Beyond Counterculture: Towards a People’s History of Psychedelic Networks

As a concept, counterculture is hardwired into our imagination. It would be difficult to understand the last 60 years of psytrance festivals, underground raves, New Age spirituality, cyberculture, and drop-out communalism without the narrative of counterculture. However, even a cursory inspection of the scholarship devoted to the topic reveals contradictions in how the counterculture is conceived.¹ As the American historians Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle argue, “the term ‘counterculture’ reifies what should never properly be construed as a social movement,” and they insist that its meaning has been lost in “a nebula of signifiers comprehending bongs, protest demonstrations, ashrams, and social nudity.”² Sociologists have likewise noted the under-theorization of the counterculture. They argue that the inherent dichotomization between counterculture and mainstream is largely irrelevant in a post-modern world defined by alienation, atomization, and cultural plurality.³ Considering all the problems with the concept of counterculture, why has it become integral to the United States’ historical imagination?

There are two reasons. First, the fundamental ambiguity of the term counterculture has made it remarkably versatile; it can be applied to almost any historical context in which groups of people challenge sociocultural norms outside the arena of politics. Second, the term has offered scholars a way to discuss psychedelic cultures without explicitly mentioning drugs, either out of personal bias, institutional pressure, or fear of social censure. In what follows, I show how the counterculture narrative is a product of the War on Drugs, which has informed a persistent scholarly bias against psychedelic drugs. The roots of this issue can be traced back to the book that popularized the concept of counterculture, Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter-culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), which intentionally minimized the impact of psychedelics on postwar American society. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how “counterculture” remains a poorly defined way to talk about rapidly developing milieux, scenes, and networks born out of the religious awakening stimulated by psychedelics in the mid-1960s and proposes an alternative framework of “psychedelicism.”

Though the initial formulation of “counterculture” occurred in sociological literature from the 1950s, the concept would have remained obscure academic jargon if it had not been for Roszak's massively popular book. This bestseller redefines the term counterculture as an exclusive descriptor for the flower children of the white middle class, producing the definition most familiar to us today.⁴ Responding to earlier sociological formulations, Roszak maintains the negativist conceptualization of counterculture as inherently “deviant” but inverts the moral valiance of such deviancy.⁵ In this text, Roszak argues that mainstream values have been corrupted to such a degree that they existentially threaten humanity. In opposing these values, the deviance of the counterculture is morally exemplary.

An ardent endorsement of the beatnik bohemians, The Making of a Counter-culture casts the Cold War military-industrial complex as evil and sixties love communitarians as the only salvation for humanity. According to Roszak’s paranoid vision of the impending apocalypse, the instrumental reasoning of the scientific worldview has driven humanity to the brink of atomic destruction. The only way for humanity to avoid an otherwise inevitable nuclear holocaust is a totalizing shift in human consciousness away from the “militant rationality” of the technocracy and towards the utopian worldview that animated the hipster dropouts on the margins of society.⁶ For this Berkeley professor of history, the hip youth’s experiments in communalism, free love, and ecological thinking (as opposed to the activism of the leftist revolutionaries, Black Power advocates, or women’s liberationists) represent the next stage in humanity’s spiritual evolution and an embryonic form of an emerging “superconsciousness.”⁷ Yet, his enthusiasm is tempered by his paternalistic disdain for the stoned insurgents’ “heavyweight obsession” with psychedelic drugs, which, he argues, do not expand consciousness but trap the youth in a “counterfeit infinity.”⁸ Ultimately, Roszak introduced the concept of counterculture into the public discourse as a means of obscuring the fact that psychedelics represented the “common denominator” of the hip revolt erupting around him.⁹

Roszak’s book was among the first serious engagements with the alternative spiritual awakening of the ’60s, and it laid the foundation for the serious study of the psychedelic cultures that had been largely disregarded by his peers in the academy.¹⁰ Such disregard betrayed the continued growth and diversification of acid culture through the mid-1970s, by which point psychedelics had saturated the fabric of American society, reconfiguring spirituality in the modern era.¹¹ At the core of this reconfiguration was the simple fact that psychedelics seemingly democratized mystical experiences. It is hard to overestimate the significance of this religio-cultural shift.¹² While Roszak’s work inspired a handful of other scholars to analyze the dope-smoking spiritual insurgency, their research likewise obscured the social impact of psychedelic drugs, focusing instead on a nebulous galaxy of “countercultural” institutions, such as drop-out communes, guerilla theatre, and ecological movements.¹³ The academic marginalization of psychedelics must be considered alongside the harsh realities of President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs, which launched just a few months after the publication of Roszak’s book.

Before Roszak's book, the term “psychedelic movement” was a more popular reference point for what came to be known as the “counterculture” (viz. fig. 1). After 1969, counterculture became the dominant term, pushing even the idea of a “psychedelic movement” into obscurity (viz. fig. 2). The diverse network of psychedelic communities, along with their beliefs, values, and ritual protocols, were circumscribed by a Roszakian vision of the counterculture. This anti-psychedelic framework for postwar cultural rebellion shaped the public imagination in the decades that followed. This is exemplified in bestsellers like Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (Random House, 1970), which hailed the evolution in consciousness embodied by aquarian seekers as the only means of reversing America’s terminal decline while nonetheless diminishing the “longhaired rebels” embrace of psychedelic drugs.¹⁴ Conservative pundits like Robert Bork and politicians like Newt Gingrich likewise seized on counterculture, not as a salvific force, but as the source of America’s moral degeneration.¹⁵ Subsequently, the myth of a counterculture (vaguely defined) became integral to the way Americans viewed their history and the history of others.¹⁶

Psychedelic networks are not merely aspects of the so-called counterculture. Indeed, counterculture is a poorly defined way to talk about the complex interweave of networks born out of the mid-1960s efflorescence of psychedelic enthusiasm.¹⁷ Elsewhere, I proposed “psychedelicism” as a value-neutral replacement for counterculture.¹⁸ Psychedelicism recenters psychedelic networks as social forces in their own right instead of presenting them as part of an amorphous mass of cultural opposition. Moreover, it does so without insisting that psychedelicists and psychedelicist collectivities are, amongst themselves, homogeneous. Not unlike other religious traditions—other “-isms” —, psychedelicism suggests an assortment of identities with their own distinct historical roots, legacies, institutions, and ideological descendants. This framing emphasizes how psychedelics inspired a multilayered tradition with a long history of heterogeneity, antagonisms, and cross-pollination. Foregrounding these complexities is what makes the psychedelicist approach a people’s history.¹⁹ It is a historiographic stance that rejects the imposition of meaning from above (e.g., “counterculture”) in favor of a bottom-up analysis derived from the primary sources themselves. 

Formulated within sociological discourses concerning deviancy, the concept of “counterculture” implies opposition, antagonism, and rejection of mainstream norms. Alternatively, psychedelicism lends itself to analyzing how psychedelics have threaded their way into mainstream culture, from the medical industry to the military-industrial complex, from Madison Avenue to Hollywood, and from rural communes to cyberpunk collectives. As scholar Arun Saldanha argues, “the arrival of LSD in human history and evolution can be termed an ‘event’” that has altered the Western cultural superstructure.²⁰ Recognizing this, psychedelicism implies creation, experimentation, and innovation, both within and against the mainstream.

Working from the bottom up, psychedelicism also offers a means of recovering histories otherwise lost. Chief among these histories are the threads of Black psychedelicism, which have received little attention. Psychedelicist ideologies proliferated across all strata of class, gender, and race, saturating the ultra-left as well as the ultra-right of American politics. Yet, the persistence of the hippie stereotype has informed the history of the counterculture and has, in turn, caused this history to be one primarily of  “White” movements.

The move from the Roszakian logic of counterculture to the empirical program of psychedelicism challenges scholars to re-evaluate the last 60 years of American psychedelic and religious history. The development of psychedelicist cultures, their emergence, splintering, and innovations speak directly to the special talent Americans have in making and remaking religious meanings despite governmental opposition and public censure. Needless to say, it is up to us as scholars to lift the fog of the drug war so as to see the full landscape of psychedelicism.