Dear Friends,
I’m sharing this week’s ‘Curator’ post. These are riffs on the most interesting recent articles I’ve come across recently on the ‘artistic/intellectual’ web. I haven’t done this in a little bit. A lot of fraught topics at the moment. May do another round of this in a couple of days.
Best,
Sam
PSYCHEDELICS OLD AND NEW
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a lovely profile of Roland Griffiths. Griffiths, it turns out, is really one of the seminal figures of our time — almost solely responsible for the ‘reset’ in the clinical use of psychedelics and their subsequent mainstreamization.
For most of his career, Griffiths was a man in a white coat, stubbornly insisting on having no undue interest in the psychedelics he was studying, but as he approaches the end — he has stage four colon caner — he has let the mask slip a bit and talked about what’s really driving him. And what it really is is a sort of existential crisis — he was a straight-laced, successful academic psychiatrist, “checking all the boxes a researcher in his field was supposed to check,” but, as The Chronicle of Higher Education’s piece has it, “his passion for the work itself had petered out.” He got interested in meditation — “what opened for me is this window of deep curiosity about inner knowing” — and was annoying enough about it with colleagues that word eventually got around to the mysterious Bob Jesse, who had been looking for a scientist to recruit to help restart psychedelics research. Griffiths turned out to be the perfect figure for that, and the 2006 paper he lead-authored on psilocybin generating ‘mystical-type experiences’ put a scientific imprimatur on what magic mushroom users had been saying for decades.
It turned out that, once subject to reasonable scientific parameters — not the bogus science that got LSD demonized in the late ‘60s and MDMA in the ’90s — psychedelics have extraordinary, measurable benefits without evident downsides. In the case of the 2006 psilocybin study, two-thirds of participants described the experience as being “among the most meaningful of their lives” and held to that in follow-up studies. “The results were just so astonishing,” Griffiths recalled. “It was unlike anything I’d ever worked with.”
For Griffiths, too, the study was a vital moment in finding meaning. “If it had fallen on its face, I still might have ended up in the ashram,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education. But the promising new avenue of psychedelics research persuaded Griffiths that there was still value in academia — and, under his aegis, the psychedelic renaissance took off all around him, and all before Griffiths himself (worried about spoiling his neutrality) had ever tried a psychedelic. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a memorable description of Griffiths, finally deciding to take MDMA, keeping his pen and paper handy to record his experiences, and, afterwards, writing simply, “It’s all true.”
Among the direct consequences of Griffiths’ studies are the abundant articles in mainstream publications exploring the deeper history of psychedelics and altered states. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s piece reminds us that, at the time of Griffiths’ study, The New York Times — being no fun at all — had described “psychedelic mushrooms as a stubborn part of the drug problem,” while there is almost nothing more square than the time The New Yorker went on an ayahuasca trip, but now pieces on the benefits of psychedelics (“Can Psychedelics Heal Ukrainians’ Trauma?” etc, etc) are almost so common as to be unnoticeable.
The New Yorker this week has a long article exploring 19th century drug-taking and seeing it as seminal to the creation of modern consciousness. Some of the usual suspect — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincey, William James — make an appearance here, but so does the deeply-fascinating Paschal Beverly Randolph (“Black Rosicrucian sex magician”) and so, in an unexpected context, does Sigmund Freud. Freud’s experiments with cocaine in the 1880s are seen as seminal to his work — not so much because of the properties of cocaine but because its study “involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject,” as The New Yorker puts it. In other words, the basic premise of the Scientific Enlightenment — that of a stable body of ‘objective knowledge’ based on the solid mental state of a detached observer — starts to fade away, and it becomes necessary to follow Freud in conceiving of a self that’s multiple, that contains disparate contradictions and nonetheless flows between them.
With Freud — via the medium of psychotropic substances and altered states — a path emerges out of the dogmatism of empirical science. This is the theme that appears on the margins of several articles I’m reading this week. Griffiths presented himself always as a dispassionate man of science — “I believe in the data,” he was in the habit of answering whenever anybody asked him some touchy-feely question about the spiritual side of psychedelics — but, as he himself was quietly acknowledging, the whole study of psychedelics wasn’t really about exploring some particular substance, however promising, it was about reintroducing the centrality of personal, subjective experience. “In an important sense, it’s not about psychedelics,” said David Yaden, the hand-picked successor to a professorship Griffiths established. “They’re the means to study something else I think is more important, which is that our minds have the capacity to positively transform.”
That idea appeared as well among the trip-takers of the 19th century. “Personal experience is the criterion of truth here,” wrote Jacques-Joseph Moreau, a French psychiatrist who encountered hashish while traveling in the Middle East. But it was exactly that sensibility that found itself on the defensive in an era of scientific objectivity. And, in a surprising turn, the split between ‘objectivity’ and more ‘spiritually-minded’ understandings affects how we take in the leading scientific discovery of the 19th century, the theory of natural selection. A discussion in The Wall Street Journal of a new biography of Alfred Russel Wallace makes clear that the primacy of Charles Darwin in advancing natural selection wasn’t so much that Darwin was trying to take credit away from Wallace (as I think everybody has more or less assumed) as that within the small community of evolutionists Darwin was deemed to be the more presentable figure, in large part because of Wallace’s “ardent defense of spiritualism.” James Costa, Wallace’s biographer, contends that it was exactly “because of Wallace’s iconoclastic streak, and not despite it, that he was able to produce his greatest insights” — and, in Wallace’s case, that iconoclasm was intimately intertwined with his spiritualist inquiries. In other words, the more ‘spiritualist’ way of perceiving the world wasn’t necessarily at such odds with the ‘hard science’ epitomized by ‘Darwinism.’ Wallace had gotten to exactly the same insights that Darwin had but through a more idiosyncratic road. The decision to privilege Darwin in the dissemination of the theory was more tactical than anything — with both scientists recognizing that Wallace would make a more confusing messenger.
And the interest in subjectivity appears in the mid-20th century, again at a period of ascendance for empirical science, with the attempt to turn creativity into a subset of science. But, as documented in a Louis Menand piece for The New Yorker, something like the opposite took place. “The postwar cult of creativity,” he quotes Samuel Franklin as saying, “was driven by a desire to impart on science, technology, and consumer culture some of the qualities widely seen to be possessed by artists, such as nonconformity, passion for work, and a humane, even moral sensibility, in addition to, of course, a penchant for the new.” The business establishment, particularly in a field like adverting, found itself embracing a gospel of creativity, encouraging its practitioners to tap into their subconscious, to embrace storytelling, to find much more fluid ways of conceptualizing the world.
Science constantly presents itself as being part of a linear progression of knowledge. The triumphs of empirical science in the mid-19th century (the theory of natural selection) and in the mid-20th (the splitting of the atom) were supposed to yield a sort of objective reality. But, instead, on the margins of those discoveries (in, say, the equivocatory figures of Wallace, Einstein, and Freud) is a different perspective — a more Freudian idea that subject and object are intertwined and that the state of mind of the observer determines everything about the ‘objective reality.’ As Griffiths and Yaden astutely note, the return of psychedelics under the auspices of ‘science’ is, at a deeper level, a challenge to the whole scientific method. Subjective experience becomes primary, as Jacques-Joseph Moreau put it, and with that we find ourselves less interested in some march towards ever-greater truth and instead exploring the pleasure garden of altered states, of all the infinitely many ways of being that consciousness has to offer.
GOOD ART AND BAD PEOPLE
In The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz has a somewhat tortured article about the endlessly vexing issue of what to do about good art made by bad people. The appearance of an article like this in The Atlantic is by itself a good sign — an indication that we’re moving out of the period of heightened moralism that beset the culture from (roughly speaking) 2017 to 2022 — but Shulevitz still seems to be engaged in trying to square circles and establish firm binaries in which anybody who makes good art must in some fundamental way be good, which means also that if a person is proven to be bad, then it follows that their art is fundamentally bad as well.
Shulevitz starts with the reductio ad absurdum — the case of Oscar Wilde. Shulevitz points out that Wilde had a habit of sleeping with teenagers — and yet there is very little movement to cancel him. Shulevitz speculates that this is less because Wilde’s offense is more redeemable within the parameters of 21st century morality as because of politics — “Wilde is spared because he represents—indeed, was a martyr to—one of the great causes of our time, which is LGBTQ rights,” Shulevitz writes.
Start there and it becomes immediately clear that, as she puts it, “punishment for wayward artists is being meted out erratically.” That leads to the question of whether art and morality have any crossover at all — or if, as Wilde himself would have it, art exists in some particular domain that is “quite useless” and altogether outside of moral rules.
That’s the favorite dodge of the aesthetes, and Shulevitz is party to it as well. What she claims is that art and the rest of life just don’t have much to do with each other, and in the case of David Bowie — who, it also turns out, slept with a teenager — there’s no particular reason (as many seemed compelled to do when the story broke) to rush to delete his music from their playlists. “You could call that hypocrisy; I call it sanity, because maybe punishment isn’t the way to go,” Shulevitz writes. But then Shulevitz does encounter the deeper problem — that if we watch something like Chinatown or Manhattan or the Thriller video, we just feel dirty; we know that something is off and we feel a bit violated that we’ve allowed somebody with dark twists in their psyche into our own psychic space. Shulevitz pauses there, voicing the concern and then disregarding it. “Claire Dederer recommends that we should engage with their art, not quash it, and work through our qualms at the same time. It’s a noble aspiration, but I suspect that the logic of ‘the stain’ will defeat it,” Shulevitz writes. Better then, she concludes, to just set up a veil between the work of art, which is in a sacrosanct, amoral sort of place, and the “hearsay about artists’ misdeeds or thought crimes.”
But we all know that that doesn’t quite do justice to the nuances of art. For one thing, that veil is very difficult to draw — “biography falls on your head all day long,” writes Claire Dederer in the book that prompted Shulevitz’s article. And, for another, we really, as audiences, are interested in moral ambiguity and tend to be drawn to the work of people who either have dark characters or are willing to explore darkness in themselves. We have some expectation that artists will share what they know and if we’re interested, for instance, in war, we’ll tend to prefer writing by people like Hemingway, Ernst Junger, or Céline, who know what they’re talking about, as opposed to work by some very moral, upright person who has never experienced war at all.
That becomes even more fraught when we get into the domain of sex. The dark question when we’re reading something like Lolita or The Immoralist or Salinger’s novels doesn’t really have to do with the probity of the author, it’s that we’re allowing ourselves to be led into the psychology of pederasty and that carries with it the risk that in the act of reading we ourselves are becoming ‘bad people.’
But all of this framing about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ turns not to be very helpful. It’s not exactly that art is a useless, amoral sphere — that’s a reduction to throw off the censors. It’s that art is a ritualized zone in which the subconscious has free play. That zone parallels ‘reality’ and partakes of much of the same moral structures as reality, but is in a realm in which the normal consequences of morality do not apply — if an actor is cruelly murdered on a stage, they are not really cruelly murdered, they get up again a minute later, etc. Freed of the hard-and-fast exigencies that underlie conventional morality, we have permission within the ritualized space to examine the more difficult aspects of our own psyche — to, for instance, sympathize with a psychopath without worrying that they’ll murder us; to look at some illicit relationship without feeling the need to cast judgment upon it.
This is a very delicate, ritualized process. Much of it depends on a relationship of trust with the creator — we trust them both to know what they’re talking about (which is why we’re often drawn to more morally ambiguous people in the presentation of difficult subject-matter) but also to protect us, to let us out safely again. The discovery of pederasty by people like Salinger or Allen undermines that trust — and makes us feel that we’ve been lied to in a work of art, that the creator is smuggling in the more execrable elements of their own psyche and, as Dederer puts it, “staining” us with them.
But in judging these works — and in determining the punishment (i.e. censorship) for those who’ve made them — we tend to be asking the wrong question. The real idea is that we want to be psychically strong enough to be able to take in the expression even of the most heinous people. It’s an important part of the education of anybody who’s interested in modern history to read Mein Kampf just as it is for anyone who’s interested in abnormal psychology to read Carl Panzram. The reading of texts like these isn’t any sort of exoneration of the people who write them and at the same time isn’t to be undertaken lightly — the notion is that it’s the deep end of the pool, and people read Hitler or Panzram only when they’re psychically ready. Same goes to some extent for Allen, Salinger, Polanski, etc. We can find the inner strength to take in their work without becoming — as we secretly fear — worse people for it, but that takes some degree of preparation or recalibration. I’m not sure that, having seen the documentary Neverland, I could ever enjoy ‘Thriller’ again, but that doesn’t mean that ‘Thriller’ needs to somehow be eradicated — it just means that it becomes a much darker work, not the candy that it was originally marketed as, but an expression of a very tormented psyche.
There is a more fraught topic still in the theme of redemption-through-art. If the Wilde idea of uselessness is to be taken seriously, and art treated as an essentially flippant, doodly sort of activity, then no possible moral benefit can accrue to a person making a work of art. The usual dodge of the aesthetes is turned on its head: yes, you can’t hold a person to moral account for something that’s expressed in their work, but at the same time you can’t really think better of them either for their facility in expressing themselves. But, in reality, that idea of redemption is actually what drives many if not most people to art — the idea that their unpleasant experiences, the difficult aspects of themselves, may be redeemed by being honestly or gracefully described and the truth of themselves transmitted on through the culture. How we deal with that idea is a complex topic. And much of the moralist stance at the moment is about not giving artists a pass — not saying that what Polanski did is ok because he makes good movies, or something like that. Which is more than fair. The moral injury remains the moral injury; art doesn’t redeem. But, as one of art’s properties is to mirror, so, within the ritualized space, another of its properties is to heal. That means that it’s silly to completely set up a Wildean curtain between life and art; we do want to create room in art for the penitent, the remorseful, or simply the broken, to express their hurt and sorrow. That’s a conversation that we’re sort of not quite ready yet to have — not just who gets exiled from the sphere of art based on moral shortcomings; but which compromised people are we willing to listen to precisely because we know they’re compromised. The real reality is that there’s no rule for this — and no societal prescription. Art is meant to create space for redemption — that’s a vitally important component of the creation of art — but the act of redemption, like the initial darkness, can’t be taken in easily by anyone. It takes real mental work on the part of audiences to deal with difficult subject matter and with morally-compromised creators. That means that we deal with the difficult work in our own time, in our own way. We don’t look to any societal arbiters to just give us the green light that some piece of work is ‘good’ and its creator ‘good’ also.
JUNOT DÍAZ
And on the topic of good art by ‘bad people,’ there’s a more specific case — a review of the #MeToo accusations against Junot Díaz, by Deborah Chasman, a Boston Review editor who was in the thick of the Díaz controversy.
I’m like everybody else on this. I had a vague memory of Díaz being canceled at the height of the #MeToo movement and then didn’t think about it again — and so it’s a surprise to realize that Díaz was largely exonerated from a whole tangle of accusations and that, as Chasman writes, “the difference between the public accounts of Díaz’s behavior and the conversations I was having were dizzying.” Of course, the damage is already done. Díaz kept most of his positions — The Boston Review stood up for him, an investigation by M.I.T. “cleared him of misconduct accusations,” and the Pulitzer Prize board spent $500,000, Chasman reports, before restoring him to his position as board chair — but the lasting memory of him is of a predator.
What’s so striking about the Díaz case, in Chasman’s recounting, is how seamlessly the very disparate accusations all seemed to blend together. Zenzi Clemmons initiated the accusations by publicly challenging Díaz for “forcibly kissing” her. Alisa Rivera, Monica Byrne, Alisa Valdes, and Carmen Maria Machado all wrote articles or posts supporting Clemmons’ contention but never actually repeating the charge of sexual harassment or assault. Rivera wrote that on a date Díaz told her that she “had the voice of an oppressor” and speculated that he took “sadistic pleasure in holding her when she started crying,” as Chasman paraphrases it. Byrne claimed that Díaz talked over her and subjected her to “virulent misogyny” at a dinner party. Valdes wrote that she had a sexual relationship with Díaz during which he failed to divulge that he had a girlfriend. Machado tweeted that Díaz “went off on her” at a University of Iowa event, subjecting her to an “enraged” 20-minute rant.
But, upon closer examination, many of the charges seemed to evaporate. Audio of the event at which Díaz allegedly “went off” on Machado revealed that, as Chasman writes, “he never raises his voice” — and Machado in turn backed off, saying in an interview with New York Magazine that the “intent of the tweets was to offer a boost to Zinzi Clemmons” and that “I’m not a victim of Junot Díaz, I’m a female writer who had a weird interaction with him.” The host of the dinner party attended by Díaz and Byrne wrote a letter saying that neither he nor any of the guests he spoke to could remember any shouting. And Clemmons’ accusation of a “forcible kiss” — the most damning accusation against him — turned out, as the Pulitzer board discovered during its investigation against him, to be a kiss on the cheek.
Meanwhile, though, Díaz went into a kind of purgatory — a children’s book of his, slated for publication by Random House in 2018, was never released. Chasman’s first-person account was accepted and then rejected by The New York Times due to “late concerns” and then accepted and rejected by The New Republic before finally appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
As it turned out, not only was Díaz largely cleared of the sexual misconduct charges — but that there were hardly any sexual misconduct charges to begin with. “I started to think about the totality of the charges as a ‘Bad Man’ complaint,” writes Chasman — the point being that, in the spirit of 2018, everything blended together, and Díaz’s holding somebody who was crying was interpreted as “his wanting to envelop himself in the grief, shock, and shame he’d inflicted on me,” as Rivera wrote; and his mentorship of young writers interpreted as a predatory ploy.
For Chasman, the Díaz episode doesn’t change the fundamental rightness of #MeToo. As she writes, “#MeToo’s moral center is an effort to create a new consensus around the truth of women’s lives. It’s a powerful and necessary corrective to the systematic erasure of sexual violence and sexual harassment.” But the clear miscarriage of justice in the Díaz case — the accusation standing in for a presumption of guilt — raises questions about what #MeToo really represented.
Thinking about #MeToo from the vantage-point of 2023 — and taking a structural perspective — what much of it was about was thinking through the nature of journalism. The advent of sexual harassment law meant that the primary route for dealing with charges of sexual harassment would be in civil courts, but in practice that seemed to be ineffective — cases were expensive and difficult to bring and foundered on ‘he said she said.’ But that standard inverted itself once — starting with The New York Times’ lead on the Weinstein story — publications opened themselves up as a vehicle for accusations of sexual harassment and ‘believe women’ became a rallying cry in public space in a way that it never could within a court system. With the compounding pressure of social media, virtually all concern about libel faded away — it became acceptable to print accusations long before they had made any appearance in any court — and there was never close to enough time to do the sort of exhaustive review of alleged wrongdoing, as was carried out by the Pulitzer board in the Díaz case, before publications and public opinion reached their conclusions.
Recently, I watched She Said — which gives the hagiographic version of The Times’ reporting on Weinstein and of the origins of #MeToo. I’d forgotten, or hadn’t quite realized, how much of it was about a shift in journalistic perspective — The New York Times, after the Trump election, looking into “all workplaces where sexual harassment might happen,” as the Rebecca Corbett character puts it in the film. At least in the way it’s laid out in She Said, #MeToo was a direct response to Trump. The sexual assault charges against him seemed not to impede his path to the presidency, but they opened up a lane for an extremely ad hominem style of reporting on sexual misconduct. To an astonishing degree, that really became the defining cultural event of a whole era. It shifted the balance of power in gender relations in striking ways; introduced new levels of propriety into sexual conduct and public speech; and remade both the traditional media and social media as a tool for seeking redress for allegations that hadn’t made it into the court system. The social consequences of that are so stark that we’ll spend at least a generation trying to sort all of it out. But it is worth dwelling, as Chasman bravely does, on some of the immediate cost. Sometimes the allegations did get it wrong — and journalists neglected their responsibilities to perform due diligence; and public opinion lacked any effective means for restoring ruined reputations.
What we learn from all of that is that journalism is a more delicate instrument than we were willing to acknowledge in 2018. To really do a story involved painstaking digging. But in the spirit of 2018, there was a tendency to defer to more ‘spiritual truths’ — Byrne, in response to a question from The Boston Globe about whether Díaz was a sexual abuser or a jerk, said, “What is the difference?”; Machado saying in the New York interview that the “condescension” she detected from Díaz was the same thing as if he really had “went off” on her at the University of Iowa event. In the context of the time, brass tacks attention to what was actually said or what allegations actually consisted of was seen as reactionary — and, to a great extent, that has done lasting harm to journalistic institutions. Many publications gambled on being on the ‘right side of history’ with their #MeToo pieces. From the vantage-point of 2023, it’s already clear that the truth was far more complex than that, and journalism lost out in its drive to be morally pure.
Good points about the good/bad art issue. The problem is that, art or no art, people are complex and messy. We all are. Jung wrote about this often with his ‘shadow’ self concept. There’s yin/yang. The best of the us have a little evil and the worst of us have a little good. There’s an irony in the rise of culturally fascistic woke identity politics, the whole cancellation purity culture: Eventually everyone will be exposed, including the leftists, as messy impure hypocrites. And ultimately that’s what we need: For everyone to realize what we already know: Human purity is an illusion.
Artists are often unconventional, weird, different, intense, extreme, etc. It’s in our nature, our blood. Being sober, I’ve met hundreds of sober artists in AA, male and female, who’ve done terrible, even taboo, things in the past. If I’m honest I’m one of ‘em. But so what? That’s life? Most of us had difficult childhoods. We drank to survive. We did stupid shit. We got sober. We changed. We made amends. We moved on. That’s life. We’re going to dig into every single artist’s personal life and dole out moral certifications as to whether they can be treated as worthy artists, worthy human beings? That sounds like Nazi Germany to me.
You nailed it in the dumb hollowness of the good/bad binary. It’s totally absurd and unrealistic and unhelpful. As you pointed out: When it’s someone who benefits the left suddenly they’re silent.
This can’t be taken seriously. Art has never been morally virtuous or safe, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to Dostoevsky to Miller etc.
Wrote a piece on that: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-henry-miller
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
No kidding. I would add to this the q: Should we not read T.S Eliot or listen to Wagner because both had a history of Anti-Semitism? And then there's the knotty question of the fabulous art by Woody Allen--don't shoot me, but I think his films are some of the best ever made. And I'm Jewish and love Eliot and Wagner.