Drug Abuse Hinders Our Defense of Civilization » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

This week, in continuing to muse over Douglas Murray’s newest book, On Democracies and Death Cults, I turn to something avoided by most of the media, even in Israel.

The devastation wreaked on lives and societies by abuse of drugs such as fentanyl, cocaine, meth, and heroin should horrify us. It is the worst of the West, evidence to groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and other similarly authoritarian ideologues of decadence and soul rot in those who do not accept their particular disciplined way of life. Just as the cruel inequities of Jim Crow gave Stalin’s propagandists plenty of cover in the Thirties, so too does our inability to inspire so many people to avoid a life of dissolution weigh on the Western soul.

Israel, too, has its drug problem. No one wanted to draw any attention to that in the wake of the atrocities of Hamas and of the exterminationist threat that Iran continues to promote. No one wanted to suggest a moral equivalence, even among those who had formerly done so.

But Murray does not believe the truth should be hidden. This piece follows his thought as he set down the horror of the Hamas onslaught on a dance festival of young people, which there as here, many or most high on various drugs. Not just any drug. Although, as Murray made clear, drugs such as cocaine were present, which deliver a very specific kind of pleasurable feeling, at festivals such as this, the use of psychedelics are key.

October 7, 2023 was a Jewish holiday, observed with much joy every year. But in Israel, as in many places in the modern world, and in ages past, young people seek their own pathways for celebration, community, and inspiration. As in Western democracies, participation in religion is up to the individual, and young people in particular feel the pull of something higher than any law or custom drawing them. For better or worse, that has meant for some psychedelic drugs and dancing.

Peyote was used in traditional worship by some Native Americans in the Southwest. Those psychedelic cactus buttons could even be purchased mail order. Scientists synthesized its active ingredient, mescaline, and Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian novel Brave New World, wrote a moving book about his experience taking the drug (still legal at the time). He titled the book The Doors of Perception, taken from the words of the British visionary William Blake, which he felt encapsulated the experience: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Huxley was followed in this genre by theologian Alan Watts in his The Joyous Cosmology, which brought a similar report about the recently discovered drug LSD. Researchers in several universities continue in recent times to explore the therapeutic possibilities of these and other psychedelics.

In 1965, while all these drugs were still legal, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters placed LSD at the center of the free-form events they started holding on the West Coast, which they entitled Acid Tests. Kesey employed the brand-new band the Grateful Dead as the house band at these events, which the Dead’s Jerry Garcia described in a 1989 interview:

It wasn’t one of those things where people paid to come and see us specifically, so we had the option to be able to not play…. Since nobody had any expectations about what we were going to play, we could play anything that came into our minds.

Openness to the unfolding of the world accompanied by a roomful of other explorers, entirely open and vulnerable in a world of unfolding mysteries.

Tom Wolfe, who chronicled these events in his Electric Kool- Aid Acid Test, described what happened at one of these events, in which the audience was as much a part of the show as anyone else. A woman had taken a turn down a dark pathway of her mind, and suddenly, her cries started being picked up by microphones and heard by all. “Ray, Ray, who cares? Who cares?”

On and on, rattling the nerves of those who were open to anything and quite vulnerable. Hugh Romney, present at that event, heard that call as a moral summons: Do we really care? It became a spiritual rallying point, and Romney found he could help direct everyone’s caring towards the woman, who passed through the danger.

Garcia, who was there at that Who Cares? “Acid Test,” spoke to an interviewer in 1991 about how he has been constantly aware of the extraordinary openness of those at his events. For him, his art was infused with responsibility. Garcia said:

I thought, if I’m going to be onstage I’m not going to say anything to anybody or address the crowd, because it doesn’t matter what you say, sometimes just the sound of your voice might inadvertently set somebody off. The situation with psychedelics is so highly charged that you never know what’s leaking in. I don’t mind doing it in the music, because that’s where I divest myself of ego. It’s egoless, something I trust. If the band has something to protect, it’s the integrity of the experience, which remains shapeless and formless. As long as it stays that way, everything’s okay.

In a world that was formless and soon, after 1966, beyond the law, those who believed in its worth had to assume responsibility for the integrity of what they did. Is not that assumption of personal responsibility the key to civilized life? Human laws change, the various forms by which we order ourselves constantly change. It is our job here in such a world to find the highest kind of order, the beckoning call of that which drives our own self and gives it integrity, and live by it in such a compelling way that it draws others to its life. This lies at the heart of Western civilization — the compelling love of the self-evident truths that make a civil order possible. We do not need others to order us — we seek the great integral order with all our hearts.

Hundreds of young Israelis were at the Nova Festival on October 7, and, as Douglas Murray reported, many of them were under the influence of psychedelics, treading the now well-worn path pioneered, for better or worse, by Kesey and the Grateful Dead among others, sixty years ago. Many were deep in the extremely open mental state of connection to their fellow dancers if not to the whole of the mystically unfolding world around them.

And as dawn came, the party was attacked by land and air by Hamas. The death worshippers had come, bringing not care and love, but deliberately planned death, sexual torture, and abduction. Murray wrote:

People who had taken [psychedelic drugs] would have almost no ability to comprehend the situation in which they found themselves. People who had literally prepared themselves to be at one with the best aspects of the universe instead found themselves face-to-face with the worst things anyone could see.… To come across the worst sights imaginable — of friends being murdered in front of you — at the exact moment when your mind and body are least expecting it is something very few people could live through.… A number of the young people who had survived had been sectioned into mental institutions. A number had killed themselves. Others had tried to kill themselves in the hospitals.

Psychedelics were illegal in Israel then, as in most places. Murray was not advocating or excusing the drug use at Nova or making a case for their use, as did Huxley and Watts among others, past and present. His point was the depth of the horror that was inflicted and a hellish collision of those seeking to celebrate life in a state of incredible openness with those seeking only to impose death and torturous humiliation on those whose existence they have dedicated themselves to obliterate.

Murray challenges us: do we see the reality of the horror here, or do we turn away from it, and discount it by one rationalization or another? Do we use our inevitable imperfections as an excuse to stop exercising moral discernment? Do we have the courage to recognize that in order to be free, we must choose with all our heart and soul and everything else we can discover to devote ourselves to the freedom that is the West’s precious heritage? Do we worship a tyrannical being who can find no better way to establish order than horror and brutality? Or do we use force only to stop those who would destroy the image of the God who calls us out of slavery and invites us to discipline ourselves lovingly to an order that frees us all?

That, Murray makes clear in his harrowing meditation, is the issue at stake. The beauty of truth that draws us forward, the compassion that enables us to live with each other’s imperfections and inspires us to reach ever higher beyond them.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

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