This book addresses current issues in liberal democracy by looking at European thought underwriting a particular set of aesthetics that emerged in the 1960s. Arguing that we ought to see this period as foundational for present concerns and critiques of liberal democracy, it suggests that “psychedelic aesthetics” illustrate the political-theological issues the United States inherited from European discussions about the limits of liberal democracy. It is not a straightforward history, however. Nor is it a cataloging of who’s who in the counterculture or an assessment of what is commonly regarded as “psychedelia.”. Invoking the term “psychedelic” signals an interdisciplinary approach to what I see as the “mind-manifesting” of European thought in American liberalism. I use the term “psychedelic aesthetics” in a metonymic way—not as a closed set of features but an open set of descriptions to address ongoing concerns in rights-based, liberal culture.
I believe that the phantasy structure manifested by psychedelic aesthetics gets at the political-theological concerns underwriting liberal democracy. Understanding the structure is not a celebration of it. It is a suggestion like the story of Phaethon, who insisted upon driving Apollo’s chariot and scorched the Earth until Zeus had to strike him down—one reminding us of the human tendency toward arrogance. To study forces beyond our limits is not to rein the virtues of fortune but to remind ourselves of the dangers of imbalance. “Political theology” speaks to what ought to be rather obvious to most of my readers: whether one is “religious” or not, the place of religion in relationship to global politics and civil life in the twenty-first century has been a prevalent issue. While I will give it more extensive discussion, from the outset “political theology” names not just the relationship between religion and the public sphere or spheres but the underlying faith a democratic citizen or subject has in the political order and its laws.
Americans often look to the 1960s as a time of revolution and insurgency, a time when America’s values were either challenged or changed. Despite Francis Fukuyama’s oft-cited claims in the 1990s concerning the “end of history” and the end of the Cold War, what we have seen in the first decades of the twenty-first century continues to be the fallout of the restructuring of political boundaries after the “great” wars of the twentieth century and, though less studied by American youth, increasingly the Iranian Revolution.
On the international stage, we witness challenges to liberal democracy in terms of refugee crises, terrorism, and the potential dismantling of the European Union following events like the “Brexit.” Liberal media presents attacks in Paris and Nice alongside Orlando and domestic mass shootings with less attention to ongoing strife in the Middle East. Such media serves to preserve a Western liberal frame of “crisis.” Yet, one American man who attended my public lectures in 2014 as I was formulating the material for this book insisted repeatedly, “what crisis?”
For me, the crisis at least partly involves an increase in traditionalist perspectives of Paleoconservatism in the United States and the National Front (sometimes overly conflated with the Nouvelle Droite ) in France—what others sometimes term the mainstreaming of the “alt right.” Religious traditionalism is certainly part of and often complicit with these movements. This is more pronounced in the United States with perspectives like Paul Weyrich and the broader Christian Right participating in mainstream life since the late 1970s (about the same time as the Iranian Revolution). Reactions since 9/11 have increasingly produced the critical term “postsecular” among academics in the West. Although thinkers such as Talal Asad and José Casanova were already discussing religion in the public sphere, and media scares such as Jonestown, Waco, and the cult phenomenon did a lot of affective work shaping discourse on “fanaticism”; shifts toward rights-based reaction-formations based on identity took on a feverish pitch after Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis and 9/11, destabilizing traditional metaphors of left and right in the political spectrum through the one-dimensional turn toward globalization.
Announcements of a “postsecular” period mark a context where Western liberalism finds itself in constant crises on various fronts. Distinguishing the term from historical description, liberal social philosopher Jürgen Habermas says:
Despite Habermas’s qualifiers, scholars such as Akash Singh have noted that the frame of postsecular is already entrenched in Western political sensibilities and histories.the expression “postsecular” is not a genealogical but a sociological predicate. I use this expression to describe modern societies that have to reckon with the continuing existence of religious groups and the continuing relevance of the different religious traditions, even if the societies themselves are largely secularized. Insofar as I describe as “postsecular,” not society itself, but a corresponding change of consciousness in it, the predicate can also be used to refer to an altered self-understanding of the largely secularized societies of Western Europe, Canada, or Australia. … In this case, “postsecular” refers, like “postmetaphysical,” to a caesura in the history of mentality. But the difference is that we use the sociological predicate as a description from the observer’s perspective, whereas we use the genealogical predicate from the perspective of a one who shares in the goal of self-understanding.1
In “Is Who Postsecular?” Singh locates the post-postcolonial era with the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The distinction with the postcolonial era exists in the necessity for both existing and newly emerging political entities to confront “[n]ew patterns of immigration grounded in grooves worn by other aspects of globalization (movements of capital, goods, services, etc.)”2:
My aim is not to say that the liberal political projects promoting secularism (including multiculturalism) are “dead,” but that there is a discursive usefulness in the term “postsecular” in challenging the generally publicized valuations dogmatically aligned with the European Enlightenment in which religious or spiritual “enchantment” is the antithesis of rational, progressive discourse.What is crucial about the post-postcolonial … is that the movement of persons, the new immigration, cannot be folded back into the same processes of assimilization/ghettoization that were sustainable throughout the twentieth century. In 2010 we heard this in another way from Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, and later from other European leaders: multiculturalism is dead. This is an awareness of the postsecular situation. It is one among so many recent admissions of crisis.3
As I look at psychedelic aesthetics, I often employ a postsecular attitude. Because many psychedelic enthusiasts are concerned with “breaking through” or “opening up” consciousness, few realize the ways liberalism informs their own set and setting and is reinscribed in neurological maps they take to be metaphysical evidencing of “universal” consciousness.
What does this all have to do with psychedelic aesthetics? I believe the convoluted discussion with relationship to traditionalism, human potential, and confidence in liberal democracy in the West is rooted in the 1960s, not just in the United States but in France and Germany as well, especially after May of 1968. The events in Europe sparked explosions of philosophical and theoretical discussions in the United States that are ongoing but often seen as elitist and esoteric.
The European thinkers whose ideas influenced critical and cultural theory in the United States were reacting to problems stemming from the difficulties of imposed liberal democracy in Weimar Germany after the First World War (and Gaullism and Maoism after the Second). During the years leading up to and just after the Second World War, a number of European thinkers took refuge in American universities. Their transatlantic crossing brought with them the concerns of much more dire political conditions than their students in the United States had ever experienced and helped influence a generation of young people. This is largely a meditation on that influence, which is often obscured by the cultural memory of “the sixties.”
Many of the thinkers who came to the United States were on the left, either by association with Marxism, Jewishness, or both—because both were the default enemies of the right when National Socialism seized power in the wake of failed liberal democracy known as the Weimar Republic. Such thinkers were understandably concerned with establishing that their critiques of liberal democracy came from an altogether different perspective than Fascism, and one of the marks of what we now call classic “critical theory” was an interrogation of why a Marxian revolution did not take hold of Germany in the 1920s. In the postwar United States, European skepticism and pessimism blended with a homegrown humanist optimism.
In 1960, C. Wright Mills began his “Letter to the New Left” claiming that distinctions between left and right had disappeared:
For a secular humanist description, there is quite a universalizing, evangelical ring to the last sentence. The New Left of the 1960s, while influenced by both European post-humanist skepticism and American secular humanist optimism, was itself infused with traditions of New Thought and religious experimentation dating back to the early colonies. The American New Left was more liberal than Marxist, despite structural critiques, surface pretensions, and lifestyle experimentation. Abstract optimism in change waned by the end ...The Right, among other things, means what you are doing: celebrating society as it is, a going concern. Left means, or ought to mean, just the opposite. It means structural criticism and reportage and theories of society, which at some point or another are focussed [sic] politically as demands and programs. These criticisms, demands, theories, programs are guided morally by the humanist and secular ideals of Western civilization—above all, the ideas of reason, freedom, and justice. To be “left” means to connect up cultural with political criticism, and both with demands and programs. And it means all of this inside every country of the world.4