When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture-the critical role they've played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and music {think of jazz or rock improvisation}, of poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen, not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, after all, chemicals with the power to alter mental constructs-to propose new metaphors, new ways of looking at things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs. Anyone who uses them knows they also generate plenty of mental errors; most such mistakes are useless or worse, but a few inevitably turn out to be the germs of new insights and metaphors. {And the better part of Western literature, if literary theorist Harold Bloom's idea of "creative misreading" is to be believed.} The molecules themselves don't add anything new to the stock of memes resident in a human brain, no more than radiation adds new genes. But surely the shifts in perception and breaks in mental habit they provoke are among the methods, and models, we have of imaginatively transforming mental and cultural givens-for mutating our inherited memes. • • • At the risk of discrediting my own idea, I want to acknowledge that it owes a debt-how large I can't say-to a psychoactive plant. The notion that drugs might function as cultural mutagens occurred to me while reading The Selfish Gene while high on marijuana, which may or may not be an advisable thing to do.
( Michael Pollan )
[ The Botany of Desire: A ]
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