Philip Slater
Philip Elliot Slater was an American sociologist, social critic, author, and playwright. He was the author of 12 books and more than 20 plays, and was a blogger for The Huffington Post. Formerly a professor and chair of the sociology department at Brandeis, he left academia at the age of 44 after writing The Pursuit of Loneliness, a critique of American culture.
After the book's success, Slater moved to Santa Cruz permanently, got rid of most of his possessions, and pursued a life of voluntary simplicity. He continued to write non-fiction, but also began writing fiction and plays. He started acting and became artistic director of his local theatre. Throughout his career as an academic and as an author, Slater was primarily concerned with the topic of democracy and how individualism, money, and authoritarianism posed threats to its continued existence.
Biography
Early life
Slater was born on May 15, 1927, in Riverton, New Jersey, to Pauline Holman and John Elliot Slater, a shipping company president and chairman of the New Haven Railroad. He was baptized at Christ Episcopal Church in Riverton and grew up with two sisters in Upper Montclair, where he attended Mount Hebron School and was listed on the honor roll.He graduated from Montclair High School in 1945, but was already serving in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II when commencement occurred. Slater began serving during the historical end of war period between Victory in Europe Day in May and the Victory over Japan Day in August 1945. At the time of the war, 69 percent of Slater's graduating class were enrolled in the armed services due to the draft. He served as a merchant mariner from 1945 until 1947.
Harvard
After the war, Slater earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard with a thesis on Consumer Organization and Political Power. In graduate school, Slater took a course by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Robert W. Hyde on the subject of psychopathology, eventually joining his human subject research project administering LSD to paid volunteers at Boston Psychopathic Hospital from 1952 to 1954. Hyde would also become his mentor. As part of the project, researchers had to also be test subjects to understand the drug they were testing and the study itself. Hyde himself was one of the first people to ingest LSD in the United States. During his two years working under Hyde, Slater began using LSD himself outside the lab.At this time, the term psychedelic had yet to be coined, and it was still assumed that LSD was psychotomimetic, such that it mimicked psychosis. Hyde's group was part of two separate studies, one sponsored by the Geschickter Foundation and the second by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. In the latter study, Slater was doing quantitative research investigating what would happen when subjects took LSD alone or in groups. He found that the people who took it in groups were best described as manic or schizoaffective, while the people who took it alone were diagnosed as depressive or schizoid.
Slater completed his dissertation on the Psychological Factors in Role Specialization and received his PhD from Harvard in 1955. Later, Slater and his co-authors, Kiyo Morimoto and Hyde, presented a paper on their LSD research to the American Sociological Association in 1958. It was supported by the Human Ecology Fund and published as "The Effects of LSD Upon Group Interaction" in 1963. Slater was unaware at the time that his research group was surreptitiously funded by the MKUltra program run by the CIA. It was not until the 1980s that Slater learned the truth. Slater lectured for the next six years at Harvard in the Department of Social Relations.
From 1958 to 1961, Slater collected research at Harvard while teaching a class on social relations. He later used this data for his then-forthcoming book Microcosm: Structural Psychological and Religious Evolution in Groups. The book received positive reviews from some sociologists, including Laiten L. Camien, who recommended digitizing Slater's qualitative data for use in a computerized information retrieval system. Sociologist Samuel Z. Klausner gave it a mixed review, noting that Slater's hypothesis needed further testing, while anthropologist Marvin Opler gave it a negative review, criticizing Slater's narrow, Freudian approach. Slater left Harvard in 1961.
Brandeis
Slater became an associate professor at Brandeis in 1961, and full professor and chair of the sociology department in 1969. He later recalled that the sociology department was disliked by other faculty and faced major pushback because the department was progressive and unified in their pedagogical approach. According to his daughter much later, Slater felt that academia was too "petty". His book, The Pursuit of Loneliness was released to wide acclaim while he was still at Brandeis. It was part of emerging popular discourse in the 1960s and 1970s to question the value of rugged individualism, and Slater's book followed that trend.Social psychologist Kenneth Keniston reviewed the book positively, making note of Slater's core argument: material abundance had rendered older cultural appeals to scarcity in support of individualism moot and irrelevant, which conflicted with newer cultural values and attempts at progress, which were blocked by the older, obsolete paradigm which prevented social change. Slater argues that the future that Americans were trying to create is, paradoxically, one that avoids looking into the future, and ultimately, one that serves technology instead of being served by it. Slater believed this old approach was fundamentally authoritarian and anti-human. "It spends hundreds of billions of dollars to find ways of killing more efficiently, but almost nothing to enhance the joys of living...the old culture threatens to destroy us", he writes.
Writer Jesse Kornbluth notes that the Pursuit of Loneliness was released at a precarious time in American history, when the country was involved in two wars, one overseas in Vietnam, and the other at home against the youth culture of the 1960s. Kornbluth recalled "it seemed as if the country would split apart at any minute." Historian Christopher Lasch gave the book a negative review, noting that Charles A. Reich had already covered much of the same material in The Greening of America. Lasch also complained about Slater's lack of focus and habit of explaining politics in terms of psychology. Slater resigned from his position at Brandeis in 1971 to co-found the Greenhouse growth center in Cambridge.
Greenhouse growth center
Slater first became aware of new methods related to encounter groups in 1965. The human potential movement had reached the mainstream by 1967, with personal development workshops receiving increasing attention as the Esalen Institute in California became more well known. The idea for a new group based in the Boston area began to coalesce in Slater's circle of academics.Slater recalled that he began to see the entire process from a systems perspective for the first time in 1969, coming to believe that the people leading a group and the individuals themselves were all part of a working whole, but that the conventional process and content were inevitably in conflict with each other. This realization would eventually lead Slater to move away from scientific skepticism and metaphysical naturalism in the mid to late 1970s, towards non-empirical modalities.
By 1971, the idea for a modern encounter group finally came to fruition, with Slater co-founding Greenhouse, a non-profit growth center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with Jacqueline Doyle from Esalen and Morrie Schwartz from Brandeis. Many others were involved, including Irving Zola, Natalie Rogers, Alan Nelson, Harrison Hoblitzelle, Lou Krodel, Paul Crowley, Charlie Derber and Jack Sawyer. They primarily served low-income clients with a focus on self-actualization, progressivism, and social equality. After the group closed its doors, Slater moved to Santa Cruz and joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, but then also resigned.
Move to Santa Cruz
After his move to Santa Cruz, Slater began focusing on acting and writing while living a simple life with little income in a style he called voluntary simplicity in his book Wealth Addiction. He also took up playwriting and helped found and later became the artistic director of the Santa Cruz County Actors' Theatre.In the 1970s, Slater began to experiment with psychedelics again, after staying away from them for the most part since the early to mid-1950s, although he had smoked cannabis in the late 1960s. His interest in the counterculture of the 1960s and the human potential movement began to move towards the then emerging genre of New Age literature with his book The Wayward Gate: Science and the Supernatural. It received many good reviews in the popular press, but more serious critical reviews panned it, with writer and book critic Gerald Jonas calling it antiscience.