Visionaries, dreamers, and autocrats have long dreamt of reshaping humanity to their preferred model. In the last century, eugenics was enthusiastically embraced among Anglo-Saxon elites, then by Communist Russia as a means of creating a hyper-selfless Homo Sovieticus, and, most infamously, Nazi Germany’s drive to create a “master race” via racial-hygiene laws and the extermination of people with disabilities and other “lives unworthy of life.”
Eugenics, a policy that seeks to “improve” humanity, dismisses the importance of bestowing a sense of worth and dignity to all individuals in the quest of breeding only “the finest”. Today, our expanding knowledge of genes and demographics has created eugenic possibilities far beyond those of the last century. Once rejected largely due to Nazi atrocities, eugenics is being embraced by both the Left and Right. Yet its beating heart lies not in politics, but in tech-driven approaches that reflect, as New York Marxist academic David Harvey called it, “a fetishism of technology” that transcends conventional politics.
In a way that past eugenicists could only dream, technology now opens the possibilities of engineering something far more radical than sterilizing the weak and giving bonuses to those with the right genetic inheritance. Instead, the looming prospect of an entire biological transformation emerges. For half a century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to better specs before conception, as they look to edit genes to produce “superior” offspring.
New technology — from “gene editing” to in-vitro birthing and cloning — provides new ways to create “the better human.” One big difference from 20th-century eugenics is that today’s effort is a largely private matter, at least until now, shaped not by the state, but the technocratic elite. What’s emerging is a modern version of John Calvin’s Protestant “Elect,” based not on faithfulness but measurements of IQ and ability. This new dominant class, as Daniel Bell predicted some 50 years ago, can employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “ordering the mass society.”
Promoted by technologists, these efforts tend to be intrinsically “dehumanizing,” as the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned. Eugenic technology, Sacks argued, operates “in detachment, driven by analysis, the breaking down wholes into constituent parts.” In this emerging world, we see the expansion of technology imposed on masses that have become less intelligent not despite but because of ever greater exposure to social media and increasingly, to artificial intelligence.
Don’t worry, at least that’s what those who benefit the most from this shift suggest. Their answers boil down to this: let us lead you into the perfectly honed future. Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s influential Softbank venture fund, recently suggested that artificial intelligence would lay the foundation for the creation of the “superhuman.” Not satisfied with making life better, Son now “really wanted to become an architect, to design the future of humanity,” as the Financial Times reported.
Politically, the current neo-eugenics movement spans the gamut. Ray Kurzweil, longtime head of engineering at the painfully progressive Google, is perhaps the best-known advocate of creating a “posthuman” future, with human behavior and attitudes shaped by the interface with machine technology. Sam Altman, generally a supporter of Democrats, wants AI bots to serve as “super assistant” for every dimension of life, supplanting the roles once played by parents, friends, teachers, ministers and neighbors. Mark Zuckerberg, a long-time donor to Democrats, thinks human contact can be supplanted by properly customized bots in his Metaverse.
Similar thoughts about automating humanity also come from Trump-leaning oligarchs like Elon Musk, who uses genetic screening before impregnating women who meet his criteria in order to create his “kid’s legion” of superior babies. Peter Thiel, an influential figure on the so-called Tech Right, warns darkly of “a deadly race between politics and technology,” with technology deemed superior to democracy. Thiel embraces the notion that cognitively gifted represent the future of society, and is a key investor in Orchid, a gene-editing IVF firm. He’s also, like Kurzweil, an enthusiastic backer of transhumanism.
The techno-elite’s vision constitutes a call for a scientifically ordered society detached from marriage, family, religion, and the broad sense of community. In its most extreme form, the eugenicists embrace “transhumanism” like Thiel — searching for extended mortality through technology. Today, we witness Silicon Valley’s obsession with efforts to extend life through the use of drugs, technology, and rigorous exercise, a kind of techno-Spartacism lacking that culture’s strong sense of communal obligation and honor. But this is just the beginning. “The rise to power of net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal,” writes Jaron Lanier.
Potentially the most radical and far-reaching of the emerging creeds, transhumanism offers a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality. The new tech religion treats mortality not as something to be transcended through moral actions, but as a “bug” to be corrected by technology. The aim is to, in the words of tech engineer Anthony Levandowski, “develop and promote the realization of a godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”
“Transhumanism offers a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality.”
Ultimately, like their early 20th-century predecessors, the new eugenicists have little time for traditional religions, with their focus on the essential equality of people and acts of charity and concern for the less fortunate. They want to abandon the teachings that have underpinned much democratic and egalitarian thinking in the West. They’re trying to make a religion of their own.
In contrast, transhumanists reject Judeo-Christian egalitarianism. Yuval Noah Harari sees instead a future where “a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans” gain control of society and use genetic engineering to cement the superior status of their offspring. The new eugenicists are not going to “wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic,” he notes. Instead, bioengineers will rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs. He concludes: “They will thereby create new godlings, who might be different from us Sapiens as we are different from Homo Erectus.”
Some of the new eugenicists have a disturbing influence on the current Administration. Curtis Yarvin, a far-Right gadfly with ties to Vice President JD Vance, embraces the so-called Dark Enlightenment and favors ending democracy and imposing a tech-led monarchy. Like eugenicists of the last century, he has advocated for measures to keep down those deemed inferior. He seems also to have a soft spot for slavery, suggesting black people might have been better off without abolition.
Such thinking undermines the MAGA agenda, which draws its strength from the multiracial working and lower middle class. Some Right-wing nativists, like Steve Sailer, even think Republicans should ignore non-whites, even as they become an ever larger part of the electorate. These views get validation from Razib Khan, a science popularizer with links to Right-wing eugenicons like Sailer and Ron Unz. He wants race science to inform a reshaping of society, for example suggesting men “import” more East Asian women to marry the often not appealing — at least to Western women — nerdish types.
Yet it would be misleading to see the new eugenics drive as exclusively a phenomenon of the Right. In the last century, many on the progressive Left openly embraced eugenics, including leading lights like Margaret Sanger and Jane Addams. For them, the need was to curb the breeding of inferiors, largely Eastern and Southern Europeans, while encouraging childbirth among the superior, enlightened people, mostly Anglo-Saxons like themselves.
This notion of “salvation by science” also appealed to some on the European Left. The famed Swedish sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, backed the sterilizations that were part of government policy till the mid-Seventies. This reflected the notion that socialism required a population that culls the genetically flawed. In 1941, Alva Myrdal wrote in Nation and Family that “In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gained momentum. Generous social reforms may facilitate home-making and more childbearing than before among the groups of less desirable as well as more desirable parents”.
A similar stance was advocated by The Webbs, the British inventors of Fabian socialism, who considered a policy of encouraging “the healthy” to have more offspring while blocking, as Sidney Webb put it, the “breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized ‘residuum’ unfit for social life.”
The conception of those “unfit” for social life resonates with some among the anti-MAGA crowd because it reflects the Democrats’ dependence on educated professionals. Elon Musk may be an object of hate for Leftists, but a defense of elite institutions is now mandatory on the Left, which demand protection from the populist masses as the repository of superior thinking. From all this, notes historian Michael Lind, comes the notion, popular on the Left, that the red states are “filled with inbred, knuckle-dragging, white nationalist Neanderthals plotting to overthrow democracy.”
Whether on the Right or Left, the core belief of all eugenicists lies in the assumption that we should shape and cull the human herd to fit a particular vision. This idea is gaining influence, particularly from the wealthiest and most powerful forces of our age. Threatened are our longstanding notions of morality, family, and self-governance critical to democracy and our flourishing as humans.
