Huxley: Evolution's High Priest
By Adrian Desmond
Michael Joseph, 1997. 370 pp., $40 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/14473
Thomas Huxley was "Darwin's Bulldog", a brilliant scientist and fearless propagandist for Darwin's theory of evolution. Whereas Darwin, however, feared that evolution would undermine the authority of church and state, Huxley, as Adrian Desmond's first volume of his biography explained, was more combative. He challenged clerical power to clear the way for acceptance of the theory of evolution by the late 19th century.
Desmond's second volume picks up the story of the last two decades of Huxley's life, from 1870 to 1895. With evolution assured its place in science, and a politicised Darwinism its place in society, the capitalist and the working classes tussled over its meaning.
During these two decades, Huxley slipped from hero to villain in the eyes of the workers as his scientific and anti-clerical radicalism pulled up shy of the genie of political and social radicalism that Darwin's theory had helped to unleash.
The 1870s began with Huxley still crossing swords with the church, the "most socially powerful group of intellectuals in the land", as he sought and received endorsement from the state, persuading politicians that science, not religion, was essential to the nation's industrial and imperial future.
Under Huxley's urging, science became an arm of the state, not only in terms of fostering the greater exploitation of productive resources and cranking up the factories and other industrial hardware of capitalism, but also playing a major role in the ideological defence of the capitalist social order.
In 1886, during the Great Depression, Huxley was caught in a bus by a riot of hungry Londoners. This event reinforced his dislike of socialism, under which "the 'Have-nots', whether they lack land, or house, or money, or capacity, or morals, will have parted among themselves all the belongings of the 'Haves' — save the last two".
The old radical was now the new reactionary, the former enragé the new moraliser, the penny-a-lecture hero of the factory hands now the Right Honourable T.H. Huxley taking tea with Tory prime ministers and deploring Marxist revolution.
In his fall from proletarian grace, he discovered empire, jingoism and England's "civilising influence" in the colonies. He turned against his friend, the novelist George Eliot, for "her notorious antagonism to Christian practice with regard to marriage"; the courageous pioneer of reason and enlightenment now intoned that "Freethinking does not mean free love".
Having routed the priests with evolutionary theory, "clearing out their supernature and usurping their authority to speak on the origin and meaning of life", he now felt impelled to make "Nature" fill the gap in the struggle against socialist revolution. Socialists were questioning the "Malthusian core of Darwin's eternally struggling Nature", but Huxley defended competition and struggle to justify the natural inequality of people and the naturalness of capitalism.
Not that Huxley was a rabid deregulator and free marketeer. He believed that municipal gas and water socialism, a meritocracy to reward talent no matter from which class and a paternalist granting of career opportunities to women, despite their "biological limitations", would help to harmonise the interest of the "capitalist and the operative'; progress through competition, with a safety net of sorts for the casualties, would ensure the stability of capitalism.
No wonder the capitalist state now liked Huxley, who had made evolution respectable and serviceable.
Huxley's personal evolution parallels that of the theory. Both are tales of science smashing the intellectual and social power of superstition, and of expanding the potential to serve the needs of the labouring masses, only to fall under the hegemony of the ruling class and become a secular authority to bolster the power of that class and the diversion of the world's wealth to its own profits. But not without contest from those who were inspired by the best of Huxley's science and spirit, from his earlier years.
Desmond takes a scintillating story of "class, power and propaganda", and tells it with an elan which, however, often gets out of hand. His breathless, fast-paced narrative is like listening to someone talk non-stop at the top of their voice, or to a race-caller in the verbal frenzy of the last 100 metres down the straight at Moonee Valley.
Despite Desmond's lather of verbal over-arousal, and his "cine theory of narration", which assumes his readers have the attention span of a TV addict, his "contextual history of science" is truly exciting and utterly relevant.