Nick Gillespie of Reason says, Thank you, Ram Dass!
Ram Dass, the psychedelic pioneer once known as Richard Alpert and notorious for getting fired by Harvard after giving undergraduate students drugs in the early 1960s, died at age 88 a little more than a week ago. So passed one of the figures who helped make postwar America vastly more individualistic, libertarian, weird, and wonderful.
Ram Dass’ journey from being the wealthy, repressed homosexual son of a railroad baron to a conventionally promising academic psychologist to the author of bestselling hippie bibles to the leader of a Hawaii-based New Age community was very public and extreme. But it neatly traces the arc of a square, buttoned-down Organization Man country into a place where hyperindividualized freak flags became the national uniform and the pursuit of spiritual and psychic wisdom became legitimate. Without figures such as Ram Dass — relentless seekers who challenged the boundaries of common decency and bourgeois respectability — we’d all be living in much duller, grayer world.
Richard Alpert’s father was the president of the New Haven Railroad, and the future Ram Dass grew up rich and entitled. He eventually made his way to Harvard as an assistant professor of psychology, where he crossed paths with Timothy Leary and helped create the “Good Friday experiment,” which catalyzed the nascent psychedelic movement. In short order, he and Leary were kicked out of Harvard and ended up living in a commune in upstate New York where they, along with Ralph Metzner (who himself died earlier this year), published an acid-drenched version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that inspired the Beatles, among others.
In 1967, Alpert migrated to India and came back to the United States a few years later as Ram Dass. His 1971 book Be Here Now, cheekily dedicated to “the one eye love” and subtitled a “cook book for a sacred life,” helped introduce America to the now-ubiquitous term namaste and other Eastern mystical concepts. He eventually landed in Hawaii and created the Love Serve Remember Foundation.
I’m not sure I’d rate their contributions to society a net positive.
Hard to challenge the first three terms: “So passed one of the figures who helped make postwar America vastly more individualistic, libertarian, weird, and wonderful.”
Though even at that some it depends on when you start the clock [ie, at the peak of postwar Corporate America Gray Flannel Suit Man, or earlier], your preferences, and your approach to individualism.
America is much more individualistic and weird in many ways, but it’s also getting conformist in that way one does with anyone who doesn’t have a freak flag to fly and would rather keep it personal if they did. Options for a more conservative temperament and lifestyle do come in for their share of ridicule now and then, and increasingly.
What mode of life gets urinated on more by our modern pop culture than a two parent, uniracial, middle class family living in a suburban home with 1-3 natural born genetically descendant children? They’re all squares and fascists and clingers and closet pedos, if I understand the message of our entertainment industry correctly.
That and much of the cultural and regional diversity has faded, become commoditized, or become homogenized into more limited forms packaged for mass consumption. Look at what happened to country music, now just a variation of pop.
Look at what happened to country music …
I’m with you there on country music. Shame what happened there. But that has no connection to Alpert, a harmless goof, who found a career feeding the seemingly endless appetite of wealthy flakes for spiritual bromides. There will be others.
But country music, damn, it used to be good.
You forgot to mention Ram Dass is Jewish.
Country music in Nashville is also run by…the Jews. Even Nascar.