The problem with this blogging shtick is that when a question occurs to me, I have to pursue it and worry at it and see whether I can make something out of it. In the days when I had a full to-do list just keeping my family fed and housed and clothed I used to be able to just shrug and move on. There was no time for extra problems. Now, as an old man, reduced to blogging for a way of convincing myself I am not altogether useless, I feel I am obliged to pursue every whimsical notion. It becomes like a tiny stone in my shoe, or a raspberry seed under my denture. I know it will stay there until I make the effort to make sense of it.
This once famous mantra sneaked up on me the other morning out of nowhere. As I recall it was first composed by Marshall McLuhan, already famous for “The medium is the message”, in the early 1960s and given wider currency by Timothy Leary, as part of his campaign for LSD as a lifestyle. It implies that everyone has a right to decide whether his own existence includes a duty to his fellow man or whether he can feel free to focus on himself alone and cater to his own desires without regard for the rest of society, from which he can, if he chooses, “drop out”. Conscience free.
This has become an earworm. I will not be free of it until I see where it will take me. So here we go.
“Turn on.” That’s an obvious invitation to look for enjoyment in drugs : alcohol, tobacco, mushrooms, Valium, cocaine, marijuana — whatever is your pleasure. It’s your body. You can put into it whatever you choose. If you choose to mistreat it, that’s your own business. Of course this ignores the probability that the wrecked carcass you eventually drag to the emergency room in need of resuscitation and rehab is not going to represent an outrageous expense to the public purse, society’s rainy-day fund. Your Roman-candle approach to living most likely did not have room for health insurance. But even if it did, that doesn’t change the overall equation — public money spent to detox you is still money that might have been spent on more worthy purposes if you had lived a more responsible life. But those are depressing thoughts. Ignore them.
“Tune In.” I take that to be an invitation to an ongoing party. The free-living, free-loving, free-floating party being thrown by all the free spirits who have chosen to be hedonists. All others — cubicle-slaves, 9-to-5-ers, three-piece-suits, Eagle Scouts, and Goody-Two-Shoes are to be turned away by cheerful bouncers at the door of this always-fair-weather venue, high on whatever they have chosen to be high on and determined not to admit wet blankets. You aren’t ready for the carefree life if you bring with you your worries about deadlines, your second thoughts, your financial insecurities, and your guilt trips. Tune in assumes that there is an alternative world where those cares don’t exist, and that the passport to that world is the one you have already applied for with your first drop of LSD. A quick survey of the scene at Haight-Ashbury or the 1960s East Village would have confirmed that the party actually existed — and you were welcome! Of course there would have been a certain amount of after-the-ball clean-up required — trash removal, broken windows and bones, vomit in the gutters, STDs (for the uninitiated, that stands for “Sexually Transmitted Diseases”), and a certain amount of minor crime requiring policing, court appearances, sentences, and incarceration at great public expense, but that’s to be expected at any large party where lots of revelers congregate. Not to take it too seriously.
“Drop out.” This assumes that the inhibiting web of social obligations that seek to limit your absolute freedom can be shed by a simple act of abnegation. Once you declare your personal independence, you will be free to concentrate on your own happiness. The welfare of others will be the business of the self-appointed do-gooders and Eagle Scouts. Your connection to the civic world will be limited to your knowledge of the route to the head shop and the best place in the park to sleep it off without a cop banging his nightstick on the soles of your shoes. You will be able to reduce your world to the size of your own skin by a simple act of renunciation. God didn’t create cities and countries and social contracts; he just made people. Two people with built-in ways of pleasuring each other. That they went on from there and wove this whole web of interdependence and “you are your brother’s keeper” nonsense was strictly their idea. Go back to the beginning. It’s just you and those tasty animals and fruits. You’re here for only a brief moment, so make the most of it. That guy who just passed out in the next booth will wake up in the morning on his own without your help. You ask nothing from society except to be left in peace; it therefore has no right to ask anything from you.
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Only of course it’s not quite that simple. You are dependent on the efforts of others to make your freedom possible. You take for granted that the sidewalk you use to get to the head shop will be there, and swept, and not buckled up by tree roots to trip you. You take for granted that if you nevertheless happen to fall there will be a cop or a sanitation worker or a fireman to pick you up and an ambulance to bring you to the ER. You rely on school teachers and Sunday school teachers to explain to incipient criminals that robbing people sleeping on park benches is both morally questionable and illegal, and unlikely to be very profitable. Your security is in the hands of the do-gooders, and their existence is due to the mutual aid society that you can’t “drop out” of altogether no matter how much you wish you could.
So where does that leave you ethically? Do you really have a right to deny your dependence just because you want to? I would say perhaps yes, provided you fully renounce sociaty’s help. Do it like Simeon Stylites, who spent 37 years removed from the world on his 4×4 wooden platform, never making any demands on the community whatsoever (although where did he get the wood, and who brought him water and a change of underwear?). No mutual dependence, no mutual obligation, no head shop, no cops, no ER. Is that what McLuhan and Leary had in mind? Hardly, or they would have headed for the north woods instead of Height-Ashbury or academia. Instead, they preached tipping the balance so that society got the burden of caring for you and you got none for caring for society. They called it dropping out; I call it narcissism.
So where does that leave us? Somewhere on the spectrum between freedom and slavery, being a monk or a politician, lies a point of compromise for each of us, according to our individual readings of the word “responsibility”. Oh, yes, a monk, if he is a conscientious one, is not a drop-out; he concerns himself with everyone, to the exclusion of himself. We may be inclined to pooh-pooh the practical results (or not), but his prayers are for all of us. Just as the efforts of the honest politician should be for the benefit of everyone. Excluding the monk on the grounds that one has personally perhaps no belief in the efficacy of religion — calling him an ineffectual drop-out from the world — is not accurate. According to his lights, he prays for all mankind. If he finds a drunk on the sidewalk he will intervene to help, not pass on with the sign of the cross and a “tut-tut”. This is more likely to be the act of the politician, who will be tempted to first check his pocket to see whether he can afford to pay for the taxi to take the passed-out guy to the hospital, while the passed-out guy gasps in his last breath. Even as an atheist I have greater sympathy for the monk.
But the politician is also acknowledging his obligation to others, just like the social worker or the doctor, although in my observation of the species I would be more inclined to ascribe humanitarian instincts to the social worker or the doctor. Or to the taxi driver who is willing to stop and help and perhaps even to decline the fare. If our LSD tripper wants to be able to find head shops in his city, he must accept the fact that a certain amount of civic involvement is the price. He needs to at least keep an eye on the crooked developer who would like a tax abatement from his friend the crooked city councilman who can help him finance the construction of the building with a last-minute amendment to a spending bill providing for a nice progressive-sounding allocation for nursing education.
These may strike you as sort of grubby and unscholarly examples. I agree. A more pressing one might be our duty, confronted with millions of pieces of indestructible plastic garbage inundating uninhabited islands on the South Pacific, to take some steps to protect our grandchildren and great grandchildren from the rapaciousness of the makers of the clamshell containers from your fast-food take-out restaurant. Or those who would despoil natural wonders that took geologic ages to form by bull-dozing the tops of the mountains and dumping the overfill into the valleys to clog the once pure rivers in a search for more coal with which to pollute the air we all have to breathe. Those things are worth considering, and if along with them come the head shop and a few bongs, then that’s part of the price. But it won’t work unless we all once in a while acknowledge our common humanity and our need to take care of our tiny blue home. The monk may, in our opinion, be ineffectual, but at least he’s trying. On the other hand, who knows?
Leary and McLuhan, in their formulation, got it wrong. “Wake up, tune in, pitch in” is more like it. One more raspberry seed flushed away.
Vance Weaver 