Berkeley Talks: Ramzi Fawaz on the psychedelic power of the humanities

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Ramsey McGlazer: I’m delighted to be here and in conversation with Ramzi. And before the conversation gets going, I’d like to offer just a bit of backstory to shed some light on how I approach Ramzi’s new work and how I understand its importance. I’ve been grateful not just to understand, but also to experience firsthand his new work’s curative power as I’ve read and reread it for today.

So whether or not Ramzi knew it would be, preparing for our conversation has for me already been healing. For a long time, every couple of years or so, I’d have an interaction that would go like this. I’d be at an academic conference or another similar event and I’d introduce myself to a colleague I’d never met before. And after a minute or so, I would come to understand that the person I was speaking with thought they were meeting not me, but the other gay Ramzi.

So these interactions might not have been so memorable for me. They might not have left such a deep and lasting impression. If it weren’t for the fact that repeatedly I could sense my colleague’s disappointment when I told them which “Ramsey” I was.

I could see that they were a little let down by my clarification because it meant that the person they first took to be a celebrity, Fawaz, was in fact only me, McGlazer. So because this kind of conversation would recur, I developed a low-grade complex related to it. And although this may sound ridiculous, it may sound ridiculous to some of you, but I really did begin to wonder whether there was room enough in the profession for more than one “Ramsey.”

And so it’s been both a pleasure and a balm to read Ramzi’s latest work. And I’ve been especially moved to find that this work seeks a cure for the kind of competitive individualism that would have us believe that it’s both possible and desirable to be the only one. The search for such a cure or rather for what Ramzi calls a “comprehensive form of self and world retrieval” — maybe we can come back to that phrase — takes him to various places, from the psychedelic session to the humanities classroom and from the multiplex to the multiverse. Ramzi, we are so fortunate that you’re here to guide us through some of this journey.

Ramzi Fawaz: Wow. Thank you.

Ramsey McGlazer: I’m hoping you’ll be willing to start the conversation by just telling us a bit about how you arrived at your current project. How did you discover the psychedelic humanities, or how did they discover you?

Ramzi Fawaz: Well, first of all, an embarrassment of riches. Thank you both so much. This is so beautiful. I just want to say that Cal is my alma mater. Some of my greatest mentors are here — Kevis Goodman, Kathleen Rand — so I am a product of this intellectual universe. And I’m in awe and honored to be in conversation with you. Thank you.

I came into contact with the psychedelic humanities somewhere about two-thirds of the way writing my second book, Queer Forms. I was writing about a variety of queer and feminist cultural objects, some of which were directly from San Francisco. And one of them was Tales of the City. Some of you may know the serial gay fiction Tales of the City. And I was shocked that maybe one scholar had ever written an academic essay about Tales of the City. And so I wanted to study it in its original context.

So I did something very unusual, which is that I interviewed 30 people who had read it in the Chronicle as it came out in the ’70s. And that was really transformative. I gave a paper about this at the San Francisco LGBT Museum and Center.

At the end of that talk, a man raised his hand, like a septuagenarian gay guy, raised his hand and he said, “I love what you’re doing. I’m totally with you, but you never talk about the fact that all of us that were participating in women’s and gay liberation were always on drugs. And a huge way in which we were exploring our sexualities and really sort of opening out the possibility of destabilizing these categories like gay and lesbian, straight, gay, whatever, was the fact that these drugs were completely transforming our affected universe, like our emotional universe.” So that was part one.

That was the first of three things that led me there. And as I explored more in the queer and feminist ’70s, drugs are everywhere, right? The Cockettes, the classic glam drag group were always on LSD. You just see it in the water, literally and figuratively. So that was part one.

The second, of course, was just like everybody else. I read Michael Pollan’s, How to Change Your Mind while I was under lockdown for the COVID pandemic. I had a fellowship at the Stanford Humanity Center and suddenly we couldn’t go anymore to the school.

So I was in San Francisco and I’m reading this book and I’m sort of mind-boggled by the specific chapter where he talks about the neuroscience of psychedelics, where he talks about how we’re finding out that psychedelics rewire the brain, that there are these transformative effects that make … He describes often psychedelics like language, like, it works on your brain.

And I kept, as I was reading it, I was like, “He’s just describing humanities education.” That really kept returning to me. I was like, “He’s really describing what we do in humanities classrooms, except we don’t use drugs. We use art and literature to invoke these transformative effects.”

And then the last was that I was just watching a bunch of popular media that looked really psychedelic. I went and saw Everything Everywhere At Once, and my brain exploded into a thousand pieces. I saw the Spider-Verse movies and was just agog that they’re so critical of identity politics. They’re all about affiliation across identity. I watched the television show Undone. It’s another amazing psychedelic media text. I was reading the Southern Reach trilogy.

Once there was a critical mass of these texts, I thought, “Something is happening. Like, this is not an accident.” There is a cultural phenomenon happening where media and popular culture is catching on to the psychedelic renaissance and it’s sort of metabolizing it aesthetically.

And the last thing I’ll say there is that, at the same time, I was also thinking like, “What do I want out of this career?” Sitting under lockdown when I was almost a full professor, and I was thinking like, “I’ve moved very quickly through the career. What do I want to do with my life?”

And I really had a moment where I was like, “I actually want the work that I do to have some kind of healing effect on people.” I want it to be consonant with this renaissance and I want to also be healed by it. And so those things all sort of came together all at once, and the Spider-Verse movies was really where it started, and I went from there.

Ramsey McGlazer: Amazing. Could you maybe describe some of the challenges you’ve encountered as you’ve done this work, which is remarkable, not at least because it’s truly interdisciplinary. So I’m just wondering how you’ve worked to explain the value of the humanities to clinicians and scientists and how, conversely, you’ve made humanistic insights legible to them.

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah. You know, I am not sure that I have convinced any scientists of anything yet. I would say that one of the big challenges of the field is that there is a huge amount of pomp and circumstance around the desire for the study of psychedelics to be interdisciplinary. And it’s not clear to me that scientists have the bandwidth or even care that much what humanists are saying.

And I might just be in the wrong places. We have a transdisciplinary center for the study of psychoactives at Madison. It’s an extraordinary center. I’m so grateful to be affiliated, but if we’re being honest, it’s not transdisciplinary yet. It is really mostly scientists and pharmacists who are doing very, very narrow studies.

So I was saying earlier, most studies in psychedelic science are asking extremely specific questions like, how does 10 milligrams of psilocybin administer to people between this age and that age affect one aspect of depression?

So to me, they’re in desperate need of conversation with humanists to be able to think about the larger historical political social dynamics of what it is they’re doing, and also the, So what? So if you’re going to be able to use 10 milligrams of this to be able to help depression and what else? Is all of this work really just to find a magic bullet for little idiosyncratic elements of stress on the human body or are we actually trying to change hearts and minds in really important transformative ways? Not so that at the end of the day, people will all be liberal or progressive, but literally so that people can think in a more expansive way. And so that’s number one.

The other hurdle that I find, and it’s weird to talk about this, is that so many humanists are so … They’re all prudes. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like, you talk to humanists about drugs or having fun or going dancing and everybody’s like, “What?” There’s just such an anxiety and a fear about losing control among a group of scholars who’ve spent their entire life studying aesthetic experience, which is about the loss of the self to some kind of artistic or creative or imaginative phenomenon.

So I mean, I write about that in my essay, “Tripping on Mushrooms” with Edward Said. I say, “There’s a really weird dissonance between how much we talk about feelings and effects and sensations and the aesthetic, and yet we don’t really like to have feelings as humanists.”

A good example of this is PMLA, many of you know is the premier journal of literary studies. I’ve talked with their current editor a number of times about pitching a theories and methodology section about the psychedelic humanities in some way.

But then I ended up editing a special issue of at South Atlantic Quarterly on this topic and I thought, I don’t want to rehash the same thing. So I wrote him and I said, “Listen, I have a really controversial idea. Would you be open to this idea?” I said, “What if you did a theories and methodology section with professors writing about how doing psychedelics changed the way they do scholarship?”

And I thought, this is a really great opportunity for humanists to intervene because scientists have a huge struggle talking about this because if they talk openly about doing psychedelics, they could have their licenses revoked, they could lose funding from the government. So somebody has to talk about the actual drug-taking experience besides just clients. And so I said in my pitch, I said, “This is a really good opportunity for humanists to talk about it. Look, if Michael Pollan can write a whole book about him taking drugs and not get fired, we should create an environment.”

And the pearl clutching was, it was so, like, “We could get legally in trouble.” I was like, “We’re not telling people to do drugs, we’re just talking about them.” So there is this deep anxiety that to talk about something is to say you should do it, is an imperative.

So I find that one of the hurdles is that there’s so much we could learn that we’re not learning because we’re afraid of saying it. Most scholars I know drink like a bottle of wine every night. So it’s not like we’re not engaging in altered states, right? Every scholar I hang out with in Madison is always in some way altering — they’re taking weed, they’re doing whatever, but somehow talking about how having a powerful altered embodied experience might change and improve the way we study is really off the table often. And I think we need to break through that. That has to change.

Ramsey McGlazer: Do you think that applies to aesthetic experience also? Do you think there’s a similar inhibition when it comes to engaging with aesthetic …?

Ramzi Fawaz: Yes, because think about it. It’s like I said it today in today’s workshop. It’s like, could I possibly convince any of my colleagues to go to a rave or just to go have a sensory experience that is outside of your norm?

I taught study abroad in London last season and it changed my life. It’s like the coolest thing I’ve ever done. If you’re a graduate student or a faculty member at some point or another, you need to teach study abroad at your institution. It’s so cool.

And I remember just being overwhelmed by aesthetic experiences. I told people that sometimes I would be walking in central London and I would have to avert my eyes from a street because it was too much to see. I was like, “It’s all so beautiful. It’s all so beautiful. I can’t. I can’t.” And I loved feeling overwhelmed. I would go to museums and I would go to raves and I would go tell my students that I was doing these things because they were also doing them, right?

And we were having a shared experience. They were like, “I went to this dance club and I did this and I went to this music event.” And it was so powerful to have a shared experience with students where we were all going to different locations, but we were all being activated in an aesthetic and embodied way.

And that, I think yes, I think there is also a limit to what people will expose … Like, I’m going to give one example I gave in the workshop: It’s unbelievable to me that over a billion people on this planet play video games and not a single professor I know who isn’t in game studies plays video games. Don’t you want to know what other people are doing? I play video games all the time. It’s life-changing. They’re more interesting than most novels being published today. You are in an immersive movie for 65 hours.

It’s amazing. If you don’t have kids, you have time to play some video games. And so again, the fact that people are not accessing all of these other things they could be doing, it’s surprising to me.

Ramsey McGlazer: I don’t know if it would be helpful for people new to your work, maybe for you to lay out the contours of the whole project or not.

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah. So I’m writing a book called How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World, and I’m kind of pitching it almost like an academic self-help book, and the book has two dimensions.

It begins with this just fundamental problem that we all are struggling with. I start with the question of like, Why is it so difficult for people to respond to human diversity without wanting to annihilate everyone? That is a problem that I just want to understand better. What is the mindset required for human beings to encounter plurality, multiplicity, diversity and say, “Oh, that’s cool. That’s really interesting. What’s going on? What is that?” And so it struck me at the beginning of the project that I’m very dissatisfied with the answers that the interdisciplines offer.

So I say in the book, I say we have three dominant modes for understanding difference that are sort of out in the ether. One of them is xenophobia, just hate other people. The second would be neoliberalism like, “Oh, it’s great that people are diverse because then we can exploit their diversity. We make money off of it.” And then the third, and the one that’s supposedly most ethical, is the social justice discourse that’s about protecting and guarding different identities from harm and appropriation.

And while I say in my work, of while these are very, very different logics, they lead us to the same place, which is difference is wrong or scary, or it’s good but needs to be protected. And it leaves such little room for the idea of communing freely across our differences. There is so little room for affinity and attachment and borrowing and sharing and like any notion of reciprocity, which all of us know in our interpersonal lives, like we all live every day talking to people who are not like us and not wanting to destroy them.

So I started with wanting to understand, like, how do you invoke that mindset? And I was fascinated by the ways in which psychedelic science is showing us that one of the potentials of psychedelic experience is the loosening of the grip on one’s rigid sense of self long enough to open out to access effectively the multiplicity of the world. So that fascinated me.

And in my own psychedelic therapy, I had experienced an encounter with levels of multiplicity I had never … I was just in touch with so many different aspects, not only of myself, but all the people in my life. And I thought, OK, so maybe what I want to do is talk about how these psychedelic forms of popular culture, what they all seem to be doing is trying to invoke in their audience a sense of such dramatic dislocation from the way you view the world that you could suddenly see more than you could before.

When you watch Everything Everywhere All At Once, whether you love it or hate it, I know people who hate it because it’s so difficult to watch. You see one Asian American woman and suddenly you’re like, “She’s a million things.” And so suddenly you’re like, “Maybe I’m a million things.” And the Spider-Verse movie goes outward. It isn’t about how he’s a million things; it’s about how there’s a million versions of this kind of being of the spider-person. And I thought, each one of these texts seems to be trying to work on a different sensory aspect of being a person in order to leverage open something new. So that was part one.

Part two, which was unexpected, I did not think this would come about, was that the more and more that I had my own psychedelic therapy experiences in group therapy, and the more that I read about psychedelic integration — which is the process of taking a psychedelic experience and therapeutically processing it or making meaning of it and integrating it into your psyche — the more I thought this is exactly what humanity’s education is.

This is literally what we do. We assign works of art, literature and media, which have a transformative effect on students, and it’s not just a metaphor. You are reading and watching media that is activating electrical signals in your brain. It’s just that you’re not ingesting drugs. Then we sit in a classroom every week and we integrate the experience collectively and there is a guide, who is a professor who has a whole host of interpretive capacities to help people work through what’s happening to them.

Every humanities professor who’s ever taught has received that email from a student at the end that is like, “You changed my life. This blew my mind. I am a transformed person.” And I thought, why don’t we talk about that as a psychedelic experience? This is an extraordinary value of the humanities classroom that we don’t talk about, which is that it literally has the potential to not only make people critical thinkers, expansive, but to actually heal them in a way.

Ramsey McGlazer: I wanted to ask you this because there’s something you write that’s very moving in the introduction to the special issue. You write, and I’m going to quote you for just one second, that, “The simple fact that students frequently feel better about themselves and more confident in their ability to confront the challenges of daily life because of what they learn in the literature and cultural studies classroom.”

So a version of what you’ve just shared with us. Your students are clearly extremely lucky to have a guide like you. I’m wondering though what you make of the moments when humanities teaching makes students feel worse. I think they’re also not infrequent, though it could be I’m assigning the wrong objects. I know you’re of course aware of these moments happen, not least because you’re arguing also in that piece against treating psychedelics as panacea or the teaching of literature as that, that simple univocal healing agent. So could you say more about this?

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah.

Ramsey McGlazer: What do you do when a student comes up against a limit or is disabused, disappointed, disillusioned or devastated by an encounter with an aesthetic organization?

Ramzi Fawaz: Well, so I want to frame that with a little piece of wisdom I received from a friend of mine who’s a burner. He goes to a Burning Man every year. And he said once something that I found really interesting, he said even a bad trip is a good trip. And what he meant was the idea that like setting aside, like the very small percentage of people who have psychotic breaks, etc., which is why in the clinical setting, there’s all of this care around who should and should not take psychedelics.

But setting aside these extreme cases, I think he’s really fundamentally right. What he’s saying is that most bad trips are about a sustained hours, a long encounter with some very difficult feeling state where you get really lost in thinking about, like, your mother’s mortality or about like your aging or whatever. And that’s painful.

It is a painful encounter with something for a very long amount of time. And what’s extraordinary about coming out on the other side is that you realize that you are resilient enough to live through that. And then you’re like, “Next time I’m going to create a better set and setting so that I don’t go into this really dark space.”

But I think that is the point of MDMA-assisted therapy, which has its problems, right? It just had this huge debacle at the governmental level, whatever, but it’s basically not about making people feel happy. It’s about making people be able to access the full range of their cisorium so they can recognize that even bad, ugly, disgusting, painful things, you can live with them. And I think that is what we’re supposed to be doing for our students.

Ramsey McGlazer: So forgive me the quick detail detour into my own teaching, but this week in my grad seminar we talked a lot about the aphorism of Adorno’s, according to which I’m just going to quote him, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” And so if someone says to you, “It sounds like you’re saying that it can, that wrong life can in fact be lived rightly.” Is that person mishearing your argument or is that in fact your argument?

Ramzi Fawaz: I think that’s probably right. Yeah. I mean, I love Adorno, and he’s also unbelievably moralizing and he’s extraordinarily strict about what he thinks is radical and not. And I’m just not. I don’t have that investment. I don’t think that people can live by that level of strictness.

And also everybody in this room knows if you are somebody committed to serious long-term behavioral change, if you’re like, “I would like to change as a person over time,” it is unbelievably slow. And you go back and forth and you go back and forth, and it requires a lot of spaciousness.

So I want to give my students spaciousness to go wrong on the path to figuring out what is right for them, not what is right according to a theorist or according to a political ideological program. So for me, it’s what I try to do, to go back to your earlier question, is to open up a space where I create all the feelings are OK, like put them all out. This disappointed you. Why? What were you expecting of it?

I’ll give an example: My students, I teach them on Thelma and Louise every year. It’s my favorite movie of all time, obsessed. And I always have students who are like, “Why aren’t they lesbians?” Or like, “Why isn’t it about Black people?” And I’m like, “Because it’s not. “Why do you want it to be something that it’s not?” I can give you 10 movies that are about Black outlaws, right? If you want that movie, there’s another movie.

What I press at them is I’m like, “You’re allowed to be disappointed, but I’m curious why you have set yourself up for this disappointment when you could receive the world as it is not as you want it to be.” And I think part of what is really great about psychedelic experience at its best is that far from creating delusional thinking, if done in a setting that is driven towards positive behavioral transformation, you’re doing psychedelics to ultimately see things as they are, not as if you have projected onto them.

The irony of that is that psychedelics are so deeply shaped by people’s mindset that it requires a lot of cognitive work to not get lost in your own delusions. So I think part of our job in the classroom is to honor students’ feelings and then be like, “Where did that come from? Why do you need this from the cultural text? What would open out if you release that attachment? What if you let the movie be what it is?”

Then you can see that it’s a form of anarchist feminism. It’s precisely about saying, like, “Girl, if you want to be a lesbian, go do that. And if you don’t, you don’t have to do that. Maybe you have a best friend.” And maybe you want to go off into the unknown with them. Do you, do whatever, right? Why does it need to be fixed?

So I think, I don’t know if that’s an adequate answer, but I think it’s clearing the space for all of the feelings and then saying, “We’re going to now interrogate those feelings lovingly.”

Ramsey McGlazer: I mean, I think that actually anticipates the next set of questions I wanted to ask you, which are about the symptom, just the category of symptom. And with, again, apologies to anyone in the audience who doesn’t want to enter my wheelhouse, but since I work psychoanalytically, the symptom has a specific meaning where it’s not just a source of suffering to be alleviated or eliminated, but a message to be read …

Ramzi Fawaz: Decoded.

Ramsey McGlazer: Right? Read. Yeah, exactly. And so I would just love to hear more from you what you make of this, how you see your work as relating or not to this understanding, specifically, symptom.

Ramzi Fawaz: Well, I might use a teaching version, because you and I talked about this earlier, right? I don’t think this quite squares with the symptom exactly, but it’s my version of it, which is that I’m sure many of us in this room who teach, experience this, it’s like students come in and they have certain attachments and they are committed to certain ideological positions, certain values, and then those values go from being a position they’re taking to being a symptom. It becomes, like there’s almost a repetition, compulsion where they have to keep reading or interpreting the world through one lens.

I teach a class called ethics and it’s like the students can’t stop talking about consent. It’s the one framework as though all of sex is about consent. And I’m like, consent is one aspect of sex, not all of its aspects.

So my version of this, my version of being a psychoanalyst in the classroom is at some point when I see that frame overtaking the possibility of diverse conversation, I say, “OK, you know what? I’m going to play along. Let’s say this is the only thing that’s operative. Let’s take it to its nth degree and see what plays out.”

I’m going to give a really weird example. In one of my classes, a queer ethics class, I’ll have all these undergraduates who are like, we will read Unlimited Intimacy, which is a very challenging book that is about condomless gay sex, and about its possibilities and its ethics and whatever.

And students love, they’re very intrigued by the argument. They were concerned that the book is very exclusive, that it’s predominantly about white gay men and that he’s celebrating a universe in which lots of other kinds of gay men are not desirable, like if they’re of color, if they’re not muscular or whatever.

So I said, “OK, I’m intrigued by this contradiction between: You love consent, but you want inclusion.” So I said, “So if somebody asked you like, ‘Would you have sex with me? Would you have sex with anybody on the planet?’” They’re like, “Absolutely not.” And I was like, “So by your standards, you are exclusive and thus retrobating conservative.”

You can’t have both. You can’t have universal inclusion all the time and consent all the time. Consent is fundamentally exclusive. It says “Yes,” here, “No” here, right? It’s about, “Don’t touch me,” “Yes, touch me.” And it is fundamentally exclusive, and it’s going to work against your liberal values and you’re going to have to hold the two in tension.

That’s the nature of sex. There are sex spaces that are deeply exclusive. I spent years being like, “Why am I not included because I have this high voice and people like masculinity?” Well, because they don’t want it.

I’m not going to make people like me. You have to move on. At some point you have to be like, “OK, I’m going to go create my own thing.” So I don’t know if that seems like a good example, but it’s like I see them, like, that is their symptom, which is that they can’t handle contradiction.

And I’m like, I push them all the way to that and then they’re like, “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize that.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s called: You have to split decisions.” Sometimes it’s consent, sometimes it’s not, you have to decide. So I don’t know if that’s an adequate answer, but yeah.

Ramsey McGlazer: How recent was this?

Ramzi Fawaz: This one’s like a few years ago, but I do do this to my students all the time. I really like to push them to the limit of that … A very silly example that I’ve talked about actually in other episodes of the podcast, and I said this in the workshop: My students often love to perform a very rote, sort of boring political theater in which there will be conservative students that will take a position that offends other people, and they know that it’s going to offend people, and then they’re like waiting for people to be offended. And then the liberal students are all too happy to be offended and then pounce on them.

And then it produces this just, like, nightmare. And at one point I said to them, I was like, “What if you just stopped? What if you just stopped doing this thing? And what if instead of worrying about offending people, you say what you actually believe, not what you think will be incendiary. Let other people answer honestly and you don’t have to be the moral police on the left.” We go back and forth.

And what comes out of this conversation is that some of the conservative students say, but in the dorms, some of the other students in the class said, “If they ever heard that we voted for Trump, they would never speak to us.”

And I look at the left-wing students and I’m like, “You sound kind of like a fascist.” So you’re literally telling people, ‘I will exclude you permanently from my entire realm, even though I’m all about inclusion and I love everybody.’”

I’m like, “Could you possibly see why that might not make sense?” So I think I try at all these moments to kind of show them how, when they hold onto certain logics in such a rigid way, they’re actually contradicting their own values and that’s OK if they’re OK being hypocrites. But if they want to actually live out some of their values, they might have to think that through.

Ramsey McGlazer: You’ve entered the terrain of the final set of questions I wanted to put to you, which had to do or have to do with how the fact of current fascist resurgence has entered the classroom for you, and how you’ve worked to deal with it. Also, if you want to say how it relates to the work you’re doing, as well.

Ramzi Fawaz: Well, let me start with the psychedelic question. I want to remind everybody, we all know this, but we don’t always say it explicitly. There is nothing about psychedelics that inherently articulates them to radical or liberatory politics at all. There’s a huge spate of literature being published, like there’s that great essay by Nischay Dabino and Brian Pace that is all about right-wing psychedelia, how QAnon shamans are obsessed with LSD.

And so what that to me, what’s so great is the sense that it forces us to be responsible. It’s like there’s no magic bullet for mass immiseration. When you know these drugs can be used for really positive transformative effects and some of the most heinous forms of violence, it means the responsibility lies in the people who use them, administer them, how we use them, in what context? There is no out from responsibility.

So one of my problems with the science is that there’s this obsession with being like, what if we could find the one chemical in every single drug that if administered to everyone equivalently would always create healing? And it’s like, girl, that’s what everybody has wished since the beginning of time.

That’s what Hannah Arendt writes about. We’ve always tried to find an out for human contingency. And the end point of that is usually just killing everybody because human beings are unpredictable and you cannot control them.

So for me, I always start from the idea that, in fact, it is a good thing for our ethical compass to realize and be clear-eyed about the really pernicious uses of psychedelics because it reminds us that whatever social transformative power they have will not ultimately lie in the drug. It will be in the worlds that we create around the drug-taking experience. And just like in the mindset, and that is integration, which we can get to in a second.

Now, how do I deal with the question of fascism in my classroom? It’s exactly what Damon said. It really meant a lot to me that you used the word democratic a number of times. I think it’s fair to say that if you read across my oeuvre, and I owe a lot of this to Kathleen Moran and a few other people like Libby Anker, some of you might know, brilliant political theorist. I really have gone from being an American cultural historian to being a democratic political theorist who uses popular culture to talk about democracy. And one of the things I do in my classes is I’m like, the thing we have to cultivate is our ability to confront plurality in ourselves and others without freaking out.

That is really what I want for them. It’s like I’m not there to tell them to go fight Trump or to do this. They can decide that if they want. I want them to learn how to be able to decide something together, like how to make a critical judgment about the world and then move forward with it.

And I mean, this really relates to the psychedelic experience, because what is involved in healing with psychedelics is that you have this amazing affect of transport and then you need to decide what meaning you want to make out of it and what you want to do with it. That requires you to take in a lot of data and manage a lot of variables.

So I think what I keep doing now is signposting for my students, like this is a miniature version of a democratic space. It’s somewhere in between the private and the public because we’re not out in the public realm, but we’re public, in that we’re at a public institution. You guys pay to go here. You own some portion of the university, at least conceptually. And so this is a place where we practice democratic judgment, like making decisions.

And let me tell you, this is so hard because they live in a world of right and wrong and good and bad. And so they think that making a judgment about anything is making a moral claim about whether it’s good or bad. And I’m like, “No, it’s just deciding for the moment how you want to live together and then you might change your mind later.”

And training them to do that to me is the most anti-fascist thing that you could ever do because the fascist impulse is to say the world is too complex. There’s too many people, we’ll will decide for you.

I think about Wendy Brown when she says in Undoing the Demos, she says, there’s a million versions of democracy, but at the end of the day, isn’t it better to be able to rule yourself with others than to have someone tell you how to be ruled?

And I remind my students, I’m like, “I think you guys often forget because you are so overwhelmed with anxiety that it actually sucks in the long term to have other people tell you how you should live all the time. In the short term, it’s great because it’s like you guys remember your mom telling you what to do and now you’re like, ‘Sure, just tell me what to do.’

“Ten years from now when you are desperate to live the life that you wanted to create, that will become a nightmare. So you might want to start thinking about cultivating the capacity to deal with negotiating differences and decisionmaking with others.” So I think that’s the way that I am approaching it now.

Ramsey McGlazer: There’s a liberal argument to the favor of complexity that prevents us from taking sides …

Ramzi Fawaz: I’ve known that, ugh, so bored.

Ramsey McGlazer: But so, that’s not true.

Ramzi Fawaz: It lies somewhere in the middle. Everything’s always like, “Oh, we can’t.” OK, I’ll give you an example. One of the things that I, one of the critiques I get from other humanists often about my work is that they’re like, “But what about undecidability? What about opacity?”

And I’m like, “I don’t want to be opaque to the world.” If you want to do that, bless you. If you want to always remain in a state of opacity to the powers that be, and you can’t be caught and you’re elusive and your idea … Good for you, live, laugh, love.

For me, I want to be able to make decisions about how I appear, and I don’t see how we can actually change … The same people who are saying that are always asking me about real material conditions. And I’m like, “Well, how do you change real material conditions if you never decide anything?” You have to take a position and you can always change that position, but sometimes you have to stand somewhere.

And I find that that is the hardest thing for my students to do because they know that once you take a stand somewhere, you will be judged by others. Other people will look at you and be like, “Really? What about that?” And so what? I tell them, “So what?” So then you either defend your position or you change it, and you change it by taking in other perspectives.

That’s what the feminist political theorist Linda Zerilli says. She says, “Perspectives are only corrigible or changeable by other perspectives.” So my feeling is if I’m always not deciding by using … The world can be complex and you can take in a lot of complex data and then make a decision based on that complexity. Why would complexity mitigate the ability to intervene in something? And in some ways, that is what has made academics irrelevant in the world.

It’s not only the deconstruction of the university and neoliberalism and fascism, and the list goes on, but also our own anxiety about saying anything clearly and directly enough that it would look like it landed someplace that couldn’t account for every position all at once. And it’s like, grow up. That’s the nature of living in the world: You’re not always right. So anyway, I’m very heated about this, as you can tell. But yeah, I really do … You know what? Be complex and decide.

Ramsey McGlazer: So living in the world makes me want to ask, before we open this conversation up to audience questions, one final thing. And this question I should say is informed by my ongoing conversation with Stephanie Young about psychedelics and state violence. So you’ve gestured towards some of this, but I want to bring the question a little closer to home and concretize it, giving you another chance to say what you’d like.

So we’ve seen in recent months and years, all too clearly, it seems to me that far from being necessarily opposed psychedelics and state violence, so I’m thinking ayahuasca and AI, K-holing and murderous government cuts, altered consciousness and oligarchy are tripping in truly heinous forms of white supremacy can be compatible, right?

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah.

Ramsey McGlazer: I know this is a difficult convergence to address, but I’m sure you’ve thought about it. So wanted to give you a chance to respond in any way you’d like, especially against the backdrop of the Bay where so many technologies of today’s state violence originate.

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah. I don’t actually find this that difficult to answer because I think that confluence is descriptive of the reality of every single field and arena in our society. All of us know professors who are anti-intellectual. All of us know religious people who are deeply immoral. We all know the confluence of a position and hypocrisy, right?

The idea that psychedelics might be taken up in deeply heinous violent formations is no surprise in a world where drugs are part of a global exploitative economy, right? Where people want to be able to dissociate from their own forms of violence, where people want to create reasons for explaining away their murderous attempt.

That’s like what Arun Saldanha talks about. He says, “What’s really happening with IDF soldiers, if we’re being honest, is that they’re being manipulated by their state to think of themselves as good people for murdering and they are probably internally up over this. Something’s happening to them, and then psychedelics become a replacement for doing the actual work that is required to process that you’ve been forced to be complicit in atrocity.”

So on the one hand, I’m like, no surprise. And then the other, I would reiterate what I said earlier, which is that it increases that, much more exponentially, the need for responsibility, right? For actually thinking about these issues in ethical terms about what would it look like to use and think about psychedelics ethically? What does it look like to respond to diversity ethically? What would it take?

And another way to put this is that the humanities, one of its greatest struggles is that we’re so good at talk. We’re so good at insight and we’re so bad at action. And I’m not talking about political action. Professors should profess. They should do their work. They don’t all have to act like frontline activists and organizers.

If you want to do that, beautiful. I love that. But I also think that the professor’s job is to also be at the university as an interlocutor to young people, but we are so bad at modeling the things that we are talking about to our students. I read about this in my work that most professors I know are overworked, depressed, don’t take care of themselves, people pleasing, often unfriendly. They produce a dysfunctional, departmental dynamic.

That shouldn’t be the case. If we’re saying that we study the multidimensional, beautiful aesthetic creations of humankind and how it changes you and improves your wellbeing, we should be able to model that it’s healing us. It’s a bad look when you can’t, and it’s really hard to sell that.

So that places the incredible responsibility on us to live up to what we are claiming. And I think the same is true of the psychedelic realm. It requires us to have a theory of psychedelic experience that links it to ethical projects in an intentional way.

Ramsey McGlazer: I think that’s a great note to open questions on.

Audience 1: I kept thinking about the times that I’ve done psychedelics and the kind of guidance often with Indigenous elders and the use of applied medicine instead of the way that is mostly used in the U.S.

Ramzi Fawaz: Sure.

Audience 1: And the idea that it often feels not just losing the grip of a self, but losing this boundary between the human and the non-human, the sentient and the non-sentient, feeling the breath of a tree or, like, connecting with a rock or a bird or its spiritual ancestors, the boundaries of time and space and spiraling.

So I’m thinking a lot about the difference between healing and numbing. So I’m also thinking about the idea of intention and adjourning, which is really important by [inaudible], like setting an intention and the ayahuasca should guide you wherever you need to go, or as you said, no [inaudible] procedure and the type of processing.

So I’m wondering, how do you see that in terms of like … Also in terms of queer communities and how much intention there is and how that way of caring is also in practice in psychedelic experiences. But it could all be taken into a numbing, which could see it in tobacco as well, as a plant, as a healing, as a connector in Indigenous traditions, and then in biggest industry.

Ramzi Fawaz: So you are exactly getting at the heart of … in this project, I’m really trying to get to a place where I say: At the end of the day, it’s not about the drugs, it’s about the frameworks that we bring to these experiences. So if you do not have a framework that is organized specifically about activating the sensory and not numbing it, right? Using it to connect to people, using it to have a more expansive sense of your relationship to the world of the universe, which can happen in many different contexts, right?

But if you aren’t setting an intentional framework that you actually follow through with behavioral and transformative structures, then you are going to get things like numbing. You actually have to go into psychedelic experiences thinking, like, I’m also as a human being capable of addiction, of obsessive disorder … or obsessive thoughts. You have to actually articulate the experience to frameworks that are about working to improve people’s relationships with others, not to shut them down. So you’re really just talking about like what is the frame within which you offer the experience. And I think that that’s key.

Now when it comes to queer communities, I have not read as much as I would like to about how queer communities are using psychedelics. Although there’s an amazing book that the Chacruna Institute put out that is all about, it’s like queers and psychedelics. But in the book Trippy … Do you guys know the book Trippy by [Ernesto] Londoño is his last name. He’s a New York Times journalist.

He talks about going on an ayahuasca retreat with a group of queer folks and how he had mixed feelings about it because he thought it was an unbelievably healing, special place, but also the framework was so heavily focused on trauma that most of what they talked about was suicide and being on ayahuasca and talking constantly about suicidal ideation felt to him very dissonant and that it magnified something really difficult and painful. And so that was an interesting situation in which a really intense worry about harm and reproducing harm weirdly accentuated the focus on that thing.

And so my view is if what you want is for psychedelic experience to be multiplicitous and never to be one thing, it is powerful and important for people to experience it in lots of different contexts, in lots of different frameworks, to see which ones work with their health and healing.

People want to lose their ego in the United States because we live in a very ego-driven society. But when you go somewhere else where ego is not the dominant factor of a culture, that may not be a thing that you need to shed. So different environments will ask for different things. But I think when it comes to the question of numbing, it really is about like, how do we set intentions about what we want the drugs to do for us?

Audience 2: [Inaudible, audio distorted: The speaker asks about the crisis in the humanities and how Fawaz’s self-help approach addresses the institutional challenges of the modern university.]

Ramzi Fawaz: I love this question. Part of the reason I sidestep the crisis of the humanities rhetoric is because one could argue that humanities has always been in crisis. And so if it’s always been in crisis, then what’s the point of even naming it as such?

But one could also say that to me, it’s a crisis of PR, honestly. We are so bad at explaining what we do to anyone outside of the university. Literally just explaining to people that we teach people how to read and write and talk. Doing a podcast has been a revelation because this, I get people who write me, students who are like, “This is the clearest articulation I have ever heard of what you do in the humanities.” And I’m like, “Haven’t you just taken four years of school?” There is a way in which we as professors are often so at a distance from …

We explain ourselves to each other so well. We have such rarefied specific ways of explaining to each other our projects, but to sit in front of an ordinary person and just be like, “Yeah, dude, we just sit and we read and we talk about it.” It’s not that difficult to process.

We have a problem of getting the word out that what we are doing is valuable and it matters. And what I find weird about that is like, it’s really not that hard to have a very quick conversation with someone who thinks that STEM is key to tell them that like most of the students who study that never go into fields with those jobs. All of the work in computer science is going to now be done by AI. There is a very easy way to show that the humanities is never going to get old because the capacity to simply be able to communicate with people, to be able to move in the world as a full person, is a necessary part of most jobs.

So to me, the reason I don’t go too deep into it is because what I want to try and do is to model what the humanities does best without belaboring the idea that it’s failing to do it or that we’re doing it badly. I’m like, “Let me just show it to you. Let me just show you what it would look like to just do humanities work at its highest.”

I think I address the crisis in the humanities the most explicitly in my essay, “Tripping on Mushrooms” with Edward Said, in which I say, maybe the real crisis is not simply that we don’t get funded or that people don’t care about us, but that we ourselves have a hard time modeling what is beneficial about what it is that we do. And if we could do a better job living what we teach, people would be like, “Oh, I want some of that.”

I remember having a graduate student say something very painful to me. She said, “I look at what you guys do and it looks miserable, and I don’t want to go into academia.” And it made me very emotional because first it sort of hurt my feelings because I was like, “I think I’m pretty cool and I think I trained you really well. This is actually pretty fun.”

But I think that she could see that there was a sort of, like, there was a group of people who, despite struggling with all of these budget crises, are generally well-resourced, get to teach whatever they want, actually get to study the thing they want, and are fucking miserable. And she was like, “It’s a bad look.” She was like, “I don’t know, this doesn’t seem fun.”

And I thought, that’s our problem and we have to change the PR around that, and that requires us to deal with our bullshit, honestly, because if you are teaching everything that you want, if you are at a well-resourced university, you should not always be in a state of crisis about it. You should be trying to lift up people who are literally not resourced.

Audience 3: [Crosstalk/unintelligible, audio distorted: Speakers discuss the “crisis in the humanities” as an overused term and pivot to the uneven material conditions and resources within higher education.]

Ramzi Fawaz: I don’t know that there is an answer to that question except like complete revolt, right? A collective revolt against the neoliberalization of the university, which we’re not particularly good at or trained to do because we also want to keep our jobs.

So I’m just talking about that one little humble part of, like, if what we want is greater public buy-in to what it is that we do, we are going to have to be able to articulate it in a public forum much more decently. Why did I do a podcast? I did a podcast because I listened to hundreds of podcasts and all I hear whenever professors go on podcasts is social scientists and scientists from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Brown. And I’m sitting there being like, “Are these the only people who come up with ideas that are worth talking about?”

Why is nobody talking to humanists? The only humanist I have ever seen on a major show is Bruce Robbins from Columbia talking on Fareed Sakaria. And Bruce Robbins is fantastic and I love him and he’s so smart, but it’s also like, why are you talking to the people that are the most established and famous in their field? He’s been famous forever. Why don’t you talk to people in their 30s who are starting teaching, who have all these interesting ideas?

And I thought, “I want to put those people front and center from core schools, from well-resourced schools, from Ivy Leagues, from small Cal State schools, all of these different voices.” And you know what I get is, students are like, “You guys are so cool, you guys are so interesting and cool, but we just don’t produce enough forums to get that out.”

So I absolutely agree. None of that is going to fix the structural reality, but I think that if what we want is an electorate that sometimes votes in our favor, we will have to make it so that in their imagination when they think about us, they think that we are actually cool and that we’re doing things that are cool.

The last thing I’ll say is like Matt Brim, who teaches at CUNY Staten Island, who teaches at a poor school is how he would describe it. He does an amazing thing. He invites his students’ parents to come to class because most of them are like, “Why are you wasting your money going to school?” And they leave after an hour and a half and they’re like, “This is so awesome. He’s so awesome. This is so fun. I didn’t know this was so fun.” It’s that basic.

Audience 4: Kind of building on this, I love this, what you said earlier around creating a safe space in a classroom where students can explore … and [inaudible, audio distorted] … we have these ups and downs, need time and space and it sounds like a lot of us have been around the academic side and thinking about the academic. I was fortunate enough to experience discussion with you outside of academia and not as someone in my 20s.

And it was really powerful and meaningful to not just … I listen to a lot of podcasts, I read a lot of things, but experiencing discourse in a safe space is a very different level of learning and expansion.

And I’m just curious, and you’re talking a lot about the role of academia and you’re starting to bring us ideas out in different ways, but I’m curious if you have other thoughts on, outside of academia, how do we create more space for some discourse and what does it look like outside of just universities and colleges and these safe spaces?

Ramzi Fawaz: What a great question. It’s so nuts and bolts. It’s like, people need to remember that they have the capacity to invite other people into a space. When you think about the radical feminism of the 1970s or gay liberation, which I write so much about, that was all grassroots everyday work. It was like women saying, “You know what? Why don’t we meet in my living room on 10th Street in New York City?

And 20 women come and start talking in a consciousness-raising session. And then they model that for other people and then they spread the word about this way of being so that suddenly there are all these radical feminists running across New York City every day going to meetings, meetings, meetings, right? This attempt to revitalize public space that is not all on the internet, that is not all social media, where we actually do things in a very local way.

Like one of the things we did, Aileen was in my class at Esalen and one of the days on that in that seminar was about radical democracy and cosmopolitanism, and we literally practiced deliberative democracy by debating every single thing that happened for two hours. It was so fun and it was really hard. We talked about how we have such a low tolerance for that, and what would it look like to invite people into a space over dinner where you just talk about something you all read, right?

So the anarchist group The Invisible Committee in their manifesto called Now, they say in a world that radically alienates all of us and atomizes us, the most radical thing you could do is, like, make dinner for your friends, right? It’s like, just offer something to people. And there is a way in which, without setting for yourself the standard of changing the world, you could do those things and just get practice at it.

So Arendt will say, people who never practice getting together with others, talking to others, deliberating over questions, are very unlikely to start to do that when the chips are down. She’s like, “It’s very unlikely that the people who never practice communing with others, when dictatorship falls are like, “‘I’m ready to be in it with you.’”

So I think really the answer is so kumbaya and cheesy, but it’s like, create little versions of the public square in your own life, invite people to do things in a sustained, regular way where you’re always talking through ideas.

I had a student in London — at one point we were talking about deliberative democracy and popular culture and he flippantly said like, “Oh, so what, we’re supposed to all suddenly start being out in the public square?” And I was like, “Why not?” I was like, “Why are you poo-pooing that thing? Do you ever go out in the public square and talk to anyone, because we don’t have a public square anymore.”

The answer, again, I think is sort of cliche, but I don’t know that there is another answer. That is the answer, is like create the thing that you want in miniature and then take it from there. And if that’s all you want, great. And if it becomes a model of a larger political practice, that’s also great.

Ramsey McGlazer: What you’re saying about practice is so compelling. If I could just ask a follow-up, so if someone were to say, “It’s not holding yourself to the standard of changing the world, but rather holding fast to an aspiration, right? And if that’s off the table …

Ramzi Fawaz: What is off the table?

Ramsey McGlazer: If the aspiration, which is everywhere under attack, is off the table. How do you respond to that kind of critique?

Ramzi Fawaz: The aspiration of changing the world?

Ramsey McGlazer: Well, you said, oh, we shouldn’t hold ourselves to the standard of changing the world. We should focus on these local …

Ramzi Fawaz: Oh, what I simple mean is if holding yourself to the standard of changing the world is paralyzing you, then it does need to be set aside. If it’s galvanizing you, go for it, girl. Whatever it is that drives you to be able to act is, to my mind, a good thing. And if you’re like, “But I can’t do anything unless it’s going to change all local politics in my town or whatever,” you might be setting yourself up for disaster because it’s not something you can achieve in one fell swoop.

And I think that being able to have more humble ambitions where you say, “I want to change the world. Maybe one way of doing that is just changing something on my street.” I mean, this is what I think a lot of people talk about — emergent strategy — like the adrienne maree brown stuff where she’s like, “Start really local.” I think that’s all I mean.

I have very big ambitions and aspirations. I wouldn’t want to take that away from anyone. I believe in changing the world. My version of changing the world tends to be, as your question posited, less about the complete restructuring of material conditions, which is a question I get asked often. And I often am like, “I just don’t think that’s what I’m doing.” I would love to. There’s other political strategies that do that work. And if you create a forum for me to participate in that, I will.

But I don’t think that any material transformation can happen in the world unless people’s framework for thinking about a problem shifts. And I think that the problem we are running into in our country now is that people are so viciously and fiercely attached to their own frameworks for understanding the world that it is, like, we all need to figuratively drop acid and shake it up. We need to just break out of these logics.

Another way to put this is if your idea of changing the world is really rigid, if you have one idea of what changing the world is, maybe find ways to shift the frame of what you think world transformation is and then try to create some small version of that.

Audience 5: I wanted to ask if you would say a little bit more about capacity. I really like …

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah.

Audience 5: [Crosstalk/inaudible, audio distorted: Audience member asks about the concept of being “opaque to oneself,” contrasting the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious with the psychedelic goal of mental expansion.]

Ramzi Fawaz: OK, sure. Which is part of why people go to school. People go to school in order to have a better understanding not only of other people but themselves. So let me backtrack and explain where my binging and opacity comes from. And it really comes from a specific disciplinary space around queer studies.

Anybody who circulates in queer and trans studies in the last 20 years knows that there was at some point … At some level, queer studies is the study of weirdos. Like that’s what it is. It’s a field that is a study of the people who don’t fit in, like misfits. And that to me was always very compelling when I first entered the field.

Sometime in the mid-2000s, there was a major move in the field towards describing all of these forms of failing to live up to norms as a form of liberatory escape from those norms.

So words like failure, opacity, ephemerality, fluidness, formlessness. There was this kind of embrace of the idea of what makes queer people and other misfits so radical is they can never be captured. Nobody can ever understand them fully. They’re always opaque to the world, etc.

And after a while, I remember thinking with my colleague Aída Lévy-Hussen, we used to say like, “I don’t want to be a loser. I don’t want to be a failure. The queer art of failure — it’s not my aspiration to fail and everything. I don’t know. I don’t always want to be misunderstood. I would like to be seen in my various dimensions, even knowing that I can never be seen fully because I’m multidimensional and a multiverse, whatever. I can hold both things at once, that I’m multiplicitous and there are dimensions of my being that can be articulated to other people and I can live with that reality.”

So I found as I taught more and more young queer people that they glommed on to that language of opacity, and they fell in love with it. They were so seduced by it. And it allowed them to take this very irritating formation: “Nobody understands me. I can’t believe nobody understands me, but you never could.” Right?

That’s the game they’re playing. Like, “Nobody understands me, but they never could because I’m just so unique and weird.” I’m like, “No, you’re not. You’re another human being on the planet and there’s been billions of us before. And you can actually be understood. There are ways to convey your form of gender or sexual nonconformity. And yes, at the end of the day, you will never be fully understood because we’re not telepaths. That is the beauty and the majesty and the mystery of being a person.”

So I am critical of the tendency to elevate the notion of opacity or not being understood to like a liberatory calling. It’s one thing to say, there are marginalized subjects, like Vivian Wong’s book about queer Asian American form is all about how like, well, Asian American people are often made invisible in our culture and so they are opaque to the culture because they are invisible.

That’s a historical argument about the way in which some people have been framed. One does not then need to celebrate opacity as this great thing. And this is where she and I and others disagree, where I think that queer studies then wants to elevate the idea of remaining opaque to yourself and others as somehow … It’s like the idea of undecidability, like always being liminal is like the best thing. And I’m like, “Sometimes you’re liminal and sometimes you’re not.” And it’s not possible to live permanently in that space. Judith Butler would say that’s an unlivable life.

So my thing is like, don’t we strive in some aspects to want to understand ourselves better? Isn’t that why we get educated? Don’t we go to therapy in order to understand ourselves better? The point isn’t to achieve a moment where you are fully transparent to yourself, but rather where you train your senses to be able to better register your own complexity, like your own multiplicity.

That to me is what’s so interesting about psychedelic experience. The idea not that you will become transparent to yourself, but that you will feel more in your body. You will have a broader opening up of a range of feeling states and you’ll be like, “Oh, my God, I didn’t know that I could receive that much.”

I said in the workshop that great quote from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the first novel of this trilogy where a character says, “I no longer felt like a person. I felt like a receiving station for a series of overwhelming transmissions.” And my thing is like psychedelic experience is about becoming a receiving station and realizing, “I can feel this much and more. I can’t believe it.” That’s amazing to me. And that to me is a form of self-understanding.

The last time I had a psychedelic therapy trip, I wasn’t letting go of anything. I wasn’t like, “I have to let go of this trauma or whatever.” I have never trusted myself more. I was just overwhelmed by sensation and in my mind I was like, “I’m fine.” I was like, “I can actually handle this much. I can receive this much.”

I really did feel transparent to myself briefly, and I like that because I knew that it was temporary. I was like, “That’s great to know that I can touch that thing.” And then next week I’m going to be in a bad mood and be like, “I hate myself and everybody.” And that’s OK. So I don’t know if that’s a good answer to your question, but yeah.

Audience 6: [Inaudible, audio distorted]

Ramzi Fawaz: Thank you. That’s so generous.

Audience 6: My name is Chio. I’m Native from Mexico and for the past six or seven years I’ve been holding space between here and Oaxaca … [inaudible] magical mushrooms.

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah.

Audience 6: My question for you goes [inaudible, audio distorted]. As you already know, in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, there was this wave — particularly psychologists — who knew that this medicine was provided there. [Spanish language].

And so my challenge is for me not to [repeat/reproduce] what happened in those parts. Even though I am someone holding space every summer — the [rainy] season, when the magical mushrooms grow — every year there is that feeling of me being responsible.

I’m curious to know how you feel about [the extraction/tourism] that continues to happen. I have been going back and forth … honestly through generations, because I come from that lineage. I have a responsibility. I was in academia and I was strongly called by [the medicine/my lineage] to get out.

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah, that’s a long time.

Audience 6: Hearing you speak about your students … I didn’t even know about [that profession] until I was in it. Fast forward 12 years later, it’s full circle because I was asked to do the medicine that my ancestors were doing. Even though physically being [in academia] is a challenge in my mind and heart, it’s beautiful to come back to these spaces to hear one another.

But also knowing where academia is now, and what happened back [then] … I see how much tourism has grown, particularly in the South [Oaxaca]. [Inaudible, audio disorted].

Ramzi Fawaz: So I will do a disclaimer that I should have done with the crisis of the humanities question, which is that I’m not going to be able to answer the larger structural problem of tourism, which is so beyond my pay grade. It’s like something that governments need to be intervening in. So much activism has to be done around that.

But I will talk about what I think I’m better at, which is the frame. My sense, I’m still learning, I consider myself a student of psychedelic studies and history, and there’s so much more I want to learn, but it seems very clear to me that the framework that says there are Indigenous people that have had these things for generations, they have ownership over the meaning of it, and then there are white Western people that are exploiting it and abusing it is not working because it ignores histories of exchange of the idea that plant medicines exist everywhere in the world.

There are some people that have way longer experience than others, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t themselves evolving. Like part of what Arun Saldanha says, this is part of what it does, is it says the people that have had ancient traditions are stuck in time and they’re only using it in one way and then there’s these people who are exploiting it.

What I would like is for us to talk more about, how are all of these groups responding to contemporary realities and changing and evolving the way they administer and frame psychedelic medicines in response to those realities. One way of being responsible for the spread of something is you could educate people about its history. You could also talk about what healthy, meaningful exchange looks like that is non-exploitative. You can ask people to, you can signpost what that looks like and offer best practices and invite people into that.

And what that might do is give people the tools to then go circulate those best practices elsewhere or to adapt them. But it requires a willingness to say, no one group has universal ownership over this experience. There are just some of us that are more proximate to long histories of its use.

So I think part of what happens is that there is such a focus on, especially white middle-class Americans using all of these drugs exploitatively, that we actually don’t put the responsibility in their hand to be like, “What is the tradition you want to create in the United States of psychedelics?” There’s more people being in a constant defensive stance of being like, “I don’t want to be racist, but I also want the drugs.” And I think if we can … People are going to do the drugs. They’re seeking them out.

Americans are really struggling about their mental health, about their relationship with their politics. They’re going to seek out everything, Buddhist meditation, yoga. We’re going to have to accept that Americans are really trying their best to find their way out of this nightmare and they’re going to do it in a clumsy and weird way.

And if the framework is always one of original bearers and owners of the experience and exploitators, you’re not going to create the conditions in which the exploitators are going to come up with a better self-understanding of why they want to access these drugs.

So my thing is we need to change the frame where we talk more, and there’s a book that does this really well. There’s a new book that’s, I’m forgetting the name, it’s about global psychedelic cultures. And what it tries to show in a series of essays is that there’s so many different cultures globally, modern, ancient, etc., that have been interacting with psychoactive drugs. And the book is saying there’s no group of people that have pure ownership over these plant medicines. They’re differing competing traditions. And if we could talk about, what is your tradition, what is the tradition of passing it on and then giving people best practices and then saying to them, “You need to figure out what your tradition is.”

I think that’s what we need to do, is to demand a responsibility for Americans to figure out what they want their tradition to be. And part of my project in this book is like the tradition should not be magic bullet for misery. It really should not be that. That is not a sustainable goal. That’s a very American thing. The last one was opioids and the one before that was Valium. There’s no magic pill. So I think we need to come up with a better, more intelligent tradition for the Western and American use of it.

And I think that people that have a longer tradition have the ability to say like, “What is the tradition you want to leave? Why don’t you come up with one?” I don’t know if that helps, if that is a good answer, but yeah.

Ramsey McGlazer: So Annalise had a question right outside, right outside.

Audience 7: Can you all hear me?

Ramzi Fawaz: Yeah. Yeah.

Audience 7: [Inaudible, audio distorted: An audience member critiques the lecture for failing to acknowledge the ongoing impact of COVID-19 on brain health and accessibility. They argue that discussing the pleasure of the humanities feels disconnected from the reality of students and faculty who are struggling with the biological effects of the virus on their ability to read and concentrate.]

Ramzi Fawaz: Oh, I think that’s totally fair. Yeah. Ma’am, may I actually respond to that?

Audience 7: [Inaudible]

Ramzi Fawaz: I absolutely agree. I would say there is a huge body of work that explores that. If I didn’t talk about it’s only because I also, I don’t think of myself as an expert enough to be able to talk about that aspect.

And then if I may thoughtfully push back on something, I think you’re absolutely right that that is something that we’ve come … We think about COVID like it’s over, and I totally agree — it’s a framework I’m not addressing here and I think that’s totally fair.

But I’m just going to say, I actually find the hegemonic aspect of academia the depressive side of it. As somebody that is very energetic and that is usually pretty upbeat, I’ve actually spent most of my career around very depressive introverts who are constantly recontaining me in my space and it is the norm that effectively you are supposed to be downbeat in the field.

So in some ways, I’m not trying to negate the misery or the unhappiness or whatever, which is all legitimate. I’m trying to actually create space for the other thing to say like, “If we are so invested in feelings and affects, why can’t we say that all of the affects are welcome?”

And I have actually found that my upbeatness is usually associated with naiveté, immaturity, like all of these things that I’m constantly having to push back against. And I’m like, “Girl, not all of us are in that space.”

So I’m with you, trust me, some of my closest friends in the academy have the complete opposite aspect that I do and I adore them and I think I try to create a lot of space for them. And I think in some ways I’m actually trying to make a little bit of space for those of us who are not oriented that way, if that makes sense.

Audience 7: Yeah.

Ramzi Fawaz: But I really, I mean, you’re absolutely right. And I would say that I’m at a stage in which I think a lot of us in this room are where we’re taking risks around COVID and we’ve normalized it. And I think it’s absolutely a frame that we should be thinking about. And you’re just pressing at the limit of whatever it is that I thought about presenting today. Yeah.

Audience 8: [Inaudible: Speaker thanks Fawaz for the lecture.]

Ramzi Fawaz: You’re incredible. Thank you so much. There is room. There is room for two and more.

Audience 8: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Ramzi Fawaz: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

(Applause)

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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