We’ve seen them before in history. And here they all are again, Homo Superior, the people who claim to be 'evolutionary leaders.'
I have been concerned to criticize and caution others against this kind of thinking and these 'superior' kinds of thinkers and doers and their attempts to form an overclass for a long time now. I dismantled this 'men as gods' thesis in Of Gods and Gaia and Politics, Planetary Engineering, and Environmentalism in 2011. Stewart Brand is mentioned in this article. I took his argument apart passage by passage in Of Gods and Gaia. Rather than repeat myself, I refer people to the above works, which offer a lengthy critique along the lines of this article by Jules Evans. I also note the presence of H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley, as well as of Darwin and Darwinism in this article, as well as in John Bellamy Foster's new book The Return of Nature. As an eco-socialist, I gave John's book a positive review. At the same time, I was discomforted by its philosophical underpinnings. Foster made it clear that Engels sought to distinguish the socialism of Marx and himself from the 'bourgeois Darwinists' who quickly sought to assimilate Darwin to Hobbesian competition and Malthusian scarcity. Darwin himself didn't fight so hard in making that distinction, and gave approval to the notion of 'survival of the fittest.' I'm uncomfortable with the entire area. I see how Foster and other marxists may be keen to appropriate Darwin, Foster shows how Engels criticised those bourgeois Darwinists who emphasised the struggle for existence over and again in their thought and politics. And yet he cites approvingly Marx's claim that Darwin's new theory of evolution gave support for his own thesis of class struggle. A struggle for existence is a struggle for existence, whether it is conducted by the individual or group. The level is an issue for evolutionary biologists and neo-Darwinists to determine (Dawkins, for instance, denies group selection). There are still people on the Left who think Darwin offers a way of founding ethics on a material basis. The fact that the 'bourgeois Darwinists' (in a tragically misnamed 'Social Darwinism') triumphed so easily against the socialists and communitarian anarchists (such as Kropotkin) who tried to show that cooperation and mutual aid is at least as important as competition is significant. I don't think Darwin, evolution, and natural selection offer an ethical basis at all for freedom, socialism, cooperation, and justice. I look elsewhere.
I gave John Bellamy Foster's The Return of Nature a strong recommendation, but kept my more critical comments back for a more extended piece of my own. This is the first draft of that piece (I have much more to come)
To be brief, I share the commitment to socialism and to eco-socialism, but I have substantial differences with respect to the books philosophical standpoint concerning spirituality, ethics, teleology, essentialism, God and religion. Not to put too fine a point on it, I see a bogus, inverted religion at work in all such thinking, including modern environmentalism. I take a far more critical view of Wells, Huxley, Darwin and Darwinism, and the technological road to enlightenment. I find that route elitist to the core. I also find so many of the enlightened to be nowhere near as bright as they claim to be. So many of the liveliest thinkers of the late 19C and early 20C were eugenicists obsessed with the sex lives of a feckless working class, a working class so unproductive as to be outproducing the superior types in the population stakes to a factor of ten. Bourgeois fear and alarm was palpable and given a scientific gloss.
Francis Bacon said that you can drive nature out through the door with a pitchfork but it will still return by the backdoor. The same applies to religion. I like the phrase which Jung discovered in Erasmus and which he had pinned over his door in Basle: 'bidden or unbidden, God is always present.' That's a truth that 'men as gods,' these supposed evolutionary leaders, are concerned to deny. And in their denial, they give us an inverted, perverted religion. Instead of humility and imperfection, contrition and redemption, there is an obsession with power, progress, and perfection. And a contempt for 'ordinary' people. There is an emphasis on the punishment of sin and imperfection, but this is an assertion of power without mercy and forgiveness, an enlightenment without a genuine transcendence. It is ghastly.
In Of Gods and Gaia, I challenged the people I called 'planetary engineers.' In recent work I have been criticising the 'planetary managers,' the techno-bureaucratic overclass who seek to oversee, order, and regulate global society from the Empyrean heights they occupy. Or claim to occupy, in claiming to be independent of the material interests of capital and labour. In truth, they serve capital and exploit labour in the shape of the global corporate form.
I have been pulling all the strands together and drawing some unpleasant conclusions with respect to the 'non-politics' of the 'classless' class of society's would-be overseers. The members of this class claim to be above material interests, post-materialist, 'beyond left and right,' and possessors of neutral expertise and 'humanitarian' understanding and consciousness. You can find them in various places, in global bodies and institutions, in research institutions, in NGO's, and in the environmental movement.
I share plenty of the aspirations of these people; I vehemently disagree with the means, the elitism, and the blatant inhumanism of these supposed humanists. As Jules Evans writes:
"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 his grandson Julian ought to have 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.’
On any number of grounds, I am not one of the elite or the elect, the chosen few, whether in terms of personality and history, or ethics and politics. Probably my most favourite line from Marx is that 'the educator must also be educated.' Immanuel Kant was particularly struck by Rousseau's moral vision of simplicity and integrity, his view of ethics as ‘the sublime science of simple souls.’ Kant wrote:
"I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity."
At a time when people, abandoned by their societies, are abandoning 'elites' and 'experts' of all kinds, we need this humility - we need a philosophy of living that touches people. If you can’t move people by inner connection, then you are lacking something or doing something wrong. ‘We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.’ (Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 2011: 184-185).
My argument is inherently and actively democratic, emphasising human beings as knowledgeable and moral change-agents. As Michael Lind argues in The New Class War, there is a systematic assault upon democracy underway, at the heart of which is a contempt for 'ordinary' people. This was always an integral part of the bourgeois/reformist-socialist critique of capitalism, but it now extends much further in the hands of a techno-bureaucratic class of experts, planners, managers, and designers who seek to organise and order the world.
Sad to say, I found the highly dubious history of the technological road to socialism almost completely skirted in John Bellamy Foster's new book, which made me profoundly uneasy, given my support for eco-socialism. I want the errors and deviations exposed and extinguished clearly and forthrightly, not denied and buried, lest the same mistakes be invited in future. I don't doubt that Foster would consider my concern with spirituality to be a mystical ecology and religion as a celebration of human irrationality (words he used to describe John Clark's work, and which Clark emphatically refuted). This route of purposeless materialism is a dead-end. Instead of universal brotherhood there will be a universal hatred in an even more deeply divided and discomforted society.
Reading Jules Evans' article I am reassured that many people are beginning to see through all this 'classless' 'humanist' 'enlightened' 'evolutionary' thinking and see it for what it is - elitist to the core, betraying its own positive ideals and aspirations to age-old hierarchical modes of thought and organisation.
I shall present some quotes and quick comments:
Produced by an organisation called ‘Evolutionary Leaders,' the book Our Moment of Choice 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 have seen precisely this coming and have sought to develop the democratic alternative.
Investigating this classless class of 'evolutionary leaders' we find the usual 'new age' 'humanitarian' 'beyond left and right' 'post-material' claptrap that should have been exposed and sent packing in truly enlightened and progressive circles a long time ago. This self-styled 'New Thought' is stale and sterile, led by 'spiritual teachers' who organize annual retreats from where they plan, train, and organise the evolution to come. They are the evolutionary vanguard. I'm struck with the parallels with environmentalism and its plethora of training camps and schools for the next generation of activists. It is an endless education as the informing of passive minds. It has none of the actively democratic content of Marx's education of the educator. But, of course, these people all consider themselves so enlightened as to be above and beyond socialism, and politics, and material interests and frankly anything in the social world. They remove themselves from society to an Empyrean heaven of their own making, all the better to reorder that society and organise the people it contains. They disdain the corrupt nature of people and society and seek their purification by way of bureaucratic intervention and regulation. Don't buy it, any of it: it is pure pretence, a self-serving self-image.
How did it come to this? Jules Evans explains:
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.
As a socialist and environmental campaigner, I have been sailing in those seas my entire life. I note that description of Marx's socialism as a Darwinian Communism. That comes out very strongly in John Bellamy Foster's The Return of Nature. I have written extensively on Marx. I think his emancipatory critique is important, central in fact. I note the lack of a critique of political economy in environmental platforms seeking the reform, even the transformation, of the world. I wrote three volumes on Marx and marxism in 2018 on the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth. The first volume was a very positive case for Marx's socialism as a social restitution and metabolic restitution; the second was a reconstruction of the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of Marx's emancipatory politics; the third volume turned in a markedly different direction and subjected Marx and marxism to a searching criticism, exposing it as an inverted religion likely to bring about Hell on Earth unless we recover the transcendent standards and Judaeo-Christian ethic that lie buried implicit in its critique. Those three volumes put me out on a limb with respect to people who are pro- and anti-Marx, but I read articles like this and I see the bogus inverted religiosity alive in the world, and I am reassured in the singular approach I take.
The article refers to the weakness of New Age 'politics' in the way it emphasizes the ‘power of positive thinking’ over the gritty complexity of geopolitics. There is a complete lack of political economy and its critique not only in this New Age mush but in the 'new (non-)politics of the classless class claiming to be so beyond politics as to be beyond the centre as well as the left and right. I'm not interested in New Age thought, it's such patent gibberish and mush as not to be worthy of critique. I am interested in the way in which the classless, 'beyond left and right,' enlightened non-politics permeates areas of environmentalism and ecology which are of serious merit. I agree with many of the green causes and ends, but disagree vehemently with the means employed. This kind of thinking openly argues that the elite will bifurcate into a whole other species. As Hubbard puts it:
'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.'
Such people view the current environmental crisis as 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.
To Evans, Hubbard and people like her sound like Nazi hippies. '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.' Beneath the love of ‘all humanity’ there lies a real and visceral contempt for real flesh and blood individuals who dare to be less enlightened, that is, moral beings affirming their own ‘yes’ and ‘no.’
Indeed. 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! This is the plain inhumanism at the heart of these classless humanist appeals to enlightenment and evolution by way of natural selection. Like the ecologist Garrett Hardin, at times she preaches a sort of space eugenics. We are not far from birth licences and eugenics.
And this is really what this kind of thinking is, 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.
As I say, I could care less about New Age spirituality, the kind of people who insist on telling us that they are "spiritual but not religious," who think that their being against organized religion somehow elevates them to a superior plane of consciousness. I find it shallow and superficial, a mere assertion of their own narcissistic refusal to be bound by others or a supra-individual code or constraint. Spirituality and religion are not alternatives. Spirituality expresses the whole and the wholesome, the entire view and vision, religion the form and the structure of expression in time and place. Human beings, as social beings, require place, ritual, organisation, contact. Those who make of a point of being spiritual but not religious are really emphasising their secession from the society of (lesser and inferior) others. They are narcissists. The moral marketplace they inhabit does indeed mirror the capitalist marketplace. My main concern is not, however, the New Age but the extent to which this kind of thinking can be found in movements and campaigns aiming to reform and even transform the social world, particularly from an environmentalist perspective.
'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 or nightmarishly fascist. 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’.
I've laboured these very points about environmentalism as a scientism that is devoid of politics so many times that I have had to draw the conclusion that the people I have sought to address and influence are indeed fully conscious members of a distinct 'classless' class of techno-bureaucratic would-be planetary managers. They have no interest whatsoever in my recommendations as to what environmentalism requires in order to advance its aims more effectively and democratically.
As I read this article, I see fellow environmental campaigners sharing an article by Barbara Ehrenreich. She and they are making a different point, and I like Ehrenreich. But I note the same inhumanism at work, and the same superiority masked by assertions of human insignificance. I find all such thinking elitist and reactionary.
In our self-obsessed age, the anonymous, mysterious cave art of our ancient ancestors is exhilarating. By Barbara Ehrenreich
This article is so much better in being rooted in realities, but I still don't care for it.
‘Starting with the implacable “mother goddesses” of the Neolithic Middle East, and moving on to the sudden proliferation of kings and heroes in the Bronze Age, the emergence of human faces seems to mark a characterological change – from the solidaristic ethos of small, migrating bands to what we now know as narcissism.’
I like that solidaristic ethos. I don't like the nostalgic frame. For one thing, it is hopeless. Social and cultural evolution has brought us to this place. For cave art, we have global information technology and interconnection. Is that a bad thing? The challenge is to establish new solidarities and loyalties out of where we are now; the age of small, migrating bands is over. The problem is that narcissism, in the sense of the self-choosing 'I,' the right of each to choose their own gods. I have no nostalgia whatsoever for 'implacable' mother goddesses; they are mere personifications of biological imperatives. Human beings are immersed in culture, which is just as well. Nature doesn't give a damn, it just 'is,' in terms of endless cycles of birth, life, and death. There are no grounds for an ethic there, only an impersonalism and an indifference. The problem lies elsewhere, not so much in the loss of transcendence as in its being brought down to Earth. In overthrowing the transcendent God - the terrible patriarchal sky-god we now have to denounce as the source of all our ills - human beings horizontalized the vertical to seek immortality, eternity, and infinity here on Earth, the realm of the mortal and the finite, consuming the planet in short order. The narcissism here is the 'men as gods' criticised above. We live in a post-Christian age but not a post-religious age. Homo Spiritualis can never be post-religious. Instead, there is an inverted, perverted religion, the narcissistic men as gods. The solution is not the return to the nature religions of 'mother goddesses,' which is a tired, hopeless, and decadent view, seeking the peace of necessity, but to seek to order things to their true ends. The sky gods who are now out of fashion - who were discarded a long while ago in favour of the self-created human gods of capital, money, commodities, power, states, bureaucracies, nations ... - were never anthropocentric: these religions were God-centred, drawing humans outside of the ego into consideration of the bigger picture. The moderns thought they could go it alone, have eaten up the planet with their boundless greed, and now, finding themselves the masters of nowhere, indulge in pious lamentation for nature's mother goddesses. It is regression and I repudiate it.
‘But it’s the Paleolithic caves we need to return to, and not just because they are still capable of inspiring transcendent experiences and connecting us with the long-lost natural world.’
‘They knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high, and this seems to have made them laugh. I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves unless we too finally get the joke.’
And where do humans stand in this way of thinking? Not very high.
This is reactionary piffle. It doesn’t so much solve the problem humanity faces as avoid it. There would be no problem at all if we just scaled back our abilities and ambitions and settled with low expectations in a life of no importance in the wider scheme of things. Such a thing is neither true to nature nor to human nature. I note this kind of thinking coming from people who have repudiated religion, particularly the Judaeo-Christian tradition. That tradition was never anthropocentric in any case, it was God-centred, with human beings finding their place in the scheme of things according to God. That tradition sought to order human activities in accordance with God’s plan of justice. It has been repudiated as no more than a myth and a fantasy in face of an ‘implacable’ indifferent nature. And we see why environmentalism is utterly futile, and politically debilitating, without motivational force: it rests on an anthropological pessimism – human beings are of little significance in this worldview. If humanity is insignificant, then so too is the nature which can only be known through the self-consciousness and creativity of human beings. This article waxes lyrical about cave art and its celebration of nature’s endless cycles. The fact is that nature is only known through human self-consciousness and creation; human beings are self-conscious nature. The article is also full of a pessimistic assessment of human civilisation, referring to social stratification, war, and hierarchical rule. It’s a familiar tale, but lamentations of class, gender, and racial division does nothing to overcome that division. Tales like this are based on the romantic and reactionary myth that problems are chronological. They yearn to turn the clock back, little realising that even if such a thing happened, the same process would begin again. The problems are structural.
But here is the real objection – the democratisation of narcissism, by which is meant that great distribution of the freedoms and comforts of civilisation.
‘Kings and occasionally their consorts were the first to enjoy the new marks of personal superiority – crowns, jewellery, masses of slaves, and the arrogance that went along with such things. Over the centuries, narcissism spread downward to the bourgeoisie, who, in 17th-century Europe, were beginning to write memoirs and commission their own portraits. In our own time, anyone who can afford a smartphone can propagate their own image, publish their most fleeting thoughts on social media and burnish their unique brand. Narcissism has been democratised and is available, at least in crumb-sized morsels, to us all.’
I’m all in favour of an egalitarian and solidaristic existence based upon an appreciation of the human place in a greater whole or greater plan. It is a view that our disenchanting science has eliminated. I would only add here that science itself needs metaphysics since, left to the scientific method alone, itself loses reality to its own form of narcissism. Seeing reality only through scientific concepts and investigation is itself anthropocentric.
But this passage sums up the issue – the objection to democratisation. Unable to uproot the wrong type of freedom and happiness, assertive choice and hedonism, critics turn on democracy and democratisation. I do something very different with my work on 'rational freedom,' I argue for the democratisation of a genuine freedom and happiness/flourishing, and that involves something much more than lamentations for a world that is irrevocably lost.
The New Jerusalem we are charged with building, as God's partners in Creation, is the New Eden. The old one has gone for good. We are enjoined to act to create the new world.