For decades, New Age guru Barbara Marx Hubbard preached a futurist gospel of “conscious evolution” guided by “love and light.” Yet, at the same time, in stark contrast, Hubbard also touted Malthusian population control. If Hubbard called for the human population to be culled, then how could she have genuinely floated her dreams of conscious evolution sincerely upon the “self-actualization” mantras of the Human Potential Movement or the “co-creation” ethos of her New Age homilies?
While Hubbard’s advocacy for population control contradicts the benevolent rhetoric of her New Age spiritualism, her Malthusianism cohesively aligns with her championing of transhumanism. As I historicized in a previous article entitled Barbara Marx Hubbard: Godmother of Transhumanism and Synthetic Spirituality, transhumanism was conceptualized by Julian Huxley as the second phase of eugenics, which would artificially enhance Darwinian evolution by merging human biology with machines. In fact, according to Darwin’s autobiography, his theory of evolution by natural selection, which inspired his cousin Francis Galton to develop the pseudo-science of eugenics, was conceived as the biological consequence of growing populations competing for limited resources in a Malthusian ecology:
“I [Darwin] happened to read for amusement ‘Malthus on Population,’ and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work.”
