I found the Huxley piece to be a much easier and more enjoyable read than I expected. He was definitely a fine writer and was adept at framing his arguments in a persuasive light. But despite his apparent efforts to find reconciliation and common ground with those who might disagree, even the section we read seems to me to be more radical than anything we’ve read from Darwin. Huxley is not just calling out western religious institutions; nor is he even calling out Christianity. Instead, he’s reaching back even further and saying that the even the non-Christian philosophical, ethical, and intellectual underpinnings of western civilization are wrong.
But while I get the sense that Huxley was not above casting a wolf’s argument in a sheep’s words, I do get the sense that he himself had genuine conflicts over the meaning of evolution. This speaks to what a jolt this entire argument must have been to all those involved and to the society around them. I find myself having to remind myself of that often during these readings.
I do wonder if Darwin, Huxley, and their supporters during this period ever gave thought the possible extinction of humanity. If the evolution of humanity was purely a natural phenomenon, then humanity would be subject to the same possibility of decline, decay, and extinction as every other species. Surely our higher intelligence and consciousness would make this process more difficult. But if evolution is nothing more than a law of nature (as opposed to a divinely inspired natural process), then the possibility of extinction can only be lowered, not eliminated. Did Darwin or Huxley consider this? Did it trouble them?
And I still find their rationalization of human sympathy for the disabled and ‘less fit’ to be unsatisfactory. Huxley proposes an “evolution of ethics” in that as we evolve and as society evolves, so too our ethics evolve. As he puts it
“Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically best.”
But evolution means not only inter-species competition, but also intra-species competition. So regardless of whether different races of humans constitute different species, if two sub-species of humans (i.e. two different civilizations) exist simultaneously at different positions of this “ethical process”, they are then subject to two different meanings of “survival of the fittest”. The civilization that is further along in the ethical process would consist, according to Huxley, of those who are “ethically best”, but not necessarily those who are “fittest” for the existing environmental conditions. The other civilization will contain only those members who are fittest for the existing environment, since they have no use as yet for concern over who is ethically best. This would seem to give the latter civilization an advantage in a head to head struggle for survival. If so, while this may not lead to extinction, it would have to be considered at least as a regression. Did Darwin and Huxley consider regression possible (or inevitable) in humans?
