Fabians and Faith
Fabian Society founder Edward Pease wrote in The History of The Fabian Society,
- It must be added that though the tradition that Socialism excludes the established creeds was overthrown by the Fabians ..., the Fabian leaders did not break the tradition in their own practice ..., no leading Fabian found a refuge for his soul in the temples of any established denomination.... The work that came to our hands in our first two decades was materialistic work ... the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as it lost Mrs. [Annie] Besant.95
Pease’s comment about losing Besant highlights her importance to members of the Fabian Society. G. Bernard Shaw nominated Annie Besant to the Fabian Society very shortly after its creation.96 Pease described Besant “as an advocate of Atheism and Malthusianism” and as one of seven authors of the "Fabian Essays” but Besant did not remain materialistic.
Shaw and Annie Besant were among the leading early members of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Blavatsky became known as the mother of the New Age movement.97 Theosophy, derived from ancient Hindu, Tibetan, and Egyptian sources, provided one of the earliest introductions of spiritual evolution. Theosophists envision the universe as composed of a series of discrete yet continuous dimensions, or "planes of nature," and individuals are perfected as they ascend the planes, a concept that appears to be essentially identical to the world divisions found in Hinduism.98 Besant helped transform Blavatsky’s second book, The Secret Doctrine, into an orthodoxy. She left the Fabian Society as her interest in Theosophy deepened and she later became International President of the Theosophical Society.99
In 1927, Besant established the Happy Valley Foundation in Ojai, California.100 Fabian Socialist Sir Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and younger brother of Julian Huxley, served as a trustee of Happy Valley School for fifteen years and was instrumental in developing the school’s educational philosophy.101 By the 1970s, as occult groups abandoned Theosophical ideas for older or newer teachings, the New Age movement stepped in and adopted Theosophy wholesale.
The Legacy of Besant’s Theosophy to American K-12 Education
One of Besant’s followers, Alice Bailey, after rising to leadership in Besant’s organization, broke away to author the Tibetan Books dictated by her own spiritual master identified as the Tibetan Djwhal Khul. Bailey established her own Arcane School and established the Lucifer Publishing Company, later renamed Lucis Trust.102, 103
Dr. Robert Muller, UN Under Secretary General for 40 years — known as the “father of global education” — created a “World Core Curriculum.”104, 105 The Preface of the curriculum manual states, “The underlying philosophy upon which The Robert Muller School is based will be found in the teachings set forth in the books of Alice A. Bailey by the Tibetan teacher, Djwhal Khul (published by Lucis Publishing Company ...).106 The first Robert Muller school was started in Arlington, Texas in 1979.107
Radio and television executive John Fetzer, best known as owner of the Detroit Tigers and founder of the Fetzer Institute, studied Alice Bailey’s writings and practiced Theosophy.108 The Fetzer Institute provided a grant to Eileen Rockefeller Growold (David Rockefeller’s daughter) to establish the Collaborative for Advancement of Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) — now known as the Collaborative for Academic, Social, Emotional Learning. CASEL is the premiere non-governmental organization that lobbies for federal funding to support the social-emotional learning (SEL) agenda in public schools.109, 110 Linda Darling Hammond, a long-time member of CASEL’s board of directors, was the education leader on Obama’s and Biden’s transition team.
Julian Huxley’s Religion without Revelation
British Fabian and zoologist Julian Huxley had no affiliation with Christianity or any other religion. He viewed all religions as evolutionary products of human culture and thinking, and suggested how to develop the role and function of religion in harmony with modern knowledge and needs. Concern that modern science could be misused for destructive purposes was part of the motivation for Huxley to create a bridge between rational science and spiritual life. Huxley called it “evolutionary humanism” (later called transhumanism) and even spoke of “evolutionary humanism” as a “developed religion.”111 In his book Religion Without Revelation, Huxley wrote,
- The moment does indeed seem to be approaching when man can and should begin constructing a new common outlook, a new habitation for his spirit, new from the foundations up, on the basis of a scientific humanism. (p. 9) ... a new orientation of religious thought will be needful. Meanwhile the one main step that can be taken now, in the light of the present development of thought and knowledge, I have already laboured: it is the reform of theology on the three-fold basis of agnosticism, of evolutionary natural science, and of psychology. (emphasis added) (p. 58)112
Eugenics: A Pseudo-Science Disguised As Compassionate Religion
Evolutionary theories were particularly important to socialists because they could be interpreted to give the impression that everything was changing, that nothing was fixed or absolute, and human progress toward perfection was achievable.113 In a chapter titled “Re-definition of Progress” in New Bottles for New Wine, Julian Huxley wrote the following,
- ... the patient labours of the students of evolution, whether stellar evolution, biological evolution or social evolution, have revealed that progress is not myth but science ... progress as a scientific doctrine.... The scientific doctrine of progress is destined to ... inevitably become one of the cornerstones of man’s theology, or whatever may be the future substitute for theology, and the most important external support for human ethics. There has not yet been time to work it out in detail.... (emphasis added) (p. 21)
As an apostle of evolutionary spirituality, Huxley believed humans have the potential to evolve into superbeings, called the New Man or the transhuman.114 This evolutionary process is scientifically directed by positive and negative eugenics.
Eugenics is a pseudo-science/religion launched by Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) in 1883 that promotes artificial selection of people to advance the evolution of humans. Scientists would be the priests of this new religion, measuring and quantifying the value of humans through psychometric and biometric tests to sort the superior from the inferior. These scientist-priests would guide human evolution by encouraging the ‘fittest’ to breed more and with each other (positive eugenics) and discouraging those ‘unfit’ from breeding at all (negative eugenics) through voluntary or involuntary sterilization, segregation, racial miscegenation laws and, at its most extreme, euthanasia, or mass murder. The reality, however, is that prominent members of the Fabian Society promoted eugenics because they believed Britons were a superior race of people.
Fabian Society co-founder Havelock Ellis put it this way, “The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born.”115 Today, our knowledge of the human genome and our growing capacity to manipulate it present unparalleled opportunities to see to it that “undesirables” of any sort shall not be born. Havelock’s interest in transgender psychology suggests that the crude forced sterilization of the early 20th century has morphed into today’s voluntary transition surgeries that result in sterilization and make it all the more tempting to view as a scientific act of “radical sympathy.”116 But the cloak of radical sympathy is ripped away by the flagrant racism in the writings of early British Fabians.
In the October 1927 Vanity Fair article titled “A Note on Eugenics, The Battle Between Inferior and Superior People for the Possession of the Earth,” Aldous Huxley lays bare the radical truth of the eugenics movement.117 Huxley made his case for creating, “a society compelled by law to breed more and more exclusively from its most gifted and socially most successful members.”118 He elaborated,
- In societies like our own the inferior are in a very strong position because they are technically trained.... When the masses of the coloured races are as well trained and highly industrialized as our own, we shall have little or nothing on our side to outweigh their numbers.... The white races will be at the mercy of the coloured races and the superior whites will be at the mercy of their white inferiors.... The reaction to manifest deterioration will be a policy of eugenics.... whatever means of racial improvement are adapted, I take it that the criterion of human excellence and with it the eugenic goal will remain more or less the same.
Aldous Huxley’s distain for people of color and “white inferiors” is evident in his concern that educating them puts them in a “very strong position” and thus his recommendation for a policy of eugenics to make “racial improvement.”
Huxley’s article was not just an expression of his personal views. Contempt for ordinary people and outright racism were two of the defining creeds of British Socialism. The Lord Douglas Jay, Economic Secretary to the Treasury wrote in The Socialist Case, “... in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.”119
Aldous Huxley’s mentor, Fabian Society co-founder H.G. Wells, said the quiet part out loud when he wrote:
- We cannot go on making power for you to spend upon international conflict.... You must organize the Peace of the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.120
In a June 1907 article published in The Free Thinker, Shaw is quoted as saying,
- The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of Man: in other terms of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth. If ... the Superman is to come, he must be born of Woman by Man’s intentional and well-considered contrivance.... I do not mean natural selection as popularized by Charles Darwin ... on the contrary.121
The Free Thinker writer suggested that Shaw was talking “amazing nonsense” and had it not been for zoologist Julian Huxley, also a Fabian Society founder, the populace would hardly have known that Darwin existed. Julian Huxley’s Darwinian ideas would become international education policy when Huxley became the first president of UNESCO, the education body that the NEA worked to establish in the U.N.
Fabian Eugenics as International Education Policy
Julian Huxley immediately wrote a manifesto imagining UNESCO as the vehicle to spread the gospel of scientific planning, birth control and eugenics.122 Actually, Julian Huxley was more ruthless than his brother in describing how the healthcare system should be used for negative eugenics. Writing for the Eugenics Review in 1936, Julian Huxley proposed,
- We must plan our eugenic policy along some such lines as the following: ... The upper economic classes are presumably slightly better endowed with ability to succeed in our social system — yet are not reproducing fast enough to replace themselves.... We must therefore try to remedy this state of affairs by pious exhortation and appeals to patriotism, or by the more tangible methods of family allowance, cheaper education, or income-tax rebates for children [positive eugenics]. The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically ... must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief [welfare] should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world; and so on [negative eugenics]. That is to say, much of our eugenic programme will be curative and remedial merely, instead of preventive and constructive.123
The UNESCO plan Huxley put in place in 1946 continues to this day with UNESCO partnering with organizations such as the World Health Organization, SIECUS, and Planned Parenthood.124 Selective administration of health care as recommended by Julian Huxley is a hallmark of Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel’s proposal for healthcare rationing. His vision is depicted in the Wall Street Journal as “The Reaper Curve.”125 Since 2019, Emanuel has been a Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization.126
The Fabians’ deceptive tactics symbolized by the wolf in sheep’s clothing protects their eugenics agenda with the illusion of altruism. Many reforms admired by today’s leftists were not born of a desire to improve the lot of the poor, but to guarantee Briton’s survival as one of the globe’s foremost races.127 For example, Access to Reproductive Technology (ART) is limited to candidates with certain financial qualifications.128 British writer and broadcaster and contributing editor to The Spectator, Dennis Sewell wrote,
- Beneath their seemingly compassionate rhetoric ... the founders of the Fabian Society were snobbish, elitist and harboured a savage contempt for the poorest of the poor .... For the Fabians, eugenics was not merely some eccentric hobby or sideline, but central to their social thinking.... As late as 1946 [economist and philosopher Lord John Maynard] Keynes was still describing eugenics as ‘the most important and significant branch of sociology.129
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