Comment by lo_zamoyski
8 months ago
“Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi, and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab—and took high doses of magic mushrooms.”
I seriously wonder what this Catholic priest was thinking.
According to a natural law view, the reason for taking a psychoactive substance is a major component in determining whether taking it is licit. A bad intent corrupts the act. So, if I have a martini in order to calm my nerves, or choose to savor the goodness of a glass of beer, then knowing what we know about the effect of alcohol in moderation and our own personal response to the quantify in question, there is nothing wrong happening. (Catholics are not teetotalers. We like our wine.) Indeed, if you are in a state of high anxiety that impedes the use of reason, taking something to calm your nerves would be therapeutic and restorative. But if we consume alcohol in order to get drunk or buzzed, then this is morally illicit, as the intended effect — the distortion of perception and the impeding of the operation of our rational faculties — is immoral. This is because, on a natural law view, our nature is to be rational animals — to know reality as it is, which is what the senses and reason are for — and to intentionally thwart our nature, and especially that which is most essential to our humanity, our rationality, is bad for us as human beings. (It also produces emotional distortions, which are, again, something bad for us.) That is why it is an affront to human dignity to trip, and we intuitively perceive this when we see a drunk or someone who is high. They disgust us, they arouse pity in us, or, in less serious cases, we laugh at them, because the comedy is the result of them failing to be rational and thus human.
The principle of double effect also tells us how and when taking a substance with harmful side effects is licit. The intent is, again, an essential component, and recreational drug use is simply never licit for that reason as explained above.
The idea of using drugs to produce a “spiritual experience” is also nonsensical. That is because it isn’t a bona fide spiritual experience. It is a hallucination, a corruption and suppression of the perceptive and rational faculties which is how we come to know reality. It does not clarify our perception of reality per se, but darkens it by producing mental and emotional distortions. A true spiritual “experience”, if you want to call it that, would involved the heightened or elevated operation of perception and rationality, not their diminution. So the real McCoy is exactly opposite. That people subjectively report having gained insight is either a side effect of the hallucinogen disrupting some pattern of denial or whatever, or merely an error of perception (which is expected, as people high on drugs aren’t thinking clearly and have a poor ability to appraise the validity and value of their thoughts).
True spiritual maturity is sober. Hallucination is the exact opposite of sober. It is a fraudulent ersatz, not some royal road to the divine or whatever.
Sometimes I listen to music explicitly for the way it makes me feel, emotionally and physically.
That the "drug" is auditory (physical) instead of chemical (physical) does not change anything meaningful.
Catholics do this too. In fact they are encouraged to do so.
I conclude that your argument is flawed.
I conclude that you've attacked a straw man.
Music does indeed move us emotionally. Some music can move us toward healthy emotions conducive to our flourishing, some can move us toward degradation. So, music can be good or bad with respect to the effect it has on us, and our intentions can be good or bad depending on what we want out of music. Circumstances are also important: you don't play waltzes at funerals, and you don't play requiems at wedding banquets. This accord is a matter of rationality. Appropriate music complements or accentuates the content of the occasion, creating an integrity between reason and emotion, while inappropriate music misdirects emotion and sets it in opposition to reason.
(Since you mention Catholics, yes. For example, chant can be used as part of the liturgy to help move us toward a higher, more contemplative state. This is why some of the bad, schmaltzy music that's been employed at many masses since the 1970s has drawn so much ire and disgust. It is not only objectively bad, but trades the contemplative for the mawkish and sentimental. This is tragic, given the magnificence and wealth of the liturgical music tradition.)
Where drugs are concerned, I never said that all psychoactive effects are bad. In fact, I explicitly said that not all are. We can drink coffee in moderation to make us more alert. We can drink alcohol in moderation to calm our nerves. We can take opiates in moderation to relieve pain. Etc, etc. None of these uses involve the dimming of reason — certainly not the intentional dimming of reason — or the twisting of the senses, or the abuse of the emotions at odds with reality. In the first two examples, we are using drugs in a restorative way; we are enabling the proper function of reason and so on. In the third example, we may be using opiates in a restorative way (ever try functioning when you're in pain?), or, if the dose is high enough to impede reason, we do so not with the intention of impeding reason, but with the intention of relieving extreme pain while tolerating a secondary, undesired side effect of temporary diminution of reason. By impeding reason and clear perception, recreational drug abuse intentionally deprives us of the ability to know and perceive reality, and deprives us of the ability to discern what is good for us and to act rightly in accord with it.
So, where an analogy between music and drugs can be made hinges at least partly on the ill or good effects it produces, which is greater, and whether the ill effects are intended. Recreational drug use intends the bad effects by intending the delusions, the hallucinations, and the irrational. Music that habituates bad mental habits, habituates bad emotional responses and moods, or contains harmful content should likewise be avoided.
I appreciate your thoughtful response, but I think you are being misled by the popular wisdom and where it is disconnected from ground truth.
One phrase that jumps out, because it's a bit of a cliche, is "recreational drug abuse". It can be parsed a couple of ways, and you may not intend it this way, but it's often used to imply that all recreational drug use is abuse. This is not correct or reasonable.
Caffeine is a recreational drug, as are Fentanyl, MDMA, cannabis, et cetera. All can be abused to physical detriment. But all also have medical and therapeutic uses as well.
Moving back to the the main point though, I am not claiming equivalence between music and drugs. Some drugs are as safe as music, but most are not.
But both are sometimes used explicitly for the changes in brain chemistry that they evoke. My argument is that it is reasonable to use music for the purpose, and it is also reasonable to use drugs for the purpose. You need to be more careful with the latter, but that is not a condemnation. We use lots of things responsibly, which require caution to use safely.
Your phrase "intentional dimming of reason" also suggests an incomplete understanding of recreational drugs. Some do, but some do not. Some of the legal ones do. Some of the illegal ones do not. Some of the illegal ones that do, can be used responsibly in dosages that do not.
But even further than that, dimming of reason is not necessarily always a bad decision. We do it all the time. I am assuming you are religious, so I apologize if this is offensive, but faith is an intentional decision to diminish (or devalue, or at least demote) your reasoning abilities. So is love. And patriotism. These can be healthy and productive things, in moderation.
People who choose to temporarily alter their perceptions via recreational drugs have many reasons for this choice. Some are trivial, like entertainment. Some are reasonable, like relaxation. Some are suggestive of deeper psychological problems, like escapism. And some are interesting, like breaking rigid or unhealthy patterns of thought that may be associateed with situations or ideas.
You can do serious and useful work, with the help of some recreational drugs, typically hallucinogens or entheogens. Denying that fact is denying reality. Everyone should choose their own path, and responsible use of recreational drugs can be a perfectly valid and good and healthy option. And irresponsible use of (some) recreational drugs can be less harmful than irresponsible use of other affective things.
In short: it's more complex than that. You seemed to be suggesting that any intentional altering of one's thought processes (using drugs) was a horrible no good very bad idea, but that idea is simplistic and wrong.
Thanks. Sanest comment on this thread. The fact that something "feels" very real and insightful doesn't make it so.
their "spiritual experience" came from Demons, change my mind.