Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture

433 Pages·2016·4.807 MB·English

by  David Kaiser (Editor), W. Patrick McCray (Editor)

Groovy Science

Groovy Science : Knowledge, Innovation, and American
Counterculture
David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, Editors
The University of Chicago Press :: Chicago and London
David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and
professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is
the author of Drawing Theories Apart, also published by the University
of Chicago Press, and How the Hippies Saved Physics. W. Patrick McCray
is professor in the department of history at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Visioneers and Keep Watching
the Skies.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 37288- 4 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 37291- 4 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 37307- 2 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226373072.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kaiser, David, editor. | McCray, Patrick (W. Patrick), editor.
Title: Groovy science : knowledge, innovation, and American counter-
culture / David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, editors.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. |
Includes index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2015040309 | ISBN 9780226372884 (cloth : alk.
paper) | ISBN 9780226372914 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226373072
(e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Science—Social aspects—United States. | Counter-
culture—United States—History—20th century.
Classifi cation: LCC Q175.5 .G756 2016 | DDC 303.48/3097309046—
dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040309
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/NISO Z39.48– 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction 1
David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray
Part One: Conversion
1 Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy
(and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958–1 968 13
D. Graham Burnett
2 Blowing Foam and Blowing Minds: Better Surfi ng
through Chemistry 51
Peter Neushul and Peter Westwick
3 Santa Barbara Physicists in the Vietnam Era 70
Cyrus C. M. Mody
Part Two: Seeking
4 Between the Counterculture and the Corporation:
Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology
in the 1960s 109
Nadine Weidman
CONTENTS vi
5 A Quest for Permanence: The Ecological
Visioneering of John Todd and the
New Alchemy Institute 142
Henry Trim
6 The Little Manual That Started a Revolution:
How Hippie Midwifery Became Mainstream 172
Wendy Kline
Part Three: Personae
7 The Unseasonable Grooviness of Immanuel
Velikovsky 207
Michael D. Gordin
8 Timothy Leary’s Transhumanist SMI2LE 238
W. Patrick McCray
9 Science of the Sexy Beast: Biological Masculinities
and the Playboy Lifestyle 270
Erika Lorraine Milam
Part Four: Legacies
10 Alloyed: Countercultural Bricoleurs and the
Design Science Revival 305
Andrew Kirk
11 How the Industrial Scientist Got His Groove:
Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Fashioning
of Technoscientifi c Innovators 337
Matthew Wisnioski
12 When Chèvre Was Weird: Hippie Taste,
Technoscience, and the Revival of American
Artisanal Food Making 366
Heather Paxson
Afterword: The Counterculture’s Looking Glass 391
David Farber and Beth Bailey
Contributors 397
Index 401
Introduction
David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray
groovy \´gru-v i\ adj 1: marvelous, wonderful, excellent. 2: hip, trendy, fash-
ionable.
Something was happening. Otherwise, why would The-
odore Roszak be agreeing with Edward Teller? What
could the left-l eaning history professor and favorite of
Berkeley- area coffeehouse radicals possibly have in com-
mon with a nuclear-w eapons designer whose dark visions
helped inspire Stanley Kubrick’s sinister Dr. Strangelove?
Something was happening. But what was it?
As the 1970s began, Teller and Roszak were about as
far apart politically as two men could possibly be. Yet they
found some quantum of concordance in their assessment
that young Americans were relating to science and technol-
ogy in a manner very different from that of just a decade
earlier. When he surveyed the development of science in the
United States since 1945, Teller concluded that “all is not
well.” The problem was especially acute among “our young
people,” for whom “thorough and patient understanding is
no longer considered relevant.” To Teller—t he very apo-
theosis of the military-i ndustrial complex—t his endemic
“lack of interest” was “the surest sign of d ecadence.”1
Roszak concurred. As he wrote in his 1969 book, The
DAVID KAISER AND W. PATRICK MCCRAY 2
Making of a Counter Culture, the youth of his day were fl eeing sci-
ence “as if from a place inhabited by plague,” seeking “subversion of
the scientifi c world view” itself.2 Roszak’s counterculture—a monolithic
term he deployed to capture what was actually an inchoate collection of
individuals, interests, and ideologies— was antirationalist and opposed
to both sterile technocracy and impersonal “Big Science.” Instead of
astrophysics, engineering, or molecular biology, youthful members of
the counterculture, Roszak held, were more likely to embrace astrology,
Eastern religions, and chemically enhanced spirituality.
Starting from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Teller and Ros-
zak both arrived at a common diagnosis: by the late 1960s, American
youth— and American society in general—h ad turned away from the
science and technology that had underpinned the expansion, power,
and prosperity of the United States since 1945. But Roszak and Teller
were wrong in their assessment. America’s youth had not turned away
wholesale from science and technology. Everyone from vocal campus
radicals to members of Nixon’s “silent majority” could see that a new
type of science, a new way of engaging with technology, was emerg-
ing. Something new was percolating from 1970s- era dorm rooms, ’zine
publishers, hot tubs, and experimental communities. This book explains
what and why.
Our argument in this edited collection is that members of many strands
of the American counterculture, although wary of a larger society that
seemed to prize conformity, consumerism, and planned obsolescence,
were not antiscience. Rather, we argue, many young people who self-
identifi ed as part of the counterculture in the United States, stretching
from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, dismissed examples of
science and technology that struck them as hulking, depersonalized, or
militarized—a rejection of Cold War–e ra missiles and mainframes rather
than of science and technology per se. Instead of the traditional science
and technology promulgated by giant government programs, defense
contractors, and corporate research labs, the counterculture embraced
something new and different. We call this alternative groovy science.
Indeed, this book’s cover art refl ects the blend of the conventional
and the countercultural. Here is a stereotype of an Establishment sci-
entist—white, male, hair closely cut—but his activities are blurred, dis-
torted, and shifted by colorful, sometimes polarizing, and often groovy
forces emanating from outside the lab.
Some of the most iconic, colorful, and controversial fi gures in the
American countercultural movements were enamored of modern science
INTRODUCTION 3
and technology: people like psychedelics enthusiasts Timothy Leary and
Andrew Weil, human-p otential mavens Werner Erhard (of “est” fame)
and Michael Murphy (cofounder of the Esalen Institute), and Whole
Earth Catalog visionary Stewart Brand.3 Each of them actively sought
out the latest advances in quantum mechanics, chaos theory, cybernetics,
ecology, and beyond, often paying handsomely to encourage the work
and learn of it fi rsthand. Following their lead, many young people who
self- identifi ed as members of the counterculture tended toward small-
scale “appropriate technology” rather than the massive projects of the
Sputnik era. When Leary solicited essays from “tuned-i n” physicists on
quantum entanglement in 1976, for example—w hile sitting in a Califor-
nia jail on drug charges— he was seeking the comprehensive worldviews
of modern science, not the room-s ized mainframes of Cold War techno-
science; but his tastes can hardly be dismissed as “antiscientifi c” for all
that.4 Likewise, the long-h aired freethinkers who bought the makings
for Buckminster Fuller– inspired geodesic domes from Brand’s Whole
Earth Catalog or who eagerly snatched up copies of popular books
about cybernetics and the brain by Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, and Staf-
ford Beer were hardly fl eeing from science, no matter how their activi-
ties might have appeared to observers like Teller and Roszak.5
We therefore borrow the term “groovy” to label this cluster of activi-
ties and aspirations. Originally a slang term used by African American
jazz musicians in the 1930s and 1940s, by the late 1960s the word
had become more closely associated with “hippies” and countercul-
ture. The songwriting duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released their
“59th Street Bridge Song” (also known as “Feelin’ Groovy”) in 1966; a
few years later the Grateful Dead produced a cover. In 1971 a clinical
psychologist at the University of Southern California explained in The
Under ground Dictionary that among the largely white, middle-c lass
celebrants of American counterculture, “groovy” had come to mean
“great, fantastic, joyful, happy.” The term faded from common usage
during the 1980s, and hence it provides a useful marker for the “long
1970s” on which we focus here.6
The essays in this volume do not aim to cover all aspects of the
history of science in the United States during the 1970s. Rather, they
lay a foundation for addressing the shifting practices and cultural va-
lences of science and technology during this recent and underexplored
period. Examples of groovy science can be found among mainstream
researchers who sought ways to engage with different communities and
non traditional forms of science, as well as among fringe thinkers who
sought a place in the mainstream’s spotlight. Groovy science, in other