How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan explores the origins of the modern use of psychedelics, its early proselytizers, why they got a bad name, and thus why the federal government became interested in banning them back in the ’70s. Recently, rules governing their use in research have been loosened. According to many of the resulting studies, single therapist-guided trips can cure alcoholism, reduce fear of death for the terminally ill and markedly lessen depression. Two economic factors make them unpopular with some – therapists can’t make much money if the patient only comes once, rather than for years, and since there are no patents on psychedelics and many of them are naturally occurring, pharmaceutical companies do not stand to make much money from them either. The fact that Pollan tried many of the psychedelics himself, often with underwhelming results, increases the anecdotal interest of the book.

How to Change Your Mind

Champagne flowed in Hell this day,
Corks flew, confetti sifted,
Satan triumphant pumped his fist
And was on shoulders lifted.

“Suffering which falls to our lot in the course of nature, or by chance, or fate, does not, ceters paribus, seem so painful as suffering which is inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another. This is because we look upon nature and chance as the fundamental masters of the world; we see that the blow we received from them might just as well have fallen on another. In the case of suffering which springs from this source, we bewail the common lot of humanity rather than our own misfortune. But that it is the arbitrary will of another which inflicts the suffering, is a peculiarly bitter addition to the pain or injury it causes, viz., the consciousness that some one else is superior to us, whether by force or cunning, while we lie helpless.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, “Psychological Observations” (c. 1840)*

If a tire on my car is punctured and flattened by a nail that falls off the truck of a careless tradesman, I may curse my bad luck, and even the careless tradesman, but I will not curse so violently as I would curse you if you punctured and flattened my tire by design.  I accept being drenched by a thunderstorm; I reject being drenched by a malicious boy with a hose.  The reason, Schopenhauer explains, is that I am resigned to being under the power of nature, or chance, or fate, for I very readily perceive that this is the way of all flesh.  But I refuse to be under the power of a malicious boy, because that boy is intelligent and his malice is directed at me.

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe一
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law一

Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional” (1897)

You may recognize the name Alfred Russel Douglas as that of the homosexual poet and Catholic convert who caused so much trouble for Oscar Wilde.  This is a complicated story that has not been clarified by Wilde’s posthumous sympathizers, but this story is not the story I wish to tell.  Douglas became a Roman Catholic in 1911, at the age of 41, this being one aspect of his strong, although perhaps not absolute, repudiation of the libertinage he and Wilde had enjoyed in the gay ‘90s.

In 1920 Douglas founded a weekly magazine called Plain English; one year later a successor called Plain Speech.  These magazines were Catholic, reactionary, and (like Chesterton’s Catholic New Witness) mildly anti-Semitic.  English anti-Semitism in the 1920s was the breakup of what Chesterton called the “Victorian Compromise,” this compromise being that the English would grant civil rights to Jews and Jews would thereafter love England like Englishmen.  By the 1920s, English anti-Semites complained that Jews had in fact used their civil rights to advance to positions of great power in politics, law, culture and the press, but had continued to identify primarily as Jews.

Thus only the English had compromised.  As Chesterton wrote 1922,

“What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry—Weird Melancholy.”

Marcus Clarke, “Preface” to A. L. Gordon, Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1876)*

I never visited Australia and, given the agonies I suffer when packed in an airplane, suppose I never will.  But I am tempted by the promise of a landscape of “weird melancholy.”  I am also arrested by the suggestion of that simple phrase.

A series of disquieting indications forced me the other day to conclude that my sewer line had ceased to flow.   This last happened five or six years ago as the result, I was told, of an obtrusive root that had forced its way through a joint in the aged pipe.  This same obtrusive root had made itself a nuisance five or six years before that.  

As on those earlier occasions, I excavated the bullhead cleanouts, pried off the caps, and peered down into their fetid recesses while the disturbed water roaches (a.k.a. palmetto bugs) scattered in alarm.  Although feeling sorry for myself, I reflected that there is much to be said for my life when it is compared to that of a water roach that lives in a sewer.  But my life was not all sunshine, for what I saw at the bottom of those two bullhead cleanouts confirmed my worst fears

My grandmother had hanging above her stove a small plaque that read, “houses are made of brick and stone, but homes are made of love alone.”  It is nice sentiment but leaves out of account the importance of a free-flowing sewer, which a deeper philosophy knows is the true je ne sais quoi of a happy home.  

“It is a rather serious thing that an ordinary intelligent human being should have to rely on everything else except the public press for his information about public affairs.”  

G.K. Chesterton, “A Parenthesis on Minorities” (1926)*

We must at the best of times make do with a diet of very dubious information, what with the fatuous wheedling and whining of our neighbors and relations, the insouciant dishonesty of hired mouthpieces of rapacious commercial interests, the slick mendacity of politicians who propose, with well justified confidence, to remain in office by bamboozling their voters. And to this unwholesome stew we must add the spurious meat that is manufactured for a price by the Ministry of Truth that we call our media.  It appears to be the creed of this perfidious rabble that he who blows,

“The longest, strongest hurricane of lies,
May have the highest seat in Paradise.”**

And this, as I said, is the character of the chefs who furnish our food for thought in the best of times.  These rascals really get down to business in times of war.  This is because they are, for the most part. meretricious salesmen who work on commission.  As the great historian Harry Elmer Barnes long ago explained, to no effect whatever:

“Oh! purer than the morning light, 
And more beloved than dead of night, 
Come soon to set the world in tune
From midnight till the dial marks noon:
From dawn till the world’s end. Come soon!
Come soon!”

Ford Madox Ford, “Song” (1907)

“Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.”

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942)

Vindication is a curious word but hardly a curious desire.  If we pull this word up by its roots, we see that to vindicate means to declare with force or to dictate with vim.  As a practical matter, it means to speak the last word and to pronounce the final judgement.  Thus, a man is vindicated when he is saved from a false and opprobrious charge by a resounding declaration of his true merit and worth.  One day—although perhaps not until the End of the Ages— a mighty voice will declare that a man unjustly scorned shall henceforth, and justly, be admired.  Henceforth and forever, it will declare, a man who was mocked shall be praised.

Ivan is Alyosha’s older cynical brother, though still only in his early twenties, in The Brothers Karamazov. He is the one credited with dreaming up the “poem” about The Grand Inquisitor who says he is better than Christ because he actually wants happiness for people, whereas Jesus gives them perfection to aim for and standards so high that only the strong, a tiny minority, could ever hope to approach them. The Grand Inquisitor will, through the Catholic Church, offer the lie of eternal life and will distribute the bread that the many are too ill-prepared to share. The Church will also offer the confessional where sins are expiated so the weak can sin with the expectation of forgiveness and look forward to eternal salvation.

Ivan’s nihilism, however, has had an ill-effect on his half-brother Smerdyakov who has murdered their father as a result. When Ivan tries to get him punished for this, Smerdyakov is several steps ahead of him and threatens to frame him for the murder instead. Ivan desists, and devolves into madness. Once insane, he has a conversation with the Devil, who he is aware is a figment of his imagination. The Devil, perhaps not surprisingly, turns out to have an excellent sense of humor. From the book:

“There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, “laws, conscience, faith,” and, above all, the future life. He died: he expected nothing but darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was astounded and indignant. “This is against my principles!” he said.” Continue reading →