Shroom: a cultural history of the magic mushroom Andy Letcher Faber & Faber, 360pp, £12.99 ISBN 0571227708

Musing on his recent mescaline experiences, Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception recalled a theory put forward by the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson suggested that the main function of the nervous system, commonly construed as giving a lucid picture of "reality", is in fact eliminative. In other words, it keeps out far more of this dazzlingly strange universe than it lets in. We live not in houses of glass, but in gloomy hovels whose windows are small and thickly grimed with dust. It's easy, on one level, to see the evolutionary advantage this would have conferred: people rapt in life's weird majesty would have been hopeless at making hand-axes. But if we are really to be wise Homo sapiens and not just busy Homo faber, a balance must be struck. Our visionary and our practical tendencies have to be reconciled.

Ever since Plato, this reconciliation has been the essentially subversive task of philosophy. Dialectic was that which confronted ordinary life with life's possibilities, the everyday world with the luminous realm beyond it. Rooted in the limitless freedom of "the Forms", "the One", "Being" or "Mind", philosophers scrutinised established order with a necessarily critical eye. The trend in philosophy over the past 60 years, however, has been towards a bleak reversal of this loyalty. Almost all our celebrated thinkers are the pale heirs of Wittgenstein, who said that commonplace words and phrases ("table", "lamp", "my broom is in the corner") are the only reality worthy of consideration. Thus it is that western thought has stuck its head firmly in the sand, not just retreating into the mun-dane, but asserting with a maniacal fervour that nothing exists outside it.

I've started with this brief philosophic preamble because here is a curious and somewhat depressing thing: a cultural history of magic mushrooms with the rigidly anti-psychedelic (not to say anti-philosophic) bias of current reductionist thought. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but this is no dry academic tome; it's a publication that strives for hipness. Like a plain-clothes policeman at a rave, Shroom wears all the right gear - the down-with-the-kids title, the hookah-smoking caterpillar on the cover, the frequent references to people "tripping" or being "bemushroomed" - yet can't quite conceal a sneer of distaste. In keeping with Wittgenstein, unusual ideas and perceptions are judged by the blokeish standards of what "normal" people think and feel. This might suffice for a tabloid editorial, but isn't much help if you want to learn anything new.

Like most neoconservatives, Andy Letcher is also sweepingly anti-historical. His basic idea is that psychedelics are a recent phenomenon in the west, any speculation about their use by druids or Athenian initiates being pure fantasy. Again, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The problem is that Letcher has decided his thesis in advance, and either shoehorns the facts into it or disregards them altogether. Hence the mycologically exact images on a bronze Gothic door can't be mushrooms or evidence of a hidden cult because the design would never have got past the bishop (would he really have been familiar with the diminutive Liberty Cap?) and because "there was no cult" in any case. Ah, of course. The recent theory concerning the psychedelic nature of prehistoric cave painting, one that even the arch-sceptic John Gray supports in Straw Dogs, is dismissed on account of its being controversial - a stance that would have put paid to Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin.

In a typically glib aside, Letcher says that those early artists might simply "have been bored" (he doesn't suggest why people would risk their lives descending into inaccessible caves in order to sit and doodle). Letcher's attitude towards the past seems to be that, since we can't be sure, we shouldn't even speculate - another of Wittgenstein's innovations. Once again, fair enough. But to move from lack of certainty to certainty of lack, deriding all theories as not just imaginings but actually "wrong", is a peculiarly dishonest move. Even when it gets to our own era, Shroom struggles to find a good word for psychedelics or their proselytisers. Letcher is a master of the primly disapproving epithet, a rhetorical device that manages to slight people even as they are introduced. Thus the radical psychiatrist R D Laing is "maudlin", Allen Ginsberg is "infamous", and everyone else with the temerity to advance an unorthodox view is somehow "troubled" - as if dissent were synonymous with mental instability.

Ploughing through this outwardly cheery book, I often felt as if I were reading a report by some grey Westminster functionary. Whereas Huxley saw that psychedelics simply dilate the reducing valve of consciousness - with all the joys and perils this entails - for Letcher they cause "erratic behaviour" that proves "problematic" to those in authority. He comes across as wholly in thrall to official procedures and opinions, seeming to view the slightest deviation from common sense as irresponsible and im-plicitly paranoid. And yet to rubbish ideas because they are "provocative", "bizarre" or "far-fetched", in this unmapped terrain above all, is merely to inoculate yourself against discoveries (conversely, the astrophysicist Niels Bohr used to criticise new cosmological theories for being "not crazy enough"). The definitive book on magic mushrooms needn't be written by one of the hippies that Letcher stereotypes, but it does require someone at least a little open-minded.

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