The Review: Dropping acid with the dolphins

Plus: Is it time to bring hallucinogens into the classroom? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. Last week The Review published a wonderful [essay]( by Benjamin Breen drawn from his recent [book]( Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. In the early 1960s, as Breen recounts, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson participated in a bizarre project run by the psychologist John C. Lilly that attempted to teach dolphins how to speak English. It occurred to Lilly that taking LSD — and even giving it to the dolphins — might help the process along. The dolphins, Lilly insisted, “had very good trips.” For Bateson, the stakes were far higher than advances in marine zoology. In a world threatened by every variety of destructive human madness, including nuclear annihilation, Bateson had faith that, as he said, “from the dolphins we may learn a new analysis of the sorts of information which we need — and all mammals need — if we are to retain our sanity.” The idea that psychedelics, with or without aid from dolphins, might help solve social and political problems was in the air at the time. At Harvard, the psychologists Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary were [dosing]( students with acid, which was thought to “be an aid to spiritual and moral growth,” as Leary’s acolyte Lisa Biebermann, a recent Radcliffe graduate, put it in 1966. A little over a decade earlier, Aldous Huxley had argued in The Doors of Perception — which would become a key text of the counterculture — that “contemplatives” of the sort made by mescaline use “do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war.” SPONSOR CONTENT | Queen’s University Belfast [Changing the Future of Food]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. 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. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Artificial Intelligence and the Significance Crisis]( By Leif Weatherby [STORY IMAGE]( Only a computationally informed humanities can save us now. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab]( By Benjamin Breen [STORY IMAGE]( How a 1960s interspecies-communication experiment went haywire. THE REVIEW | OPINION [Does High-Profile Climate Science Tell the Full Story?]( By Patrick T. Brown [STORY IMAGE]( Social feedbacks and career incentives cause scientists to leave out a lot. THE REVIEW | OPINION [DEI Is Not the Way to Settle the Caste Debate]( By Shareen Joshi [STORY IMAGE]( What we need is more, and better, scholarship. Recommended - “Did he bring that pain — of being Black and overlooked, Black and undervalued — to the dance project that he took on a few years later?” In The New York Times, Romaissaa Benzizoune [writes about]( the dancer and choreographer Louis Johnson. The Times has produced a digital transfer of a rarely seen 1959 short film of Johnson by the filmmaker Richard Preston. - “To live as an artist in exile is among the most glorious triumphs of human will: a spiritual victory.” Also in The New York Times, Celeste Marcus writes about [art and exile]( by way of Chaim Soutine. - “I doubt that most clumsy people reach uncanny levels of understanding, yet Weil, by any measure, was not like most people.” That’s Robert Pogue Harrison in The New York Review of Books, [discussing]( Costica Bradatan’s In Fear of Failure, which features Simone Weil among its cast of failures. - “She often recalled the moment when she was teaching a freshman composition course at Columbia in the late 1960s and my father had a secretary call her out of class to come home because he was having a problem with the dishwasher.” Also in The New York Review of Books, David A. Bell [turns]( his historian’s eye to his mother, Pearl Kazin Bell. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Future of Campus Safety - The Chronicle Store]( [The Future of Campus Safety]( Colleges can’t foresee and avoid every possible safety concern. Yet students, parents, and others are demanding that colleges do more to keep campuses safe. [Order this report]( to explore strategies colleges are employing to counter threats to their communities’ well-being. JOB OPPORTUNITIES [Search jobs on The Chronicle job board]( [Find Your Next Role Today]( Whether you are actively or passively searching for your next career opportunity, The Chronicle is here to support you throughout your job search. Get started now by [exploring 30,000+ openings]( or [signing up for job alerts](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. 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