This book was born in March 2020, the month when the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic. I had been researching Aldous Huxley for a year or so, and was curious about his support for eugenics. I noticed other New Age thinkers also promoted eugenics in some form or another. I kept on following the thread, and ended up writing this project on ‘spiritual eugenics’.
Read MoreThe accusation that ‘X is a eugenicist’ is thrown around a lot on Twitter these days, as a way to try and cancel someone.
Read MoreA new biography has just been published of the Huxleys — Thomas, the great Victorian man of science, and his grandson Julian, the great 20th-century public scientist. The book, by Professor Alison Bashford, is quite sympathetic to Julian, who would be cancelled today for his lifelong support for eugenics, if anything besides a Wetherspoons pub had been named after him.
Read MoreIn the 1970s, Timothy Leary, high priest of LSD, starting preaching a new gospel. He become obsessed with the idea of a hierarchy of different genetic castes spread throughout the Earth, at different levels of evolution, culminating in a super-caste of Californians destined to leave Earth and continue their evolution in space. He preached selective breeding to enhance intelligence, and even suggested Hitler was ahead of his time in his plan to breed ubermenschen.
Read More‘Do you really want to be perfectly well?’ So begins a tantalizing advert in Good Health magazine in 1905. It invited the reader to the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, where countless specialists are ‘studying this one thing alone — how to get well and how to stay well.’
Read MoreThe 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’. HG Wells, Anticipations (1901)
Read MoreIn 1879, in Breslau, a group of idealistic young Germans gathered round an oak tree at midnight to swear an oath. They swore to do everything they could to return the German race to the glories of its Teutonic past, and to found a utopian commune. A young man called Alfred Ploetz, 19, was chosen to be its future president.[1]
Read MoreThis is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project.
It feels taboo to read Mein Kampf. It is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’, in Karl Ove Knausgard’s phrase. You download it and think, ‘I must be on some FBI list now’. Nazism still inspires hate-crimes and murders, like the Buffalo shooting. It’s the extreme opposite of modern liberalism — in place of diversity, equality and minority rights, it preaches white supremacy and rule of the strong over the weak.
Read MoreIn previous chapters of the spiritual eugenics project we have ambled down relatively unpopulated lanes of historical research. Now, we emerge onto a daunting autobahn: Nazism. No topic has been more pored over by historians. And there are no more awful events in human history than the Nazis’ programme of mass murder.
Read MoreLast month Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson released a TV series called The End of Men, warning that American men were becoming effete, flabby and sterile. Civilization is descending into chaos, the series suggests, but that’s OK, because ‘hard times produce strong men’.
Read MoreWhat happens when a world leader falls for crackpot philosophy? We’re going to examine a movement known as Cosmism, which appeared in late 19th century Russia and the early Soviet Union. It set itself the grand task of steering evolution to create immortal, cosmic superbeings. We’ll also look at how this fanatic philosophy influenced Putin, and may have helped inspire the Kremlin’s fledgling eugenics programme.
Read MoreThe ‘religion’ of eugenics originated in the UK but Britain never passed a law legalizing involuntary sterilization of those deemed unfit. Instead, the UK exported eugenics around the world via events like the first international eugenics congress of 1912. Countries from Brazil to Japan would introduce eugenic laws, and no country was more aggressive in its eugenic policies than the United States.
Read MoreIn this chapter, we will look at how Julian Huxley and his peers developed the religious creed which he would later call Transhumanism, and how their visions of scientific utopia inspired his brother’s humorous novel, Brave New World.
Read MoreThis is the latest entry in my ‘Spiritual Eugenics’ project, which explores the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics. For a definition of these terms, an introduction to the project, and more articles from it, go here.
In the next three articles, we’re going to meet the most important family for this topic — the Huxleys.
Read MorePerson A, one one side of you, says this:
‘Life-outcomes are determined by your social class’.
Person B, on the other side, says this:
‘Life-outcomes are determined by your genes’.
Make a guess as to the politics of Persons A and B.
Read MoreBritish geneticist Adam Rutherford has a new book out, called Control, about the history of eugenics and how it might or might not come back in the 21st century. As regular readers know, I’ve been researching and writing about eugenics myself for the last two years — you’re probably sick of it by now! — so I read Rutherford’s book to learn and review.
Read MoreIn 1921, the British psychologist William McDougall declared:
Read MoreI have two hobbies — psychical research and eugenics. So far as I know, I am the only person alive today who takes an active interest in both these movements. [‘The need for psychical research’]
On the 18th of January, 1874, a remarkable dinner party took place at the London home of Erasmus Darwin, older brother of naturalist Charles Darwin. The guests included Charles Darwin, the novelist George Eliot, a young classicist named Frederic Myers, and Darwin’s cousin, the statistician Francis Galton.
Read MoreThis is the third entry in the Spiritual Eugenics project.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was an epochal moment for western culture. Darwinism challenged the old faith of Christianity, but it also created new faiths, new ‘science-religions’, new mutations of evolutionary ethics, politics and religion.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreBy eugenics I refer to a programme, launched in 1883 by Francis Galton, to improve the genetic quality of human beings, through negative eugenics (preventing those deemed genetically unfit from passing on their genes, either through voluntary or involuntary sterilization, confinement, or extermination) and through positive eugenics (encouraging those deemed genetically fit to pass on their genes more, through breeding with others deemed fit, or through donating their seed to ‘genius sperm banks’).
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