5) Nietzsche and the New Age cult of the superbeing

Nietzsche by Hadi Karimi

In 1883, the same year that Francis Galton coined the word ‘eugenics’, a strange religious text was published, announcing the coming of a new type of human. The grand announcement went completely unnoticed at the time, and yet it would capture the imagination of the world in the coming decades. The book, of course, was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Born in Germany in 1844, Nietzsche was a brilliant student, and at 24 became the youngest ever Chair in Classical Philology at the University of Basle. He seemed set to scale the heights of European academia, but his career went off-piste after he published his first book The Birth of Tragedy, a strange, brilliant, rhapsodic hymn to Richard Wagner, which received poor reviews and was barely read. He left academia in high dudgeon, fell out with Wagner, and became a wandering scholar-hermit, traipsing across Europe with a trunk of books and a portable stove, completely isolated, writing ever more flamboyant and unread jeremiads against western civilization. In the 1880s, he experienced an extraordinary burst of creativity, until he suffered a mental collapse in 1889, aged 49, and never worked or even spoke again until his death in 1900.

In his 1882 book, The Gay Science, Nietzsche declared that the Christian God was dead. But western civilization was still clinging to Christian values like goodness, charity, humility, and even truth. It was time to be brave and face reality. The death of God had unmoored us from all these tired old values. Free thinkers should smash them up (one of his books is subtitled ‘how to philosophize with a hammer’) and create new values, new ways of being.

In place of Christianity, which he despised, Nietzsche preached a spiritual biology. Humans are animals, and should embrace our animality. We should follow the wisdom of the body, and seek a life of vitality, strength and self-actualization. ‘Become who you are’, Nietzsche tells us. He suggests we should become the artists of ourselves, replacing the Christian ideal of ‘goodness’ with an aesthetic ideal of beauty and intense living.

But this new philosophy of self-actualization is not available to everyone, only to the biological elite. Nature is ruthlessly unequal. On the one hand, there is the natural aristocracy, the Alphas, the ‘higher men’, the ‘oligarchs of the spirit’. Far in the distant future, perhaps there is even the ubermensch, the superbeing, who might yet evolve. And then there are the lesser humans, the untermenschen, the weak, the cripples, the mediocre masses.

Christianity and social democracy are massive frauds, conspiracies against nature’s Alphas. They are ‘slave moralities’ — somehow, the weak managed to fool the strong into obeying values like ‘goodness’, ‘humility’, ‘charity’, ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, and into believing these values are God-given. In fact, they are invented as a sly trick to shackle the strong and empower the weak, who pretend to be humble but are actually driven by resentment and the lust for power. Judeo-Christianity and liberal democracy are victim cultures. We shouldn’t glorify the oppressed and the downtrodden, we should glorify the strong and the vital.

Instead of meekness, the ‘higher men’ should embrace self-assertion. Instead of asceticism, they should embrace the body and its desires. Instead of ‘Thou Shalt’, the higher man says ‘I will!’ Instead of equality, charity, democracy and all that sickly Victorian bunk, nature’s Alphas should do what they want. They are beyond good and evil. It is time for the ‘blond beasts’ to throw off the shackles of Christian civilization and go on the rampage again:

They enjoy freedom from all social control, they feel that in the wilderness they can give vent with impunity to that tension which is produced by enclosure and imprisonment in the peace of society, they revert to the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters, who perhaps come from a ghostly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture, with bravado and a moral equanimity, as though merely some wild student’s prank had been played, perfectly convinced that the poets have now an ample theme to sing and celebrate. [The Genealogy of Morals, 1887]

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), he unfurls his religious vision of the coming ubermensch, or Superman:

Behold, I bring you the Superman! The Superman is the meaning of the earth…. Man is something that shall be overcome.

Although he never refers to the ubermensch again, he often returns to the idea of an aristocratic caste of superior humans, ‘higher men’, who should follow their own laws and treat the masses with disdain. Society should be ordered not according to ‘universal human rights’, but for the emergence of an elite of superior humans.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he writes:

a good and healthy aristocracy…has no misgivings in condoning the sacrifice of a vast number of people who must for its sake be oppressed and diminished into incomplete people, slaves, tools…society cannot exist for its own sake, but rather only as a foundation and scaffolding to enable a select kind of creature to ascend to its higher task.

The creation of higher beings is a cultural, political and biological project. It requires the total destruction of Christian values like charity and belief in the equal sacredness of individual life and its replacement with a sort of spiritual Darwinism. He writes in The Will To Power (1901):

All ‘souls’ become equal before God: but this is precisely the most dangerous of evaluations! if one regards individuals as equal…one encourages a way of life that leads to the ruin of the species: Christianity is the counter-principle to the principle of selection…The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish: but it was precisely to them that Christianity turned as a conserving force…What is ‘virtue’ and ‘charity’ in Christianity if not just this mutual preservation, this solidarity of the weak, this hampering of selection?

Christian pity or compassion is a vice in his biological morality. In The Will To Power, again, he declares:

precisely pity I recognized as more dangerous than any vice…One has to respect fatality — that fatality that says to the weak: perish!

He agreed with the Reverend Malthus that charity and philanthropy do more harm than good. We should follow nature’s law:

The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy… And one shall help them to do so. [The Antichrist, 1895]

The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living…ascending life…demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life [Twilight of the Idols, 1889]

Although Nietzsche often sounds libertarian and dismissive of politics, on other occasions he suggests the state should dedicate itself to ‘the breeding and education of higher men’. He writes in Schopenhauer as Educator (1875): ‘Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men — this and nothing else is its task’ . There should evolve a ‘party of life’, which will ‘embrace the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless extermination of all degenerate and parasitic elements’ [Ecce Homo, 1908]

The higher man, he writes, must ‘gain that tremendous energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and, on the other hand, the annihilation of millions of failures’ [Will to Power]. He writes:

Many too many live and they hang on their branches far too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree! I wish preachers of speedy death would come! [Thus Spake Zarathustra]

Reading the quotes above, you may wonder how Nietzsche ever became so popular, and why he is still so fashionable among academic philosophers and the general reading public. How is he not banned or at least criticized as a proto-fascist preacher of mass murder?

Nietzsche is a writer of great rhetorical skill, insight, humour and charm, and he is never boring. He never sticks to one point for long, and he will usually contradict himself within a page. So there are many Nietzsches, and I have quoted him at his most brutal. Personally, I think he is a very dangerous philosopher, but he is also one of the philosophers whose work has meant most to me, especially in his first work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

His defenders today say that his far-right and fascist devotees misunderstood him. But, as you can see from the quotes above, it is not hard to read him as preaching a spiritual elitism and murderous contempt for those deemed ‘unfit’. And that’s precisely how intellectuals interpreted him in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Nietzsche and the New Age

Nietzsche prophesied his works would only become known 20 years after their publication. This turned out to be true. From around 1900, his books were discovered and translated, and they went off like dynamite in European intellectual culture. The playwright George Bernard Shaw declared in 1896: ‘Before long, you must be prepared to talk about Nietzsche or retire from society.’ The American reactionary columnist HL Mencken announced in 1904 that Nietzsche was ‘the prophet and embodiment of those habits of thought which are dominant among the thinking men of the world today’.

Why did his thinking capture the zeitgeist? It was an important part of what has been called the ‘mystical revival’ of the 1880s-1920s (see Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment, 2007). The 1860s-1870s had been the hey-day of Darwinism, scientific naturalism and materialism. But by the 1880s, the public mood had shifted. Where was meaning and purpose in the materialist universe? What about the mind, the soul, mystical experiences, life after death?

In the last quarter of the 19th century, various ‘spiritual’ organisations and movements were founded — Theosophy was founded in 1875, the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1887. These organisations attempted to forge a path between Christian fundamentalism and the fundamentalism of scientific materialism, and instead to create an ‘occult science’ or ‘scientific spirituality’. Like Nietzsche, these movements preached self-actualization and the realization of your highest self, and their members were enthused by the prospect of a New Age and the coming of a new species of superhuman.

The intellectual and artistic culture of the 1880s-1920s was remarkably heterodox. New ideas and fads mingled together: occultism, psychical research, socialism, vegetarianism, anti-vax or anti-vivisection activism, ‘simple living’, arts and crafts, ‘life worship’, fascism, feminism, homosexuality, eugenics, ecology and the Nietzschean cult of the superman, all could jostle together and fuse in surprising ways. The playwright George Bernard Shaw summed up the eclecticism of the time: ‘I have attended a Fabian meeting, gone on to hear the end of a Psychical Research one, and finished by sleeping in a haunted house with a committee of ghost hunters.”

You can see this heterodox mingling of ideas in the pages of The New Age, a progressive journal edited by A.R Orage from 1907 to 1922, before Orage left to become a disciple of Gurdjieff. In the 1890s, Orage was a young spiritual seeker in Yorkshire. One day in a Leeds bookstore, he met another young seeker — Holbrook Jackson — who handed him a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Orage read it all night and came back the next day with eyes gleaming.

Orage and Jackson set up an ideas society in Leeds, then moved to London and bought The New Age in 1907, turning it into the most exciting avant garde journal of its day. In its pages could be found essays on everything from scientific utopianism to occultism, from Fabianism to psychical research. But above all, Orage turned The New Age into a vehicle for preaching Nietzsche’s cult of the superbeing. In his first edition, he wrote:

Believing that the daring object and purpose of the universal will of life is the creation of a race of supremely and progressively intelligent beings, the NEW AGE will devote itself to the serious endeavour to co-operate with the purposes of life…

One finds a similar dream of the coming of superbeings throughout the mystical revival of the 1880s-1920s. It’s there in Theosophy, in the Golden Dawn, in the Society for Psychical Research. One finds it in the educational ideas of Maria Montessori, who preached the coming of the New Child, ‘a superior being, giving promise of a New Humanity, with powers of mind and spirit hitherto unsuspected’. It’s there in the Bolshevik idea of Homo Sovieticus, and in the fascist idea of the New Man. It eventually filtered down into popular culture, helping to inspire the idea of ‘superheroes’, who first appeared in newspaper cartoons in the late 1930s.

With the new cult of the superbeing came a sense of impatience with the average masses, and a contempt and panic regarding those deemed ‘unfit’, i.e the mentally or physically disabled. There seemed to be more and more of them. Instead of ascending into superbeings, there was the danger that humanity would degenerate into morons and imbeciles. Aldous Huxley wrote in 1934:

If conditions remain what they are now, and if the present tendency continues unchecked, we may look forward in a century or two to a time when a quarter of the population of these islands will consist of half-wits. What a curiously squalid and humiliating conclusion to English history!

And so Nietzsche’s dream of the superbeing often fused with Galton’s eugenics. Historian Dan Stone, author of Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, points out that early writers on Nietzsche ‘took for granted the fact that Nietzsche and eugenics were synonymous’. In 1909, a German eugenicist called Maximilian Mugge wrote in The Eugenics Review:

To Sir Francis Galton belongs the honour of founding the Science of Eugenics. To Friedrich Nietzsche belongs the honour of founding the Religion of Eugenics…. Both aim at a Superman…an ideal of a race of supermen, as superior to the present mankind…as man is superior to the worm.

Nietzsche had preached the need for a new post-Christian ethic — pitiless, brutal, hard — which would sweep away Christian and Victorian notions of charity, philanthropy and care for the weak. A similar pitilessness is apparent in Nietzsche’s Modernist followers, like DH Lawrence. His novels celebrate Life Worship, vitality and self-actualization. But this is only possible for the elite, the aristocrats of the spirit. In his 1923 novel Kangaroo, Lawrence writes: ‘The mass of mankind is soulless…Most people are dead, and scurrying and talking in the sleep of death.’

The earth was so crowded with mediocre people, perhaps it would be better if there was a violent clearing out. In his 1920 novel Women in Love, Ursula rails against ‘these ugly, meaningless people…She would have liked them all to be annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her.’ Her lover agrees: ‘Not many people are anything at all…It would be much better if they were just wiped out.’

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence had a particular distaste for the weak, sick and helpless (even though both were quite sickly themselves). Victorian humanitarianism was a mistake — the weak should be put out of their misery. In a letter of 1908, Lawrence wrote:

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.

Such sentiments were common among Nietzsche’s apostles. George Bernard Shaw, who preached the coming of the ubermensch in works like Man and Superman, also called for the culling of the weak and unfit. In a lecture to the Eugenics Society in 1910, he said:

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill…A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.

A.R Orage, in The New Age, likewise insisted on the necessity of eugenics to prepare for the coming of the ubermensch, writing: ‘the Superman, if he is to appear at all, must be willed — in plain English, must be bred’. This involves ‘the much more practical problem of providing conditions for the multiplication of the desirable and the extinction of the undesirable’.

We’ve seen in this chapter how Nietzsche’s dream of the superbeing fused with eugenics in the ‘mystical revival’ of the 1890s-1920s. In the next chapter we will focus on one influential organisation in the ‘mystical revival’ — the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and explore how its members promoted an occult form of eugenics.