Barbara Marx Hubbard and the Evolutionary Leaders
The Evolutionary Leaders — Barbara Marx Hubbard is third from right, in the pink top. Deepak Chopra is in the centre of the front row.
A new book came out recently called Our Moment of Choice. Produced by an organisation called ‘Evolutionary Leaders’, it announced that mankind was on the brink of an extraordinary evolutionary leap, from the chrysalis of homo sapiens to a whole new species of unlimited potential.
I looked into who these remarkable ‘Evolutionary Leaders’ were. The group was founded in 2006 by a lady called Diane Marie Williams, president of the ‘Source of Synergy Foundation’, in partnership with Deepak Chopra TM, perhaps the most successful teacher in the New Age.
It says something about the modern spiritual market place, doesn’t it, that TM. Imagine Jesus TM, Mohammad TM, the Buddha TM.
Diane and Deepak Chopra TM teamed up with around 50 other spiritual teachers to organize annual retreats where they could plan how to lead evolution. The group included New Thought preachers Michael Beckwith and Gregg Braden, enlightened guru Andrew Cohen, and Barbara Marx Hubbard, the ‘mother of conscious evolution’, no less.
In 2010, they all gathered on the stage of Michael Beckwith’s Agape Church of New Thought and sang ‘Man in the Mirror’.
Make that change!
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to proclaim yourself a Leader of Evolution doesn’t it? I’ve made some iffy claims on my CV, but never that.
Imagine. ‘I am leading evolution. I am pulling humanity up by its bootstraps. I am the leading edge, the peak, the transcender, I am a whole new species’. And who is it that says this? Not Friedrich Nietzsche, no, a motley crew of botoxed business coaches and fixed-grin Law of Attraction zombies.
Imagine if the culmination of 13 billion years of cosmic evolution was this guy (Gregg Braden, star of Ancient Aliens and a noted Leader of Evolution). Darwin wept.
A brief history of ‘conscious evolution’
How did it come to this?
The roots of evolutionary spirituality lie back in the late 19th century.
Darwinism blew apart the old certainties of Christianity. The Bible, taken literally, was shown to be incredible. But Darwinism didn’t just destroy old beliefs, it also led to an explosion of new faiths.
Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s friend, preached the idea of science as a religion. Others preached Darwinian capitalism (Herbert Spencer), Darwinian Communism (Karl Marx), Darwinian Anarchism (Pyotr Kropotkin), or Darwinian ethno-nationalism (Ernst Haeckel).
There were also attempts to preach various forms of Darwinian spirituality — Alfred Russell Wallace preached an evolutionary Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky preached evolutionary Theosophy, Sri Aurobindo preached evolutionary yoga.
Most importantly for our purposes, HG Wells put forward a vision of the inevitable evolution of a god-like species of hominid — call it homo universalis — who would conquer the world with science, transcend all earthly limitations, and unite in peace and free love under a one world government.
This vision was enthusiastically adopted by his younger colleague, the biologist Julian Huxley — brother of Aldous, grandson of Thomas.
HG Wells (left) and Julian Huxley (right) while working on The Science of Life
Thomas Huxley had insisted evolution had no teleology or purpose, but his grandson Julian disagreed. Evolution created humans, then humans became the conscious steerers of evolution. Or a few special humans did, anyway — like him.
In his famous essay of 1957, ‘Transhumanism’, Julian Huxley wrote:
It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution — appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.
As Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue, would put it a decade later: ‘We are as gods, so we might as well get used to it.’
The man most often credited as the father of ‘conscious evolution’ is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist, Catholic priest and friend of Julian Huxley.
De Chardin put forward a somewhat heretical version of Christianity, in which Christ consciousness radiates from humans, connecting into a global consciousness which Chardin called the ‘noosphere’. Eventually, this global consciousness will reach such a heightened state that it will reach the ‘Omega Point’ — a point at which consciousness transcends time, matter and death, and the entire universe becomes divinized.
Julian Huxley and Chardin’s fusion of evolution, science and spirituality inspired other scientists like Jonas Salk, one of the discoverers of the polio vaccine, who urged humans to think about their long-term species destiny, and who set up the Salk Institute in California, currently leading the world in its research on genetic enhancements to make us superhumans.
The shadow side of this evolutionary spirituality (as regular readers will know by now) is a tendency to spiritual inflation and spiritual elitism — it’s not very attractive to be certain you are one of the very few enlightened humans who are steering the evolution of the species. Nor is it very endearing when you declare that only the smart should survive (Salk called this ‘survival of the wisest’), and everyone else is disposable (Salk tested out the polio vaccine on mentally retarded children, while both Huxley and Chardin were advocates of the eugenic sterilization of those they deemed obstacles to humanity’s advance).
Barbara Marx Hubbard, mother of conscious evolution
In the 1960s, these ideas spread into popular American culture and attracted people who were not, strictly, part of the intellectual or scientific elite, although they were wealthy and happily saw themselves as part of the evolutionary elite.
Such a one was Barbara Marx Hubbard, the ‘mother of evolution’, the ‘midwife of humanity’s transformation’, an extraordinarily grandiose figure, whose actual achievements pale besides her cosmic self-estimation. GK Chesterton once said of HG Wells, ‘one can lie awake at night and hear him grow’, but Wells to some extent earned his self-inflation. Ol’ Mother Hubbard, not so much.
I’ve been researching her this year — I read three of her books, God help me — and this week watched a documentary on her, American Visionary, which you can watch for free over the next few days here(as of December 19 2020). It is a poignant portrait of the bubble of spiritual narcissism encountering reality.
Barbara was born in New York in the 1930s, the daughter of a beautiful mother and a millionaire father, Louis Marx, who owned the largest toy company in the world. Sadly, her mother died of breast cancer when she was a child — she still, in her 80s, burst into tears when recounting this traumatic event.
Barbara went to Paris and married an American artist. But the life of a wife and mother did not fulfil her ambition. A greater destiny was calling to her.
It seems that, around this time, she had a powerful mystical experience, in which she felt herself rise into space and see the Earth from above, labouring to breathe and covered by too many humans. Then she heard Evolution itself speaking to her.
I heard the words: ‘Our story is a birth. What Christ and all the great beings came to reveal is we’re one, we’re good, we’re universal. Go tell the story Barbara’.
Barbara left her husband to preach the Evolution of Humanity. She went to work for Jonas Salk on outreach projects for his new Institute, and fell in unrequited love with him. She read Sri Aurobindo and met Abraham Maslow and Buckminster Fuller. She became a fervent flirty networker — she describes the thrill of networking, or ‘synergy’, as ‘better than sex’.
She started to call herself a ‘futurist’ and worked on various grand projects. She worked on a project with Salk called the Theatre of the World— an attempt to tell the story of evolution dramatically, which didn’t come to much (although Robert Anton Wilson saw it and loved it). She led a project to persuade NASA to have a ‘people’s shuttle’, but the idea didn’t take off.
In 1984 she ran to be the vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Her manifesto was that there should be a Peace Room in the vice-president’s office, like the War Room, but to map all the good projects happening in the world.
She managed to get a nomination, and the speech she gave at the 1984 Democratic Convention was taken as proof of the extraordinary power of consciousness, will and intention to alter reality. Magical politics!
But was it magic, or rather the power of a very rich person and her wealthy backers to buy five minutes of platform time at the Democratic Convention? Her speech didn’t achieve anything. There is no Peace Room.
Rather than the triumph she and her followers take it to be, the moment illustrates the weakness of New Age politics, how it emphasizes the ‘power of positive thinking’ over the gritty complexity of geopolitics.
Then in the 90s and Noughties she emerged in the New Age marketplace as a prophet of conscious evolution. She found her people among New Thought gurus and spiritual hucksters like Neale Donald Walsch and Marc Gafni (Gafni has faced allegations of sexual abuse for decades, yet Marx always supported him).
Her titles became increasingly grandiose — Mother of Conscious Evolution, or rather, she IS evolution. ‘I sometimes say I am 13.6 billion years old’, she says in the documentary.
She had a burning sense that the critical moment was at hand. Humanity was about to make an evolutionary leap, comparable to the leap to homo sapiens. We would become homo universalis, transcending our material bodies, living for ever, traveling through space, sleeping with various partners (like HG Wells, she foresaw that the future would be polyamorous).
She imagines evolution as a mountain — some can’t get beyond base camp, some get a bit higher but then struggle and fail. But a few, the superhuman elite, get to the top of the mountain and then fling themselves into the future:
At the top we meet everyone who has also kept growing. This union at the peak sets the foundation of our leap beyond the mountain and into the Kingdom; the quantum Transformation to life ever evolving as a universal species in a universe full of other beings who have also had the courage to rise to the tops of their mountains, on their own planets in galaxies everywhere
Yes, the elite of all the planets meet and network, in a sort of cosmic Davos.
Our time is coming. We who survive the transition will have crossed the abyss from creature to co-creator, by virtue of our creative genius. We shall identify increasingly with the perspective of God as we build new worlds, create new microorganisms and redesign our bodies for cosmic time and space.
Like HG Wells, she warns that not everyone will make the Leap.
Those who attempt to maintain the old separatist stance…will be removed from the growing edge of the human community. They will harden, calcify and eventually die of separation. Only love can advance the next stage of evolution.
Those remaining in self-centered consciousness will be either extinct on Earth like all past earlier humans, or so different that they seem to be a different species.
The elite will bifurcate, in other words, into a whole other species.
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… 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.
The current environmental crisis is a sort of apocalyptic sorting of the fit from the unfit.
During this crisis we will weed out the unworkable from the workable
The Nietzschean superhumans need to be steely in their acceptance of the passing away of the unfit.
Evolution is compassionate, but not nice. It cannot afford to be nice at the expense of the whole of life. Those who do not follow the Way of Love will not be able to handle the powers of co-creation.
There are missions of mercy to nurse the sick…There is also the new mission of the future: a mission to the strong, the whole, the builders, the scientists, the artists — the conceivers who will co-create new worlds…The New Order of the Future consists of self-selected souls attracted to the future of the world
You see how she can sound like a Nazi hippy? It infuriates me that she is so convinced she is a member of the superhuman elite when, to me, she’s a New York heiress. How dare she look down on humanity and condemn them to extinction for not being as lucky as her. How dare she say: ‘Those who choose longevity will evolve differently from those who choose to remain in the terrestrial/mammalian life cycle’. It’s not like the poor choose not to have the healthcare available to the ultra-rich. They can’t afford it!
Like the ecologist Garrett Hardin, at times she preaches a sort of space eugenics. She writes:
The slightest defect, a faulty crew, a careless act, a lack of trust, and the mission can be totally destroyed. NASA aims for “zero defects.” Perfection becomes the norm….The astronauts were selected for perfection in certain areas. [Likewise] the builders of new worlds in space will aim for zero defects, because when mistakes occur they will be less acceptable than on Earth.
As the world approached 2012, Barbara decided that the Shift would happen on a specific date — December 21 2012 — an event that would be as significant for humanity as the birth of Christ or the evolution of language. And she, Barbara, was its mid-wife.
She teamed up with Stephen Dinan, CEO of the Shift Network (one of the biggest New Age platforms) and with fellow Evolutionary Leaders like Michael Beckwith and Jack Canfield. They launched a campaign, aiming to get 100 million people all over the world to align their intention for the evolutionary shift. And then BOOM! It would happen.
The documentary follows the journey of this campaign. For most of it, Barbara is filled with confidence — how could she not be, she is Mama Evolution! She is the creator and destroyer of species!
But as the big day approaches, Barbara’s grandiosity starts to fracture. They are nowhere near 100 million participants. She gets on a flight to Australia for the first event, but while she’s travelling, the US news is suddenly filled with reports of people’s apocalyptic fears. She becomes desperately frustrated at not being in the US to get on the TV news, so she can herald the Birth of Homo Universalis. ‘I’ve spent 50 years saying this!’ she says distractedly, in an airport carpark. ‘It’s very hard for me.’
A friend reflects:
She felt that she wasn’t reaching enough people quickly enough. That many of her peers were becoming more famous, being asked to be on television shows she wasn’t asked to be on. She had a sense she was failing.
She flies back to LA for the big launch event (poor woman, in her 80s, flying to Australia then straight back to Los Angeles). Sting is meant to turn up but he doesn’t. Only a few thousand tune in around the world. And the media doesn’t notice the Birth of New Humanity.
Her sister recalls:
She felt she was fulfilling her life purpose — telling the story of our birth. And then…not much happened afterwards. And the fact this magical transformation didn’t happen was very depressing. She lost her mission. And when Barbara doesn’t know what her mission is, there’s a tremendous pain….It was naïve and grandiose to think that that event would change the world.
At the end of the documentary Barbara consoles herself: they didn’t notice Jesus’ birth in the manger either, did they? Yes, but your ‘birth’ was in an Beverly Hills New Thought church for rich people. She’s so cocooned in her bubble of privilege she doesn’t realize how grotesque the comparison is.
Barbara died last year. I’m fairly certain she expected to live forever. She wrote: ‘We will be perfect as a beautiful flower, one that has not been damaged by disease’. She would regenerate her body, become eternally youthful, then travel through space, floating between intergalactic cocktail parties — ‘there goes Barbara, the Mother of Evolution, isn’t she swell?’
But instead she got sick, died, and decomposed, just like everyone else.
I think she is a prime example of spiritual inflation, narcissism and schizoid trauma-avoidance — I reckon she was spoiled by her father, traumatized by her mother’s death, then bored by domesticity, so she launched herself on this grandiose schizoid mission for 50 years, claiming she was manifesting cosmic love when really she left one husband then left another in a nursing home when he got dementia.
Still, despite this setback, the ‘conscious evolution’ movement and the self-proclaimed ‘Evolutionary Leaders’ are still announcing the coming shift. They’re still selling courses to help you make that change — the Evolutionary Leaders are almost all corporate and career coaches. As Barbara said, ‘When you align with evolution you experience ‘vocational arousal’.;
This is what it is, really, a flaky sort of capitalist spirituality. Don Lattin, an excellent observer of the human potential movement, notes in the documentary:
there’s something grandiose and even narcissist about thinking you can heal the world with your thoughts. It’s an elitist movement, mainly white, middle class, people whose basic needs are already met and have the time and money to go these workshops and retreats.
It’s a movement that is so politically naïve it’s actually dangerous. It has a tendency to magical thinking which can either be vapidly euphoric — ‘here comes the Shift!’ — or nightmarishly fascist — ‘the demonic archons are against us but don’t worry, here comes The Storm!’
There is no understanding of science, economics, power, the slow work of changing policies. Just wishful thinking. You see this in the ‘Call to Actions’ which end each chapter in Our Moment of Choice. The Calls to Action include ‘walk barefoot on the grass’, ‘tend to the vibration of your heart’, ‘meditate on your higher purpose’.
One can’t help but reflect on how the human potential movement — this movement dedicated to humanity’s evolution — has itself degenerated.
It was once championed by leading scientists and artists. Yes, they were often psychopathic eugenicists, but at least they made genuine contributions to their fields.
Now, its chief spokespeople are business coaches and New Thought hucksters with bad hair and too much make-up, or discredited hucksters like Andrew Cohen and Marc Gafni. It’s such an intellectually mediocre scene now, filled with platitude-spouting shysters like this:
Which is a pity, as there is something important in it. The aspiration to self-transcendence and species-transcendence. The vision for the future. The hope and optimism. The embrace of technological progress, ecological sustainability, peace and spiritual transformation.
All of that I like. Just don’t be too quick to assume you’re one of the evolutionary elite. As Thomas Huxley put it, in words I wish his grandson had reflected on:
I sometimes wonder whether people, who talk so freely about extirpating the unfit, ever dispassionately consider their own history. Surely, one must be very ‘fit’ indeed, not to know of an occasion, or perhaps two, in one’s life, when it would have been only too easy to qualify for a place among the ‘unfit.’