History of My Reading: Vietnam and my (two) draft physicals

As the summer of 1968 ended and I finally worked out the details of attending the Iowa Writers Workshop in the fall, I faced a more formidable test.  I was going to be drafted, at the height of the Vietnam War.

The subject of Vietnam had been a necessary focus of my life and my reading since 1965, growing in urgency as I approached the moment my student deferment ended.  Draft calls were high by then--mine was certain to come soon. 
 

Vietnam in all its aspects wasn't easy to face, and it still isn't.  Benjamin B. Barber begins his essay, which leads off the 1990 compilation The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination (Beacon Press): “There is no event in America’s recent history more painful—more memorable yet less remembered—than our long and futile military engagement in Southeast Asia...Vietnam is an invitation only to amnesia—a hard and numb scar we prefer not to notice.”

On a track of Randy Newman’s great 1970 album 12 Songs, the singer describes the promising start of a love affair, except that she wants to talk about the war. “I don’t want to talk about the war” the singer asserts.

 By the time I heard this song I was heartily sick of talking about the war. I had been talking about it, thinking about, bewildered and angry, bitter and immensely sad about it, for what seemed like forever, even if, all told, it took up a wearisome decade. In particular I was aware of how it was poisoning my college life and beyond, my early to mid 20s, with all of its immutable experiences and all of its urgency in determining the course of my life.

For we were shadowed by Vietnam war events until, for a few years we ate, drank, slept, read and talked the Vietnam war, and what it was doing to our personal lives, our generation, our country and humanity, as well as the people living and dying in that faraway land.

Meanwhile it took friends and acquaintances and distant contemporaries, wounding their bodies, minds and lives, and killing them dead, whether they fought in the war, fought against it, or otherwise witnessed it close up. It deformed the country, turning family members, friends and generations against each other.

Knox History prof John Stipp

In college, Vietnam also became an education in itself, and eventually central to my education there. The first event I recall was a “teach-in” on American policy in Vietnam given by a group of Knox College faculty in my first year, probably in the spring of 1965. With lots of competition for attention, it drew only about 100 students (according to history professor John Stipp, one of the two speakers I definitely remember.  The other was another history professor, Gabe Jackson.) But I was one of the students in the audience, and I’ve never forgotten at least the feeling of that event.

Our professors placed the American military presence in the context of the geography and history of southeast Asia and Vietnam specifically, from even before the French Indochina war. They described political and moral implications. They provided facts and sources that already contradicted US official statements.

Their scholarship and analyses (some familiar, some not) were daring to contradict official policy, lambasting the mistaken reasons for a war and its conduct while it was happening. This was academic discourse with a contemporary purpose. It meant something to our lives at that moment. And it was at least a little dangerous for them, as it would be very dangerous particularly for the male students listening, and not listening.

The amount of scholarship and writing on Vietnam already by 1965 is suggested in The Viet-Nam Reader published that year, edited by Marcus Raskin and Bernard Fall. Reporter and scholar Bernard Fall in particular was a respected voice on Vietnam, since he started out a supporter but became a critic. He had been reporting on the region since the early 1950s and warned the US was making the same mistakes as the French. He continued to report on the war, and was accompanying US Marines in Vietnam in 1967 when they were ambushed, and he was among those killed.

That spring of 1965 was when the US became fully involved in a war in Vietnam, with the first ground troops, the first search-and-destroy missions and in particular, the first bombing of North Vietnam. Escalation (a word we were learning) continued through the summer, and so student interest also escalated the following fall.  In 1965 (either spring of my first year or fall of my second) I took a public position against the war in a debate sponsored by the Speech department, but I remember it as a defining moment for me.  

Then by 1966 and 1967, Vietnam was on everybody’s mind. We saw our time, thought and emotions absorbed by meetings, debates, petitions, marches, demonstrations with four or five people or thousands—in hot rooms, in the cold and snow, in the rain, and a broken-hearted poetry reading in the spring sun. Draft calls began to ramp up, which added to the urgency for those of us facing the draft in our near future.

Much of the reading I remember was in pamphlets, booklets and periodicals. We relied on periodicals partly because these events were happening rapidly, and books take a long time. But a lot of the press seemed to be simply repeating government and think tank misinformation and lies. We relied on different periodicals, such as Ramparts and the New York Review of Books, which published, among others, Mary McCarthy’s journalism (collected in Vietnam, 1967) and Noam Chomsky’s analyses.

In The Nation magazine I was particularly reading William Eastlake’s columns from Vietnam, probably before and certainly after he taught a semester at Knox. Esquire under editor Harold Hayes published provocative pieces, as did Harper’s Magazine. I didn’t regularly see the better New York Times reporting while I was at Knox, mostly because the paper didn’t get to the Knox Library for several days by mail. I might read the Sunday Times on Wednesday, if I remembered.

I.F. Stone

Another invaluable resource (when we could find it) was I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It was unique—the product of one man, a veteran Washington journalist who was blacklisted in the 1950s, but refused to be silenced. He became virtually the only journalist to question the official account of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that LBJ used as a pretext for war. He was later proven correct. His lacerating critiques of US Vietnam policy and the lies the government told were often based on careful reading of public sources including newspaper stories. A wonderful 1970s documentary on Stone showed him literally tearing the New York Times apart, page by page.

There are now several collections of I.F. Stone’s work. The two I have are The I.F. Stone’s Weekly Reader (1974) and Polemics and Prophecies 1967-1970 (1972.) Also in the early 70s, when the poet Celia Gilbert, my colleague and friend at the Boston Phoenix, turned out to be I.F. Stone’s daughter, I got the opportunity to meet him several times.

“It is time to stand back and look where we are going,” Stone wrote in early 1968. “And to take a good look at ourselves.” The students I knew felt this was something we were more or less forced to do just about every day.

Eventually the periodical reporting got into book form. I read Jonathan Schell’s long article in the New Yorker in the summer of 1967 that became the book, The Village of Ben Suc, a detailed account of the destruction of a Vietnamese village by American troops.

But the book that had the most direct and profound effect on me in my college years was an unheralded paperback by an unknown author. It was Air War: Vietnam by Frank Harvey, a factual account of exactly what the title said. I read about it in Robert Crichton’s review in the New York Review of Books, and the excerpts he quoted were so horrifying that, when I read them aloud as part of Bill Thompson’s teach-in in the Gizmo, I had to choke back the tears.

The Bantam paperback was troubling and exhausting, mundane and horrifying—I often had to stop reading, fearful I would fall into a melancholy without end. The incredible damage that this bombing did was almost beyond understanding—I still remember one fact: B-52 bombers—with conventional bombs-- could kill every living thing within a fifty mile radius.

This book led me many years later to Gerald J. DeGroot’s 2005 The Bomb: A Life (about the atomic bomb) and in particular Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (The New Press, 2002.) I wrote about the latter book in a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, on the eve of the bombing of Baghdad that began the Iraq war. Lindqvist’s book further deepened my conviction that arose from Frank Harvey’s book in 1967, that all bombing of civilian settlements is fundamentally immoral.

When the internal government documents purloined by Daniel Ellsberg—which later became known as the Pentagon Papers-- began appearing in 1971, they confirmed what some of us already knew or at least strongly suspected. The pattern of official lies was there for all to see. In his 1972 book Papers on the War, Ellsberg used them as a basis for his recollections about Pentagon analysis and how it was used, and misused.

Two of the classic nonfiction books on the Vietnam war appeared near its end. Fire on the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam was a nearly 600 page history by scholar and freelance journalist Frances FitzGerald, published in 1972. Some of it had appeared in The New Yorker. It won a Pulitzer.

A year later, former New York Times reporter David Halberstam devoted more than 800 pages to a history of hubris-directed policy on Vietnam in The Best and The Brightest. By then I was the books editor at the Boston Phoenix, and interviewed Halberstam on this book (his first) in the Boston Ritz hotel—his energetic eloquence and intimate buzzsaw voice that made him a talk show favorite for decades were already in evidence.

I also met Frances FitzGerald, when we were both at a futurist convention in Washington on assignment to different magazines, and again in New York. She also had abundant wit and charm, but she was not as much of a media personality as Halberstam throughout a writing career that also resulted in a number of distinguished books on a variety of subjects.

The memoirs and fiction from the Vietnam war mostly came later, towards the end of the war or afterwards, such as Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (which exposed the horrors of the medical care wounded veterans received, years before this became a public issue), Michael Herr’s Dispatches (expanding on his work as a Vietnam correspondent for Esquire) and Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam books. In the 1992 book Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers, Herr and O’Brien both had trouble describing the nature of their books—memoir, New Journalism or fiction? It seems these war experiences required hybrid forms.

But in the late 1960s, three of the contemporary novels we were reading that had some bearing on Vietnam were actually about World War II. All three employed black humor to expose the deadly folly. Castle Keep by William Eastlake was about the war in France and later Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House 5 was about the firebombing of Dresden. But the novel everyone I knew was reading in my later college years was Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

Here was a war novel unlike any other, especially for young men like me who had grown up on war movies and war comics and playing at war with our friends using World War II surplus and souvenirs.

The main protagonist is an American bomber pilot named Yossarian, who is convinced that the American military is trying to kill him. The novel is a model of the painful humor of the absurd. But that insight wasn’t absurd to me. By its actions, I was convinced that my country was trying to kill me, or at least cynically devaluing my life by using me as an instrument for unjustified ends. And though one could argue whether this was chiefly impersonal or semi-personal, even today I can’t see much evidence that I was wrong.

It was a point of view buttressed by a few other things we were reading and hearing about in the late 60s. One was The Report From Iron Mountain, about a supposed secret government commission that concluded that war was necessary to the US economy and way of life, including the need for combat deaths. Eventually it was claimed to be a satire, that no such commission existed, but its arguments remained.

The other was a Selective Service memo on “channeling”: the use of the draft and draft deferments to channel young men into desired occupations useful to the military, or—in the parlance of the time—to the military-industrial-university complex.  (This language in Selective Service documentation for years has since been confirmed.)

This spoke to the larger context as well as to a specific subject of great moment: namely the draft and what to do about being drafted.

I remember talking with draft counselors in Chicago several times. Some were sponsored by American Friends and other pacifist organizations with religious affiliations. Others were more specifically against the Vietnam War, and offered technical knowledge and advice on laws governing the draft, including our rights as potential and actual draftees.

So I read a lot of associated pamphlets and booklets and books, a few of which survive in my collection, if not specifically in my recollections. One is We Won’t Go: Personal accounts of war objectors, collected by Alice Lynd in 1968 and published, as many of these books were, by Beacon Press.  Another is In Place of War: An Inquiry into Nonviolent National Defense, prepared by a working group of the American Friends Service Committee, and published in 1967 by Grossman. It's a thought-provoking thought experiment in a different kind of civil defense.

1967 poetry reading at Knox College. Leonard Borden photo.

We were also reading—and listening to—poems about the Vietnam War, which were important in both deepening and sorting out my thoughts and feelings. Robert Bly brought his collection,  A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War, on one of his Knox visits. We had our own such event on the Old Main lawn, as I described in an earlier post.

Bly’s collection, published by his own Sixties Press, contained some nonfiction excerpts by I.F. Stone and others, appropriate lines from Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, and poems by contemporary poets who participated in group readings. They included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Lowell, George Hitchcock, James Wright, Donald Hall, John Logan, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, Robert Creeley and Bly.

Denise Levertov visited in the spring of my senior year, and handed out antiwar factsheets as well as her antiwar poems. I was one of the students granted a few private minutes with her, up in Sam Moon’s office. I remember I brought her a cup of tea from the Gizmo, which pleased her. I recall mentioning to her how the barrage of news and necessary decisions relating to the war was becoming overwhelming to “us.” Some wondered, I said, if we could even justify doing anything else. She was startled by this, and quickly affirmed that of course we should still take time to do life-giving things every day, like read, write and “think about your dreams.” It was that think about your dreams everyday that stuck with me.

(Levertov also edited the 1968 Peace Calendar and Appointment Book for the War Resisters League, which interspersed poems among the calendar pages by scores of American poets, including William Stafford, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, Nancy Willard, Galway Kinnell, Sam Hazo, Gilbert Sorrentino and Jim Harrison, as well as these poets who visited Knox while I was there: Robert Creeley, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, David Ignatow, Mitchell Goodman and Levertov.)

I left Knox in 1968 without a degree, vulnerable to the draft. I kept changing my official address all summer—a tactic recommended by one of those draft counseling handouts or articles—so a draft notice couldn’t find me. In the fall I became a student in fiction and poetry writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, but I never really settled in Iowa City. I was often in restless transit, to Galesburg, to Chicago where Joni was living in the Del Prado Hotel near the lake on the South Side along with other student teachers for a semester in the Chicago school system. And back again to my narrow winter room, my pork tenderloin sandwich at the lunch counter before class on Tuesday afternoons, with the Moody Blues on the jukebox.

But my every step seemed dogged by the draft. I was sunk into myself and my conundrum. I learned one thing from responses in every place, from family, lovers, friends and other strangers. That no one knew what I felt as I faced what was before me. Only other young men with a draft physical looming at that moment could begin to fathom it.

From Alice's Restaurant (1969)

A draft physical order finally caught up with me.  On one of my preliminary visits to moving to Iowa City, I was warned by Workshop students not to register with the Iowa City draft board, so I remained registered in Galesburg.  That turned out not to be so wise either.

I was called for a pre-induction physical in Chicago. I caught the train from Galesburg, and had my draft physical straight out of a nightmare Alice’s Restaurant movie. I had hearing test results with me that clearly showed I was functionally deaf in one ear, which I’d been assured by a joyful draft counselor would get me out. But it didn’t.

Among the multiple ironies--none of which I was in the mood to savor at the time--was that my fondest ambition at age 11 or 12 was to become a Naval Academy midshipman.  Because Members of Congress could appoint a qualified candidate to Annapolis, I figured I had a chance, since I was known to ours.  But I think I can remember the moment--trotting down the steps made of piled rocks from my house to the street-- when it came to me: I could not meet the Annapolis physical standards because of my deafness, and there was nothing I could do about it.  And so I had to give up that dream.  All that I knew about Army standards now told me my deafness should be disqualifying again.

But standards seemed to be functionally relative. There were quotas to meet, and it was a high draft call that month.  Still, the times were such in the late 60s, and the war so controversial, that substantial disagreement if not dissidence had begun to appear within the military. This was clear at the draft physical. Comparing notes later with others from Knox and Galesburg who had their physical that day, it seemed that its outcome depended more on the luck of the draw than any factual basis. If your line led to a sympathetic doctor, and you wanted out (some even asked), he got you out. If it led to a functionary or an angry true believer, you were in, no matter what. I was unlucky.

There was a written part to the exam. We started out at school desks in rooms set up like school rooms, filling out forms and taking psychological tests, directed by a no-nonsense young lieutenant.

After our humiliating physicals we returned to the same room for further forms. When we finished, the lieutenant closed both doors, and told us what it was really like in Vietnam. It was the most powerful anti-war message I had yet received. He told us that in effect our lives were being thrown away.

Dazed and disoriented, I managed to also get my wallet stolen so I left penniless as well as hopeless. I borrowed a dime for a pay phone to call Joni at the Del Prado.

But I soon went back to the pamphlets and books, wrote letters and got an appeal physical. Unfortunately it was also going to be my induction physical. If I passed, I would be inducted into the army.

I also started the process of obtaining conscientious objector status. I’d been corresponding with William Eastlake, and he cautioned me not to let my perfectly reasonable objections to the Vietnam war become opposition to all wars—a justifiable one might come along any day, he wrote.

At the time, CO status was granted almost always only on religious grounds if you were a member of a recognized church, and only if you were conscientiously opposed to all wars and killing, and not only to killing in this war.

But this was the only war they were going to send me to fight or support. And potentially killing me wasn’t as infuriating as forcing me to kill others I had no reason to harm. The first might kill my body, but the second would definitely kill my soul. To me this was personally and morally clear. It was defining.

Still, I was torn about CO status, but I filled out the forms, and I was prepared to use them if necessary.

And if all else failed, I knew my last step. There would come a moment in which inductees would be asked to take one step forward, indicating they accepted induction.  That was a step I would not take. That would set off another process which could send me to prison, if I didn’t figure out how to survive in Canada first.

My appeal/induction physical was at Fort Des Moines in Iowa. The Obamas stayed at the Fort Des Moines Hotel during his presidency, but it’s a little different from the place where I stayed back then, in the barracks for three nights. My physical lasted three days.

I took a bus alone from Iowa City. As the only person in my “group”, the Army designated me as its leader, and assigned me the responsibility of filling out the forms and keeping the expense accounts.  On the forms I had to keep an accurate count of myself each time I got off and on the bus.

 I got to Des Moines early, and spent a giddy afternoon with a girl I met on the bus, whose name was Trish. She worked at the phone company in a small Iowa town. We walked around in the sunny air and may have gone to a movie. I do remember that we eventually were talking to each other in slight English accents.  It was a time when the practice of youth, freedom, sunshine and innocence was summarized by the Beatles.

I arrived on time at Fort Des Moines, though my actual physical was to be the next day. I was billeted in a barracks for the night with at least a hundred others from all over Iowa, most of them younger and very excited and eager to be leaving Iowa in uniform.

Robert Bly in the 60s

But there were a few, identifiable by age and hair length, who quickly found each other, and found me. One of them knew even more about our rights than I did, the first of which was we were still civilians and the Army had no legal right to hold us there. So we went somewhere for a beer, and I got more valuable advice about the physical itself.

My physical at Fort Des Moines replicated the conflict among the personnel conducting it that I saw in Chicago, but this time more dramatically. My appeal physical was managed by a desk sergeant on the first floor, who was mutely if clearly sympathetic. If I wanted out, that seemed pretty ok to him.

But that decision was to be made upstairs (literally—I think it was the third floor) by a doctor, a young lieutenant who eventually told me that no matter what I brought to him, he was going to pass me. He’d been drafted out of medical school, and if he had to go, I would have to go.

This back and forth, this circuit from downstairs to upstairs with occasional trips to off-base doctors, went on for three days. I caught on to the drill early: maybe because this was an appeal, or maybe because of the desk sergeant, they were duly if not actually examining every claim I made. And so I kept making them, and they kept sending me for more tests and evaluations.

There were a couple of highlights. They sent me to a doctor elsewhere in Des Moines for another hearing test. He was elderly, and had the most primitive equipment I’d seen since my first grade hearing exam. I’d been tested several times since with the latest machinery at the University of Pittsburgh, but this guy’s idea of a hearing test was to stand behind me and ask me to repeat what he said. “One,” he said, and then moved a few feet. “Two...”

Denise Levertov in 1968

So by the time they sent me to see the psychiatrist I was either hallucinating or seeing some odd things, like a film crew following me, and a nurse smiling brightly as she emerged from a broom closet door I’d been staring at as I waited.

Eventually, after three nights in the barracks and three days on the first, second and third floors, the desk sergeant was briskly amused and rather pleased to tell me that I’d essentially worn them out, and that I would be reclassified as unfit. The papers I got in the mail merely stated that my appeal—based on my hearing—had been successful.

My journey back from Fort Des Moines began with hash browns at the bus station eatery, and in the adjoining arcade I bought an old red marching band coat, Sergeant Pepper style.

It sounds like a Joseph Heller story now, but it was hell at the time. I was so traumatized and conflicted by the years and months leading up to the hours and days at Fort Des Moines that I dropped out of the Workshop, left Iowa, and wound up back in Galesburg, fulfilling my own prophecy in a poem published in the Siwasher my senior spring: “I will hide.”

History of My Reading: Everybody Must Get Stoned (1967-8 etc.)

cover of Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass

Throughout the school year of 1967-68 (plus a little before and for several years after),  I read books and articles about or partially inspired by psychedelic experiences and related topics.  This is a selection in context.

I got stoned for the first time in The Temple.  That's what it was called--an otherwise unused room in the attic, where the roof slanted down so the ceiling was very low. There were no windows.  It was dark and snug and safe, illuminated by candles and small lights.  It's sole purpose was to host the ceremonies of the weed.

This was in the house on West First Street in Galesburg where I lived my senior year of college.  I'd unsuccessfully tried cannabis the previous spring, and this setting definitely helped me achieve the desired state.  Once the ritual smoking was over--we sat in a loose circle passing the joint around and talking--I was urged to concentrate on the music playing on the stereo.  I was told to recline, and the two speakers were placed on opposite sides of my head, near my ears.  I knew I was stoned when I seemed to be hearing the music through both ears--basically a physical impossibility in my case (i.e. maybe the bass and drums to some extent.)

The Temple was gradually abandoned that year, as smoking dope became more open in off-campus apartments.  Everyone who smoked dope knew everyone else who did, and they could be trusted not to betray.  To the other operative student divisions was added the suddenly overriding one of Heads and Straights.  There were exceptions (those that hung out with Heads but didn't indulge, those that played it Straight but took a toke in secret) but mostly they were known, too.

Around us the culture was bending.  Songs were full of high points and stoned puns, stoned humor broke out of hiding to start appearing in public (even on television), while Dylan sang "I would not be so alone/ Everybody must get stoned."

We rediscovered our senses, as hearing, vision, smell, touch and taste all seemed enhanced, at least in terms of clarity and presence. At best, time slows and the sensory richness before you fills the moment.  The delicate movement of smoke through light becomes both more fully and beautifully what it is, and a joyful metaphor made real, an insight into the nature of existence.

 We might have experienced some synesthesia as well, in which the senses crossed in some way.  Concepts became experiences: that everything is alive, that it is all one. Before they all became cliches they were vivid perceptions, accompanied by awe and joy: the pure perception of beauty, that beauty is truth and truth beauty, all you need is love.  There would be entire stoned evenings when almost the only words spoken were "Oh wow!"

Mental operations could get a rush, as connections proliferated.  Short term memory couldn't keep up (though it didn't disappear: once when a group of us had a stoned discussion and everybody lost the thread, we successfully reconstructed the entire conversation, back to front), and I especially noticed that I had new access to long-term memories.  It seems strange to me now, but at 20, I was amazed to suddenly remember my childhood.  I recalled radio and television shows, boyhood friends and so on.  Once I not only recited the batting order of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, but demonstrated the batting stances.  I mean, it was only 1968! But it seemed an amazing recovery of what seemed gone forever.  (Although I can pretty much still do this.)

Those I associated with were, like me, uninterested in hard drugs, but curious about psychedelics.  But we were marooned in a small town in the Midwest, and these were hard to come by.  I didn't do any that year--at least not deliberately.  And that was a problem I ran into elsewhere later, one major factor in why I stopped: unless you were wealthy and/or well-connected, you never really knew what you were getting.

That winter of 1967-68 we hosted a big time cannabis dealer from California who called himself Reverend Jim.  He didn't spend much time in the house, as he spread the word all over campus, but as his hosts we got plenty of free product. We smoked it, and made brownies. It was either considerably stronger than we were used to, or it was laced with something else, because once I became a lot more stoned than I intended. I wound up paralyzed in my bed, watching movies in my head. It wasn't unpleasant, but it didn't need repeating.

I remember sitting around one afternoon with one of Reverend Jim's traveling companions who was quoting the wisdom of someone he considered to be "heavy," or enlightened.  "He said, life is a shit sandwich--at best."  Not something that we naive love and peaceniks wanted to hear, even if it came from California.

While seniors like me were just getting our stoned feet wet, some of the incoming first years were already veterans.  I remember being impressed by one who said he didn't smoke tobacco, clearly implying he smoked only something else.  Their culture was already different, and grass was simply part of it.

Our campus culture seemed to change remarkably quickly as well.  I remember once participating in a couples evening that was as conventional as suburban young marrieds except that alcoholic drinks weren't served, only grass.  The main event was an ice cream feast, designed for the blind munchies.

In the next few years, I tried "LSD" a few times, and "mescaline" once.  I place these in quotation marks because I was skeptical even at the time that they were exactly and purely that.  My experiences were mixed.  But taken all together, they did make a difference, and I did gain some lasting insights and memorable experiences.  I dove deep into Abbey Road on "acid" in Berkeley.  In the Colorado mountain countryside on "mescaline" I saw the swirl in wood as liquid and moving, the embodiment of its process over time.  I peered down into microscopic depths, watching microbes and molecules in motion.  Pretty simple visual hallucinations but I nevertheless "saw" profound truths about the substantial but not quite visible support of things.  So when the science started catching up, I was ready for it.

I eventually became discouraged by the unreliability of the product, and by the unreliability of people.  On almost every psychedelic occasion, and quite a few cannabis ones, I had to bring myself down to cope with something or someone gone awry.  Those stoned conversations also began to lose their charm.  Once I listened to two people conversing who were evidently more stoned than I was, because it was very clear to me that they were each talking about something entirely different from what the other person was talking about.  And neither of them noticed.  It was fascinating in its way, but also disconcerting.

Eventually "the scene" also got darker, with darker drugs, violent politics and enabled psychotics.  But before that, in my senior year, we took cannabis and psychedelics seriously as the keys to a new counterculture--more honest, sharing, hip, fun, loving and open to different sensual and internal experiences, for which there seemed to be some precedent in Eastern religions, western exoteria and indigenous cultures.  So in addition to experiencing what we could, we read about it all.

1964 edition

First there was the classic The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.  Originally published in 1956, it was an augmented account of his mescaline experience a few years before.  It introduced me to the idea that the brain functions as a limiting filter to shape the otherwise overwhelming sense data into usable conclusions (though in some ways this resembles Quine's analysis of language.)  Huxley likened it to a "reducing valve."  Today's neuroscientists use the concept of models--that the mind has models of the expected reality that perceptions should match or at least be measured against.  Psychedelics bypass the reducing valve and the models.

Huxley took mescaline several more times, and said he had greater and more profound experiences on LSD, which he took for the first time in 1955.  His support for psychedelics was striking, in light of the role played by the fictional drug soma in his most famous novel, Brave New World.  But he didn't waver, and in the final stage of cancer, fulfilled his intention of dying while on an LSD trip.

Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were Harvard professors exploring the therapeutic uses of psychedelics in the 50s and early 60s, concentrating finally on LSD.  After being fired from Harvard, Leary became its best known advocate, partly through the enthusiasm of poet Allen Ginsberg.  LSD was technically still legal when I first read this trio's 1964 book, The Psychedelic Experience in my senior year.

 Its most influential sections are about preparing for an LSD trip.  There was already propaganda around about "bad trips" and the potential dangers of LSD, and I knew it was a powerful drug, so I paid attention.  The book recommended having a Guide and perhaps "programming" the trip, and it especially emphasized the importance of set (your mental preparation and attitude) and setting (the place and physical conditions.)  Though we basically only did cannabis together at our place, the Temple was all about set and setting.  Ironically then, when I first did "LSD" about a year later, I tripped with slightly younger people who had no concept of set and setting, but I deferred to their greater experience.  Early on, I found myself in a crowd of people watching a violent movie, while trying to appear normal.  Fortunately, whatever I took wasn't all that strong and I was able to bring myself down to a steadier state.

LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic by P.G. Stafford and B. H. Golightly was a paperback published in 1967.  It is a fascinating compendium of research findings suggesting therapeutic uses for mental disorders and the treatment of alcoholism and other addictions, as well as heightened creativity and life-changing insights among otherwise normal people.  But this was the last year that LSD was legal, even for research.  Medical and other research was basically forbidden and didn't happen for the next fifty years.

Nevertheless I continued to informally monitor related research.  I still have my 1972 copy of Altered States of Consciousness, a collection of research articles edited by Charles T. Tart, and another anthology from that year, Consciousness and Reality (edited by Charles Muses and Arthur M. Young) that has an aura of intellectual excitement and discovery.

 Before he became the gray-bearded guru of natural healing, Andrew Weil was a Harvard student involved (and in some ways implicated) in the Leary experiments and scandal, who published his own take on psychedelics in his book The Natural Mind, also published in 1972.

And then the rest was silence, except for occasional chapters in such arcane texts as the catch-all Alterations of Consciousness by Imants Baruss, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, and the occasional account of a post-60s trip, as Sting's detailed description of taking ayahuasca in Brazil that opens his autobiographical Broken Music.

  That was the situation until the completely unexpected How to Change Your Mind in 2018 by Michael Pollan, best-selling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma.  As research began to cautiously revive around the world, Pollan produced this combination of reportage, interview and personal account that the New York Times named as one of the ten best nonfiction books of that year.

Pollan covers much of the history, including the scare stories about people on LSD going blind from staring at the sun, which 60 years later is exposed as fake news.  He confirms the continuing promise of psychedelics in addressing a range of illnesses and conditions, confirms LSD's power to spur creative re-thinking (many of those Silicon Valley innovators tripped out) and generally updates that 1967 paperback LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic.  I found him most interesting on the plant-derived psychedelics, particularly mushroom-based.  These substances really do have life-changing and even "miraculous" effects.

Every study I've seen since Leary et al has confirmed the determinative importance of set and setting.  Pollan's own trips were conducted very much to that 60s script: he had a  guide, the setting was quiet and had objects to contemplate (though mostly his eyes were masked), music was played and so on.  These have become standard in the new, well-organized tripping, governed by a kind of New Age professionalism.

But the importance of set and setting were established long before Leary. Most plant-based psychedelics were used for many thousands of years by indigenous peoples in serious explorations of the larger reality. These traditional cultures used their psychedelics within ritual settings and with elders as guides--i.e. attention to set and setting.

What Pollan experienced on his trips made it impossible for him to ignore the so-called spiritual dimension, the beyond-ego experiences.  He confirms that the effects of these substances substantiate the descriptions of the mind's workings that have been refined over thousands of years by Buddhist meditators and other Eastern (and a few Western) practitioners.  These also are being confirmed by neuroscientists, and explored over the several decades in the Mind and Life conferences sponsored by the Dali Lama (I reviewed the books resulting from the first seven conferences in 2004, also for the San Francisco Chronicle.)  

This connection has a long history. Practitioners of Eastern religions attain their insights mostly without even plant-based substances, but with fasting and various forms of meditation.  Yet the insights are similar.  In the decades before he took his mescaline trip, Aldous Huxley studied Hindu and other Eastern texts and consulted with well-known gurus.  The Leary/Alpert/ Metzner The Psychedelic Experience was subtitled "A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead."

Richard Alpert soon became Baba Ram Dass, and his first book Be Here Now (1971) became a revered text in certain quarters.  But that takes us into the counter-culture, subject of our next installment in this series.

To wind up the more specific elements of the substances themselves and their effects, there is now more of a distinction between cannabis and the psychedelics (LSD, and of increasing interest, psilocybin.)  Cannabis has been legalized in many states in the US through popular vote, but there is not the same acceptance for psychedelics.  In my past experience, at least some of the effects to some extent that are claimed for psychedelics were available with cannabis (assuming that's all I was ingesting.)   There may well be a qualitative difference, and in that sense I'm sorry I missed a true psychedelic experience.  Even in the lap of the cannabis industry, the likelihood that I'll run into a dependable opportunity isn't great.    

History of My Reading: Flunking Evolution (Winter 1967-68)

“The evolutionary backdrop and the ecological setting, rather than the flashy on-stage protagonists of the drama, are more of my concern. Yet the answers are never simple, in part because the questions cannot be clearly phrased. The shadowed globe continues to spin. We are embedded in our history, in all our personal histories, and in theirs.”
Lynn Margulis

In order to fulfill my distribution requirements so I could graduate in the spring of 1968, I took "Evolution" in the winter of the 1967-68 school year.  Among the requirements Knox had then, was a certain number of of math and science courses.  I had taken math to the level of my incompetence and beyond, and one science course for non-majors, in Astronomy, taught by Dr. Priestly, head of the Physics department.  I did well enough, and Dr. Priestly seemed sanguine about the non-majors part.  So I planned to take his two other courses for non-majors, one on Science and Society that would be given in the spring, and one that the course catalog said would be given this winter. But it wasn't.  So I was stuck with a Biology department course on Evolution, given by a different teacher.

I recall never getting a handle on the subject, or the purpose of the course. It seemed too technical and disjointed for a non-science majors course, which it was supposed to be.  But I believe I was just barely passing.  Then it was time for the final.

Two things happened at that point, which were at least partly related. The first—and possibly most fateful---happened in the library.

I was also taking a philosophy course that term. (I’d taken several, starting my first year, and had considered it as a major, before committing to English Literature and Composition.) Perhaps it was for this philosophy course, but in any case I was reading a journal in philosophy in the library.

In what I seem to recall was just a book review, I read a sentence that was almost incidental. It said that the Darwin’s theory of Evolution was shaped in part by existing political and economic ideas and ideologies. It suggested that so-called Social Darwinism predated Darwin--and that these ideas and ideologies influenced Darwin's theory.

It was a sudden bolt of lightning to my conceptual framework, which is what I learned to call it in my first philosophy course. Scientific theories were, we were told and I had believed, based strictly on the scientific method of hypothesis and experiment (or evidence) to test the hypothesis. The idea of pure science, or "value-free science" was a kind of postulate, an axiom, if not a dogma. It was what you assumed as a starting point. The logic of Natural Selection emerges directly from meticulously studied evidence. Darwin’s theory was based on science, and nothing else.

 But in a sentence in a philosophy journal, I was told that it might not be necessarily so.   Science might also be guided, consciously or not, by other factors, including unacknowledged ideology.  As I learned later, this view of Darwin was neither new nor uncommon, but after a course in Evolution it was still new to me.

Oddly, although studying the Vietnam War had shown me the tangle of motives and ideology leading to deception and self-deception in politics and government, I still assumed the evidence-based objectivity of science itself, if not the ends to which that science was directed. Especially a science and a theory so remote from weapons development and social control.

But it could be I was also receiving an unconscious echo of my high school disillusion with Catholic dogma, and the claims that the Church's actions (like the Inquisition) were based entirely on religious doctrine. All that had also been exploded for me in a library--my Greensburg public library, in the reference room, where I read the eye-opening and hair-raising...Catholic Encyclopedia.   

So now this comment in the philosophy journal suggested that even the theory of evolution is not utterly impartial and objective, as piously claimed. I have since learned this view had a long history. But for me this was a discovery.  I had just found an opening to this idea, and sensed a glimmer of the other side. I was both stunned and excited. It was like the moment that nearly every first year philosophy student faces when presented with the argument that it’s possible that the world does not exist at all except in our heads. It becomes both an obvious and more complex argument pretty quickly, but at first, it’s a mind-blower.

So was this. To some, this may now be a commonplace observation: that the formulation, acceptance and rejection of scientific theories, including Darwin’s, are shaped in part by ideas outside of science, as well as ego, institutional power struggles and conventional inertia. To others it may still be unorthodox.

But to me in 1968 it was a new and electrifying notion. We hadn't learned it in Evolution class. I was very excited by the idea. It filled my head, and I wanted to learn more. I wanted to explore it.

Too late, as it turned out. Because there were no papers in the course, just this last big exam.

Which brings me to the second thing that happened.

In the days leading up to the final exam, we were supposed to view an exhibit of bones--fossils probably-- in a room on campus. There would be questions about those bones, and how they illustrate evolution, on the exam.

I went with a group of friends who were also in the class. The exhibit made no sense to me. I didn’t see how I was going to remember the shape of skulls and tiny white bones. I went into a Groucho Marx crazy scientist routine, perhaps with the help of a white lab coat I found on a hook. Nobody thought it was funny. Everybody was worried.

The night before the exam I walked around campus. In the library, at tables outside the dining rooms in Seymour Hall, students were frantically studying. It was clear as day to me that none of them expected to remember anything they were studying past the day of the exam. The exam was everything.

I had done the same thing before—studying for the exam, and the exam only. It was the drill. Play the game, that suddenly serious game. I knew I should suck it up and do it just one more time. But this time I could not bring myself to do it. It was a charade, it was a travesty, it was a tragedy. With the seriousness of what was going on around us, what might be happening to some of us next (like being drafted into the war), it was insane.

It had nothing to do with education, I felt so acutely, and nothing to do with reality. It even had little to do with the study of evolution as far as I was concerned.

I was supposed to be concentrating on the patterns of bones. Instead my head was swimming with this new idea that the theory of evolution, that science itself, was not so pure, was complex, perhaps more human. What did it all mean?

Sick at heart, I expressed some of these thoughts, and my desire to research and write about this, on the back of my exam the next day. Probably not as calmly as I just have.  On the exam itself I got as far as the first question on the bones, and stopped. Just stopped.  No More.  No More.

There are various ways now to describe this second thing that happened, and its relationship to the first. I tended towards self-righteous anger, and there was some of that. But the emotions were more complex and more complete. It was definitely some kind of crisis. Perhaps in a way, of conscience, or consciousness. So much suppressed, repressed, was rising. It made me suddenly very upset and very tired.

I failed the exam. That was enough so that I failed the course entirely. Eventually this would result in my not graduating with my class, or at all.  All of that wasn't settled until late in the spring, so I will continue this evolution in a future post.

 But the result of that moment in the library with the philosophy journal comment about evolution, I will tell now.  Especially because it involves the next several decades of my reading.

Paul Shepard

The first story I relate to that moment also leads back to Knox in for me a melancholy way. Three months or so before I hauled my stuff up the stairs to the third floor of Anderson House and began my college residence, a young family packed up their belongings and left Galesburg. The father was Paul Shepard, a much beloved and revered young teacher in the biology department for about a decade. His legacy lives on at Knox in Green Oaks, some 700 acres restored to natural prairie habitat. It was Shepard’s vision, and he directed Green Oaks for its first decade as well.

At the behest of a mutual friend, Prof. Doug Wilson of the English department, I bought Shepard’s first book, Man in the Landscape (1967)at the Knox bookstore.

I'm not sure when I read it all.  I recall being mesmerized by the writing in just the first chapter for awhile, which set me off dreaming and thinking.  But it may not have been until after I left Galesburg that I read enough of the book to understand that it is an ambitious and multi-disciplinary study in the area of what we came to call ecology. It dealt with the relationship of social and cultural beliefs to attitudes about the natural world, and how science was conducted. Shepard apparently taught a course by that title which must have been the basis for the book.

Doug Wilson and Paul Shepard. Photo by Flo Shepard.

In other words, it was just what would have intrigued and interested me. If our time at Knox had overlapped, I would have taken that course, and the course of my life might have been altered.

For one thing I would likely not not be worrying about a science course requirement in my senior year.  But that realization was to come, for this story is just beginning.

Apart from two books he co-edited I saw in the 70s, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that I chanced upon another Paul Shepard book on a bookstore sale table near the Public Market while visiting Seattle. Nature and Madness was even more mind-blowing. I saw there were several books between that first one and this one.

I found those two in the Squirrel Hill public library in Pittsburgh and was awed by those as well. They were Thinking Animals and The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. Both dealt profoundly in aspects of animal and human evolution--and in the co-evolution of humans and the animals humans hunted.

Eventually I mentioned my discoveries and enthusiasm in a letter to Doug Wilson. He brokered the beginning of a correspondence between Paul Shepard and me.

Unfortunately it lasted only to the extent of two letters from me and one from him. Just after I arrived in Arcata in 1996, I learned that he had died from cancer.

I learned it by a letter from his widow, Florence Shepard, who noted our brief correspondence. Very soon she asked me if I wanted to write something for an issue of the Wild Duck Review about his work. I met Casey Walker, its editor, and writer Jack Turner (The Abstract Wild) for coffee here in Arcata at Los Bagels, and talked about the approach I would take. My article appeared in that special issue of August 1997, along with contributions by Stephen Kellert, Delores LaChapelle, C.L.Rawlins, Barbara Ras, Barbara Dean, Steve Chase, Joseph Meeker and Flo Shepard, and a poem by Gary Snyder. (I’ve republished a longer version of my essay here.)

By then, yes, I had realized that all the events that flowed from flunking that evolution course would likely have been quite different if Paul Shepard had still been teaching at Knox when I was a student there.

Flo and Paul Shepard

And even that isn’t the end of the story. In fairly short order, Flo Shepard asked me to create a website about Paul Shepard, featuring biographical information that she wrote and photos she provided; photos and descriptions of his books (including posthumous volumes) with quotes from reviews, plus other information and a couple of short Shepard essays not otherwise collected.  So I did.

Eventually that site became technically obsolete, but it was the basis of a subsequent site that Casey Walker assembled. Not too shabby for the guy who flunked evolution.

In that winter in early 1968 we were already awash in dreadful waves of information about air and water pollution and environmental destruction, and in predictions of ecological doom. That became my major interest brushing upon science in the 1970s—when I read two of the first academic collections on the new subject of ecology co-edited by Paul Shepard (The Subversive Science, still a classic, and Enviro/Mental.)

In grade school and high school I had been interested in astronomy and the sciences of the Space Age, so I later gravitated towards the new physics of the very large and the very small. But all along the way since college I kept my eye on the larger question of what influences a scientific theory.  I was reading Lewis Thomas, James Gleick, William Irwin Thompson and others, and watching the Nova programs and the great PBS series' by Jacob Bronowski, James Burke and Carl Sagan.

Then in the 1990s I became interested in the history of the theory of evolution through an interest in H.G. Wells and the future, and that reading and writing continued into the next two decades. I saw Wells interpretation of Darwin as key to his idea of the future, which became ours. I wrote about all this in my Soul of the Future series.  The relationship of  Darwin's Evolution and various ideologies over more than a century and a half turns out to be extremely rich, complicated and important.  Eventually I read a number of books on Darwin and evolution, and many more on issues these books raised, in areas of natural science, ecology, philosophy, anthropology, Indigenous "science" and so on.

 (For example, books related directly to Darwin still on my shelves include Before Darwin and Young Charles Darwin by Keith Thompson, Apes, Angels & Victorians by William Irvine, Darwin's Century by Loren Eiseley, Getting Darwin Wrong by Brendan Wallace, Darwin's Blind Spot by Frank Ryan, Alas, Poor Darwin ed. by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose,  Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? (philosophical essays) ed. by Elliott Sober, Life's Solution by Simon C. Morris, Evolutionary Origins of Morality ed. by Leonard D. Kataz, Life on Earth by Stanley A. Rice, as well as other books and authors mentioned in this post.)

But this continued reading was more than background for blog posts. Consider it irony, given my less than stellar academic record or experience in the sciences, but in the early 2000s I found myself becoming the go-to guy to review books on science for the general public at the San Francisco Chronicle, and wrote them also for Salon and other outlets. Perhaps their theory was that if I could make sense of it, other readers could, too. But of course the Chronicle has many scientifically literate readers in the Bay Area and down Stanford way, including eminent scientists. So I had to work at it.

Back cover of the paperback edition of Damasio's book,
with excerpts from my review at the top.

Nevertheless, for the SF Chronicle I reviewed a biography of Einstein, and a couple of books on brain science, including one by Antonio Damasio. (His agent later said that an overjoyed Demasio read the entire review to him over the phone.)

 I reviewed a half dozen or so books on psychology, and all nine books in the Mind and Life Series, derived from public discussions held by the Dalai Lama and Buddhist practitioners with scientists in a number of fields, including physics, neuroscience, psychology and biology.  One of the Mind and Life Institute cofounders was biologist Francisco Varela, who introduced the concept of autopoiesis, or self-regulating life.

For the North Coast Journal I reviewed books on the history of quantum theory, on astrophysics, paleoanthropology, two books on Darwin, one on cultural evolution, several more on psychology and another half dozen or so on climate science.

And partly because publishers kept sending me new books on science, I wrote about dozens more on this blog site.

Along the way I learned how impure science is. A theory may be accepted because of reputation, or denied because of ego and institutional politics. Those who even discovered information that called the standard view into question had their careers trashed, at least for a time.  I saw examples of this over and over, from archaeology to quantum physics, and some seemed pretty scandalous.

But this is apparently so widespread and so well known among scientists that they can joke about it. One of the books I reviewed for the Chronicle was The Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh. In it Singh quotes physicist Max Planck saying that new ideas seldom win over adherents of old ones—usually a generation must pass while the new idea’s “opponents gradually die out.” He also quotes English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane’s four stages of acceptance for a scientific idea: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so.

But the role of ideology in the formation of a theory has also entered into the dialogue. And its clearest example has always been evolution. In my posts on H.G. Wells and his novel The Time Machine I’ve noted the ideological influences on Darwin and the ideologies that latched onto his theories as a triumphant exemplar.

It should be unsurprising—but instructive—that much of the actual science taught at Knox in 1968, including in that evolution course, is now considered wrong. Apropos of bones, dinosaurs were believed to have all been cold-blooded and slow of foot. T.H. Huxley’s suggestion that they were ancestors to birds was derided and forgotten. None of that is considered the true view any longer.

Life was divided into two kingdoms only: plants and animals.  Now there are six (though some scientists are abandoning the entire classification.)  Protozoa in 1968 were one-celled animals. They aren’t anymore, and some scientists consider the very word to be obsolete. In other sciences, such basic concepts as plate tectonics had not yet made it into textbooks, and even the Big Bang itself was not the accepted cosmological explanation until the late 1960s.

What has lasted is the lesson I learned that night in the library: to question, to probe, to analyze theories and how they are made. Seeing them in the larger context of society, history and ideology eventually makes for better science, and—for citizen non-scientists (and non-science majors)—better evaluation of scientific theories and findings.

But it may be even more important than that.

In 1968 the latest interpretations of Darwinian evolution were gene-centered. Gene centeredness became both especially prominent and popularized with Richard Dawkins’ 1975 book The Selfish Gene. That book, and the  gene as the determinant of evolutionary change via survival of the fittest , took the 19th century ideology supporting the predominant interpretation of Darwin to a condition close to dogma. That ideology begins with the master 19th century metaphor of the machine--lifeforms as cogs in the machine of evolution.

That ideology further emphasized violent competition, aggression, conquest, and man against nature.  Survival of the fittest, the struggle for existence, nature red in tooth and claw, winner take all, the war of all against all--they all were idolized as drivers of natural evolution and as the essence of animal and human nature, with no exception, and no room for compassion, cooperation, or co-existence.

But in subsequent decades, both the science and the ideological basis came under attack from different directions. (And perhaps I need to say here I am not at all talking about so-called creation science, or a denial of evolution itself.)

By the 1980s eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was attacking the Darwinian tenet that natural selection operating slowly over great periods of time is the main or only driver of change, despite the discrepancies in the fossil record (those little white bones presumably.)

He believed that the basis for this bias was more ideological than scientific: the insistence that natural selection is very gradual was because it came from a politically conservative class and time in England that favored gradual social change. A theory of more sudden change as well as gradual change—the “punctuated equilibrium” Gould favored—was too much like revolutionary political threats to the established order.

Today variations of punctuated equilibrium are more generally accepted, as is another more recent—and more revolutionary theory—proposed by biologist Lynn Margulis, who found in microscopic life the evidence that crucial steps in evolution were taken by means of symbiosis: separate organisms living together for mutual benefit, beginning with the evolution of microbial life.

Lynn Margulis

Perhaps it is possible that among the periodicals in the Knox library in the winter of 1967 was an issue of the Journal of Theoretic Biology which contained Margulis’ now-landmark first article setting forth the central tenets of her theory of symbiosis within the cell. It had been rejected by 16 other journals. But even when it appeared, it was derided. Though symbiosis is not the same as cooperation, it is close enough. It did not fit the prevailing ideology of selfishness.

Margulis persisted and found more evidence while the establishment had time to get used to the idea. She later joined with James Lovelock in developing the Gaia Theory, which is symbiosis on a grand scale. It is, as another biologist described it, symbiosis as seen from space.

Life, Margulis wrote, "does not 'adapt' to a passive physiochemical environment as most neo-Darwinians assume; instead, life actively produces and modifies its surroundings."  The biosphere is not "determined by a physical universe run by mechanical 'laws...the metabolizing biosphere is physiologically self-controlled."

 If science survives for another century, Lynn Margulis will be recognized as a major figure.  Far from being a war of individuals or species, or objects that operate according to 19th century machine metaphors, she has shown that life is completely interdependent.  The earth is not only our home--it is our body.

Evolutionary theory in the 21st century is moving towards multiple explanations. In their 2014 book Evolution in Four Dimensions (MIT Press), Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb examine not just the genetic (itself a vastly more complex subject than got fixed in the public mind in the 1990s), but the epigenetic (non-DNA inheritance), behavioral (animal learning passed on) and symbolic (human heritage though language and other systems.)

Science is based on evidence, but evidence can be a tricky thing. Sometimes people see the evidence they look for, and they fail to see it if they are not looking for it. That includes scientists. One of the primary reasons for not seeing the evidence is that it does not fit into the current theory, or the current ideology.

This has been shown to be true countless times in the study of animals, when evidence of intelligence, tool-making and communication have been overlooked, because of the ideology of human exceptionalism, which itself derives as much from the ideological right of capitalist humans to exploit and lay waste to the rest of existence as it does from any religious or scientific dogma.

One important illustration is the work of primatologist Frans B.M. De Waal, who documented patterns of reconciliation behavior in primates (after fights, the participants would seek each other out and engage in friendly behavior.) Previous researchers hadn’t seen this because prevailing beliefs emphasized aggression and competition, and so they missed the signs.

It does not seem a coincidence to me that many of these beliefs—the selfish gene, animals as aggression and competition machines, human exceptionalism and so on, are all major underpinnings of capitalism, and its exploitation of the planet. Nineteenth century capitalists were at least conscious of co-opting evolution, and thereby guiding any science that deals with animal or human behavior. By the modern age, these sciences were functional captives of that ideology.

Contemporary British philosopher Mary Midgely has written eloquently on this broader subject of the ideology often unconsciously assumed in scientific theories, particularly in her book Evolution As A Religion. (Margulis also refers to the orthodox neo-Darwinism as "a minor twentieth century religious sect.")  Midgely points out that scientists attack others for basing their beliefs on ideology or religion, while failing to see the cultural myths and assumptions that underlie their own scientific views.

“Social Darwinism or Spencerism is the unofficial religion of the west,” Midgely writes. “And it is widely believed that the theory of evolution proves this kind of narrowly self-assertive motivation to be... fundamental, universal and in some sense the law of life. Mystical reverence for such deities as progress, nature and the life-force is then invoked to explain and justify cut-throat competition. As we have seen, such a view of the natural motivation of our species is simply a mistake, a projection of current interests.”

Many new discoveries run counter to the 19th century ideologies of man against nature rather than humanity embedded in nature, of capitalistic selfishness as natural but cooperation for a common good as unnatural in human or animal nature, and even human intelligence as entirely separate from animals.  And, the argument goes, this is all so embedded to our nature that it is useless to believe we can resist or change it.  What could be more basic than your selfish genes?  You can't fight it because it's human nature.  These ideologies survive and try to rule science as well as the rest of us, in Ted Carpenter’s phrase, “like a watch ticking in the pocket of a dead man.”

There are those who are tempted to inappropriately use the new research to support a different ideology, but animal research for example does find support for the existence of cooperation and altruism, perhaps even the empathy and imagination that are clearly survival tools for our species.  But taken together, the implications of this research are necessary correctives to the one-sidedness and especially the destructiveness of the ruling paradigms.

What does the new science regarding the origin of species tell us? That we must be talking about origins plural, for evolution is much more complex and involves several different pathways than suggested by Darwin and mandated by Dawkins. This is even truer in regard to evolution in a larger sense.

We must see this as the ideology it is, and what it means. Insofar as it is a rigid explanation of animal and human behavior, this ideology of complete selfishness, acting only in one’s self-interest, life as a war of all against all, all the time—is wrong. For more than a century it has excused human destruction that has led us to the brink of mass extinctions and an unrecognizable Earth. And it is still leading us there.

Failure to see this ideology for what it is—an ideology—is a major failure of science in the modern age. That the ideological underpinning of predatory capitalism are the same as those of evolutionary science is no coincidence. Capitalists at least were conscious of co-opting evolution, and thereby guiding any science that deals with animal or human behavior.

This dogma of evolution fit wonderfully well with capitalist economic theory—and why not? Capitalists were paying the bills. Although some scientists tried to refute these interpretations, the scientific mainstream continued to aid and abet this view.

All of this contributed to the seeming present inevitability of predatory capitalism which rules the world, and which has proven unable to modify itself in light of the findings of science, most conspicuously climate science.

 Fredric Jameson is reputed to have observed today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Evolutionary theory and dependent theories of human nature have contributed to this stranglehold on the imagination. Yet predatory capitalism continues to bring the end of the world closer.

All our ecological "doom and gloom" of the late 1960s led to change, but not enough, and not fast or widespread enough. With the onrushing climate crisis, with mass extinctions and multiple ecological catastrophes underway or in the offing, time is running out.

Ours remains a crisis of consciousness. If humanity doesn’t fully commit to an ideology of interdependence and the science that supports it, then humanity as well as the world that supports it are in danger of extinction. Human civilization will turn out to be a bloody but hopeful experiment that didn’t quite make it far enough to respond to this challenge, largely if not entirely of its own creation. We’ve taken this course of evolution, and we’re flunking it, and taking the planet we know with us.