alan Piper, author of Bicycle Day and Other Psychedelic Essays.
In 2024 you might think that the twentieth century social history of psychedelics had been thoroughly ploughed over by a plethora of existing studies and that there was nothing dramatically new to be revealed. However, the history of psychedelics continues to attract novel historical investigations. Benjamin Breen’s newly published cultural history of psychedelic science Tripping on Utopia is timely because we are in the throes of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance with its own utopian stripe, emphasizing the medical potential of psychedelics and the financial potential of its onward commodification.
Breen’s study explores the previously largely unacknowledged engagement with psychedelic drugs by two eminent anthropologists, Margaret Mead (1901-1978) and Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), who investigated the scientific and social potential of such drugs, principally LSD. Breen’s novel angle demonstrates that there are yet new ways to slice the cake of psychedelic history.
The subtitle of Breen’s book is Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, but in Breen’s narrative approach Gregory Bateson hardly takes second place to Margaret Mead, his professional colleague to whom he was married for a period. In Breen’s book, as the title suggests, the central characters, Mead and Bateson, are briefly enamoured with the utopian potential of psychedelics, but for different reasons later become more cautious in their endorsement.
It also focuses on the interest shown in psychedelics not only by Mead and Bateson but by a variety of governmental and non-governmental organisations during the period of the last Cold War (1947 – 1991), in particular the United States secret services and military as well as what Breen calls the Macy circle. The Macy circle being those attending or connected with the Macy Conferences held under the aegis of the Macy Foundation; a progressive think tank promoting an interdisciplinary approach in the sciences. Several of these conferences, which both Mead and Bateson sometimes attended, addressed the subject of the scientific potential and social impact of psychedelic drugs.
Breen provides ample background to the lives and research projects of Mead and Bateson for readers with little or no knowledge of their lives or importance as anthropologists. Both were popular mid-century authors in the US on topics such as sexuality, the family and mental illness, as well as respected but sometimes controversial academic figures. Bateson became a pundit of the ecological movements emerging in the 1960s, and an icon of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog.
Breen highlights how Bateson and Mead’s interest in psychedelics initially grew through their interest in altered states in folk religious practices in Bali and New Guinea. Then through the weaponisation of anthropology and psychedelics in the service of World War Two operations and later through covert activities during peacetime, the Cold War era. Breen’s focus on engagement with LSD studies by Bateson has drawn the ire of the International Bateson Institute, established to support his work and memory. Its principal complaint is that Bateson and Mead’s engagement with psychedelics was brief and peripheral to their life’s work. Readers will have to decide for themselves according to their reading of Breen’s book, the latitude his study allows for some interpretation on this point.
Readers approaching the book through their established interest in the history of psychedelics will discover a fascinating insight into the previously unacknowledged role played by Mead, Bateson and the various institutions and individuals they were engaged with. However, readers familiar with the work of Mead and Bateson but with little knowledge of the mid-century history of psychedelics will necessarily only get a partial view of the general cultural history of psychedelics. That is not Breen’s fault as his intention is to lift a curtain on what is an essentially obscure corner of psychedelic history.
Breen spreads his net extremely wide, sending this reader in search of potted histories of the enormous variety of characters he pulls into his story. In the process Breen reveals the ties of those individuals to better known figures from psychedelic history such as John Lilly. The author though has little time for the pundits of popular psychedelic culture such as Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary, whom he styles as thirty-something bead-wearing white males and at least partly endorses the established but controversial trope of them being responsible for the early termination of investigation into the scientific potential of psychedelics.
Breen ties Bateson and Mead’s socially progressive programs, based on their anthropological and ecological insights, to their interest in psychedelics. However, he believes that but for Mead’s need to conceal her lesbian or bisexual orientation at a time when McCarthyism extended to outing and firing government employees they considered to be sexual deviants, she might have championed what the psychedelic renaissance now claims is possible. Namely a happier, healthier society through the insights offered by psychedelic drugs. In parallel, Bateson’s engagement decreased as he became disillusioned with the dark side of government and scientific investigations into psychedelics—underscored by his past engagement with anthropology in the services of wartime operations, such as assessing the likely hostility of indigenous populations to advancing Allied forces or willingness to cooperate with them.
One striking aspect of the book is that most of the characters, whether anthropologists, scientists or those connected with government investigations into the weaponization of psychedelics, are all experimenting freely with the drugs on themselves. This has a parallel with the current ‘psychedelic renaissance’ where whether openly or confidentially the majority of those engaged with the current medicalisation, or commodification of psychedelics by funding profit-based research, have a personal enthusiasm for psychedelics initiated through prior recreational use. Breen himself has admitted in interview to having had experience with psychedelics, which no doubt inspired his passion for investigating the way they touched the lives and work of Mead and Bateson.
Readers with an appetite for yet one more angle on the tangled history of psychedelics, science and popular culture will find Breen’s book a very easy read due to the fluency and narrative style of his writing, which is dotted with imaginary reconstructions of events and conversations and a carnivalesque catalogue of often eccentric figures.
Benjamin Breen: Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. Grand Central Press (US), Footnote Press (UK), 2024
"The author though has little time for the pundits of popular psychedelic culture such as Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary." Without us scofflaws, rebels, resisters, underground dealers and manufacturers, who would even know about the psychedelic revolution? Wd there even be a "psychedelic renaissance"? And why wouldn't those with declared or undeclared more-than-introductory experience with psychedelics be the ones best suited to promote, describe and research their use? "The tangled history of psychedelics" need not have been so tangled if the post-WW2 history of the West were not yet more severely tangled.
A key to understanding the "drug effects" of these "drugs" is seeing that there are none, as such. All the effects are the quite natural effects of being a mysterious being in an even more mysterious kosmos, and experiencing a slight prod to see this reality.
https://www.academia.edu/95408960/Psychedelic_Elephant_A_Critique_of_Psychedelic_Research
I really wanted to like this book, which is at the intersection of various fields I'm passionate about, and it does contain a bunch of fascinating historical information, but I must agree with the Bateson Inst. and other commentators that the author draws some slightly tenuous connections in support of the book's core thesis, overstating some aspects of Bateson's and Mead's lives and carefully eliding others while also occasionally painting slippery slopes that lead from speculation to innuendo to assumed fact. The caricatures he paints of people like Leary - a complex and of course controversial figure, but far more than the lecherous sociopathic grifter he's cast as here - are especially disappointing.