In 2015, Google engineer Anthony Levandowski started The Way of the Future, a church to worship super-intelligent AI. And now we have the Religion of the Future Police, began by former Google manager Malcolm Collins and his wife Simone.
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In 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.
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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’. HG Wells, Anticipations (1901)
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In 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]
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This 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.
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In 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.
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Last 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’.
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What 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.
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The ‘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.
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In 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.
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This 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.
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Person 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.
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British 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.
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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.
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This 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.
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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.
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A new book came out recently called Our Moment of Choice. Produced by an organization 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.
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I want to discuss the difficult question: to what extent can one cleanly distinguish a ‘spiritual emergency’ from other psychotic experiences.
‘Spiritual emergency’ is a term introduced by two transpersonal psychologists — Stanislav and Christina Grof — in 1989, to describe a disturbing spiritual experience which has some aspects of psychosis, but which should not be treated as ordinary mental illness. Instead, insist the Grofs, a ‘spiritual emergency’, if properly handled, can ‘have tremendous evolutionary and healing potential’.
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The first part of this essay looked at the first and second wave of Malthusian thinking, in the 19th and early 20th centuries respectively. This second part will look at the third and fourth wave.
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Two visions of the future were unfurled this month. The first was a study from the University of Washington, which showed population was in rapid decline in many countries of the world. The authors suggested world population would peak at around 9 billion, sooner than the UN had predicted. The decline in national populations could, the authors suggested, even lead to nations competing for immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa to supply the work-force for their countries. It follows comments by Elon Musk last year that the biggest global issue in 20 years will be ‘population collapse’.
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For Brexit architect Dominic Cummings, the real prize of Brexit is to position the UK as a leader in a global genetics arms race.
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