A weird type of nerd/hippie hybrid that I used to see all the time, but I no longer see anymore: people who are obsessed with dolphins and whales, and believe they’re superintelligent, able to psychically communicate, and are extremely wise, enlightened, spiritual, and pacifistic.
This was a tremendously widespread belief; in my anecdotal experience, it would not shock me if, in 1990 (the crest year of all this), 2 in 5 blond women believed dolphins were ultra- intelligent and/or psychic. Among “gray pony tail” guys who look like the Dad from Family Ties, this belief was near 100%. Among Californians, this belief was also close to universal.
The belief in superintelligent, enlightened alien dolphins was everywhere in the 1970s and 80s. David Brin’s Uplift books like Startide Rising had a future where mankind colonized the universe with dolphin best buddies with robot hands. Larry Niven’s Tales of Known Space identified dolphins as the second sentient race on earth. And do I even need to mention the Hitchhiker’s Guide? Hell, even the crew of the starship Enterprise went back in time to save cetaceans able to communicate with an unknown space probe. Leonard Nimoy, who directed the Voyage Home, said many wise things about the importance of ecology, but also ultra-cringey things about cetacean intelligence being greater and that they had higher spiritual development (Nimoy was very much a California guy sometimes).
In short, intelligent cetaceans became, like hyperspace or teleporters, a part of the LINUX-like, “open source” well of ideas that scifi writers drew on by default when worldbuilding.
It was an interesting area where nerd culture and hippie culture touched. Nerd culture because it was full of scifi stuff like advanced aliens and psychic powers, but also hippie/counterculture because of the grounding in the natural world, ecology, the disdain for violence and love of peace, and a parent/child relationship with nature where nature is wiser, and the job of humans is to learn.
I had forgotten, until just now, that intelligent dolphins got shoehorned into the later Dragonriders of Pern books. I hadn’t realized that was riding the wave of a larger trope.
@kontextmaschine, any kontext you’d care to provide?
This definitely had some interaction with the Cold War era research on marine mammals. And psychonauts, and the whole anarcho-woo conspiracy theories and wolf fandom thing that met in New Age and head shops and the fact that there’s shops that are both.
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure that whole crowd is probably partly furries now, because, like, seriously “spiritually I’m a wolf/dragon/dolphin and I’m turned on by that” has a name and its own subculture now.
Tangentially, holy shit you should read this once over on John C Lilly. Beside the dolphin fucking thing, there’s just… A lot to unpack about the culture in there.