In Abrahamic religions, it is God who selects the Wheat from the Chaff. As Nietzsche put it, “the ruling caste of the future … must now take the place of God … They deliver the physiologically botched by teaching them the doctrine of ‘swift death’”(Nietzsche, 1911, p. 266).
Eugenics was a science-religion launched by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, in 1883. Galton suggested that the science of heredity could be combined with animal breeding techniques to steer evolution and create ‘master-minds’ (Galton, 1865).
It was embraced by its followers as an evolutionary religion (Galton, 1909, p. 42), which would replace homo sapiens with a ‘new born Apollo’ (Pearson, 1930, p. 217).
Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel, Brave New World, is frequently read an anti-eugenic dystopian satire. However, his essays from the late 1920s and early 1930s show the extent to which he supported the sort of caste-based scientific-eugenic dictatorship proposed in Brave New World. He promoted eugenic policies from the 1920s until his death in 1962 as a means of lowering the quantity and raising the quality of the population.
Scientists would be the priests of this new religion, measuring and quantifying the value of humans through psychometric and biometric tests to sort the superior from the inferior, discouraging those deemed ‘unfit’ from breeding at all (negative eugenics) through voluntary or involuntary sterilization, segregation, racial miscegenation laws and, at its most extreme, euthanasia, or mass murder (Bashford and Levine, 2010). This ‘jehad or Holy War’ (Galton, 1909, p. 99) would save civilization from being swamped by imbeciles (Huxley, 1994, p. 150).
The eugenic ‘religion of the future’ was extremely popular from the 1880s to the 1940s, across the political spectrum and in many countries of the world. Many different policies and activities were promoted in eugenic terms as helping to create a superior race or species, including everything from body-building and yoga to organic farming and psychedelics. For example, in 1941, the German poet-soldier-physician Gottfried Benn called for a “systematic educational effort in the direction of conscious enhancement…say with mescaline or hashish, supply the race with a stream of spiritual insights which could lead to a new creative period” (Benn, 2007, p. 44).
Gottfried Benn, for example, wrote in his 1933 essay ‘Eugenics’, written following the Nazis’ ascent to power, “It seems to me certain that once again a new man will emerge from this transformation in Europe, half as a mutation and half as a result of eugenics” (Benn, 2013, p. 207).
Several other important figures in western psychedelic history saw both psychedelics and eugenic breeding laws as technologies to assist the evolution of superbeings.
At the other end of the evolutionary scale, Yeats suggested that western civilization was in danger of collapse because “the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs.” He thought state-enforced eugenics was necessary, “Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes” (Yeats, 1962, p. 423).
Abraham Maslow privately expressed support for negative / passive eugenics and even euthanasia to raise the genetic quality of the species.
Another leading figure in the human potential movement, Osho, argued that, to create the ‘new man’, there needs to be a global eugenic law with a total global ban on births for 20 years, and then a medical-spiritual board of control should regulate all reproduction, authorizing births through artificial insemination so that only genetically-gifted children were born. The human population should be reduced by 75%. Aid to the third world “should completely stop.” (Osho, 2022, 1: 5).
One encounters an apocalyptic tone in later prophets of evolutionary spirituality as well. Timothy Leary wrote a ‘declaration of evolution’ in 1968, announcing that the ‘new mutants’ must “acquiesce to genetic necessity [and] detach ourselves” from previous generations. It is time, the declaration announced, “for the old mind to die, so that a new one, with expanded sensitivities, could be born” (Leary, 1970). Rajneesh Bhagwan/Osho declared:
I want to be finished with the whole past completely, I want it to be erased completely … Only then the new humanity is possible, a new world, a new man … This world is not worth saving … it will be better if the third world war happens and destroys this whole stupid humanity (Osho, 2022, vol 1: 1).
A good example of this desire for an apocalyptic separation of the fit from the unfit can be found in the thinking of Barbara Marx Hubbard, a champion of evolutionary spirituality and transhumanism from the 1970s to the 2010s. In books like The Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation (Hubbard, 2015), she channeled and interpreted the message of God/Evolution to the ‘evolutionary children of God’ (Hubbard, 2015, p. 126). Only a few special beings get to the top and become intergalactic immortal gods:
Individually we can choose to embrace options for evolutionary choices such as longevity, space migration and evolved consciousness. Those who choose these paths will evolve differently from those who choose to remain in the terrestrial/mammalian life cycle … (Hubbard, 2015, p. 59). Just as Neanderthal man passed away, so too will self-centered Homo sapiens retire once it has finished the work of preparing the way for Homo universalis …
We will weed out the unworkable from the workable (Hubbard, 2015, p. 96).
Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law declares:
We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.
To which Crowley adds the commentary, “there is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this … It is the evolutionary and natural view. Nature’s way is to weed out the weak” (Crowley, 2004, p. 11).
And it is happening now.
- After remaining relatively unchanged since 2015, the proportion of people affected by hunger jumped in 2020 and continued to rise in 2021, to 9.8% of the world population.
- Around 2.3 billion people in the world (29.3%) were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021.
- Almost 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020, up 112 million from 2019, reflecting the effects of inflation in consumer food prices stemming from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to contain it.
- A UN-led review earlier this month found all 2.1 million residents of Gaza at critical risk of famine, with 500,000 already in catastrophic conditions. Netanyahu has laid the groundwork for ethnic cleansing. “We are afraid and very concerned that this might be a new standard in international law and this will make the world a lot more dangerous to all of us,”
In his 1939 book, Pain, Sex and Time. Heard argued that humanity had reached the limit of its current evolutionary phase, and needs to advance to the next level and become superbeings.
This new order would be non-violent, he insists, though he also says all of humanity would be guided by an ‘International Police Force’, a cross between policemen, psychiatrists and priests, dedicated to helping humanity achieve ‘complete liberation from the self’.
The biggest ethical problem with evolutionary spirituality, as I see it, is its marriage of science and religion. Every religion has its particular values and prejudices, but apostles of evolutionary spirituality insist their dogmas are objective ‘empirical facts’, as Aldous Huxley liked to say. They invariably commit what GE Moore called the naturalistic fallacy—they shift from the Is of scientific data to the Ought of moral preaching. And often the data is extremely weak. With eugenics, psychiatrists could deem someone a ‘moral defective’ based on a snap judgement, confining them to incarceration, sterilization or even extermination. Eugenics is obviously an extreme case but I see a similar risk in any science-religion that claims it can quantify people according to their level of self-actualization as more or less ‘fully human’.
If the dogma of science-religions become enshrined in laws, you have a risk of what Alfred Russell Wallace (referring to eugenics) called a ‘medical tyranny’ run by ‘an arrogant scientific priestcraft’ (Wallace, 2003, p. 214).
In all of their spiritual utopias, there is one presumed goal for the entire population – the evolution of humanity to a higher state. All means and all lives serve that goal and those who do not agree with it are excised from the body-politic.
Kingdom Come 