2) Pre-Darwinian precedents for spiritual eugenics

The aim of the ‘Spiritual Eugenics’ research project is to explore the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics. It will explore how New Age spirituality adapted Darwin’s theory of natural selection into a theory of the ‘spiritual evolution’ of a new species of superbeings, a master-race. Along with this, one often finds the idea that some humans are not evolving, not ‘fully human’ (to use Abraham Maslow’s phrase), and these sub-humans perhaps need to be controlled, maybe sterilized or even at worst exterminated, to aid the next stage of humanity’s spiritual evolution.

This was, and still is, a very common idea in spirituality — particularly the idea that some humans are evolving into superhumans, and there is a genetic, hereditary aspect to this.

The project will focus on the period 1880 to the present day, looking at how spirituality responded to and grew out of Darwinism. However, it is useful to note briefly that there are older historical precedents for the idea of ‘spiritual eugenics’ to be found in religious and philosophical traditions. These fed into New Age spirituality, where they fused with Darwinism.

a) Infanticide of disabled babies in traditional and indigenous societies

The tendency to define some humans as ‘fully human’ and others as subhuman is ubiquitous, unfortunately, as is the custom of killing those deemed ‘subhuman’ — as can be seen in the history of infanticide of disabled babies in many cultures around the world.

Most traditional societies seem to have accepted infanticide of babies who were unwanted, because the family was poor, or because the child was disabled, or female, or twins — and thereby an extra economic burden. Estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans.

Infanticide of disabled babies is still common in many African societies, where they are deemed ‘spirit-children’, capable of bringing bad fortune. A survey conducted by Disability Rights International found that 45% of women interviewed by them in Kenya were pressured to kill their children born with disabilities. Infanticide is also still practiced in some Amazonian indigenous tribes, if the baby is disabled — it’s been debated whether its ethically appropriate or ‘culturally insensitive’ for the state to intervene in this matter.

b) Hinduism

The Upanishads teaches that all beings are sacred and part of the Divine. At least one of the Upanishads (the Vajrasuchi Upanishad) states that all humans have the capacity to awaken to their true divine nature, regardless of their caste.

However, other Hindu texts, like the Manusmriti, insist that in practice, only one race of people can achieve liberation — the Aryans — while all other races are mleccha, barbarian and unclean. And within the Aryans, there is a strict hierarchy, with the brahman or priestly caste at the top of society uniquely capable of spiritual liberation, while the shudra at the bottom of society are impure and barely human. The Manusmriti and other texts forbid intermarrying between castes.

This inspired modern defenders of spiritual elitism and eugenics, like Friedrich Nietzsche, who declares: ‘Close the Bible and open the Manu Smriti!’ Gerald Heard, another mid-20th century defender of spiritual eugenics, called for a ‘neo-Brahmin’ class of superbeings to run society.

Infanticide of unwanted children — especially girls or disabled babies — was very common in 18th and 19th century India, despite the efforts of the East India Company to stop the practice.

Eugenics was propagated by some Indian brahman elite in the early 20th century as in accordance with Hindu teachings. For example, in 1927 an Indian civil servant called TN Roy wrote in the Journal of Heredity:

The greatest eugenic movement that the world has as yet witnessed originated in India. It was the institution of the caste system. That intermarriage between two different races was undesirable was early appreciated in India and hence prohibited.

c) Plato and Aristotle

In Plato, one finds a similar idea to the Upanishads — humans have the potential to awaken to our true, divine nature, but in practice most humans are asleep and sunken in bestial desires. In The Republic, Plato divides humans into a spiritual hierarchy, with a priestly caste of philosophers at the top, then warriors, then the masses. The Republic suggests the philosopher-rulers should oversee citizens’ reproduction, so the ‘best’ breed with the best. Citizens might object to this scheme, so instead their breeding would apparently be governed by a state lottery, which would in fact be fixed by the philosopher-rulers (one of Plato’s more ridiculous ideas). He wrote:

Weak parents should not procreate. Because their children would inherit their inferior qualities, they would have no strength to lead a meaningful life, or in any way contribute to the state.

So the pursuit of the good life seems to depend on heredity, in his view.

Plato’s student, Aristotle, was both a biologist and a political philosopher, and he developed a theory of eugenic bio-politics. In Aristotelian ethics, the aim of life is eudaimonia, flourishing or human fulfilment, and the aim of the good society is the flourishing of citizens. The achievement of eudaimonia depends on three things — nature, habit and reason. Good birth (eugenia) is one of the necessary but not sufficient causes of eudaimonia.

People have different constitutions, different mixes of humours, and you can sometimes tell people’s characters from their body-types or physiognomy (an idea that would be very popular with 19th and 20th century eugenicists). People’s nature emerges from their natural conditions — Northern ethnic groups are more courageous, Aristotle argues, while Asians are more docile and passive.

Some people’s nature makes them more capable of the good life, others make them less so. Some humans are ‘natural slaves’ — they are capable of obeying orders but not capable of rational deliberation or eudaimonia. Greek men are particularly ‘well-mixed’ in their natural temperament, and therefore particularly well-suited to the pursuit of the good life.

The legislators of the good society should strive to develop the best stock by governing what type of people reproduce and at what age. Deformed children should be killed, Aristotle argued (in line with common belief at the time).

He writes: “For the city to be excellent is no longer a task of luck but of scientific knowledge and deliberate choice.” This ‘scientific’ breeding programme combines with rational philosophy to engineer the ‘great-souled man’, who is vastly superior to, and contemptuous of, the masses. (For a good analysis of Aristotle’s theory of heredity and his eugenic politics, see Mariska Leunissen’s From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle).

d) Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism

Judaism and Christianity were unusual among ancient religions in explicitly banning infanticide of unwanted or disabled babies. Islam also banned infanticide. In these religions, every life is considered sacred and the disabled are just as beloved in the eyes of God. Nonetheless, these religions can still contain hierarchies of spiritual worth, and make sharp divisions between the saved / elect, and the unsaved / passed over — and this distinction between the saved and the unsaved would later reappear in the modern cult of eugenics.

The Jews are, according to the Torah, the chosen people of God. Jews should only marry with each other. The argument for this, however, seems to be not biological so much as doctrinal — if you marry a gentile, your children are more likely to worship strange gods and break the Jewish covenant with Jehovah. I don’t know if in practice Jewish communities practiced eugenics, in which a rabbi oversees who marries who in order to produce ‘better’ progeny.

Christians also see themselves as the chosen people of God, the light of the world, the salt of the Earth. Anyone can convert to Christianity and become ‘born again’. But heredity could play a role — after all, Jesus was supposedly a direct descendant of King David, and not a commoner as he appeared to be.Occasionally, Jesus’ cryptic parables suggest our hereditary natures determine whether we are good or evil, as in the parable of the good and bad seeds. He preaches:

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also.

I don’t pretend to understand what Jesus meant by this, but the quote was often wielded by Christian eugenicists in the early 20th century, as in the eugenic poster below.

In Gnosticism, a syncretic and eclectic tradition both within and outside Christianity, one also finds a spiritual ranking of humans. Some humans are pneumatikoi¸ awake, enlightened, pure, while most humans are impure and asleep. Gnosticism is a religion for the esoterikoi, the superior few, while ordinary religion is for the dull masses. Some Gnostics seemed to believe humans were really two different species — the righteous sons of Seth, and the evil sons of Cain. The Gnostics (according to this tradition) are Seithian ‘children of light’, while most humans are evil children of darkness. One sometimes finds a similar polygeny (ie the idea that humans are really different species) in New Age spirituality, where some seekers pride themselves on being ‘star-seeds’, Lemurians, one of the 140,000 light-workers etc.

What one doesn’t find in Gnostic traditions (as far as I can see) is any sort of eugenic plan for steering reproduction to produce more pneumatikoi — for Gnostics, the best policy is not to have children at all, to escape the prison of matter as quickly as possible.

e) Later utopian movements

Two final historical precedents for spiritual eugenics can be found in Renaissance magic, and in the 19th-century American Christian commune of Oneida.

Renaissance magic was deeply influenced by Plato’s philosophy and the idea that the magus can, through magical techniques, become superhuman. Some magi also wrote schemes for Platonic utopias. One spiritual eugenic example is The City of the Sun, written by an Italian magus called Tommasso Campanella and published in 1602. Campanella’s Platonic utopia is run by an elite of priest-magicians, who use astrological magic to govern the city. The chief priest, in his utopia, is also in charge of the city’s breeding, and chooses who can breed and when, to ensure the spiritual fitness of the population.

Finally, the Oneida Community was a utopian commune founded in Oneida, New York in 1848 by a Protestant perfectionist called John Humphrey Noyes. The Oneidans believed they could perfect themselves into spiritually pure beings, thereby hastening the coming of the Kingdom of God. Part of their plan for engineering pure beings involved ‘stirpiculture’ — reproduction in the commune was governed by a board, who matched sexual partners to try and create the most perfect progeny. This scheme would later catch the attention of Aldous Huxley, who used it as inspiration for Island, his own spiritual-eugenic utopia.

Oneida’s stirpiculture board

To conclude, you can see how precedents for the idea of ‘spiritual eugenics’ could be found in earlier religious and philosophical traditions. In the next section I will describe how Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection created many new forms of ‘science-religions’, including eugenics.