If not for homophobia, we could have had Utopia... through LSD.

I'm reading "Could LSD Have Achieved World Peace? Ask Margaret Mead. In 'Tripping on Utopia,' Benjamin Breen chronicles the legendary anthropologist’s doomed effort to save the world through hallucinogens" (NYT).

Here's the book: "TRIPPING ON UTOPIA: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (commission earned).

The the reviewer, Charlotte Shane, writes:

"Tripping on Utopia" makes the convincing case that [Margaret] Mead and her cohort were key players in the first wave of psychedelic science... which began not in the 1960s but in the 1920s. "Timothy Leary and the baby boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era," Breen writes. "They ended it."

Mead’s interest in psychedelics stemmed from her lifelong quest to find a way to help humanity design peaceful, culturally diverse societies full of self-actualized individuals— in essence, a utopia.... 

Despite her reams of writing, Mead was a person with many secrets and her desire to keep one of these — her long-term romantic relationship with another woman — may have been the definitive blow to her optimistic fascination with LSD. By 1955, Mead was being investigated (for the second time) by the F.B.I. and had read studies that showed patients dosed with psychedelics sometimes confessed to truths they wanted to keep under wraps. To create utopia, she’d have to ruin her own life.

Reading about Margaret Mead's "lifelong quest to find a way to help humanity design peaceful, culturally diverse societies full of self-actualized individuals" — is it your quest too? — I got to thinking about a book that got heavy promotion in 1971, "A Rap on Race," by Margaret Mead and James Baldwin. 

Baldwin and Mead intertwine discussions on "identity, power and privilege, race and gender, beauty, religion, justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination." They talk about "New Guinea, South Africa, Women's Lib, the South, slavery, Christianity, their early childhood upbringings, Israel, the Arabs, the bomb, Paris, Istanbul, the English language, Huey Newton, John Wayne, the black bourgeoisie, Baldwin's 2-year-old grandnephew and Professor Mead's daughter."

Why didn't that bring us Utopia?

I'm reading the contemporaneous NYT review of that book. (The book wasn't really written, but recorded.) The reviewer, Richard Elman — author of the novelization of the first 2 "Smokey and the Bandit" movies — scoffs:

No fuss. No bother. Eliminate dirty smudges on the fingertips, broken nails, and messy erasure marks. You don't need to revise, rethink, or rewrite. You don't even need to write. Just think of it, folks: No more bloodshot eyes, or coffee bowels, or angry friends you've stood up to work just a little longer, harder, more.

Apparently, back in 1971, there was something known as "coffee bowels."

Sealed inside your own angry mortal human vacuum, to be just as fatuous as Margaret Mead and James Baldwin about the crisis of our time — particularly race — all you have to do is talk and not listen, always avoid expressing your feelings openly, refer constantly to other times and other cultures with historical and/or pseudo — historical truths, interrupt whenever possible, call yourself a prophet or a poet, insist that you are being emotionally sincere and/or objectively rational, and record it all on tape, to be transcribed later as a book.

And that, though it's 53 years old, is the sentence of the day.

You may perorate endlessly: "Well, I wonder. Perhaps it's a very bizarre wonder, but I can't get myself into the head of, let us say--we're speaking in such horrible generalities, speaking of white and black people."... Or you can declare abruptly: "Of course, George Washington didn't have any children, fortunately."...

Announce that "love is the only wisdom." Assert such "in the name of your ancestors." Denounce any and all assertions of "racial guilt." Speak out fearlessly against the plight of Chicanos, Filipinos, Sephardic Jews of Israel. Presto! You're off the hook. You've got a book. You haven't had to say anything at all, and it will probably sell fairly well. This is called instantaneous wisdom, although some may call it "A Rap on Race."...

Thus history will record the moment Baldwin said to Margaret Mead: "The point of a man is being a man."

Ha ha. The reviewer thinks Baldwin said something ridiculously obvious. He had no idea that half a century later, a statement like that would be intensely controversial and could get you what the People of the Future would call "canceled."

With their tape recorder, Margaret Mead and James Baldwin got together one steamy night last August. They had a mutual friend. So first they ate dinner and then they went blah blah blah in front of the recorder late into that night and then again the next day-- about [as quoted above] New Guinea, South Africa, Women's Lib, the South, slavery, Christianity, their early childhood upbringings, Israel, the Arabs, the bomb, Paris, Istanbul, the English language, Huey Newton, John Wayne, the black bourgeoisie, Baldwin's 2-year-old grand nephew and Professor Mead's daughter.

It was a proto-podcast. Forget the book. You can listen to it here, on You(topia)Tube.

***

Why haven't I ever made a "Utopia" tag? I'm making it now. Wait to click it. I'll need to apply it retroactively. Perhaps there are 20 posts in the archive that deserve it. [UPDATE: Tag retroactively added to 28 posts in the archive.]

***

By the way, the "Rap About Race" reviewer ends by opining that we, the NYT readers, had "better start talking to each other and stop listening to wise men and women among us except when they deign to write down what they have to say in novels and plays and poems and essays and yes, then revise, if necessary." 

Very funny from the perspective of 2024. He told us to stop doing the one thing that is almost all anyone does nowadays.