10) HG Wells and the New World Order

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics research project, which researches the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality. You can find the rest of the project here.

Why discuss HG Wells in a work on ‘spiritual eugenics’? Wells is rarely associated with New Age spirituality — he’s the epitome of techno-utopianism, or what today we would call transhumanism, a word popularized by Julian Huxley, Wells’ onetime disciple.

Yet the transhumanist worldview is not so far from New Age spirituality. Both emerged in the late-19th century, as a response to Darwinian evolution. Both are attempts to inject meaning and purpose back into evolution, via the dream of humans evolving into superhumans. Both suggest humans can become gods, capable of astonishing feats like telepathy, immortality and astral travel.

The two worldviews have different ideas of how we become gods — technology versus magic. However, as Arthur C. Clarke noted, the line between magic and technology can be blurred. Are psychedelics a technology, for example, or a magical sacrament? Is Elon Musk’s Neural-Link a new technology or a ‘wizard’s hat’?

These two worldviews lead to two different genres of ‘weird fiction’ — fantasy, and science fiction. But they share affinities and one finds spiritual eugenics in both. For example, HG Wells wrote a sci-fi book called Starbegotten, in which Martians send cosmic rays to Earth to influence our evolution and create a new race of superbeings. Aleister Crowley wrote Moonchild, in which spirits influence our evolution to create a new race of superbeings. Aliens, spirits — the metaphors are different, but the eugenic dream of superbeings is similar.

Although Wells was a secular Fabian socialist, he believed in telepathy and radical life extension. And socialism, in the early 20th century, overlapped with New Age spirituality more perhaps than it does today, much to the annoyance of George Orwell, who despaired:

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Socialist ideas circulated in the same progressive ‘occulture’ as other new ideas or interests — vegetarianism, psychical research, magic, mind-altering drugs, eugenics — and these ideas overlapped and cross-fertilised with these other ideas in surprising ways.

For example, if we look at the Fabian Society, the left-wing think-tank of which Wells was a member, we note that one of the founders, Frank Podmore, was also a leading researcher in the Society for Psychical Research. The Fabian Society itself was a splinter group from an earlier spiritual collective called the Fellowship of New Life, whose members believed in humanity’s spiritual evolution into god-like beings.

Wells himself had no interest in seances, the afterlife, or magic. But he was interested in devising a post-Christian, global spirituality, and he thought eugenics had a central role in that.

The man from the future

Herbert George Wells, Bertie to his friends, was born in 1866. He grew up in Bromley in the London suburbs, the son of a failed greengrocer father and a religiously conservative mother. He was a sickly child, and spent his adolescence bored out of his mind, working 13-hour shifts in the Southsea Drapery Emporium. It’s curious that the other famous resident of Bromley is David Bowie. There are parallels one could draw: both Wells and Bowie felt like aliens from the future in suburbia. Both imagined the evolution of homo superior, beautiful and terrible beings who would displace homo sapiens.

Bertie was rescued from suburbia when he won a scholarship to study at the Normal School of Science, under Thomas Huxley. His first day there was, he said ‘one of the great days of my life’. Decades after his teacher’s death, Wells would still identify himself as ‘one of Huxley’s men’.

Wells as a young student at the Normal School of Science

Huxley’s vision of evolution as an aeon-long uncertain cosmic adventure fired the young Wells’ imagination. It liberated him from his mother’s conservative Christianity and gave him a sense of a world in flux, in which man’s place was not fixed. The future belonged to those with reason, foresight and will, even if they were lower-class nobodies like Wells or Huxley.

Unfortunately, Wells was not a great student. He lost interest in his studies once Thomas Huxley stopped being his lecturer, and graduated with poor marks. It was while working as a teacher and living in a cramped apartment with his first wife that he started to write stories. Between 1895 and 1900, he wrote several brilliant science fiction novels in quick succession that would secure his reputation for posterity — The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man. He called them ‘scientific romances’. They are all, in their way, riffs on Darwin and Huxley’s theme of the grandeur of evolution, the awesome power of science to change the world, and the open-ended question of humanity’s ascent or extinction.

In his first novel, The Time Machine, the hero goes forward to Earth in 802,701 AD. There, he discovers homo sapiens has evolved into two different species — the over-civilized and pathetically idle Eloi, and the swarthy Morlocks, who live underground and work industriously. It seems to be a parable of Victorian class divisions, except it turns out the Morlock actually breed the aristocratic Eloi to eat them.

It’s a vision of ‘degeneration’, the dark twin to Darwinian evolution. Ever since Darwin had unveiled his theory, armchair prophets warned that evolution was not necessarily upwards. Every species could degenerate, become less fit, and go extinct. The Time-Traveler then journeys even further into the future, and finds himself on an Earth bereft of humans, and populated instead by creepy octopi.

Wells’ next book, The War of the Worlds, published in 1897, is another evolutionary romance. Like Bulwer-Lytton’s Coming Race, it imagines what would happen if humans encountered a superior species. London is invaded by octopi-like creatures from Mars, who land in flying saucers and maraud through England on tripod machines, exterminating the British with heat rays and poison gas. They over-run British civilization in a matter of days, before dying of a viral infection.

Wells shows that nothing is certain in an evolutionary universe. We might encounter other species far superior to us — humans are to the Martians as ‘lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us’. Victorian civilization was complacent in its superiority but, after the alien invasion, the narrator suffers ‘a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel…the fear and empire of man had passed away.’

Western countries and white people had conquered other races for 500 years, and according to Darwin that was somewhat inevitable. But what if this happened to the West in turn? Wells writes:

before we judge [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.

Reading War of the Worlds, one gets a sense that Wells has some sympathy for the aliens. They are the advanced, technologically-superior race. They are the predator that decadent British society deserves. The narrator comes across a soldier who welcomes the culling:

Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.

Beyond the Age of Confusion

After his astonishing first run of novelistic successes, Wells turned himself into the first of a new breed, the ‘futurist’, a techno-prophet who warns the public what marvels and catastrophes lie ahead.

He had an uncanny prescience. He predicted the invention of answer-machines and emails, audio books, television, a ‘world brain’ containing all the information ever discovered. He helped to create the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, championed birth control, and predicted a relaxation of sexual morality, the evolution of new forms of partnership, the separation of sex from procreation, even the blurring of gender characteristics. He also predicted the invention of the tank, laser weaponry, air bombing, atomic energy and atomic war.

He told his readers that humans had passed from a ‘very nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one’, and entered what is now known as the ‘Great Acceleration’ — a period of exponential growth in technological innovation, human population, and consumption of natural resources. This creates incredible opportunities for humans, not least, the extension in average life expectancy, the steep fall in child mortality and the spread of knowledge and education. But it also creates frightening new challenges: above all, the challenge of over-population.

Wells was a leading member of the Malthusian League, the organisation set up by Annie Besant in 1877 to try and combat over-population. Human population had barely grown for two hundred thousand years, until the Enlightenment, when new technologies enabled people to grow more food, develop better medicine and live longer. The population exceeded one billion for the first time in 1800, and then doubled over the course of the 19th century. As we now know, population then grew from two billion to six billion over the 20th century, and has grown to 7.9 billion in the last 20 years.

Wells, like all Malthusians, saw over-population as the ‘greatest evil of life’. He wrote that the ‘overcrowding of the planet’ is

the fundamental evil out of which all the others that afflicted the race arose. An overwhelming flood of newcomers poured into the world and swamped every effort the intelligent minority could make to educate a sufficient proportion of them to meet the demands of the new and still rapidly changing conditions of life… Upon this festering, excessive mass of population disasters descended at last like wasps upon a heap of rotting fruit. It was its natural, inevitable destiny. [A Modern Utopia]

Over-population, Malthusians believe, leads to the exhaustion of natural resources, soil erosion, famine, pandemics, and an increase in human suffering due to the growing number of delinquent or ‘superfluous’ people living wretched lives. Above all, the Malthusian League believed that over-population leads to war. The more crowded the Earth, the more nation-states and empires will compete for diminishing land and natural resources, and the more ignorant electorates will vote for war-mongering nationalist demagogues.

The problem for Wells was that homo sapiens had advanced to a stage where it faced planetary challenges like over-population, pandemics or the threat of atomic war, but it was trying to meet those global challenges with the primitive technology of the tribalistic nation-state. Wells saw ‘a great absence of plan everywhere’, and he blamed it on the ‘disease of Parliaments’ and the nation-state: ‘The modern democracy or democratic quasi-monarchy conducts its affairs as though there was no such thing as special knowledge or practical education.’ Even worse, because some of our challenges emerge from scientific advances (like atomic energy) there is a risk of a public backlash against science and a return to dark age thinking.

What is the solution for the Age of Confusion? We need to trust in the scientific method and scientific expertise. Like Thomas Huxley, Wells believed in a scientific elite, a new priesthood who should be given power and resources to develop new technologies. He believed in ‘the intelligent minority’, the ‘elect’, the men and women of talent and genius, who have the energy, will, foresight and scientific vision to step out of habitual reality and imagine the future. This new elite has the rare ability to take a planetary and long-term view of human evolution. The average politician imagines a year or three ahead. The futurist imagines hundreds, thousands, even millions of years into the future.

The scientific elite needs to form a new model of government, capable of meeting the challenges of the times. He called it different things — Utopia, the New Republic, the New World Order, but it’s always the same basic idea, of a world state run by a scientific elite. If Wells has a religion, it is the eventual triumph of the world state. In his most exalted moods, he imagined the universe itself willing its emergence. The process ‘has an air of being a process independent of any collective or conscious will in man, as being the expression of a greater Will’.

The emergence of the world state would be a phase shift in human existence. Life will be unimaginably better. It was difficult for most people to imagine itnow, in the ‘Age of Confusion’, but a few long-term thinkers, like him, could see the glorious future beckoning towards us. He tried to clarify the prospect to his readers’ minds in books like A Modern Utopia:

Now in a couple of brief centuries the Utopians, who had hitherto crawled about their planet like sluggish ants or travelled parasitically on larger and swifter animals, found themselves able to fly rapidly or speak instantaneously to any other point on the planet. They found themselves, too, in possession of mechanical power on a scale beyond all previous experience, and not simply of mechanical power; physiological and then psychological science followed in the wake of physics and chemistry, and extraordinary possibilities of control over his own body and over his social life dawned upon the Utopian.

How will humanity reach this glorious prospect? Earlier in his career, Wells imagined there would be ‘a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period’. Or perhaps the world-state would emerge after a catastrophe — an atomic war, or climate collapse. It was also possible the revolution would come about through a gradual ‘awakening’, through an ‘unprecedented educational effort’. He called this the ‘open conspiracy’ — bit by bit, intelligent people would wake up to the future, they would find each other, form organisations, spread the word, and gradually the New Republicans would take control of the world.

The world state would be run by scientific committee. Property would be largely abolished, but there would still be class divisions, according to talent and intelligence. In A Modern Utopia, Wells imagines the world state divided into four classes — the base (an underclass), the dull (the working class), the kinetic (the industrial class) and the poietic (the intellectuals). There would be no drudgery for any of these classes, as machines would do most of the work. All would know their place, and all would be ruled by the Samurai — a ‘voluntary aristocracy’ of scientist-rulers who, like Plato’s Guardians, have taken religious vows. They are vegetarian, don’t drink or smoke, take cold baths, and go on annual solitary retreats in the wilderness. They also wear the same Nordic folk costume. Anyone can prove themselves worthy of joining the Samurai, through a yearly examination, though they will tend to form a genetic caste of their own, as Samurai naturally prefer to breed with each other.

This idea of an elite caste of supermen attracted many young British people, who set up Wellsian groups called the Samurai, the Utopians, or the ‘Kibbo Kift’ — this last outfit were a futuristic scout troop who planned to build the new utopia after the collapse of liberal civilization. Part of the attraction of being a ‘Wellsian’ was feeling like you were one of the elite ‘intelligent minority’. This may explain why he was, paradoxically, the most popular writer of his era.

The Kibbo Kift, inspired by Wells’ Samurai

In the future World State, everything would be under scientific control — food, energy, economics, education, and above all, population. Wells predicted that the human population would fall from two billion to 250 million in the coming decades. Every citizen of the World State would be taught the basics of birth control and sexual hygiene.

Wells was an early prophet of the Sexual Revolution, predicting there would be a ‘a considerable relaxation of the institution of permanent monogamous marriage in the coming years’. All kinds of new sexual relationships would become possible, perhaps gender distinctions would dissolve and we’d all become ‘non-binary’. In A Modern Utopia, the citizens get to practice free love — ‘there are no bonds’. Wells wrote:

A man or woman ought to have sexual intercourse. Few people are mentally, or morally or physically in health without it. For everyone there is a minimum and maximum between which lies complete efficiency. Find out your equation, say I, and then keep efficient.

His maximum was bigger than most. He is estimated to have slept with at least 100 women (one for each book he wrote), was married twice, had affairs with everyone from Rebecca West to birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, as well as numerous fleeting encounters, which he called passades. He liked to pick up women while bicycling, and wrote a bicycle romance called Wheels of Chance. Sex was just another human activity to be rationalized and controlled. Women should be liberated and educated, so they could say, as his New Woman heroine Ann Veronica says: ‘I want you. I want you to be my lover…Is that plain?’

In practice, sex proved less easy to rationalize than Wells imagined. His free-loving shocked and disgusted many of his progressive colleagues, particularly when he picked up their daughters. One irate father punched him in the face in Paddington Station, while the brother of another young mistress allegedly tried to shoot him from the window of a London club.

The Global Ministry for Evolution

On July 26 1927, the Malthusian League met for a dinner at Holborn Restaurant in London to celebrate victory. The League had worked tirelessly since 1877 to normalize birth control with the British masses, and by 1927 it looked like the battle was succeeding. In 1900, the average British fertility rate per family was 3.5 children, by 1927 it had fallen to two.

The key-note speakers at the celebratory dinner were HG Wells and John Maynard Keynes, one of the great economists of the 20th century. In his after-dinner speech, Keynes proposed a toast to Reverend Malthus, and declared that the battle to slow population growth in the UK had been more or less won. But the next battle was just beginning, to control not just the quantity of humans in the UK, but the quality. Keynes declared: ‘I believe that for the future the problem of population will emerge in the much greater problem of heredity and eugenics.’

HG Wells agreed, writing: ‘we do not want any children; we want good-quality children’. The prime challenge for the scientific elite was to manage and control human reproduction, to prevent the evil of over-population, and steer the evolution of the species. Eugenics was an essential part of this mission — every member of the Malthusian League supported it.

In 1927, as today, anyone could have as many children as they wanted (except in China). You needed a license to drive a car, but to bring humans into the world? There was no regulation at all. This, to Wells, was the heart of the problem. If you expected the State to support you, then the State was perfectly justified

in saying, before you may add children to the community for the community to educate and in part to support, you must be above a certain minimum of personal efficiency, and this you must show by holding a position of solvency and independence in the world; you must be above a certain age, and a certain minimum of physical development, and free of any transmissible disease. You must not be a criminal unless you have expiated your offence.

Why? Because if you bring children into the world you can’t support, or if they’re likely to inherit your tendencies to crime or ill health, then you’re harming the collective. You’re slowing or threatening the species’ evolution into superbeings. Reproduction, therefore, must be brought under state control, through a global ministry for evolution:

The total population of the world is, on the most generous estimate, not more than 1,500,000,000, and the effectual indexing of this number of people, the record of their movement hither and thither, the entry of various material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal convictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and the elimination of the dead, colossal task though it would be, is still not so great as to be immeasurably beyond comparison with the work of the post-offices in the world of to-day, or the cataloguing of such libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections as that of the insects in Cromwell Road. Such an index could be housed quite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for example.

He imagined a global index of humans, perhaps using finger-prints (the invention of Francis Galton). And this global ministry for evolution would not hesitate to prevent the unfit from reproducing. In the chilling final chapter of Anticipations (1901), Wells writes of the ‘people of the abyss’, who fail to evolve:

the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death…The [men of the New Republic] will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of the population — the small minority, for example, afflicted with indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for intoxication — exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused…

In later works like A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells pulled back from his promotion of ‘death chambers’. He wrote:

The dreadfulness of all such proposals as this lies in the possibility of their execution falling into the hands of hard, dull, and cruel administrators.

But still, evolution is ‘a struggle between higher and lower types’. So ‘there must be a competition in life of some sort to determine who are to be pushed to the edge’ (an unfortunate phrase). He suggests that the unfit could be sent to different islands — an island just for ‘cheaters’, for example, or an island for alcoholics.

We may associate eugenics with the Nazis and think of it as a far-right policy. What’s surprising is how popular eugenics were with British left-wing progressives. Wells was a member of the Fabian Society, a left-wing think-tank which founded the London School of Economics and helped to form the Labour Party. Many of his friends and colleagues in the Fabian Society were also committed eugenicists, such as George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. So was William Beveridge, architect of the welfare state. So was John Maynard Keynes. Beatrice Webb regarded eugenics as ‘the most important question’, while her husband declared ‘no eugenicist can be a laissez faire individualist… he must interfere, interfere, interfere!’ George Bernard Shaw thought ‘nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization’. He wrote:

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living…A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber.

The efforts of these British eugenicists led to the passing of the Mental Incapacity Act in 1913, which allowed the incarceration without trial of 40,000 men and women deemed mentally unfit. Leonard Darwin, grandson of Charles, recommended sending squads of scientists flying around the country to identify and arrest the unfit. One woman, Edith Huthwaite, from Yorkshire, was categorised as a moral defective after being convicted of theft. She was imprisoned in a psychiatric facility for 18 years, without trial. But the real damage from eugenics, as we’ll see, came when British intellectuals exported it abroad, and it was taken up and given a virulently racist twist in the United States and Nazi Germany.

There are many varieties of spiritual eugenics. Wells’ variety was not racist or nationalistic. He wrote in 1905: ‘just now, the world is in a sort of delirium about race and the racial struggle’. He argued there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ race, every person is a mingling of different tribes, and this inter-racial mingling is likely to happen more and more as the World State emerges. Your British daughter might even marry a Chinaman, he predicted in A Modern Utopia. This was a truly shocking idea in 1905. But, Wells assures his readers, the cultural differences will be much smaller in the globalized world of tomorrow.

To understand why Wells and his socialist comrades were so keen on eugenics, we need to try and enter their worldview. They thought over-population threatened the species and was the principal cause of war, disease and misery in the world. They thought every aspect of life needed to be brought under scientific management, especially human biology, or we would be threatened with war, ecological collapse, and extinction. The alternative to eugenics was far crueller — in the name of liberalism or religion, you allowed people to come into the world who were condemned to live miserable lives of illness, poverty, dependence and delinquency. You left mothers to abandon or murder their unwanted babies. Surely it was much more humane to manage human reproduction rationally, so that unwanted or unhealthy humans were never born in the first place.

On the one hand, the progressive eugenicists look on the ‘superfluous masses’, and saw nothing but misery and waste. Wells’ mistress, the birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger, wrote:

After my eight months tour of the world, I am glad to agree with HG Wells when he says that the whole world at present is swarming with cramped, dreary, meaningless lives, lives which amount to nothing and which use up the resources and surplus energies of the world.

On the other hand, their eyes were fixed on the prospect of the coming supermen and superwomen of the future. Humans who are living at the peak of their potential, men and women of genius, creativity and vigour. People like them, only more so. Wells imagines humans evolving into god-like beings, perfect physical specimens, taller than us, stronger, more beautiful, who live far longer than we do, who are far more intelligent, far more social, far more technologically advanced and globally connected — whether by technology or telepathy. It is because Wells can imagine humanity as it could be, that he is impatient with humanity as it is.

In Starbegotten (1937), for example, he imagines aliens sending cosmic rays to Earth to hasten the evolution of a new race of hyper-intelligent and scientifically advanced superbeings. But the prospect of homo superior only sharpens his contempt for ordinary humans. The narrator declares:

I hate common humanity. This oafish crowd which tramples the ground whence my cloud-capped pinnacles might rise. I am tired of humanity — beyond measure. Take it away…Clear the earth of them!

Thirty years earlier, in Anticipations, he wrote:

The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish…in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess.

We know now where such ideas lead. Wells, at least, quietened his support for eugenics in the 1930s and became one of the architects of what would become the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But in the last years of his life, Wells seemed to have lost his optimism in homo sapiens.

In his final book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, he writes that he always had faith that some new order would emerge from the age of confusion, and the ‘fascinating question’ was what this new order would look like, ‘what Over-man…would break through the transitory clouds’. But now, the ‘more he scrutinized the realities around us, he more difficult it became to sketch out any Pattern of Things to Come’. Man seems destined for extinction, he concludes:

The planet spins, climate changes, so that the old overgrown Lord of Creation is no longer in harmony with his surroundings. Go he must…Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive.

It is sad that the great optimist lost his faith in humanity, just as institutions of global governance like the United Nations started to emerge, and humanity embarked on a long era of peace, prosperity and technological progress. We live in the world he prophesized: a globalized world of wireless communication, where everything ever known is available online, instantly; a world of global institutions managing planetary threats like climate change and COVID; a world of globe-trotting free-loving hedonist cosmopolitans, who choose their own religion from a spiritual buffet. It’s also a world where birth control has been normalized, and foetuses with congenital illnesses are aborted.

And yet, as Wells feared, there is also a backlash against the world he helped to create. A growing number of people rail against what they see as a sinister global technocracy of control and repression. Evangelical and New Age conspiracy theorists warn of the ‘new world order’ engaging in an ‘open conspiracy’ to control us, track us, vaccinate us, and gradually reduce our number. To which Wells would have replied, quite right!

In the next chapter, we will examine one of Wells’ disciples, Julian Huxley, and how he developed a new global religion based on evolution, ecology…and eugenics, which he then tried to spread around the world, when he was president of UNESCO.