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Philip Elliot Slater (May 15, 1927 – June 20, 2013) 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 (1970), 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.
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.
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 Mania 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 (1966). 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, Neo-Freudianism. Slater left Harvard in 1961.
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 War, 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 (1970). 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.
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.
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 (1977). 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.
Political scientist Jarmes R. Hurtgen places Slater's book, A Dream Deferred: America's Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal (1991) into the framework of left-aligned decentralism popularized by Louis Brandeis and Paul Goodman. Slater's last major work, The Chrysalis Effect (2008), focused on the historical and global incompatibility between different types of organizational cultures, a conflict between what he called the control culture, which builds boundaries, promotes authoritarianism, and forces order on society, and what he called the integrative culture, which breaks down boundaries, values democracy, and embraces interdependence and spontaneity in a system where order evolves.
In a discussion with Craig Lambert of Harvard Magazine just months before his death, Slater said that one of the reasons he pursued a career in academia was because he was trying to realize the unfulfilled desires of his father, who had always wanted to pursue that path but went the corporate route instead.
Slater was married four times and had four children, three from his first marriage and another from his third. His first marriage was to his high-school sweetheart during his time at Harvard. He was a fan of Greek plays and those of Anton Chekhov, and enjoyed listening to Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Slater was known for his influence and was a mentor to many, including sociologist Marcia Millman, professor emerita of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and psychologist Anne C. Bernstein, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley. Slater was recognized for his early attention to the role of women in the United States and their struggle for women's rights, as well as the concomitant need for the "emotional liberation" of men. His essay "Sexual Adequacy in America" (1973) addressed many of the cultural myths about human sexuality that surround men and woman alike, pointing to the goal-oriented bias focused solely on orgasm as the product rather than pleasure as a process, an idea he links to male chauvinism rooted in Puritanism.
Ms. magazine chose Slater as one of its "male heroes" in 1982, in recognition of his "pioneering work in identifying the emotional costs of women as primary child-rearers and other gender differentiation within the family structure, in such books as The Glory of Hera and Pursuit of Loneliness".
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