Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

by Benjamin Breen

This idea—that drugs could be a tool for the creation of a new culture—was genuinely original. Peyote and related tools for the alteration of consciousness, like psilocybin mushrooms, were usually imagined as survivals from a premodern past. But what if they were, instead, pathways to a glorious future?

In a widely read essay from October 1945, George Orwell predicted that the age of atomic weapons would split the world between “two or three monstrous super-states,” each dominated by a “machine civilisation” overseen by a “self-elected oligarchy”: the United States and its European allies, the Soviet bloc, and “the third of the three super-states—East Asia, dominated by China.” Orwell predicted a future in which science was permanently weaponized in the service of a shadow conflict that depended on the mobilization of vast reservoirs of technical expertise—for, as he put it, “a complex weapon makes the strong stronger.” In this eerily prescient essay, Orwell coined a term that would define an era. The future, Orwell believed, would be locked in “a permanent state of ‘cold war.’” Margaret Mead fundamentally disagreed. Rather than envisioning the postwar world as split between three hermetically sealed empires, she began describing it as an interconnected whole. Human society, she said, was now “a great complicated machine” in which every part was mutually dependent. “We,” she declared, apparently meaning not just scientists but everyone who cared what scientists like her had to say, had a “responsibility for keeping it in good repair and improving it.” The machine was not, as more skeptical commentators like George Orwell saw it, an inhuman juggernaut poised to trample the human spirit. The machine was us. Mead saw not despair but enormous opportunity in this fact. She bel...

Bateson was evoking the widely held belief that there would soon be breakthroughs in the human sciences to rival the Manhattan Project. After all, scientists in those years were celebrating not just a new era of wonder drugs such as penicillin, but a genuinely revolutionary approach to thinking about consciousness and communication. Starting with a series of Macy conferences that began in March 1946—later dubbed the “cybernetics conferences”—Mead, Bateson, and colleagues such as Norbert Wiener of MIT and Claude Shannon at Bell Labs were reimagining the brain itself as a computer. History’s first general-purpose digital computer, ENIAC, had been announced at the beginning of that year. ENIAC was a weapon of war, used to calculate atomic bomb yields. Crucially, however, it could be reprogrammed—altered for peacetime use, gifted with new potentials. What if the human mind was the same? Perhaps assuring human survival meant developing a new science of sanity, a new set of tools for reprogramming minds and societies stuck in self-destructive feedback loops.

The Mead and Bateson of the early postwar years were more overtly experimental than at any other time in their lives. In this, they were not alone. Around the world, as colonized peoples fought for independence, gender roles shifted, mind-altering drugs multiplied, the American civil rights movement and early gay liberation struggled into existence, and global population jagged upward at an unprecedented rate, the period from 1945 to 1960 was among the most radical eras of social experimentation in history. This fact has, in popular consciousness, been overshadowed by the attention lavished on the 1960s and 1970s. But looked at another way, these decades were an aftereffect, an echo. It was in the late 1940s and 1950s that the forces of change, stored up during the war like a coiled spring, most rapidly unwound themselves.

Margaret Mead was part of the cultural consensus that created the tranquilizer era. Writing for the New York Times in 1956, in an article titled “One Vote for This Age of Anxiety,” Mead argued that if a society’s most pressing problems were anxiety and stress, it meant that it had escaped humanity’s traditional enemies of warfare, famine, and disease. The rising significance of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs in modern life was, she argued, not a sign of growing mental illness, but a sign of progress. It led to “a world in which no individual feels that he need be hopelessly brokenhearted, a failure, a menace to others or a traitor to himself… a society where there will be freedom from want and freedom from fear.”

Leary worked as a research associate at the Langley Porter Clinic in 1955, and likely met Bateson at that time. He certainly resembled Bateson in his disarmingly informal approach to psychotherapy, which often involved befriending patients rather than simply treating them. “He wanted a model where, instead of detachment, psychologists practiced involvement,” said Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass.

The underlying question was fascinatingly fundamental: are we truly the same person from moment to moment? Almost all of us feel, intuitively, that there is an inner core, a sense of self, that persists across the days, months, and years. But could this be proven? And what about drugs that promised to dramatically alter that sense of self? These questions—along with his reading of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception—led Block to find some mescaline of his own. In 1956, sitting in an interview room at the Langley Porter Clinic, Block tried the drug for the first time, “observed by Gregory Bateson.” Block loved it. Mescaline “seemed to enrich and remarkably broaden perception, whereas tranquilizers dulled and narrowed perception.” The experience was “profound… something cosmic and religious in a Zen-like way.”

Margaret Mead believed at that time, in 1955, that mescaline or LSD might allow the user to “reorganize” themselves in such a way that they could better adapt to a rapidly changing social order, heading off the mystical “fanaticism” that so often accompanied transformation experiences. This is what she had meant when, typing her thoughts about LSD late at night in the summer of 1954, she wrote of the “new possibility” that LSD might offer a path “away from mysticism and escape.” And for a brief period of a few years in the late 1950s, this dream still seemed achievable.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

In psychedelic therapy’s first decade, nearly every expert had agreed that substances like mescaline, peyote, and LSD caused “experimental psychosis.” But as those same researchers began using psychedelics themselves, many concluded that the experience conferred lasting insights. Stuck between an outmoded medical definition and their own reluctance to forsake the veneer of scientific objectivity that would be stripped away if they admitted to their self-experimentation, their contradictory public utterances about psychedelics betrayed an inner epistemological tension.

As the 1960s began, psychedelic therapy seemed poised to become a significant new treatment on a global scale even as the science of psychedelics remained a relatively small and esoteric field, one that had largely grown out of the ethos of the Macy circle. In just a few years, however, the field would be torn apart by internal conflicts and external pressures. What had once been conceivable as a unified project would fracture into mutually hostile camps. The hippies versus the spies. The skeptics versus the true believers. And Timothy Leary would be standing at the center of the fault line.

Luce and her husband, Henry, publisher of Time and Life, two of the most influential magazines in the world at the time, were staunch Republicans and anti-Communists who supported the CIA and its covert operations. They were also ardent proponents of psychedelic therapy, especially Clare, who had used LSD to cope with the death of her daughter and had introduced it to many of her friends and associates. Their personal beliefs influenced a series of largely positive articles on psychedelics that appeared in Time and Life throughout the late 1950s and into the early 1960s.

By this time, even media outlets that had formerly shown interest in the potential of psychedelic science now filled their pages with accounts of psychedelic users who threatened civilization itself. Mead could easily have followed suit. But she didn’t. Though LSD’s users could be “solipsistic” and overly inward-focused, Mead wrote, she defended the use of psychedelics as tools of spiritual insight. The trouble was that the United States of the 1960s did not have a cultural background that allowed these insights to be meaningfully integrated into society at large. In the Balinese trance tradition, she explained, “people take a great many precautions in selecting and ritually training those who will engage regularly in trance and in controlling where and under what circumstances trance may be induced.” To properly guide psychedelic users, she wrote, “very careful disciplines and rigorous forms of training would have to be developed.”

By the fall of 1980, it was not just Bateson and Mead who had died. So, too, had the ideas that inspired and drove the first generation of psychedelic science. Yet something of their sense of science as transformative and redemptive—and yes, even utopian—did survive. In September 1980, for instance, two months after Bateson’s death, Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, premiered the first episode of their television documentary Cosmos. In the years to come, it would go on to be viewed by over five hundred million people, a sizable percentage of the world’s population. “So much of what we did—Cosmos, Contact, and so many books—was stimulated, inspired, by many psychoactive substances,” Druyan told me, relaying her experiences using substances from cannabis to MDMA to ayahuasca with Sagan. In 1964, Sagan had visited Bateson and Lilly at their dolphin lab, fascinated by their work, but in the end also troubled by it. Sagan’s regard for Margaret Mead never faded, however. They were “kindred souls,” Druyan said, because they were both “realistic utopians.” And their shared credo, she said, could be summed up quite simply: “Life is not perfectible. But it could be so much better.”