‘More evolved than you’: Evolutionary spirituality as a cultural frame for psychedelic experiences

Introduction

Evans begins by locating a long-standing cultural frame for psychedelics within what he calls "evolutionary spirituality": a family of ideas, emerging since the late nineteenth century, that treats human evolution as ongoing, improvable and in some versions spiritual. Rather than accepting Darwinian evolution as a value-neutral process in which most lineages go extinct, proponents of evolutionary spirituality often combine scientific language with spiritual claims, asserting that evolution can be guided toward higher forms of human life. Evans traces this lineage through a broad roster of movements and figures (from Spencer, Bergson and Theosophy to the human potential and transhumanist movements), and notes an important conceptual ingredient: a tendency to extend Lamarckian-style thinking to psychological and spiritual traits so that acquired states (including mystical or drug-induced states) are taken as markers or engines of evolutionary advance. This essay sets out to define that tradition and to identify five ethical and political tendencies that Evans regards as problematic within it: spiritual narcissism, contempt for those judged "less evolved," social Darwinism and Malthusianism, spiritual eugenics, and the propensity for illiberal medical‑spiritual utopias. He illustrates each tendency with historical and contemporary examples from writers, spiritual movements and some influential figures in psychedelic culture, before proposing responses and counter-examples to these tendencies. The piece is presented as a critical historical and philosophical essay rather than as an empirical study of public attitudes or clinical outcomes.