Philip Slater

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 also took up playwriting and helped found the Santa Cruz County Actors' Theatre, later becoming its artistic director. 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. Film Slater collaborated with filmmaker Gene Searchinger on Paradox on 72nd Street (1982), a one-hour TV documentary aired nationally by PBS. The film features dialogue by Slater and Lewis Thomas (known for his book The Lives of a Cell, 1974) interspersed over film footage of a bustling city street filled with people. The "paradox" refers to a theme that Slater and Thomas both touch upon in their respective work, but is directly expressed by Thomas: "It is in our genes to live together and to depend on each other. To be our individual, separate selves and at the same time the working parts of others is a paradox. And to be human is to live in this paradox." Tom Jory of the Associated Press and John J. O'Connor of The New York Times both praised the film, with Jory describing it as "remarkable" and "worthwhile" while O'Connor called it "unusually stimulating" and "fascinating". Henry Allen of The Washington Post disagreed, saying that the use of crowd watching in film and television was cliché at that point. Theatre work Several of Slater's plays were produced for the Santa Cruz Actors' Theatre in the 1990s. At least two featured women as lead characters. To the Dump (1993) depicts a woman who compulsively hoards trash, while Bug (1994) tells the story about a woman who is the leader of a spiritual community that faces a turning point but finds help from a member of her family. Bug was directed by Bonnie Ronzio and was considered bold and unconventional for its time; it was well-received. April Showers (1999), Slater's ten-minute play about anthropomorphic cutlery in a dishwasher, was chosen as a winning entry for the Santa Cruz Eight Tens @ Eight festival in 2000, and was given a five-week run. Slater performed in the same festival in the role of "James" in a production of Love and Death by Kathryn Chetkovich. Later life and death Slater began teaching again in his eighties in the doctoral program in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in Santa Cruz, California, at the age of 86 on June 20, 2013. According to his daughter Dashka Slater, her father did not own a car and "his only possessions fit into two small storage bins, in his view, proof of a life well-lived". ==Interest in democracy==

Throughout his work, Slater was interested in the theme of democracy. In 1964, he and Warren Bennis, then a professor of industrial management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, collaborated on an influential article for the Harvard Business Review (HBR). Titled "Democracy is Inevitable", both Slater and Bennis foresaw the downfall of the Soviet Union 25 years before it occurred, arguing that democracy was a predictable outcome. In 1990, almost a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Slater told HBR he was now worried about the decline of democracy in the United States instead. Political scientist James 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. ==Personal life==

In February 1964, Slater supported the Boston "Freedom Stay-Out" protests in favor of desegregating Boston public schools. The next year he signed an "Open Letter to President Johnson" proposing taking steps towards a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War. 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. ==Legacy==

According to writer Craig Lambert, The Pursuit of Loneliness made Slater a leading voice of the counterculture of the 1960s. The book was "a searing critique of American culture", writes Lambert, "describing many of its ills—violence, inequality, and worship of technology among them—as fallout of the national cult of individualism that fostered isolation, competition, and loss of community." Sociologist Marion Goldman, who studied the human potential movement, described Slater as a social critic, who along with his Greenhouse colleagues attempted to warn Americans that a personal and societal transformation was needed to address the problems at the heart of the American cultural crisis. 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 women 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". ==Selected work==