Evolution and Ethics: T.H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics with New Essays on Its Victorian and Sociobiological Context

by James G. Paradis, George Christopher Williams

Overview

T. H. Huxley (1825-1895) was not only an active protagonist in the religious and scientific upheaval that followed the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution but also a harbinger of the sociobiological debates about the implications of evolution that are now going on. His seminal lecture Evolution and Ethics, reprinted here with its introductory Prolegomena, argues that the human psyche is at war with itself, that humans are alienated in a cosmos that has no special reference to their needs, and that moral societies are of necessity in conflict with the natural conditions of their existence. Seen in the light of current understanding of the mechanisms of evolution, these claims remain as controversial today as they were when Huxley proposed them. In this volume George Williams, one of the best-known evolutionary biologists of our time, asserts that recent biological ideas and data justify a more extreme condemnation of the "cosmic process" than Huxley advocated and more extreme denial that the forces that got us here are capable of maintaining a viable world. James Paradis, an expert in Victorian studies, has written an introduction that sets the celebrated lecture in the context of cultural history, revealing it to be an impressive synthesis of Victorian thinking, as well as a challenge to eighteenth-century assumptions about the harmony of of nature. With Huxley's lecture as a focal point, the three parts of this book unite philosophy and science in a shared quest that recalls their common origins as systems of knowledge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691633138
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1002
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.80(d)

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Evolution & Ethics

T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics with New Essays on Its Victorian and Sociobiological Context

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By James G. Paradis, George Christopher Williams

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08535-7

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CHAPTER 1

Evolution and Ethics in Its Victorian Context

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JAMES PARADIS

In the summer of 1892, three years before his death, an ailing T. H. Huxley wrote the celebrated lecture "Evolution and Ethics," which he delivered at Oxford University the afternoon of May 18, 1893. The lecture, together with the "Prolegomena," an introductory essay completed in June of 1894, set traditional humanistic values in direct conflict with the physical realities revealed by nineteenth-century science. The forces of nature, seen by Huxley in terms of powerful material and instinctual laws, were poised, he now argued, against civilization and the future of humanity.

Huxley built his two essays on a domestic foundation, using a wealth of autobiographical themes and images. The struggle against odds, the need for self-restraint, the summoning of courage to strip off the veil of nature and remove the garment of make-believe, all lifelong personal themes, were transformed in the manner of Montaigne into dimensions of the human condition. Willingly or not, we are all controversialists in a transitory universe:

The more we learn of the nature of things, the more evident is it that what we call rest is only unperceived activity; that seeming peace is silent but strenuous battle. In every part, at every moment, the state of the cosmos is the expression of a transitory adjustment of contending forces; a scene of strife, in which all the combatants fall in turn. (p. 49)

Here, in the depths of the aging Huxley's dynamism, lies a symbol of the Victorian age itself, like Huxley, tottering at the edge of the abyss its science had so irrevocably revealed. This sense of peril is reflected in the images of the colony that Huxley used in his two essays to characterize the polity, civilization, and England itself.

The prolific garden imagery of the "Prolegomena" had an origin in Huxley's recent occupation of a small house, Hodeslea, he had built for his retirement on the windswept chalk downs above the sea at Eastbourne, a fitting outpost for the author of "On a Piece of Chalk" (1868). Gardening had become, along with controversy, his occupation, leading him to cite Voltaire's Candide as his own — and civilized man's — proper spiritual mentor; "Cultivons notre jardin" (Huxley 1892, 564). The wall of civilization inscribing the artificial world that Huxley described in the "Prolegomena" had its physical analogue in his own garden wall; he wrote that out his study window beyond his garden he could see the "state of nature" to which all was destined eventually to return. These personal images gave Huxley's essays the intensity and clarity that moved Leslie Stephen at a meeting of the Huxley Memorial Committee to place Huxley among the greatest of English prose artists (Stephen 1895).

It is well to recall that Huxley wrote Evolution and Ethics at a time when it was not clear what role, if any, the forces of science had to play in the framing of social policy — a peculiarly modern ambiguity. As Burrow (1966), Young (1985), and Stocking (1987) have shown, writers like Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot had broadly integrated popular biology and contemporary anthropology with social argument, often through the vehicles of comparison and metaphor. At the same time, the natural sciences had undermined many traditional cultural assumptions concerning the natural order, causing politicians, clergy, and intellectuals alike to reexamine the sources of social, intellectual, and moral authority (Manier 1978; Moore 1979).

This search for authority was not merely academic. Voting suffrage, extended first to urban laborers and then to miners and farm laborers in the Second and Third Reform Bills of 1867 and 1884, had dramatically expanded the English electorate and redistributed political power. In addition, as Steadman Jones has demonstrated (1971), London in the 1880s and 1890s was a scene of cyclic economic depression attended by great poverty and social unrest. If the century had been "predominantly a history ... of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual," as William Gladstone observed soon after resigning his fourth premiership in March of 1893, that same emancipation, he added, was opening "a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers; certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subjected to its deteriorating influences" (Reid 1899, 2:732). This sense that new social forces had been unleased was felt throughout British society.

Huxley, Gladstone, and their aging contemporaries saw the social speculation of the time as competing for the hearts and minds of the emerging voters. A great variety of radical political movements had asserted themselves, each with its unique program and future: Henry Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation, General William Booth's Salvation Army, Fabian socialism, Henry George's Single Land Tax movement, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson and the Eugenics movement. Books published in the years leading up to Huxley's Evolution and Ethics included Arnold Toynbee's The Industrial Revolution (1884), the English edition of Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1892), the second edition of Galton's Hereditary Genius (1892), George's Progress and Poverty (1877–79), General Booth's In Darkest England (1890), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 1888 — 2000 (1888), and Spencer's Principles of Ethics (1892–93), not to mention William Gladstone's Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture (1890) — all works considering the values and measures that might secure the future of society. This bookish activism, avidly followed by Huxley, had its social counterpart in the atmosphere of conflict in London in the 1880s and 1890s, the years of economic instability that witnessed the 1886 Riot, Bloody Sunday (1887), and the Dock Strike (1889), as well as innumerable lesser social tremors and the vast political controversy over Irish Home Rule.

In the most important study to date of the social context of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, Michael Helf and has rightly argued that Huxley, struck by the radical political agitation of the 1880s and 1890s, had an overt political motivation for writing the two essays. Helfand, however, has constructed an elaborate texture of "hidden" intention that makes Huxley over into a repressive partisan of the status quo. Against formidable intellectual evidence to the contrary, Helfand is obliged to argue an externalist thesis that Huxley's "real" view of contemporary society was actually a "disguised" Spencerian laissez-faire dynamic of struggle for existence (Helfand 1977, 160–61). Huxley's motivation under this interpretation was to defend an entrenched middle class against the rising working classes and their anti-imperialist champions, Henry George and Alfred Wallace. This conspiratorial thesis of class conflict, aside from giving more political unity and credibility to Huxley's opponents than is perhaps justified, is too reductive for an individual of Huxley's experience and complexity.

To be sure, Huxley, formerly a middle-class administrator in London, was dismayed by the social volatility of contemporary London, which seemed to him to threaten the institutions that protected society from anarchy. A recognized reformer, Huxley was also a social realist who had spent innumerable hours on public commissions and institutional committees. As a practitioner familiar with the demands of social change, he saw social stability as the condition of social amelioration. Revolution in the cause of speculative political theory went against Huxley's most fundamental convictions and training. His opposition to groups of radicals, from anarchists and Salvation Army members to eugenicists, was a protest against the exotic Utopian character of their programs. His objections in earlier essays to the sweeping anti-Malthusianism of George's Progress and Poverty had been much more elaborately articulated in Toynbee's widely-known criticisms of George in The Industrial Revolution.

In an essay on Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, Huxley had once observed, "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals" (1893–94 2:229). The 1880s and 1890s furnished graphic evidence of this conceptual struggle, which Huxley took up by writing on social issues from his own professional and personal perspective. Given populist politics, given the power of the later industrial revolution, and given the intellectual and social implications of contemporary evolutionary theory, anthropology, and biblical criticism, how, Huxley asked, are we to affirm an ethical principle for human society? His answer was to reassert, in a series of essays culminating with Evolution and Ethics, a modified Malthusian argument based on the natural inequality between the forces of population and production.

Huxley wrote the two essays of Evolution and Ethics in imitation of Malthus for precisely the reasons that Malthus had written An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) — to refute, by reference to natural material and instinctual constraints, the romantic a priori arguments of the social idealists. Like many fin-de-siecle Victorians, Huxley feared that violent revolution might be at hand (Jones 1971, 290). In an introduction to the English translation of Théodore Rocquain's anticlerical history of the French Revolution, The Revolutionary Spirit, he had written:

The grave political and social problems which press for solution at the present day are the same as those which offered themselves a hundred years ago. Moreover, the a priori method of the Philosophes, who, ignoring the conditions of scientific method, settled the most difficult problems of practical politics by fine-drawn deductions from axiomatic assumptions about natural rights, is as much in favor at the end of the nineteenth, as it was in the latter half of the eighteenth century. (Huxley 1891, vii–viii)

But Huxley's reservations about radical political theory did not make him an advocate of social status quo or a partisan of Spencerian laissez-faire. Unlike Malthus, he had witnessed the material powers of the industrial revolution. If human society were governed by an evolutionary dynamic, that society's abilities to transform its conditions of existence might go far in neutralizing the formidable natural constraints on the individual. This theme of social transformation is the burden of Evolution and Ethics.

In education and human artifice, Huxley found two principles of transformation by which the so-called state of art supplanted the strictly evolutionary dynamic of the state of nature. The key to Huxley's political philosophy, if we may call it that, is education. Although this philosophy is not elaborated in the two essays of Evolution and Ethics, it is spelled out in detail in such essays as "A Liberal Education and Where to Find It" (1868), "The School Boards: What They Can Do, and What They May Do" (1870), "Universities: Actual and Ideal" (1874), and a dozen other essays on educational topics, collected in volume 3 of his Essays. Huxley wrote the classic nineteenth-century essays on science education, which he viewed as the means to transforming society, liberating individuals, and establishing a free market of merit and ideas — a theme that was to figure prominently in John Dewey's philosophy. This was for Huxley a profoundly autobiographical theme, reflecting upon his meteoric rise from Free Scholarship student at Charing Cross Hospital in 1842–1845 to president of the Royal Society from 1883–1885. Yet education, seen within the evolutionary dynamic, was also the social vehicle that transmitted human experience, the source of society's power to transform its surroundings (Noland 1964).

Huxley's Romanes Lecture and "Prolegomena," with all their political and autobiographical elements, were preeminently Huxley's final defense of Victorian naturalistic thought (Barton 1983). Anchored in eighteenth-century ethical categories derived from Malthus, Hume, and Hartley, the two essays invoked a Victorian anthropological perspective to argue that ethical behavior was part of a universal cultural dynamic that both depended upon physical and biological circumstances and sought to break free of them. In this dynamic, the biological and sociocultural implications of ethics were not easily reconciled. Physical nature, operating outside the compass of ethics, which was decidedly a human cultural artifice, could not furnish a norm for ethics. From the moralist's practical perspective, the cosmic background was not simply neutral, but embodied forces that effectively, although not intentionally, frustrated human ethical intent. It was antagonistic in the sense of tragedy, in which unknown forces within and without the individual bring forth chaos. The ethical individual was, therefore, knowingly or not, in revolt against the macrocosm. Human artifacts played a decisive role in this struggle, a role greatly magnified by the powers of the industrial revolution. With this reasoning, Huxley denied the romantic impulse to spiritualize the natural and pitted science and consciousness against nature and instinct. In these two major essays of his late career, Huxley achieved a plausible intellectual and social synthesis consistent with Victorian evolutionary, anthropological, and technological developments, a synthesis that explains his appeal and modernity as a Victorian man of letters.

Huxley and Eighteenth-Century Naturalistic Thought

In Evolution and Ethics, Huxley locates the historical origins of Victorian ethical naturalism in the diffuse speculative traditions of the previous century. Two of these traditions made natural process the a priori metaphor of morality (Lovejoy 1936, 289). The familiar literary neoclassicism of such figures as John Dry den, Joseph Addison and Henry Steele, and Alexander Pope, promoted as both social and aesthetic truth the old stoical injunction, live according to nature (p. 73). This aphorism's social validity is a matter to which Huxley's two essays continually return. A second, equally prominent, line of British ethical naturalism was established by the physicotheologians, who in the analogical tradition of the great natural philosophers John Ray, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, celebrated the fruits of natural inquiry as evidence of the great cosmic order of the Creator. Within this tradition, which continued unabated through William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) to Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), physical nature, duly schematized and interpreted, furnished a value-laden social norm that proclaimed the very moral codes of established religion (Gillispie 1951; Hankins 1985). As both neoclassical and physicotheological traditions thus vigorously appealed to physical nature as the standard of reason and morality, so, too, did they certify the existing social order, all of which led Basil Willey to characterize them as philosophies of "cosmic Toryism" (1940, 34–36, 55).

Developing somewhat in counterpoint to this eighteenth-century literary naturalism, however, was a third, equally bold trend of viewing human behavior from the normative perspective of populations. Assuming unity of kind in causes and effects, Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus all deliberately softened the distinctions between humans and brute animals in order to fix the individual on a material grid whose abstract terms would support a new kind of social analysis. Adam Smith, for example, argued in his Wealth of Nations (1776) that any "species" of animal, including humans, "multiplies in proportion to the means of [its] existence," child mortality being one of the key factors of social adjustment (1776, 1:97). Smith extrapolated the systematic consequences of group behavior in the notion of an economy — a closed, material, self-adjusting system. This material view of humankind was central to Malthus's study of population. In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus derived from the material circumstances of both animals and humans laws, based on populations, that identified certain forces irresistibly influencing individual behavior, including moral behavior. These forms of analysis, which derived norms of behavior from representative circumstances, established a new methodological naturalism that found its ultimate Victorian expression in the population statistics of the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet and the evolutionary speculation of Darwin (Ghiselin 1969, 49; Schweber 1977, 287–93; Ruse 1979. 145–46).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Evolution & Ethics by James G. Paradis, George Christopher Williams. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Evolution and Ethics in Its Victorian Context, pg. 1
• Evolution and Ethics, pg. 57
• A Sociobiological Expansion of Evolution and Ethics, pg. 179
• Appendix: The History of Evolution and Ethics, pg. 215
• Bibliography I: The Victorian Context, pg. 221
• Bibliography II: A Sociobiological Expansion, pg. 228
• Index, pg. 237