We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species 9780520959569

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We Are Amphibians

We Are Amphibians Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species

R. S. Deese

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deese, R. S., 1964– author. We are amphibians : Julian and Aldous Huxley on the future of our species / R. S. Deese. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28152-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-95956-9 (ebook) 1. Huxley, Julian, 1887–1975. 2. Huxley, Aldous, 1894–1963. 3. Human evolution. 4. Human ecology. I. Title. GN281.D43 2015 599.93 8—dc23 2014013939 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 10

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For my school of siblings: Rupert, Mary Ann, and Frank

I would compare the present stage of evolving man to the geological moment, some three hundred million years ago, when our amphibian ancestors were just establishing themselves out of the world of water. —Julian Huxley, The Humanist Frame (1961)

Every human being is an amphibian—or, to be more accurate, every human being is five or six amphibians rolled into one. —Aldous Huxley, “The Education of an Amphibian” (1956)

Contents

List of Illustrations

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Introduction: “The Question of Questions for Mankind” 1. Late Victorians 2. Twilight of Utopias 3. Spiritual Biology 4. Ape and Essence 5. We Are Amphibians Epilogue: The Future of Our Species

1 22 56 86 108 136 177

Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

185 187 211 223

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Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Thomas Henry Huxley / 24 T. H. Huxley, Leonard Huxley, and Julian Huxley in 1895 / 26 Aldous Huxley as a boy / 27 Julian and Juliette Huxley as newlyweds / 33 Maria Nys Huxley / 34 Juliette Baillot Huxley at age thirty-four / 35 Julian Huxley at age thirty-nine / 47 Aldous and Maria Huxley at Boulder Dam, ca. 1938 / 113 Julian and Aldous at the San Diego Zoo, 1958 / 147 “Il faut cultiver notre oasis”: Earthrise, 1968 / 175

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Introduction “The Question of Questions for Mankind”

Yoga Berra was right when he quipped, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”1 In the broadest sense, this is a story about what the future used to be. Julian and Aldous Huxley were born during the reign of Queen Victoria, but each made his mark during the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. Born in 1887, Julian established his reputation as a biologist just prior to the First World War and later worked to advance the “modern synthesis” in evolutionary biology by integrating new discoveries from across the spectrum of the life sciences.2 As the first director-general of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and a cofounder of the World Wildlife Fund, Julian remained a tireless advocate for science education and wilderness preservation until his death in 1975. Seven years his junior, Aldous Huxley made his name in the 1920s as the most savage and erudite satirist of his generation, and his fifth novel, begun as a spoof of H. G. Wells, set the standard for every dystopian fable that has followed in its wake. After the publication of Brave New World in 1932, Aldous Huxley’s work increasingly defied categorization, knocking holes in the walls between science, religion, art, and mysticism. Facing the painful advance of oral cancer in the last years of his life, Aldous kept writing until the afternoon he died—a few hours after President Kennedy was assassinated—on November 22, 1963. Throughout their long careers, both brothers shared a passionate concern for the same fundamental question: What is the outlook for Homo 1

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sapiens, and for the complex web of life from which our species has evolved? Their grandfather, the Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, had identified this as the ultimate question. In 1863, he opened his first book on evolution, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, with the following declaration: “The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other— is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature. . . . Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature’s power over us; to what goal are we tending?”3 Due primarily to the exponential increase in both human population and the technological powers wielded by our species, “the question of questions for mankind” has become at once more urgent and more difficult to answer. In the year 2000, the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced a new term, “the Anthropocene,” to signify a fact that Julian and Aldous had both intuited during the first half of the twentieth century: the impact of human activity has become so vast in the industrial age that it signals the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the earth.4 In novels such as Brave New World and Ape and Essence, Aldous Huxley had explored future scenarios in which what we think of as “nature” would be completely transformed by the promethean power of our technologies. Julian Huxley, whose early essays and fiction on the potential of applied biology provided some of the inspiration for Brave New World, reached very similar conclusions about the power of humans to transform life on earth. While teaching biology at King’s College London in the mid1920s, Julian had imagined the possibilities of engineering new life forms, and the interaction between human technologies and biological evolution sustained his attention throughout his career. In a 1957 essay entitled “Transhumanism,” Julian declared that our species “is, in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth.”5 In addition to their early sense of our growing impact on this planet, Julian and Aldous Huxley were also among the first public intellectuals to herald the potential of new technologies to change humanity itself. In 1921, more than a decade before he published Brave New World, Aldous sketched a brief description in his first novel, Crome Yellow, of a future world in which babies would be hatched in “vast state incubators” so that the “family system will disappear.”6 In 1926, Julian presented his own take on the future convergence of biology and engineering in a fantastic tale published in the Yale Review entitled “The Tissue Culture King.” Soon reprinted in the pioneering pulp science fiction

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magazine Amazing Stories, Julian’s narrative introduced readers to a wide range of innovations that had barely been imagined at the time, anticipating the possibility of human cloning and the creation of chimeras through genetic manipulation.7 Long before their contemporaries, Julian and Aldous Huxley agreed that industrial civilization was steadily transforming our planet, and emerging discoveries in the life sciences would ultimately transform human nature as well. The Huxley brothers frequently disagreed, however, about whether this state of affairs was cause for optimism or for grief. Julian, who retained the same Victorian faith in progress that had been part of his grandfather’s worldview, tended to see the growth in human power over nature—so long as it was guided by rational men like himself!—as a harbinger of progress toward a better world for all. Aldous, who shared something of the temperament of another family forebear, Matthew Arnold, expressed grave doubts about whether the fruits of industrial civilization were bringing us any closer to a better world. Such differences aside, Julian and Aldous Huxley carried on a lively correspondence throughout their lives and shared an encyclopedic array of common interests. When Aldous died in 1963, Julian Huxley arranged a remarkable memorial for his younger brother at the Society of Friends Meeting House in London in December 1963, and then published the collected recollections of Aldous’s illustrious friends and colleagues.8 The greatest shared conviction that united Julian and Aldous Huxley throughout their lives was the sense that the human race needed a new touchstone to make sense of the world and chart a path forward after the Darwinian revolution of the late nineteenth century. Their grandfather Thomas had fought passionately to advance the acceptance of evolution, but even he had been aware, especially at the end of his life, of the enormous gap that had been left by the destruction of the long-standing religious verities about the origin, purpose, and destiny of humankind. Although they rejected religious dogma, both Julian and Aldous Huxley saw it as essential for the future of our species that the religious impulses of our ancestors must not be allowed to atrophy and die. Julian’s substitute for old-time religion was a secular gospel of progress through science and technology. For Aldous, the true path was not the way forward, but the way out: the transcendence of time itself through meditation and the contemplation of nature, and, in the last decade of his life, with the aid of psychedelic drugs. For Aldous, the progress of a society was not to be measured in its advancements in science and technology, but rather the level of intelligence and compassion that its culture

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could bring to the everyday tasks of living and self-cultivation. For all their differences, the religious ideas of Julian and Aldous Huxley were each rooted in the concept of evolution. Although they discerned different paths to a better future, both saw Homo sapiens as a work in progress, conceiving of human nature as protean and wonderfully complex. To express this idea, both Julian and Aldous echoed the seventeenthcentury theologian and naturalist Sir Thomas Browne when he declared, “Thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not only like other creatures in diverse elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.”9 For Aldous, human beings could be aptly described as amphibians because we must operate in so many different elements at once. As animals whose minds have been shaped by language, we must reconcile the dynamic flow of sense experience with the more static world of signs and symbols. As mortal beings prone to believe in values and ideals that transcend time itself, we must somehow reconcile our imperfect understanding of our past, present, and future with our intimations of eternity. For Julian, the most important parallel between Homo sapiens and our amphibian ancestors was our transitional status. Just as the first amphibians had braved the harrowing passage from sea to land more than three hundred million years ago, our species was now moving from a familiar element into something entirely new. As Julian saw it, we were leaving the realm of slow evolution through natural selection and entering the accelerated realm of self-directed evolution, guided by our own discoveries in science and technology. With their distinctive views of the human condition, Julian and Aldous would each influence discourse on the future of our species in the late twentieth century. Aldous Huxley’s writings on mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and what he called the unexplored realm of “human potentialities” would help give birth to what came to be called the human potential movement in the 1960s and 1970s.10 Julian Huxley’s call for human beings to grab the reins of our future evolutionary progress would appeal to a growing number of secular progressives and technophiles who, employing the term he had coined in the 1950s, would come to describe themselves as advocates of Transhumanism by the end of the twentieth century.11 On a more fundamental level, the amphibian metaphor that Julian and Aldous Huxley both embraced reflected their common interest in ecology. In his own way, each saw the human drama as thoroughly enmeshed in what Charles Darwin had called “the tangled bank” of terrestrial life. For Julian this commitment was manifested in his work

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helping to found global institutions with the aim of protecting wild animals and their habitats in every place on earth. Aldous Huxley’s commitment to envisioning an ecologically sustainable form of civilization for the human race inspired the remarkable series of university lectures he delivered in the last years of his life, and his final novel, Island. While much of the current discourse on the future of our species emphasizes the potential of technologies such as genetic engineering, bioelectronics, and nanotechnology as means to enhance our power over nature, Julian and Aldous Huxley ultimately came to agree that our prospects for survival are contingent upon our reverence for the stunningly intricate, mysterious, and fragile web of life that supports our species. This common point of reference has given their intellectual legacy an enduring resonance. The ecological and religious dimensions that both Julian and Aldous Huxley brought to their lifelong debate about the long-term prospects of our species lent their ideas a depth and complexity too often lacking in contemporary discourse about the future. Throughout their long careers in the twentieth century, both Julian and Aldous Huxley remained acutely aware of their Victorian inheritance. Neither brother could forget the legacy of their grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, the iconoclastic man of science who had been nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his passionate defense of evolution. Even in the last years of his life, Aldous Huxley described himself as being, in the tradition established by his grandfather, “a cheerleader for evolution,” while the elder Huxley brother was so concerned with carrying on his grandfather’s legacy that one of his peers once quipped that Julian “was so busy trying to be a Huxley that he couldn’t be himself.”12 Before either of them had begun their careers, the term “Huxleyan” had already become part of the English language as a term denoting the relentless skepticism and intellectual bombast epitomized by their grandfather.13 Although the Huxley brothers no doubt valued the intellectual inheritance signaled by their family name, the technological breakthroughs and global catastrophes of the twentieth century would compel each of them to revisit and radically reimagine the paradigm of our place in nature that T. H. Huxley had advanced in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

julian huxley (1887–1975) In a sign that his parents took to be fortuitous, Julian Huxley’s birth coincided with celebrations marking Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in the

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summer of 1887. In his boyhood he learned about science from his illustrious grandfather, Thomas, in playful conversations and debates that he would remember for the rest of his life. As Julian began his career as a biologist in the years prior to the First World War, he would publicly differ, however, with T. H. Huxley’s view that the “cosmic process” of evolution that had shaped our species could never serve as an adequate foundation for a philosophy of human progress.14 On the contrary, Julian saw social progress and biological evolution as joined at the root. Among transatlantic intellectuals during the Belle Époque, such a marriage between what the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s called “creative evolution” and utilitarian visions of social betterment was hardly unique, but Julian promoted it with the fervor of an evangelist.15 Julian Huxley’s vision of biosocial progress was not the Social Darwinism of the late Victorians but a gospel of efficiency infused with the values of Fabian socialism that had more in common with the ideas of H. G. Wells than with those of Herbert Spencer. Where the Social Darwinists had stressed the element of individual competition in nature, Julian Huxley emphasized the network of relationships between living things that since the 1860s had come to be known as ecology. Throughout his career, Julian Huxley adhered to a definition of Ernst Haeckel’s term that was at once succinct and infinitely flexible: “Ecology is the science of interrelations. It studies the balance to be achieved in a system of interacting factors.”16 That his definition contains no delimiting reference to strictly biological factors highlights Julian Huxley’s conviction that the heuristic tools of biology and especially ecology could help us to understand the complex dynamics of such human artifacts as nations, empires, and the sacred or secular belief systems that animate them. In his first book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, published just before he took up his teaching position at the Rice Institute in Texas, the young biologist made this ambitious declaration about the social meaning and application of recent developments in biology: All roads lead to Rome: and even animal individuality throws a ray on human problems. The ideals of active harmony and mutual aid as the best means to power and progress; the hope that springs from life’s power of transforming the old or of casting it from her in favor of the new; and the spur to effort in the knowledge that she does nothing lightly or without long struggle: these cannot but support and direct those men upon whom devolves the task of moulding and inspiring that unwieldiest individual—formless and blind today, but huge with possibility—the State.17

Julian Huxley would maintain the conviction throughout his career that political and social problems could best be understood in biological

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terms. In his earliest lectures and essays, he promoted the theory that living in communities had played a decisive role in the evolution of the human species, accounting for the development of such essential traits as altruism. He also argued that future evolution of the human state would be intertwined with the future evolution of our species: “The function of the State is not power or anything like it. The function of the State has been and still is to raise humanity further and further above the beasts.”18 After spending a few years in the United States, where he helped to establish the biology department at what would soon become Rice University, Julian returned to Britain for military training and served a brief stint with the Army Intelligence Corps in northern Italy during the First World War. In 1919, he married Juliette Baillot, a Francophone Swiss woman whom he had met at Garsington Manor near Oxford. They would have two sons, Anthony and Francis. Over the next three decades, Julian become known on both sides of the Atlantic not merely as a biologist but as a “statesman of science” promoting the popularization of the life sciences through the new media of radio and film, even directing an Oscar-winning documentary (The Private Life of the Gannetts) in 1934.19 Julian also served as the director of the London Zoological Society from 1935 to 1942 and did extensive work for the British Ministry of Information as part of the war effort. During this period, Julian Huxley’s combined interest in both biology and a well-planned technocratic society would at times badly distort his judgment. Visiting Moscow in 1931, he expressed a strong admiration of the Soviet commitment to statefunded scientific research, while making no public statements about the tightening grip of Stalinism on every aspect of life in the USSR. Although his obliviousness to Stalin’s brutal policies at this time betrayed nothing less than a willful blindness on his part, there would ultimately be a limit to Julian’s tolerance for such despotism in the name of progress, especially when state dogmas impaired the advance of scientific research. Eventually, Julian became an outspoken critic of the Soviet commitment to the pseudoscientific doctrine of Lysenkoism and its damaging effect on the life sciences in the USSR.20 Regarding the rise of the Third Reich in Germany, Julian Huxley presented perhaps the first systematic critique of the racial pseudoscience taught in German schools and universities after 1933.21 While his brother Aldous would remain loyal to the strict pacifism of Reverend Dick Sheppard’s Peace Pledge Union (PPU) in the face of the rising Third Reich, and would ultimately leave London for Los Angles as war became

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more likely, Julian Huxley was an early critic of the Nazi regime and dedicated his considerable energy to the war effort. Just as Julian and Aldous took very different positions on the Second World War, their views on the economic and political centralization that the war engendered would also diverge. Julian saw the Allied war effort as advancing the cause of a rationally planned society in Britain that would enhance the values of science and democracy. Aldous, on the other hand, saw the trend toward centralization as a juggernaut that would crush any and all liberal values standing in its path toward a regime of technologically enhanced control of people and resources. Julian Huxley’s confidence that a wise technocratic state, mastering the new tools and resources made available by advances in the applied sciences, could lead the human race to a brighter future found its expression in the steady stream of speculative essays and political manifestos he produced during the early 1930s, such as What Dare I Think? and If I Were Dictator.22 His faith in progress through the more rational organization of society would only be strengthened by his experiences during the Depression and the Second World War. On his many visits to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, Julian Huxley became a passionate promoter of New Deal initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, praising that project as much for conserving topsoil as for generating electricity and creating jobs. But his greatest interest remained the advancement of scientific research. During the last years of the war, Julian Huxley joined his longtime friend and colleague H. G. Wells to produce a series of radio broadcasts in which prominent biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and Jack Drummond were invited to speak about the impact of new discoveries in biology on the future of the human race. Wells and Julian Huxley were both contributors to the program and collaborated in producing the anthology of readings, published under the title Reshaping Man’s Heritage. The introductory remarks to the volume present that odd combination of nascent ecological awareness and aggressive technological ambition that characterized the thinking of both Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells: Man forms part of the web of living things, plants, and animals, on some of which he depends for food and clothing. Other creatures, especially viruses, live upon him: he must master them or they will master him. Now man is continually refashioning the web: growing better plants and improving the soil in which they live, breeding finer animals, and searching for the best animal foodstuffs: in a word, reshaping the heredity and environment. He

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has explored the world, and by the invention of fire, clothing, houses, central heating, refrigeration, he has progressed toward independence of climate. Chemical science gives man mastery of the world of materials. Atoms are reshuffled to meet his needs.23

The triumphal language and the emphasis on man’s power to dominate nature is not surprising in light of the steadily accelerating advances in science and technology that both authors had witnessed since they first collaborated on The Science of Life in the 1920s. In the thirties and forties, the crises of the Great Depression and the Second World War compelled many liberal democracies such as Britain and the United States to embrace a proliferation of technocratic projects and institutions without pausing to debate their impact on the social contract. The flurry of technological competition that characterized World War II and the subsequent Cold War created the vast and intricate nexus of universities, research institutions such as Los Alamos and RAND, defense contractors, and government agencies that President Dwight Eisenhower would ultimately term the “military-industrial complex.”24 In large part because of the stunning advances in applied science and technology that it had helped to accelerate, the conclusion of the Second World War witnessed more than the ascendancy of the United States to the position of global dominance previously held by Great Britain. It also witnessed the ascendancy of Homo sapiens as the decisive power in determining the future direction of life on earth. In his environmental history of the twentieth century, J. R. McNeill cited 1945 as the year when a steadily expanding global economy, with its attendant consumption of resources and creation of pollution, began to alter the biosphere in unprecedented ways.25 Julian’s work during the Second World War put him in a unique position to have some influence on the institutions of this emerging postwar order. Just months after the defeat of the Axis powers, the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education met in London to draw up plans for the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Julian Huxley’s international reputation as a scientist and public intellectual, as well as his wartime work for the British Ministry of Information, made him a favored candidate to lead the new organization. Taking the helm at UNESCO in 1946, just as emerging tensions with the Soviet Union were darkening an already uncertain postwar landscape, Julian Huxley would present a vision for the future of our species that he believed could transcend the ideological conflicts of the eastern and western blocs, because it was predicated, unlike

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Communism or liberalism, on what he saw as a new integration of science and religion. For Julian Huxley, this combination of unprecedented human knowledge and technological power signaled the dawn of a new epoch that required a new and rational religion for the human race. Since the 1920s, Julian had promoted the idea of a “religion without revelation” based on the principles of evolutionary biology.26 Two decades later, he would conceive of UNESCO as offering a framework for the unification of knowledge and culture on a global scale. Ultimately, Julian speculated, this amalgamation of modern science and cultural traditions from around the world would lead to an entirely new form of rational and universal religion: What celebrations will be devised of human achievement and human possibilities, what pilgrimages and gatherings, what ceremonies of participation, what solemnizations of the steps in individual lives and personal relations? What rituals and techniques of “salvation,” of self-development and selftranscendence will be worked out, what new incentives and new modes of education, what methods for purgation and for achieving freedom from the burdens of guilt and fear without inflicting harm on oneself and others, what new formulations of knowledge and consequent belief? What modes will the future find of distilling its ideas of its destiny into compelling expression, in drama or architecture, painting or story, or perhaps wholly new forms of art?27

Almost a century after T. H. Huxley had mocked Auguste Comte’s proposals for a religion of humanity as “Catholicism minus Christianity,” Julian Huxley offered the world a very similar proposal for a rational religion with its own “rituals and techniques of ‘salvation’ ” and “methods of purgation.”28 As if this were not ambitious enough, Julian Huxley saw the cultural and religious unification of the human race as precursors to the creation of a unifying world government. Julian Huxley reasoned that the educational program of UNESCO should “stress the need for world political unity and familiarize all peoples with the implications of the transfer of sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization.” This was not a goal that Julian Huxley believed would be achieved in the near term, but he saw UNESCO programs for promoting science and the arts across borders as small and practical steps that could “do a great deal to lay the foundations on which world political unity can later be built.”29 Julian Huxley’s visions for a new religion and a world government have earned him a choice spot among the perennial villains of conspiracy theorists, especially on the political right. Reverend Tim LaHaye,

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coauthor of the best-selling Left Behind novels, which depict the AntiChrist as a future secretary-general of the United Nations, sees Julian Huxley as one of the primary architects of the UN’s secular-humanist and, as LaHaye sees it, implicitly anti-Christian agenda.30 Goading religious conservatives had been a Huxley family tradition since T. H. Huxley’s public debate on evolution with the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, but Julian Huxley, by going beyond the agnostic skepticism of his grandfather to promote a raft of causes from secular religion to eugenics and world government, has earned a lasting place in the demonology of the religious right. Ironically, Julian Huxley’s insistence that evolution is imbued with a clear direction and purpose that should serve as a religious inspiration for humanity has meant that his work holds little appeal for the “New Atheists” of the early twenty-first century, who generally take the view, well articulated by Richard Dawkins, that there is no design or purpose whatsoever implicit in the processes of organic evolution.31 In his memoirs, Julian described the controversies that made his term as director-general of UNESCO both turbulent and brief: As it turned out, the humanist attitude which I adopted led various delegates (quite erroneously), to think that I was anti-religious, while my liberal views were taken by others to be communistic. When I found during the conference that one of my previous colleagues was spreading this allegation of my communist leanings, I became very angry and formally asked the executive board to expel him, failing which I would resign. He was sent off on some educational mission; but some of the mud had stuck, and I was not elected as first Director-General until after several sessions of the Board, and then only for a term of two years instead of the normal five.32

In light of his wide array of other projects and the backbreaking schedule that UNESCO work required, Julian would ultimately count it as a blessing that his tenure as its first director-general turned out to be just two years instead of five.33 In retrospect, the most enduring legacy of Julian Huxley’s foreshortened tenure at UNESCO may not have been his controversial views on religion and world government, but rather his call for a new kind of conservation movement that would be global in scale. In his short book on the purpose of UNESCO, Julian made a prescient call for a universal “recognition of the fact that the wildlife of the world is irreplaceable, but that it is being rapidly destroyed.” In light of this crisis, which received scant public attention in the years immediately following World War II, Julian argued that “areas must be set aside where, in the ultimate

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interests of mankind as a whole, the spread of man must take second place to the conservation of other species.”34 In the years following the publication of UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy, Julian Huxley showed perhaps greater dedication to this idea of protecting wildlife and natural habitats than to any other goal outlined in his treatise for a “planetary utopia.” In the summer of 1947, he helped organize a conference of delegates from more than twenty-four nations in Brünen, West Germany, to discuss the protection of threatened habitats, laying the foundations for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The IUCN would emerge in 1948 as one of the first global environmental groups, supplementing the commitment of UNESCO to protect “world heritage sites” with its own parallel commitment to guard wilderness and biodiversity. Throughout the subsequent decades, Julian Huxley would travel across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, lobbying political leaders across the postcolonial world to establish national parks. A dramatic and detailed series of articles that Julian Huxley wrote for the London Observer on the destruction of wildlife across Africa would lead directly to the creation of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961.35 By the last decade of his life, Julian had moved away from the vision of the control of nature that he had promoted for most of his career, and began to embrace a much more critical view of what he came to call our “technosphere,” expressing his concerns about its effects on wild habitats and on our own human nature. In response to the Apollo moon landing in 1969, Julian and fellow conservationist Max Nicholson published a joint statement in the Times of London on the outlook for our species. The statement praised the Apollo program for offering us a view of the earth from space, but criticized the “Frankenstein tendency” of modern man to let technology “outrun his powers of forethought and control.” The uncontrolled growth of the technosphere “has imperiled the welfare of the earth and his own tenure on it.”36 In 1970, Julian joined more than two thousand signatories, including Margaret Mead and Thor Heyerdahl, in the Menton Statement, calling for “a moratorium on technological innovations the effects of which we cannot foretell and which are not essential for human survival.”37 Although he never stated that his views had been specifically affected by those of his younger brother, his writings and public statements during the sixties and seventies indicate that he had moved closer to Aldous Huxley’s more skeptical view of the sunny gospel of progress through science and technology that he had promoted for most of his career.

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aldous huxley (1894–1963) Aldous Huxley was born in the summer of 1894, about a year before the death of T. H. Huxley. Like his brother, Aldous was drawn to the life sciences, and planned at a very early age to pursue a career as a physician. Because his vision was badly damaged by a severe infection that he suffered at the age of sixteen, he shifted his ambitions from science to literature. His diminished eyesight also prevented Aldous from serving in the First World War. Instead, he spent a great deal of time at Garsington Manor, where he met some of the most notable writers and intellectuals of the time, including T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell. Aldous also fell in love with a brilliant and waiflike young Belgian refugee by the name of Maria Nys at Garsington. They married in 1919 and had one child, Matthew Huxley, the following year. Maria would die of cancer in 1955, and Aldous would later remarry. His second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, would survive him by more than four decades. If Julian Huxley has largely been forgotten since his death, his brother Aldous has not. The name Aldous Huxley remains in heavy circulation, but in connection with two books that represent only a very small fraction of his achievements as a writer and thinker. These are, of course, Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, which together have managed to brand Aldous Huxley with the improbable combination of being both middlebrow and dangerous. Middlebrow because nearly everyone who attended high school since the mid-twentieth century seems to have been assigned Brave New World at some point, and thus very many people feel that even before finishing adolescence, they have already digested the only significant Aldous Huxley novel. Dangerous because The Doors of Perception, which began as a book about the author’s medically supervised experiment with mescaline, soon became an emblem of the drug culture that followed with all of its destructive excesses. In the iconography of popular culture, the name of the generally quiet and retiring Aldous Huxley thus has been wedded to the image and music of the drug-saturated suburban satyr Jim Morrison, and his face is even to be found among the august mourners on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There is an almost Huxleyan irony in the fact that Aldous would become emblematic of a movement in mass culture that most likely would have left him cold. On his last visit to London in the summer of 1963, when the Beatles and other new rock bands were already a force to be reckoned

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with in England, Aldous sounded out of step with the emerging counterculture when he confided to his sister-in-law Juliette that “I feel remote. I have nothing in common with the young now—they are only interested in sexual problems.”38 In the first decade of his career as a writer, Aldous enjoyed great success as the author of a series of caustically funny novels, which took aim at life in contemporary England and especially at his own social milieu of aesthetes and “futilitarians,” a postwar generation of British intellectuals who were increasingly disaffected with the utilitarian optimism that had epitomized the thinking of so many prewar intellectuals. He took passing shots at technological utopianism that remained part of transatlantic discourse throughout the 1920s, but it was not until he wrote what he called his “bad utopia” that Aldous Huxley would give the visions of such contemporaries as the novelist H. G. Wells and the biologist J. B. S. Haldane his full and sustained attention. Haldane had counted both Julian and Aldous Huxley among his closest confidants at Oxford, and both brothers had been quite familiar since the First World War with his ideas about the potential social applications of biotechnology.39 The term “dystopia” had not been coined when Brave New World was published, though it may be argued that Aldous’s phrase “bad utopia” remains the best description of his vision here. Unlike the terrified and tortured subjects of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the inhabitants of the World State depicted in Brave New World are, regardless of their caste, in love with their captivity and thoroughly convinced that they are living in an ideal society. By depicting a society in which the hedonic calculus of utilitarianism had been taken to its absurd conclusion, Aldous created one of the most engaging and haunting critiques of utopian thought in modern history. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has most often been read as an attack on American consumerism, but this was only one of its many targets. More broadly, Aldous was concerned with the tendency of modern states, whatever their purported ideology, to desiccate human affairs by reducing them to their most fundamental economic components. Never abandoning the family reverence for science, Aldous Huxley did not critique the modern vision of streamlined governance for being overly rational. Instead, he critiqued it for being merely rational and eliminating those aspects of human experience, both animal and spiritual, that transcended rational calculation. This haunting burlesque of the future marked a turning point in the life of its author. In the years following the publication of Brave New World in 1932, Aldous Huxley

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became increasingly interested in mysticism and comparative religion. In 1937, Aldous and Maria moved with their young son, Matthew, to Los Angeles. There, Aldous augmented his income as a novelist by writing screenplays, and fell in love with the desert landscapes of the American Southwest. During the Second World War, as the factories for the production of bombers and other armaments transformed Los Angeles into a new kind of metropolis, Aldous published an essay on the paintings and etchings of the Spanish visionary Francisco Goya in which he posited the following interpretation of Goya’s famous caption “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos”: “The dream of reason produces monsters.” It is a caption that admits of more than one interpretation. When reason sleeps, the absurd and loathsome creatures of superstition wake and are active, goading their victim to an ignoble frenzy. But this is not all. Reason may also dream without sleeping, may intoxicate itself, as it did during the French Revolution, with daydreams of inevitable progress, of liberty, equality and fraternity imposed by violence, of human self-sufficiency and the ending of sorrow, not by the all too arduous method which alone offers any prospect of success, but by political arrangements and better technology.40

Here Aldous Huxley’s explicit views on progress are illuminated by Goya’s lucid metaphor. Where his brother Julian was animated by a steady faith in the power of reason, Aldous argued that the forces of progress, if they were not tempered by compassion and humility, could be every bit as dangerous as “the absurd and loathsome creatures of superstition.” In the years immediately following World War II, Aldous would expand upon this argument in his 1948 novel, Ape and Essence, one of the earliest postapocalyptic novels of the Cold War era to depict the ecological and spiritual disaster of nuclear warfare. This macabre satire depicts a profoundly mutated offshoot of what once was the human race, and it is punctuated by such grotesque violence that Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura Archera Huxley, vowed that she would never release the film rights to the novel. She expressed the fear that it would be produced as an exploitation film, with no regard for its underlying commentary on the emerging nuclear arms race, and the technocratic intellectuals who made it possible.41 In Ape and Essence, Aldous presented more than a nightmare vision of nuclear war and its aftermath; he also offered a critique of civilian nuclear power that was remarkably prescient for 1948. Alluding to the recent Baruch Plan to internationalize nuclear technology and thus blunt the threat of nuclear weapons, the narrator of Ape and Essence declares that

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the promise of civilian nuclear power was also a dangerous mirage. Surveying the mass casualties of a future nuclear war, the narrator declares: “For though Baruch might save us (perhaps) from taking our place in an ossuary such as this, he can do nothing to avert that other slower, nastier death,” namely, of birth defects that inevitably result from the steady exposure to radiation that would likely become more common as a result of nuclear power. “For in a world powered by nuclear fission everybody’s grandmother would have been an X-ray technician. And not only everybody’s grandmother—everybody’s grandfather and father and mother as well.”42 Thus more than three decades before the well-publicized nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima rendered the optimistic tone of Cold War “Atoms for Peace” propaganda impossibly quaint, Aldous Huxley was warning his readers that nuclear power was not the clean and limitless source of energy that it appeared to be. Still more remarkably, Aldous had been promoting small-scale solar power as an alternative to the energy provided by utilities as early as the 1939 and wind turbines since at least 1946.43 Aldous Huxley’s response to the challenges of the postwar world culminated in his advocacy of a political, spiritual, and economic program influenced not only by Gandhi and Tolstoy but also by Americans such as Henry David Thoreau, the socialist Henry George, and the back-to-the-land advocate Ralph Borsodi. In the decades following World War II, Aldous Huxley’s position on the Enlightenment ideal of human progress through science and technology was diametrically opposed to the ideas that Julian Huxley had been promoting for more than three decades. In 1946, Aldous published a slim volume entitled Science, Liberty and Peace, the thesis of which was summed up in its epigraph by Leo Tolstoy: “If the arrangement of a society is bad (as ours is), and a small number of people have power over the majority and oppress it, every victory over Nature will inevitably serve only to increase that power and that oppression. This is what is actually happening.”44 Applying Tolstoy’s words to the condition of the human race at mid-century, Aldous wrote, “Science and technology have made notable advances,” but then, “so has the centralization of political and economic power, so have oligarchy and despotism.” While rejecting the Luddite position that science and technology were inherently destructive of human values, Aldous stated, “All that is being maintained here is that science is one of the causative factors involved in the progressive decline of liberty and the progressive centralization of power, which have occurred during the twentieth century.”45 Citing the radical econo-

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mist Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of the conflict between the goals of centralized production and the pragmatic needs of ordinary people, Aldous recommended the sort of decentralized economy that had been promoted by the agrarian reformer Ralph Borsodi in the interwar period.46 During the war years, Aldous came closer than most to living the way of life that Borsodi recommended. On their forty-acre ranch at Llano del Rio in the Mojave Desert of California, Aldous and Maria lived in a very rustic and diminutive farmhouse, grew a fair portion of their own food, and lived “off the grid,” subsisting on intermittent electricity from a small generator.47 While many intellectuals, including his brother Julian, reasoned that the nuclear age signaled the need for some form of world government, Aldous Huxley lamented that the twentieth century had already become “the golden age of centralized government and dictatorship.” He recommended a greater emphasis on local forms of political autonomy to counter the growing centralization of both economic and political power: “Bitter experience has proved that no individual or group of individuals is fit to be entrusted with great powers for long periods of time. . . . The abuse of power can be avoided only by limiting the amount and duration of the authority entrusted to any person, group or class.”48 Although Aldous had been skeptical of the agrarian anarchism of both Tolstoy and Gandhi two decades earlier, his views about economic and political decentralization in the Cold War era owed a great deal to their teachings. His last novel, Island, was his attempt to crystallize his vision of political and economic decentralization into what he hoped would be a plausible sketch of a humane and sustainable society. While Aldous did not share his brother’s zeal for the idea of world government, he did see real value in the sort of transnational cooperation made possible by organizations such as the United Nations and UNESCO. Aldous had contributed to the work of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation as part of the League of Nations in the 1920s, and, in spite of the League’s disappointing performance in the 1930s, he continued to call for greater intellectual and scientific cooperation across borders. In 1949, he expressed the hope that UNESCO would lead in the creation of “a new Manhattan Project, under international auspices, for the development of universally available surrogates for the unevenly distributed and soon-to-be-exhausted minerals on which our industrial civilization depends for its very existence—e.g. wind power to take the place of power produced by coal, petroleum and that most dangerous of all fuels uranium.”49

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In the years since Aldous Huxley’s call in 1949 for “a new Manhattan Project” dedicated to the creation of alternatives to scarce resources and unsustainable forms of energy, the “new Manhattan Project” trope has become a handy cliché among environmentalists and politicians calling for breakthroughs that would lead to both less centralized and less polluting forms of energy. However, the use of this phrase in the service of global environmentalism is always betrayed by the irony that the centralized, secretive, and deadly work of the Manhattan Project represented a striking divergence from the very values that Aldous Huxley and other advocates of more humane and sustainable technologies were seeking to promote. The technical prowess brought together by the Manhattan Project was impressive even to a pacifist such as Aldous Huxley, and he could not help but hope, even against his famously jaundiced view of human history, that such prowess could be put to work for the common good if it could somehow be placed “under international auspices.” Aldous Huxley’s commitment to promoting international action to confront global problems may have found its most acute expression in his essay “The Double Crisis,” which he published in the UNESCO Courier in 1949, after it had been met with summary rejections from Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Life and from Norman Cousins at the Saturday Review of Literature. In this essay, Aldous warned that “the human race is passing through a time of crisis, and that crisis exists, so to speak, on two levels—an upper level of political and economic crisis and a lower level of demographic and ecological crisis.” There was plenty of public concern about the political and economic crises of the late 1940s, but concerning their ecological and demographic underpinnings, Aldous lamented, “hardly anything is heard in the press, on the radio, or at the more important international conferences.”50 Until his death in 1963, Aldous Huxley would work to promote awareness of the demographic and ecological challenges of the postwar world. In the beginning, he would be in the company of a few other individuals, such as the conservationist Fairfield Osborn, Jr., whose 1948 book, Our Plundered Planet, Aldous helped to promote. In the early 1960s, Rachel Carson would lend her voice to the fight, and Aldous, along with Julian, would praise her work as well. Julian wrote the introduction to the British edition of Silent Spring, and in it he quoted his more literary brother concerning the threat posed by the overuse of DDT to birds on both sides of the Atlantic: “We are losing half the basis for English poetry.”51 Beyond his admiration for Rachel

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Carson’s efforts to protect birds and other wildlife from DDT, Aldous had long shared her conviction that the goal of attaining complete human mastery over nature was a dangerous delusion. Sounding a note consonant with much of what Aldous Huxley had written since the 1940s, Carson declared in the closing paragraph of Silent Spring: “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”52 Both published in 1962, a year shadowed by the trauma of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Carson’s Silent Spring and Huxley’s Island together signal an important turning point in the history of Western thought about technology and the future of our species at the beginning of the 1960s. In his own recollections of Aldous Huxley’s work and influence, the intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin intuited that just as the work of pioneering astronomers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century had revolutionized our view of the stars and planets, Aldous Huxley’s insights concerning the direction and potential of our species had helped to found “the new astronomy that was beginning in the sciences of man.”53

“we are amphibians” In the long run, the ideas of Julian and Aldous Huxley will probably have their greatest influence in the uncharted spaces that separate our habitual categories of thought, as between science and religion, or technology and nature. While Julian’s explicit attempt to create a “religion without revelation” did not meet any more success than Comte’s attempt to fashion a “religion of humanity” had a century earlier, the elder Huxley brother did do a great deal to advance what might be described as the secular faith of environmentalism. The beauty of the natural world became the awesome revelation of Julian’s creed, and evolution became its gospel. For this reason, Julian found the image of the first amphibians emerging from water onto land three hundred million years ago to be a wonderfully apt emblem for the current position of the human race, as it moves into a new realm in which science, culture, and cooperation—rather than ceaseless competition for survival—might determine the future course of evolution. In the decades after World War II, Aldous also embraced the amphibian trope, seeing it as the clearest way to convey the multiplicity of human experience and potential. As the hopes of utopian dreamers gradually shifted from building the perfect society to expanding human consciousness in the last quarter of the

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twentieth century, the legacy of Julian and Aldous Huxley took on a new salience. While their publications, lectures, and activism concerning our relationship to nature helped lay the foundation for global environmentalism, their ideas about human consciousness and the amphibious quality of the human experience helped sow the seeds for both the human potential movement and Transhumanism. The amphibian metaphor aptly describes the Huxley brothers themselves, as both were remarkable polymaths who resisted the limits of any established ideology or discipline in an age of rampant ideological warfare and intellectual specialization. Before it had a specific biological meaning, the term “amphibian” had a more general meaning of living in multiple realms. This was the sense in which it had been used by Christian apologists from Sir Thomas Browne in the seventeenth century to C. S. Lewis in the twentieth.54 In its biological context, however, the amphibian trope has an even greater resonance in relation to the lives and work of Julian and Aldous Huxley. As the popular “Darwin” chrome car magnet will attest, the amphibian that sprouts legs and leaves the sea for the land may be one of the most direct emblems for evolution itself that human beings have borrowed from nature. Beyond that, however, the precarious existence of so many amphibian species in our own time is reflective of the danger that ecological destruction poses not only to other species but also to our own humanity. If human nature, as Aldous Huxley posited in so much of his speculative fiction, is in its own way as complex and as fragile as an ecosystem, then heedless application of manipulative science and technology to our own lives may poison or desiccate the fragile balance of life within that has made us so multifaceted. If we pave over nature both within and without in the name of some utilitarian goal or futuristic mirage, we may perish entirely, or worse, we may survive as something less than human, like denizens of the invincible World State in Brave New World or the physically immortal but spiritually debased aristocrat whom Aldous depicted in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. The second of these two novels, which centers on the attempt of a wealthy California media magnate to conquer death through technology, in some ways anticipates, and perceptively critiques, the contemporary project of radical life extension promoted by Ray Kurzweil and other Transhumanists.55 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the historian J. R. McNeill observed, “The enormity of ecological change” since 1945 “strongly suggests that history and ecology, at least in modern times, must take one another properly into account.”56 McNeill’s observation calls to mind a

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key insight shared by Julian and Aldous Huxley about one of the more vexing ironies of modernization. On the one hand, industrial civilization creates astonishing technological advances that demand ever greater levels of intellectual specialization to keep them going. On the other hand, those same technologies inevitably create global challenges that intellectual specialists are scarcely prepared to understand or to address. As intellectual amphibians who were integrating the sciences and humanities throughout their lives, Julian and Aldous Huxley pioneered the grand project of understanding our civilization and ourselves in both humanistic and ecological terms, long before their contemporaries suspected the necessity—or even the plausibility—of such a project. True to its amphibian theme, this book combines the elements of biography and cultural history without belonging entirely to either category. Some major events in the lives and careers of Julian and Aldous Huxley are highlighted in each chapter, but the general structure of this book is more thematic than chronological. Chapter 1 (“Late Victorians”) explores the intellectual inheritance of the Huxley brothers and surveys their early attempts to think about the future of our species and our place in nature. Chapter 2 (“Twilight of Utopias”) outlines the attempts of both brothers to navigate the powerful ideological currents of their time, and explores their very different responses to the idea of progress. Chapter 3 (“Spiritual Biology”) surveys the religious thought of Julian and Aldous Huxley and their attempts to articulate a new and nondogmatic sense of religious values in the wake of the Darwinian revolution. Chapter 4 (“Ape and Essence”) explores the very different responses of Julian and Aldous Huxley to the catastrophe of the Second World War, and to the ideological tensions of the early Cold War. Chapter 5 (“We Are Amphibians”) explores the significant contribution of the Huxley brothers to the global environmental movement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as their converging viewpoints about the multifaceted potential and precarious future of our species. Finally, in the epilogue, I consider the relevance of Julian and Aldous Huxley’s thought to the Transhumanist movement that has emerged since the last decade of the twentieth century.

chapter 1

Late Victorians Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed completely self-evident that the bad old days were over, that torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics, were things of the past. Among people who wore top hats, traveled in trains, and took a bath every morning such horrors were simply out of the question. After all, we were living in the twentieth century. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

On the 28th of April 1900, the Prince of Wales visited the Natural History Museum in London to unveil a statue of the legendary man of science, Thomas Henry Huxley. At the dedication of this monument to his grandfather, Julian Huxley stood beside his ostentatiously erudite father, the schoolmaster and author Leonard Huxley, then at work on the Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley. On his other side stood his beautiful and quick-witted mother, Julia Arnold Huxley, a scion of the Arnold family who would soon found the Prior’s Field school for girls in Surrey. It fell to Julian to manage his younger brothers, Trevenen and Aldous, while his mother was busy with his newborn sister, Margaret. Nonetheless, Julian was delighted at this chance to wear his new Eton uniform for all to see: black trousers, a slim black jacket, the distinctively sharp Eton collar, and a brand new top hat. Now thirteen and advancing steadily in his formal education, Julian could remember his first conversations about the life sciences with Thomas Henry Huxley, and he could even recall with some pride the time he had bested the world-famous biologist concerning the familial behavior of a fish commonly known as the stickleback. He was now old enough to know that the family patriarch had made a name for himself by defending Darwin’s theory of evolution against a horde of angry critics, including the bishop of 22

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Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce. Thomas Henry Huxley’s supporters had hailed him as an indefatigable advocate of science and progress, while conservative critics on both sides of the Atlantic had accused him of inventing a new bottle, labeled “agnosticism,” for what was nothing more than the dangerous old wine of atheism. So much had changed since that storied debate at Oxford in the summer of 1860. This monument and the presence of the future king Edward VII at its unveiling bore witness to the fact that, five years after his death, Professor Huxley’s reputation and his cause were both thoroughly established. Darwin’s theory of evolution was now widely accepted by educated people across the industrialized world. Even in China, where the Qing dynasty was caught in its own Darwinian struggle for survival, the court reformer Yen Fu had galvanized the attention of the literati by translating T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics into classical Chinese.1 In addition to achieving global renown, T. H. Huxley had been the recipient of so many honors from the British establishment in the last decade of his life that he archly joked to his son Leonard that he expected to be appointed as a bishop someday.2 While he no doubt enjoyed such vindication and acclaim, T. H. Huxley remained deeply aware of the ethical problems posed by the Darwinian revolution. At the end of his life, he had come to see the human condition, in light of Darwin’s discoveries, as a profound paradox: it was imperative for human beings to cherish and protect their sense of morality, even though there was no clear message to be derived from the science of evolutionary biology that might serve as touchstone for human ethics. The burden of his agnostic position was captured in the monument that the Prince of Wales unveiled that April morning. The last public monument to be crafted by Royal Academy sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, the piece captures T. H. Huxley seated but certainly not at rest. His left hand is balled in a fist, reflecting the tension on his brow, while his right hand grips the arm of his chair as if he is just about to pull himself up and strike another verbal blow against any one of his myriad adversaries from a life that had been full of public battles. Julian’s youngest brother, Aldous, stood nervously to see the proceedings, and to gaze at this imposing statue through the throng of adults. At six years old, Aldous was very thin and much taller than most children his age. His preternaturally large head seemed ill placed atop his spare frame, prompting his siblings and playmates to give him a nickname that he would remember for the rest of his life, “Ogie”—short for ogre.3 As he grew up, Aldous would have only the dimmest memories of

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figure 1. Thomas Henry Huxley, ca. 1880. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

T. H. Huxley, but, like his eldest brother, he would dream until his adolescence that he would one day also have a career in the sciences. Specifically, Aldous set his sights on the field of medicine, though these aspirations were cut short by an adolescent illness that would badly damage his eyesight. Although he would pursue a career in literature, he never forgot his grandfather’s fierce devotion to uncovering the truth about the origins and nature of life, however shocking it might be to our sensibilities. When he was an old man, the main thing that Julian would remember most vividly about this event was not the fact that the Prince of Wales and numerous members of Parliament were there, along with many of the late professor’s former students, to honor the memory of

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his grandfather.4 He would not remember the statue, which was placed opposite a statue of Richard Owen, one of T. H. Huxley’s rivals in more than a few scientific controversies. He did not recall the presiding official’s remarks, in which he recounted that donations for the Huxley monument had come from every state in Europe and from the United States, India, and “the remotest colonies,” nor did he recall the gratitude expressed that the Prince of Wales had survived “the dreadful peril” of a recent assassination attempt by anarchists in Belgium.5 What Julian Huxley did recollect from that morning was the way in which his sick little brother Aldous nearly spoiled the whole affair for him. It is not difficult to imagine how such a lifelike figure of their late grandfather, so ready to spring up from his chair, may have been disturbing to a gangly boy of six that morning. And his nervousness would have no doubt been compounded by the crowds, the presence of royalty, and the echo of so many feet and so much whispering in the North Hall of the Natural History Museum. Or maybe young Aldous had picked up a virus on the train into London from Surrey. Whatever the case may have been, young Julian was implored “in urgent whispers” by his panicked mother “to give up his top hat . . . for Aldous, queasy, overcome, to be sick in.”6 Aldous could not have intended to mar Julian’s experience of that morning at the museum, but there would be many other times when his goading of his eldest brother would be quite calculated. For all of their breeding and education, the Huxley brothers could not help but manifest the innate tendency of siblings to needle each other for sport. On the occasion of Julian’s twenty-first birthday, Aldous, just shy of fourteen, wrote to Julian, “Thanks for your extremely pseudo-letter. Trev tells me you have of course not written to him.” Then in honor of his eldest brother’s birthday, Aldous penned a rambling poem, beginning with these lines: Now let us eat the festal cake and munch the festal bun for hoary time shall shortly take (that nasty chap with scythe and rake) of J’s years twenty-one. Since that he soon shall come of age take up his book of life, and turn it over page by page youll [sic] find it full of wicked rage and fratricidal strife.7

The ditty continues with an arch salute to “martyred brothers [sic] patient grief” and a brief catalog of Julian’s “love affairs beyond belief”

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figure 2. T. H. Huxley, Leonard Huxley, and Julian Huxley in 1895. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

in which names are replaced with single initials. Given the date of the letter, May 28, 1908, “the beauteous K.” with whom Aldous closes the list is most likely the same “K.” to whom Julian was engaged at the time—until she broke off the engagement in the spring of 1913.8 For a budding satirist such as Aldous Huxley, the very serious—and frequently self-serious—Julian must have been the perfect straight man on which to practice his craft. The majority of Aldous’s papers and letters were destroyed in the Hollywood Hills fire of 1961, including the letters he received from friends and family over the years. Thus there is

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figure 3. Aldous Huxley as a boy. © 2013 University of California Regents.

no evidence remaining to tell us whether the ribbing that Aldous delivers in this letter from May 1908 flustered or upset Julian to any significant degree. In light of the events that would take place in the succeeding months and years—their mother’s death from cancer in November 1908 and their brother Trev’s suicide in August 1914—the letter takes on a poignancy that its author could barely have imagined as he crafted these rhymes to gently ridicule his eldest brother. In his memoirs, Julian Huxley describes the reactions of Trev, Aldous, Margaret, and himself to the untimely death of their beloved mother, Julia Arnold Huxley. In a particularly telling passage, Julian recounts how his horror at the sight of his sick mother prompted him to literally run away from her bed: “I was overcome, and ran out into the drive—

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anywhere in the open air, away from that doomed bed.” Although he was a young man of twenty-one who had just won a prestigious literary prize at Oxford, the grief and horror of this scene left Julian utterly incoherent. Moments after he fled from his mother’s deathbed, “Mrs. Judson, a Charterhouse master, came to ask how she was: I just couldn’t answer and rushed out into the fields with my misery.” At the funeral, Julian recalled that “Trev and I were on the verge of tears, and Aldous, then at the critical age of fourteen, stood in stony misery.” The youngest Huxley, Margaret, “looked bewildered and frightened, as well she might, destined at an early age to a bereft existence, until my father married again four years later.” The death of their mother meant the end of their bucolic life near the Charterhouse School, as their father moved them a few months later into “a gloomy London House in Westbourne Square, away from our beloved Surrey.”9 Within a few years, the Huxley family would face other calamities. In 1911, Aldous suffered severe damage to his eyesight due to a serious bacterial infection that the domestic servant who was caring for him had failed to recognize in time. For a period of two years Aldous was unable to see printed materials, and so he learned to read Braille by the time his was seventeen. As some of his eyesight returned, he continued his studies at Oxford with the aid of a magnifying glass and thick spectacles. Although he rarely complained about this crisis and its aftermath, it separated him from the things that he already loved as an adolescent: reading, painting, and exploring the English countryside. Aldous also reflected, in a 1957 interview, that it also made him unfit for military service, “and so I no doubt may owe my life to it.”10 As if to compound the general sense of catastrophe, the same month that plunged Europe into the Great War also brought the suicide of Trev. In the summer of 1914, Julian Huxley was in the same nursing home with Trev. Although he did not yet understand what had precipitated Trev’s nervous breakdown, Julian was recovering from his own collapse after a failed love affair that had ended in 1913 with a broken engagement, followed by his first very challenging year of teaching in the United States. Julian described his own feelings for “K.,” the young woman whom he had first met when she was a student at his mother’s school, and to whom he had been engaged for a year, as a tortured mixture of “attraction, loyalty, and guilt. It must have been clear that I wasn’t in love with her, in the true sense of the word; the ambivalent situation was becoming increasingly difficult for both of us.” The

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breakup had precipitated an earlier breakdown for Julian in the summer of 1913, but he had managed to recover sufficiently and traveled to the United States to begin his first year of teaching at the Rice Institute in Houston. When he returned to England in late spring of 1914, Julian relapsed into a state of depression and checked into a boardinghouse in Pass Christian, Mississippi. When he returned to England, he stayed in a nursing home, and discovered that “Trev had had a breakdown too, and was in the same nursing home.” Weeks later, Julian went to stay with a family friend, while his brother Trev stayed behind. At the end of June, the news of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo and the ominous drift toward war dominated Julian’s attention so much that when “the disquieting news that Trev was missing from the nursing home” arrived in August, Julian “thought that perhaps he had enlisted in the Army on a sudden impulse. But the news soon came that he had hanged himself in the dense woods nearby.”11 While Aldous would revisit the horror of Trev’s suicide in his fiction, Julian attempted, more than fifty years after the fact, to explain it in his memoirs: Trev had become deeply attached to an attractive and intelligent young housemaid working at the new family home in Bracknell Gardens, and was secretly trying to educate her by taking her out to plays, concerts and lectures. After a time he realized the hopelessness and unsuitability of the situation; and so did the girl, who gave her notice. The break between them was to be final, but she wrote him a letter full of despondency, just as he was recovering from his breakdown. It was too much for him, and he chose to die. Sarah, our faithful parlourmaid, knew about the affair, and was able to explain the girl’s letter found in Trev’s pocket.12

Given that Julian and Aldous wrote so little about the specific events surrounding Trev’s suicide, we are left only to guess about why the relationship between this young man and woman, which appeared to be sincere as well as passionate, had ultimately to be abandoned because of the “hopelessness and unsuitability of the situation.” The class-consciousness of the Huxley family had been a decisive factor in this suicide. To begin with, Trev had been disappointed in himself for not living up to the high academic standards set by his forebears and siblings. As the son of a schoolteacher, Thomas Henry Huxley had not been fated to attend either Oxford or Cambridge, but he ultimately helped to change the policies of both universities so that they were not the exclusive reserve of Anglicans from the upper classes. Leonard had broken a barrier by matriculating at Oxford, and he further strengthened the family’s connection with the rising intellectual aristocracy of Britain when he

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married the daughter of the noted school inspector Tom Arnold, younger brother to the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold. For any young person who aspired to an intellectual or professional career, having both T. H. Huxley’s and Matthew Arnold’s family trees was as likely to be as much of a burden as an inspiration. Trev, who unlike Julian and later Aldous, failed to achieve a First at Oxford, felt that burden throughout his short life, but most acutely in the summer of 1914. Soon after Trev’s suicide, Aldous wrote to his cousin Gervas Huxley: “There is—apart from the sheer grief and loss—an added pain in the cynicism of the situation. It is just the highest and best in Trev—his ideals—which have driven him to his death—while there are thousands, who shelter their weakness from the same fate by a cynical, unidealistic outlook on life. Trev was not strong—but he had the courage to face life with ideals—and his ideals were too much for him.”13 Aside from praising Trev for his ideals, these remarks may contain a veiled criticism of the Huxley family and of Aldous himself. The “cynicism of the situation” is a vague remark, but it could well apply to the parvenu fastidiousness within the Huxley family that had doomed Trev’s romance, for all of his apparent sincerity, to secrecy and shame. Aldous’s criticism of the “thousands, who shelter their weakness . . . by a cynical unidealistic outlook on life” could well have applied to himself in the coming decade when he described himself as a “Pyrrhonic aesthete” who could not take any ideals at all very seriously. Whether he tried to make sense of it or not, Trev’s suicide had left a deep and lasting wound. As the summer of 1914 faded into the dawning horror of the Great War, Aldous wrote to his friend Jelly D’Aranyi, the beautiful Hungarian violinist, about his memories of Trev. To her he would confide both his sense of gratitude at having had a brother such as Trev, and his bitter feelings of emptiness: One ought to be grateful and thankful for all the years one has spent with one that was among the noblest and best of men—but Oh God, it’s bitter sometimes to sit in this room reading before the fire—alone and to think of all the happy evenings we sat there together and all the hours I hoped to have again, when he was better. It’s a selfish grief perhaps, but oh Jelly, you know what he meant to me.14

Julian saw a direct link between the tragedy of their mother’s death and the tone of Aldous Huxley’s novels during the following decade: “I am sure that this meaningless catastrophe was the main cause of the protec-

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tive cynical skin in which he clothed himself and his novels in the 1920s.”15 Undoubtedly the death of his mother did influence Aldous Huxley during the 1920s, along with the subsequent and equally inexplicable tragedies of 1914. As an adolescent he suffered the blow of losing his mother and his life in Surrey, followed by the near-total loss of his eyesight in 1911. As he came into manhood, Aldous had barely recovered when he suffered the loss of his favorite brother to an inexplicable suicide in the same month that saw the commencement of hostilities in Europe and British entry into the war. Aldous had at first met these events with the same nationalistic spirit of his compatriots, but he soon regarded the war as more murderous and absurd with each passing year, and advised his brother Julian to remain in America and stay out of it altogether.16 It seems facile, however, to attribute the cynicism of Aldous Huxley’s first novels entirely, or even primarily, to some sort of emotional selfdefense mechanism. For one thing, the Great War was such an unmitigated disaster that it inspired a virtual pandemic of cynicism among thinking people in its aftermath. Furthermore, Aldous had been less afraid of his mother’s death than his elder brother had been at the time. He had stayed beside Julia when he visited her deathbed, and he treasured the words of her last note to him for the rest of his life. In a 1915 letter to his friend Jelly D’Aranyi, Aldous wrote: You never knew my mother—I wish you had because she was a very wonderful woman: Trev was most like her. I have just been reading again what she wrote to me just before she died. The last words of her letter were “Don’t be too critical of other people and ‘love much’”—and I have come to see more and more how wise that advice was. It’s a warning against a rather conceited and selfish fault of my own and it’s a whole philosophy of life.17

For all of the diverse philosophies that Aldous had throughout his career, he returned many times to the substance of Julia’s advice. In the last years of his life, Aldous remarked, “It is a little embarrassing that after forty five years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.”18 Moreover, the courage to face the reality of death became a theme in Aldous Huxley’s novels until the end of his life. In Brave New World, the death of the Savage’s mother in a London hospital is prophetic of the first-world way of dying that would become almost universal in industrialized countries after 1945: doped up on medication and distracted by the steady stream of meaningless images and sounds from the television screen at the foot of her bed.

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Trev’s legacy is not discussed much in Julian’s memoir, but his life and death clearly had a profound and lifelong effect on Julian. In her memoir, written a decade after Julian’s death, his widow, Juliette Huxley, expressed her long-held conviction that her husband’s tortured feelings about Trev were at the root of his frequently neurotic and insensitive behavior. Julian had confessed to her that as a child he had deeply resented the arrival of Trev for robbing him of his mother’s hitherto exclusive attention. This festering resentment was both complicated and compounded by Trev’s suicide. According to Juliette, the conflicted memory of Trev was a destructive neurosis that followed Julian to his deathbed: “A few months before he died, tormented and tormenting, I said to him: ‘Julian, you have a demon within yourself, and it is destroying you, and me’—to which, quite casually, he replied, ‘Of course I have a demon, had it since I was four.’ ”19 Decades after Trev’s suicide, when Aldous and Maria’s only child, Matthew Huxley, married and had a young son, Aldous encouraged him to name the boy Trevenen, to honor the brother whom he still remembered as “a very rare being whom we all loved.”20 Beyond that, there is very little in the surviving correspondence of Aldous Huxley to account fully for the causes of Trev’s suicide. In two of Aldous Huxley’s novels from the 1930s, however, he depicts two pivotal characters whose suicides are motivated at least partially by high ideals and an acute sense of sexual guilt. The first of these characters is “the Savage” in Brave New World, who condemns the mindless hedonism of the World State and ends up living in an abandoned lighthouse several miles north of London, where he struggles to purify himself and eradicate his infatuation with the beautiful Lenina Crowne through a monastic regime of simple living and self-flagellation. When his practice of whipping himself is recorded by the broadcast media and becomes a fashionable sexual fetish among the citizens of the World State, they flock to the lighthouse to watch his painful ritual. After a steady stream of attention from hordes of adoring voyeurs, the Savage is finally lured into taking soma and participating in an orgy. The next morning, when he remembers what he has done, he ends his life as Trev had ended his, by hanging himself. Three years later, in his 1934 novel, Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous would describe the suicide of a character with a closer resemblance to Trev. Brian Foxe is a gentle spirit who needlessly complicates his relationship with a young woman whom he loves because of his reticence about both marriage and sex. Brian delays marriage to the young woman by

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figure 4. Julian and Juliette Huxley as newlyweds. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

refusing to accept financial assistance from his elders, and he complicates the relationship itself with his fear that any kind of physical intimacy, outside of marriage at least, would turn a beautiful and spiritual relationship into something base and physical. When the novel’s protagonist, an aspiring sociologist named Anthony Beavis (based in most respects on Aldous himself), moves to seduce the young woman merely for the sport of it, the whole situation unravels quickly. She writes to Brian Foxe and confesses her deep feelings for Anthony—which she naïvely believes are mutual. Young Brian Foxe, knowing that he has lost his love and been betrayed by his best friend, ends his life by jumping from a cliff while on a hike in the Lake District. The character of Brian

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figure 5. Maria Nys Huxley. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Foxe’s mother is a saintly and beautiful woman who exemplifies many of the traits of Julia Arnold Huxley, making Eyeless in Gaza a tortured meditation on two of the greatest personal losses in Aldous Huxley’s life. It is impossible to say whether the acute sexual repression that played a role in Brian Foxe’s suicide was also a part of Trev’s psychological makeup. Such a repressive attitude toward sex was hardly an operative factor in the adult lives of Julian and Aldous Huxley, however. Aldous’s wife, Maria, was bisexual and made a habit in the twenties and thirties of arranging liaisons for him, one of which included a ménage à trois with the beautiful socialite Mary Hutchinson, whom Huxley friend and biographer Sybille Bedford describes as one of the fashionable and

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figure 6. Juliette Baillot Huxley at age thirty-four. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

intimidating “brilliant ones” in the Bloomsbury circle.21 Late in 1929, Julian, then in his early forties, became infatuated during his travels to eastern Africa with a nineteen-year-old American woman named Viola Ilma, to whom he made this alarming, if vaguely absurd declaration: “I shall conquer you with my mind.”22 The ploy apparently worked, and in a letter home, Julian peremptorily informed his wife that they were now to have an open marriage. Although he declared that he was willing to follow Ilma to a new life in the United States, the affair did not last quite as long as Julian had hoped, as Viola Ilma went on to pursue her career as a writer, editor, and increasingly right-wing spokesperson for various youth movements in the 1930s.23 The initial betrayal and extended

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humiliations of this affair deeply wounded Juliette, as she revealed in her memoir. She described Julian’s behavior during this period as reflective of his lifelong capacity to torture both himself and others with a domineering personality lacerated by painful and enduring contradictions. Although he was “puritan by upbringing,” she observed, Julian exhibited the tendencies of a “repressed romantic, emotionally adolescent” individual deep into middle age.24 As he carried out his affair with Viola Ilma on his next lecture tour across North America and even attempted, without success, to find a new research position for himself in the United States, Julian encouraged Juliette to have a liaison of her own with another man. This she dutifully did, with the advice and encouragement of her psychoanalyst. Recalling her affair with a man whom she called Jason, who would later be lost at sea during the Second World War, Juliette writes, “What I inevitably missed in Julian, Jason gave me in abundance—a devotion which made no complex demands, a constant understanding and tenderness.”25 In addition to this affair, Juliette Huxley would soon begin a longterm and intimate relationship with another woman. In 1936, the American poet May Sarton, after an abortive affair with Julian Huxley, became smitten with Juliette. The precise details of their relationship have remained private, but they conducted a secret correspondence that lasted decades. Although Juliette did not even mention May Sarton in her 1986 memoir, her relationship with the poet was documented in letters released years after her death. The fact that both Maria Nys Huxley and Juliette Huxley were bisexual is perhaps not surprising given the attitude toward human sexuality shared by the Huxley brothers and their broad circle of friends. Their letters and writings indicate that Julian and Aldous had a more open and accepting view of same-sex relationships than was common in the early to mid-twentieth century. Lifelong friends with gay men such as the novelist Christopher Isherwood and polymath Gerald Heard, Aldous made the open acceptance of homosexuality an explicit feature of the utopian society he depicted in Island.26 For his part, Julian was remarkably frank in his memoirs about his feelings of strong romantic attraction to another boy when he was an adolescent. In his novel Point Counter Point, Aldous described the Great War as a time “when the bottom had been knocked out of everything,” including long-standing religious conceptions about who we are, how we should behave, and what place we occupy in the scheme of things.27 Such instability engendered new ways of thinking not only about sex

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but also about our relationship with nature. As a professional biologist and avid outdoorsman, Julian Huxley felt the contradictions implicit in such changes acutely. Throughout his life, Julian responded to periods of emotional strain and grief by immersing himself in activity, and this led to an extremely productive and wide-ranging career, punctuated by dramatic collapses and breakdowns. Julian’s love of the outdoors was more than a pastime; it was a necessary salve for his nerves and a constant source of revelation for his extraordinarily inquisitive mind. The depth of his attachment to the natural world was reflected in his early commitment to the protection of wild spaces from commercialization. Paradoxically, his lifelong fascination with biology was informed not only by a desire to understand but also to control nature. What he called “the meaningless catastrophe” of his mother’s death from cancer colored Julian’s view of the natural world and may partly have led him to embrace the goal of complete human control over nature articulated in Britain during the 1920s by provocative Marxist colleagues such as J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal. Julian was a good friend of both men throughout his career, and he had an even closer working relationship with H. G. Wells, who advocated a similar transformation of nature for human ends to a much broader audience. In the twenties, J. B. S. Haldane would imagine the elimination of motherhood itself, through the process of ectogenesis. Aldous, who also knew Haldane, showcased this idea in a provocative passage in his first published novel, Crome Yellow, published in 1922. Here a very clever and somewhat lecherous Mr. Scogan holds forth to fellow guests on a country retreat about the possibility of completely severing sex from procreation: With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these—the means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his deplorable association with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of a few centuries, who knows? the world may see a complete severance. . . . An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower in a sunlit world.28

J. B. S. Haldane would propose this idea in more detailed and serious terms in his February 1923 address to a club of nonconformist intellectuals

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called the Cambridge Heretics Society, the lecture which he would later publish as Daedalus, or Science and the Future.29 While the concept of gestating babies in bottles no doubt strikes many people as disturbing, it is possible that for both of the Huxley brothers the freedom that such an image offered from the more confining aspects of traditional family life held no small appeal. Although the Huxley family was marked by more than one generation of exceptional achievements, it also endured more than its share of tragedy and psychological torment. The cult of domesticity that had characterized the Victorian era was remembered as more than a little bit suffocating by a whole generation of writers and thinkers in the early twentieth century, and, for Julian and Aldous, it may well have seemed that Trev had been a casualty of it. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that even three decades after Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s final assay at a plausible utopia, depicted in the pages of Island, presented a society in which child rearing was thoroughly socialized through a process of “Mutual Adoption Clubs” and not left exclusively to one’s biological parents.30 On a more fundamental level, the early loss of their beloved mother to cancer may have also inspired both of the Huxley brothers to imagine a world in which science and reason had a firm upper hand over the contingencies of nature. Given their instinctive defiance of specialization, it is not surprising that that both Julian and Aldous Huxley reflected on our changing relationship with nature in the broadest terms possible. As the already impressive technological achievements of the Victorian age were exceeded by the spectacular discoveries and innovations of the early twentieth century, radically new forms of political ecology now seemed possible, and both Julian and Aldous were intensely aware of this. The following sections outline the Victorian vision of political ecology articulated by T. H. Huxley in the last decade of the Victorian age, and then explore the dramatic ways in which Julian and Aldous Huxley each modified that vision in the twentieth century.

t. h. huxley: “evolution and ethics” Like the word “electrocution,” the term “scientist” was coined in the United States during the late nineteenth century, and T. H. Huxley made no secret of his disdain for both neologisms.31 For him the term “scientist” not only was ugly to the ear but connoted a level of specialization that threatened to thwart the broader mission of science. To say that science was a religion for T. H. Huxley would be an understatement.

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As he saw it, a fearless devotion to the truth was the perennial religion that transcended all others, and the scientific method was the best tool that human beings had discovered so far to get at the truth. To question everything and accept nothing on faith or authority was more than a procedural starting point for T. H. Huxley. He saw it as the basis of a great intellectual and moral reformation, many times more significant than the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Where that Reformation had overthrown the authority of clerics, this reformation would rigorously challenge all truth claims based on traditional forms of authority, including scriptural texts that did not comport with the evidence provided by experiment and observation. In light of his grand vision for the revolutionary role of science in the moral and intellectual life of the human race, T. H. Huxley did not view a life dedicated to science as merely a profession or specialization. It was nothing less than a calling, and frequently a call to arms. Ironically, by the end of his life T. H. Huxley had metamorphosed from an iconoclast into an icon. If his early career as a polemicist had struck a blow against clerical authority in Victorian England, his career as an educator had highlighted the promise of a new way of living based on the ethos of science. Rejecting a professorship at Oxford, and choosing instead to teach at the School of Mines and the Imperial College in London, Huxley had taught some of the most influential figures of Britain’s rapidly rising intellectual and professional class. Patrick Geddes, who had studied biology with Huxley, would later attempt to integrate his knowledge of the life sciences with his vision for urban planning as he helped to design new cityscapes in India and Israel, and he would have a profound effect on American thinkers such as the social critic Lewis Mumford and the conservationist Benton MacKaye. Another of T. H. Huxley’s students, Herbert George Wells, would both enchant and horrify his myriad readers with his visions of the future as he created the new genre that would come to be known in the 1920s as “science fiction.” H. G. Wells would still identify himself, decades after his teacher’s death, as “one of Huxley’s men.” As with all revolutionaries and reformers, however, the question of precisely what sort of future to build became in itself a burden. It had been a clear enough task to argue for the plausibility of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, and to uncover the deficiencies of biblical explanations of the origins of life. It was a much murkier and more hazardous task to outline a new ethos for human beings based on the findings of evolutionary biology. In the seventeenth century,

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Newton’s vision of a rational universe obeying fixed and comprehensible laws engendered a new intellectual confidence in the power of rational human beings to comprehend the universe in which they lived. Darwin’s vision of the human race emerging from millions of years of random mutation and constant Malthusian struggle was less likely to generate such utopian optimism. For some of Huxley’s generation, such as his friend Herbert Spencer, the way forward was implicit in the process of natural selection itself. Spencer’s vision of Social Darwinism enjoyed a great deal of popularity among social elites on both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century, but was categorically rejected by “Darwin’s bulldog” himself. Likewise, the concept of eugenics, conceived by his friend Francis Galton, was an idea that Huxley explicitly rejected. In his last work, Evolution and Ethics, Thomas Henry Huxley had declared that while the paradigm of Darwinian evolution had swept away traditional religious explanations of our origin and purpose in the universe, neither it nor eugenics could offer any basis for a new moral vision for mankind. In this remarkable lecture, Huxley surveyed a broad array of religious and philosophical traditions and found evidence of a perennial foundation for human morals in traditions as historically diverse as Roman Stoicism and Indian Buddhism. That morality, however, did not come from nature. Evolutionary biology, as Huxley saw it, merely described what was, and had nothing to say whatsoever about what should be. It would now be our awesome task, unaided by the authority of scripture or even by the majesty of nature, to answer that question on our own terms. Throughout his career, T. H. Huxley had defined this task not only as the common duty of civilizing powers such as Britain and the United States, but as the very essence of ethical civilization itself. In Evolution and Ethics, he elaborated at length on the challenge of taming the wilderness and of taming the forces of nature within oneself. Because civilized human ethics are essentially alien and opposed to nature, the establishment of an ethical society in nature resembles the arduous task of building a colony in an alien land: The process of colonization presents analogies to the formation of a garden, which are highly instructive. Suppose a shipload of colonists sent to form a settlement, in such a country as Tasmania was in the last century. On landing, they find themselves in the midst of a state of nature, widely different from that left behind them in everything but the most general physical conditions. . . . The colonists proceed to put an end to this state of things over as large an area as they desire to occupy. They clear away the native vegetation,

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extirpate or drive out the animal population, so far as may be necessary, and take measures to protect themselves against the re-immigration of either. In their place, they introduce English grain and fruit trees; English dogs, sheep, cattle, horses; and English men; in fact, they set up a new Flora and Fauna and a new variety of mankind, within the old state of nature.32

This scenario presents a distinctly Victorian conception of political ecology. The colonizers have it within their power to entirely displace the native flora, fauna, and human populations of whatever land they choose to inhabit, and replace them with their own. By sheer force of intellect and industry, they can convert the Tasmanian wilderness into an English garden, and thus need not worry about adjusting their civilization to a new landscape, because they can remake the landscape in the image of their civilization. In fact, the only thing that could defeat them would not be any unforeseen consequences from their alteration of the landscape, but merely the failure to also master the weaknesses of their own human nature as thoroughly as they can master the landscape around them.33 The historian Rosalind Williams has written of the late nineteenth century as a period when observers as diverse as Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson recognized that the industrialized empires of the world were hastening the arrival of the “triumph of human empire” that Bacon had first envisioned in the seventeenth century.34 While many writers and artists would view this trend with a degree of melancholy, T. H. Huxley would see it as a moral imperative. In his 1876 address at the founding of Johns Hopkins University, T. H. Huxley described the current expansion of both the United States and the British Empire as parallel manifestations of “that secular progress by which the descendents [sic] of savage Britons and wild pirates of the North Sea have become converted into warriors of order and champions of peaceful freedom, exhausting what still remains of that old Berserk spirit in subduing nature, and turning the wilderness into a garden.”35 He thus combined, in one rhetorical flourish, not just the grand sagas of British colonialism and American manifest destiny but also the images that would become his pivotal metaphors in Evolution and Ethics: the colony and the garden.

julian huxley: “the tissue culture king” Julian Huxley’s vision of this ecology of empire unfolds in his first and only completed foray in the science fiction genre, a story entitled the “The Tissue Culture King.” This tale, which has not previously been

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examined in any scholarly treatments of Julian Huxley’s life and thought, was first published in the Yale Review in 1926. Reprinted a year later in the pulp newsprint pages of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, Julian’s tale of weird science run amok in the African interior is stylistically derivative, owing a partial debt to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and perhaps a greater debt to the breathless adventure fiction and pulp fantasy that were Gernsback’s stock-in-trade in the twenties and thirties. It is the tale of a young English biologist named Hascombe who “goes native” and puts his considerable knowledge of modern biology at the service of a superstitious African priest-king, creating, for the glorification of the king in the eyes of his benighted subjects, a grotesque array of mutant frogs and armies of human giants and dwarves, as well as a cadre of plump concubines born from the sexless process of parthenogenesis. Reflecting Julian Huxley’s fascination with parapsychology, the story also depicts experiments conducted to enhance the power of this priest-king and his chief bishop, in telepathy, mass hypnosis, and mind control.36 As dramatically different as this scenario is from the colonial paradigm presented in Evolution and Ethics, the two do share essentially the same idea about progress. In terms of the moral relationship between the metropole and the colony, Julian Huxley retains the same vision that his grandfather espoused: England is the land of light and progress, and the African wilderness is a place of darkness and regress. However, Julian Huxley’s depiction of the relationship between civilization and the wilderness lacks the confidence of the Victorian age and reflects the anxieties of a period in which once stable assumptions about the power of colonialism and the Western vision of progress itself are all becoming more precarious. As Europeans found in their forays into central Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this was a landscape that could not be readily Europeanized. Furthermore, the story reflects a growing anxiety that the main source of European power, the fruits of science and technology, could be seized by the natives and used to oppose Europeans, even to enslave them. But perhaps the most striking innovation in Julian Huxley’s vision here is the power of applied science to transform the ecology of the colonial periphery in ways both profound and entirely unforeseen. By creating the chimeras and releasing them into the African wilderness, Hascombe has created a “second nature,” a feral landscape neither natural nor tame: “For two days we were marched through pleasant parklike country, with villages at intervals. Every now and then some new

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monstrosity in the shape of a dwarf or incredibly fat woman or a twoheaded animal would be visible, until I thought I had stumbled on the original source of supply of circus freaks.”37 This kingdom of chimeras and “circus freaks” is a place where human interference with an ecology that has developed over millions of years will now reverberate in ways that neither Hascombe nor anyone else can foresee. While Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau had also featured intimations of biotechnology, Julian Huxley’s shorter tale has a more enduring salience for two reasons. First, it is founded on a more precise knowledge of heredity, fertility, and physiology than Wells’s late Victorian novel; and, second, its scientist character is driven by a passion that all contemporary scientists and scholars can instantly recognize, the desire to obtain steady material support for his research. Thus the same motivation that has led scientists and engineers to put themselves in the employ of tyrants and militarists throughout the world has led the desperate Hascombe to offer his services to an ambitious African chieftain. In the opening pages of the story, the narrator is surprised to find a kingdom in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa with what strikes him as an anomalous level of sophistication in its architecture and general layout: “[The capital] turned out to be a really large town for Africa, its mud walls of strangely impressive architectural form, with their heavy slabby buttresses, and giants standing guard upon them.” As he moves deeper into the capital of this completely isolated African kingdom, he sees something that completely defies his expectations: “I suddenly noted something else that made me feel queer—a telephone wire, with perfectly good insulators, running across from tree to tree. A telephone—in an unknown African town. I gave up.”38 Soon enough, the narrator finds his explanation for this level of technical sophistication in the heart of Africa. He meets Hascombe, who years ago had been taken prisoner here, but then had managed to use his knowledge of science to put himself in the good graces of the ruling elite. At the top of this social pyramid he came to know the priest-king himself and his bishop, a shrewd and ambitious African by the name of Begala. As the narrator’s mysterious compatriot introduces himself, he immediately discloses his credentials as “lately research worker at Middlesex Hospital, now religious advisor to His Majesty King Mgobe.” He laughed again and pushed ahead. He was an interesting figure—perhaps fifty years old, spare body, thin face, with a small beard and rather sunken, hazel eyes. As for his expression, he looked cynical, but also as if he was interested in life. . . . Hascombe had been a medical

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student of great promise. . . . [A] big commission on sleeping sickness had been organized and Hascombe, restless and eager for travel, had pulled wires and got himself appointed as one of the scientific staff sent to Africa.39

Soon after arriving in the interior, Hascombe and his research assistant were taken captive by this tribe. The assistant died trying to escape, but Hascombe became fascinated with the mores of the local culture: “Hascombe (who had interested himself in a dilettante way in anthropology as in most other subjects of scientific inquiry) was much impressed by what he described as the exceedingly religious atmosphere.”40 Taking note of the tribe’s religious fetish for blood, Hascombe showed the chief and his councilors some of his own blood under a microscope and soon earned a place as a trusted religious advisor to the priest-king and his bishop: Hascombe had a sense of humor, and it was tickled. . . . [W]hy not take the opportunity of doing a little research work at state expense—an opportunity that he and his like were always clamoring for at home? His thoughts began to run away with him. He would find out all he could of the rites and superstitions of the tribe. He would, by aid of his knowledge and his skill, exalt the details of these rites, the expression of those superstitions, the whole physical side of their religiosity, on to a new level which should to them appear truly miraculous.41

In a wry allusion to the burgeoning discipline of mass persuasion in the industrialized world, Julian’s narrator relates how Hascombe expanded his support for his research projects throughout the kingdom, using modern methods of propaganda: “What an opportunity for scientific advertising! But unfortunately the population could not read. However, war propaganda worked very well in more or less illiterate countries— why not here? Hascombe organized a series of public lectures.”42 To maintain steady support for his work, Hascombe tailored each of his research proposals to meet the religious needs of the kingdom, from the production of tissue cultures of the priest-king and revered ancestors; to the creation of giants, dwarves, bearded women, and sexually precocious children through glandular injections; to the mass breeding of obese temple prostitutes through parthenogenesis. In explaining his modus operandi, Hascombe also works in a sly criticism of the gap between science and public opinion in modern democracies: “You see, I must always remember that it is no good proposing any line of work that will not benefit the national religion. I suppose state-aided research would have much the same kinds of difficulties in a really democratic state.”43

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In describing Hascombe’s achievements working in this milieu, Julian Huxley’s tale reveals an element that would be central to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World five years later; namely, the combination of new discoveries in embryology with the mass-production methods of Henry Ford. As Hascombe, he explains it: “I thought I would see whether art could not improve upon nature, and set myself to recall my experimental embryology. . . . I utilize the plasticity of the earliest stages to give double-headed and cyclopean monsters. . . . I have merely applied the mass-production methods of Mr. Ford. . . . My specialties are three-headed snakes, and toads with an extra heaven-pointing head. The former are a little difficult, but there is a great demand for them and they fetch a good price.”44

Julian Huxley’s tale depicts two vaunted fruits of Western civilization— applied science and the logic of the marketplace—as having a profoundly destabilizing effect, especially in combination with one another. As Hascombe, in order to serve his own material needs as a researcher, puts his knowledge of applied science and the principles of mass production in the service of the local combination of religious and political power, he transforms the wilderness, not into a garden, but into a bizarre and nightmarish landscape. When the narrator offers to help Hascombe escape from the kingdom, he is horrified to hear that, so engrossed is the young scientist in his research, he has lost all interest in escape: “The experiments which most excited his imagination were those he was conducting in mass telepathy.”45 After convincing the priest-king and his chief advisor, Bishop Begala, that such experiments would exponentially enhance their power, Hascombe was able to forge ahead with research on a scale that would have been impossible in England: He was soon able to demonstrate the existence of telepathy, by making suggestions to one hypnotized man who transferred them without physical intermediation to another at a distance. Later—and this was the culmination of his work—he found that when he made a suggestion to several subjects at once, the telepathic effect was much stronger than if he had done it to one at a time—the hypnotized minds were reinforcing each other. “I’m after the super-consciousness,” Hascombe said. “And I’ve already got the rudiments of it.” [To this news the narrator responded with great enthusiasm:] I must confess I got almost as excited as Hascombe about the possibilities this opened up.46

In another pointed allusion to contemporary trends in the age of Benito Mussolini and Edward Bernays, Julian Huxley explicitly compares the

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use of mass hypnosis in this African kingdom to the modern methods of advertising and propaganda.47 His narrator describes how the hardnosed Bishop Begala, upon seeing the power of Hascombe’s techniques of mass hypnosis, “dreamt dreams before which those of the proprietor of a newspaper syndicate, or even those of a director of propaganda in wartime, would be pale and timid.”48 In the closing pages of “The Tissue Culture King,” the narrator persuades Hascombe to attempt an escape while all of the people of the kingdom are put into a trance. They pack their provisions for the long trek back to civilization, and then Hascombe employs his skills in mass hypnosis to put everyone in this small African city-state, including the king himself and his power-hungry advisor, Begala, into a state of deep sleep. In an inspired detail that perhaps marks a milestone in the folklore of conspiracy theories, the narrator and Hascombe don “caps of metal foil” as they make their escape. These tinfoil hats, the narrator explains, “enormously reduced the effects on ourselves” of the mass hypnosis that gripped the rest of the kingdom.49 The plan for escape begins well enough, but when they cross the outer frontier of the kingdom, the narrator and Hascombe make a fatal mistake. Believing they are now far enough away from the mass hypnosis to escape its effects, they cast aside their protective tinfoil hats. Soon Hascombe is overcome by an inexplicable feeling that he must return to the kingdom. The narrator is shocked at this proposition, but realizes that he shares the same inexplicable feeling: “It was like that old friend from our boyhood, the voice of conscience. . . . But suddenly checking myself as the thought came under the play of reason . . . I then realized what had happened. Begala had waked up; he had wiped out the suggestion we had given to the super-consciousness and in its place put in another . . . ‘Return!’ ”50 Now that the narrator, in his capacity for rational thought, has recognized and rejected the programming that came into his mind under the seductive guise of moral conscience, he can reject the programmed message and continue with his plan of escape. But Hascombe is not so strong; he will not listen to the narrator’s rational arguments, but follows what he feels is somehow “his sacred duty” to return to the kingdom.51 The regressive role played by religious superstition and what the narrator calls “the voice of conscience” in this story is emblematic of Julian Huxley’s oft-stated views on religion and science. For Julian Huxley, the imperative to understand the world through rational inquiry was an unqualified good. In contrast to figures such as Dr. Faust or Victor Fran-

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figure 7. Julian Huxley at age thirty-nine. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

kenstein, Hascombe does not get into trouble because he is too eager to attain secret knowledge or the power that comes with it. Rather, his tragic mistake is to subordinate knowledge and power to the service of irrational superstition. The fact that he has carelessly placed this power within the reach of a tyrannical theocracy proves to be his ultimate undoing, as when Begala uses the techniques of mind control that Hascombe has perfected against Hascombe himself. Given the significance that so many late Victorian thinkers, including both Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley, placed in the sanctity of conscience, it is telling that it is “that old friend from boyhood, the voice of conscience” that lures Hascombe back to his doom. This is a siren song that Julian Huxley’s more rational narrator is able to resist. In a more direct, though far less poetic, manner than Huckleberry Finn, the nameless narrator of “The Tissue Culture King” is able to interrogate his conscience, subject it to the “play of reason,” and reject its injunctions.52 It is the voice of rational thought, and nothing else, that saves the narrator from falling into the same trap as Hascombe. At the end of “The Tissue Culture King,” the narrator apologizes for “sermonizing” as he presents quite explicitly the moral of the story:

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The question I want to raise is this: Dr. Hascombe attained to an unsurpassed power in a number of the applications of science—but to what end did all this power serve? It is the merest cant and twaddle to go on asserting, as most of our press and people continue to do, that increase of scientific knowledge and power must in itself be good. I commend to the great public the obvious moral of my story and ask them to think what they propose to do with the power that is gradually being accumulated for them by the labors of those who labor because they like power, or because they want to find the truth about how things work.53

Julian makes an argument here that would have increasing salience in the twentieth century. In an age of modern research and development, applied science would come to yield enormous power. When such power was put in the service of superstition and enhanced political control rather than rational progress and individual freedom, the results could be terrifying. For all its flaws as a work of literature, Julian Huxley’s science fiction tale anticipates, with its exploration of biotechnology, Fordism, and propaganda, some key elements in Brave New World. It also presents a vision of a feral wilderness that is neither nature nor civilization. Given the ecological chaos engendered by climate change, habitat loss, and failed states around the world, Julian’s grotesque idyll of freelance biotechnology in a feral wilderness may prove to be more prophetic, in many regions, than his younger brother’s vision of a carefully managed World State.

aldous huxley: “o brave new world, that has such people in it” In the spring of 1932, just as Brave New World was garnering its first reviews in Britain and the United States, Aldous Huxley wrote to the American novelist Edith Wharton and observed with some amusement that H. G. Wells “had found the book rather annoying.” In the same letter, Aldous credited Bertrand Russell with providing much of the novel’s intellectual framework: “Fundamentally what is said is the same as what Russell says in the last chapters of The Scientific Outlook only, of course, it can be said with more penetrative energy in a novel.”54 In fact, the parallels between Aldous Huxley’s vision of the World State and Russell’s description of the “Scientific Society” were so close that Russell had consulted his publisher Stanley Unwin about whether Brave New World was a prima facie case of plagiarism. Russell privately decided to drop the matter, however, and gave the book a favorable

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review in the New Leader, concluding, with some sense of alarm, “I am afraid . . . that while Mr. Huxley’s prophecy is meant to be fantastic, it is all too likely to come true.”55 Written soon after Aldous attended the founding meeting of Julian Huxley’s utilitarian Political and Economic Planning (PEP) group in 1931 and published early the following year, Brave New World lampoons the Fabian brand of utilitarianism advanced by PEP. This Swiftian fantasy also takes aim at a number of ideas—such as ectogenesis, the creation of new kinds of recreational drugs, and the maintenance of youth through hormone therapy—that Julian Huxley had recently advocated in his 1931 book of essays What Dare I Think? Aldous Huxley’s depiction of applied science in Brave New World develops the premise that technologies such as ectogenesis would not be used to breed smarter human beings, as both J. B. S. Haldane and Julian Huxley had supposed, but rather for the production of more docile workers and citizens. Furthermore, it would matter little in the long run if the masters of such a scientifically regulated society styled themselves as Bolsheviks, Fascists, or plutocrats, as the practical results of their methods would be essentially the same. By gleefully combining names and terms drawn from Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and American consumerism Aldous drives home his point that ideological distinctions between the varieties of managerial autocracy would count for nothing in the long run. Charlotte Haldane, who recognized in Brave New World a direct attack on the optimistic vision that her husband had presented in Daedalus, or Science and the Future, diagnosed Aldous as subject to a sort of moral and artistic schizophrenia, unable to choose between his Huxleyan and Arnoldian inheritance: “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are nothing next to Dr. Huxley and Mr. Arnold.” She argued that, in the conclusion of Brave New World, the Arnoldian impulse to moralize seizes control: “Dr. Huxley, who knows and cares about biology and music, science and art, is once again ousted by this double of his, [a] morbid, masochistic medieval Christian. . . . The result is distressing.”56 This droll caricature of Aldous Huxley’s thinking had some basis in reality. In Brave New World, Aldous was in fact expanding upon concerns about the cultural and moral impact of industrialization that Matthew Arnold had expressed more than a generation earlier. In his seminal essay “Culture and Anarchy,” Arnold observed that the broad changes wrought by the rapid advance of science and industry had the power to free modern culture from moribund dogmas and traditions: “But now the iron force

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of adhesion to the old routine—social, political, religious—has wonderfully yielded; the iron force of exclusion to all which is new has wonderfully yielded.” Arnold saw tremendous potential for the growth of art and culture in this age of unceasing innovation. He warned, however, of two serious dangers that lay ahead for modern culture: The danger now is not that people should obstinately refuse to allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or other to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate the importance of them altogether, and that they should think it enough to follow action for its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the will of God prevail therein.57

Like Arnold, both Julian and Aldous Huxley were convinced that the dissolution of old religious ideas and traditions by the forces of modern science and industry could be disastrous if it were not guided by the wisdom of, in Arnold’s oft-repeated formulation, “the best which has been thought and said.” This unease about mass culture displacing high culture is reflected in the narration of Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue Culture King,” with its passing references to contemporary trends in industrialized societies, but is given full expression in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. While Aldous’s friend and admirer H. L. Mencken had made a cottage industry in the previous decade out of ridiculing the beliefs and pastimes of the “booboisie,” Aldous went several steps further and depicted the burgeoning world of mass culture as not just insipid but insidious.58 Aldous Huxley would later regret that his only detailed alternative to the utilitarian hive of the World State in Brave New World was the feral wilderness of the Savage Reservation. In a radio play adaptation of the novel that he narrated for CBS in the 1950s, Aldous added greater stress to Mustapha Mond’s discussion of island communities where exceptional people were allowed to live outside the restrictions of the World State.59 This idea of an island utopia in a world that has succumbed to both totalitarianism and consumerism would, of course, provide both the inspiration and the title of his last novel, Island. However, the stark dichotomy between the Savage Reservation and the World State does give the novel a dramatic tension that it could not otherwise possess. Lenina Crowne reflects on the adventure of visiting a Savage Reservation in the West: “Not more than half a dozen people in the whole Centre had ever been inside a Savage Reservation. As an Alpha-Plus psycholo-

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gist, Bernard was one of the few men she knew entitled to a permit.”60 The same exotic and forbidden quality that makes the Savage Reservation exciting to Lenina makes the Savage himself a celebrity when he comes into contact with the citizens of the World State. For all their voyeuristic fascination with the Savage, however, the defining trait of the citizens of the World State is a complete lack of interest in the natural world. It is his vaguely romantic interest in nature that makes Bernard Marx so puzzling, annoying, and even a bit frightening to Lenina: Bernard considered Electro-magnetic golf a waste of time. “Then what’s time for?” asked Lenina in some astonishment. Apparently for going on walks in the Lake District; for that is what he now proposed.61

In the society of the World State, the natural world has been adequately preserved, but only as a backdrop for mindless and thoroughly social recreation. One can visit the Lake District, or with the right permits, a Savage Reservation in the American West. But the contemplation of either the beautiful or the sublime in nature itself is dangerous to the health of the social organism, and therefore precluded by thorough social conditioning. The fact that Bernard wants to walk in the heather of the Lake District or contemplate the moon in rough weather over the English Channel is emblematic of his maladjustment: On their way over the English Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller and hovering on his helicopter screws within a hundred feet of the waves. The weather had taken a change for the worse; a south-westerly wind had sprung up and the sky was cloudy. “Look,” he commanded. “But it’s horrible,” said Lenina shrinking back from the window. She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foamflecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the hastening clouds. “Let’s turn on the radio. Quick!” She reached for the dialing knob on the dashboard and turned it at random. “. . . skies are blue inside of you,” sang sixteen tremoloing falsettos, “the weather’s always . . .”62

This scene, as described from Lenina’s perspective, evinces how thoroughly she has been conditioned to see nonhuman nature in the purely social terms of the hive mind. The moon is neither distant nor solitary, but seems more like the countenance of a citizen in an urban crowd, “a pale face . . . haggard and distracted.” Lenina’s reflexive dash for the

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radio to shut out the sublime image of this seascape and replace it with the comforting noise of the radio is an image from Brave New World that Theodor Adorno found particularly resonant. In his commentary on what he saw as the most salient elements in Brave New World, Adorno wrote, “Huxley is well acquainted with the latest model citizen who contemplates a bay as a tourist attraction while seated in his car listening to radio commercials.”63 Although Aldous Huxley’s childhood ambition of pursuing a medical career was thwarted by the severe damage to his eyesight that he suffered as an adolescent, he remained deeply interested in the life sciences and argued throughout his entire life as a writer and public intellectual that the social, political, and even the religious concerns of the human race could never be disentangled from biology, and thus could never be addressed effectively without considering their biological and ecological dimensions. All of his works of speculative fiction, from the dystopian satires of Brave New World and Ape and Essence to the sensible but doomed utopia that he described in Island, explored such biological concepts as ectogenesis, eugenics, and physiognomy, and all three placed a heavy emphasis on the overarching factors of population and ecology. In stressing the importance of biology, Julian and Aldous Huxley were following the interests of their grandfather, but not necessarily his convictions. While Thomas Huxley had certainly considered “man’s place in nature” to be a subject both fascinating and important, he also argued throughout his career that civilized ethics were constructed and maintained in opposition to nature, while Julian and Aldous both attempted in distinct ways to ground their ideas about human society and ethics in their understanding of the life sciences. Regarding the relationship of the state to nature, Julian and Aldous Huxley differed from their grandfather as well. Delivering his influential Romanes Lecture, “Evolution and Ethics,”64 during an age of high colonialism, T. H. Huxley depicted human ecology, or the relationship between humanity and nature, in colonial terms. Framing the goal of humanity as the process of taming nature within and without, T. H. Huxley presented as its emblem the example of a disciplined colony that diligently transforms an alien landscape into a civilized landscape. More than a generation later, Julian and Aldous Huxley introduced two new factors into their visions of human ecology: the Faustian power of applied science, and the combination of mass

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production and mass culture that European intellectuals in the early twentieth century knew simply by the shorthand term “Americanization.”65 While T. H. Huxley’s vision of creating a new ecology in an alien landscape reflected the confidence of a colonialist age, the works of his grandsons reflected the anxieties of the late colonial era and even presaged, especially in the case of Aldous, the new anxieties and the new possibilities of the dawning postcolonial age. A generation before Richard Dawkins first articulated the concept of meme theory, Julian Huxley presented a very similar idea in his lectures on what he called the “psycho-social phase of evolution.” In his broad description of the history of the universe, evolution was a process that transcended biology and yielded increasing complexity at every step. Before the advent of life, stars advanced the process of evolution by producing more complex elements, including elements such as carbon that would be the building blocks of life, through the process of nuclear fusion. When the first generation of stars perished in spectacular supernovae, they seeded the cosmos with these elements, and when the gravitational fields of the succeeding generations of stars slowly collected and concentrated this cosmic debris into planets, they created new laboratories for the creation of life. Once life came into the picture, evolution advanced rapidly through the process of natural selection. The third and final phase of evolution, as Julian saw it, began when human beings created symbols. This ignited the “psychosocial phase” of evolution, when ideas and concepts reproduced, mutated, and competed— just as their biological forebears had done for millions of years. The ideas embraced and propagated by Julian Huxley and his brother Aldous illustrate this process of intellectual inheritance and mutation quite well, though neither Julian nor Aldous Huxley could conceive of their intellectual heritage as something wholly distinct from their bloodline. As members of an established and self-conscious intellectual aristocracy, they could not help but see their genetic and their intellectual inheritance as of a piece, so that ideas and traditions were inextricably intertwined with the blessings and curses of “mother wit” and melancholy inherited from the Huxley and Arnold clans.66 When the Victorian era became a target for a new generation intellectuals during and after World War I, Julian and Aldous Huxley could not resist this intellectual tide, but they were not content to follow it wherever it might lead. Aldous Huxley, in spite of his early reputation as an iconoclast, did not admire the Bloomsbury writer and critic Lytton Strachey’s attack on his grandparents’ generation in Eminent

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Victorians, and he consciously resisted the most prominent trends in literary modernism embodied in the work of contemporaries such as Joyce and Pound. During his life, Aldous’s rejection of most modernist experimentation in fiction helped to brand him as a middlebrow writer, but in the twenty-first century his maintenance of stylistic ties to the nineteenth century has been praised by some novelists as one of his signature strengths. The novelist J. G. Ballard observes that Huxley’s novels had a deeper resonance than those of his twentieth-century contemporaries precisely because “he had far deeper roots in the Victorian Age, with a rich mix of high-mindedness and secure moral compass that we find baffling in our culture of soundbite philosophy and focus group wisdom.”67 For Julian, the habit of speculating about the moral and philosophical meaning of evolution, though very common among his grandfather’s generation, would put him profoundly out of step with the increasingly specialized and non-normative culture of twentiethcentury biology, especially after 1945.68 Both Huxley brothers defied twentieth-century categories of ideology and intellectual specialization. In their religious thinking, each sought a path to the transcendent that could be reconciled with rational thought, and particularly with the discoveries of evolutionary biology. In their approach to politics, each was committed to a program of economic and social collectivism, either on a global scale, as advocated by Julian, or on a local scale, as envisioned by Aldous. Perhaps the most salient area in which Julian and Aldous Huxley defied categorization was in the field of ecology. Julian Huxley’s ecological thought frequently emphasized the rational control of nature in agriculture and industry, but he also pioneered the international effort to set aside large areas across the world as wilderness reserves. For Aldous, the goal of reconciling the human race to its place in nature required the abandonment of wholesale industrialization and the creation of local and decentralized economies, kept small by the voluntary use of birth control and powered by renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. These hybrid visions of our possible future defied the utilitarian and pastoral categories that dominated most environmental discourse in the twentieth century, but each would prove to be influential. Although the contribution of the Huxley brothers to postwar environmentalism has barely been explored by scholars, it is in this last area of ecological sustainability that the Huxley brothers’ amphibious ethos has had the most enduring impact. Julian’s global foresight led him to help found transnational groups that are still influential today, such as the IUCN and WWF.

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Aldous Huxley’s writings on the potential of decentralized economies, small-scale agriculture, renewable energy, and psychopharmacology all had a profound influence on the counterculture and back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which in turn helped lay the basis for transnational trends such as organic agriculture, renewable energy, and secular spirituality that have continued to grow in this century.

chapter 2

Twilight of Utopias Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. —George Orwell, “Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun” (1943)

In the winter of 1915, the young biologist Julian Huxley was teaching in Houston, Texas, as part of the founding faculty of the Rice Institute. Although Houston was still a small city, the completion of a new deepwater port, officially opened by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, and the wartime demand for petroleum had combined to accelerate its growth. Within a decade, Houston would be the largest city in Texas, its skyline would be a respectable sawtooth of skyscrapers, and the Rice Institute would become Rice University. Julian’s career was advancing just as fast. Then twenty-eight, he had already published his first book on evolutionary biology, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, and his reputation had elicited the offer of a professorship at Rice as soon as he had completed his doctorate at Oxford. Julian maintained a steady correspondence with Aldous, and was happy when he received a letter in December raising the possibility of a visit. HMS Lusitania had been torpedoed in May of that year, so the news that his younger brother might brave a transatlantic trip to see him was no small thing. Aldous, an aspiring poet then in his second year at Oxford, had another reason

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for wanting to visit America, however. With a certain amount of hedging, the nineteen-year-old explained: There is a good man going to Florida, one D.H. Lawrence, a novelist and poet and genius . . . who impresses me as a good man more than most, proposes, how unwisely soever it may appear, to go to the deserts of Florida there, with one Armenian, one German wife, and problematically, one young woman called Dorothy Warren, to found some sort of unanimist colony. The purposes of which are to await a sort of Pentecostal inspiration of new life. . . . The gist of all which is that when, and if, I go and see you, I shall very likely go and see him also, to spend, perhaps, a little while in his eremitic colony . . . which, I am sure, would be quite particularly medicinal to my soul.1

If Julian’s next missive to Aldous expressed his own views concerning his younger brother’s plan to join D. H. Lawrence’s scheme for a “unanimist colony” in the wilds of Florida, it has been lost in the mists of time, or in the fire that destroyed Aldous Huxley’s library and the majority of his personal papers in the fall of 1961. Circumstantial evidence, including accounts of a sometimes contentious relationship between the eldest Huxley brother and D. H. Lawrence, suggests that Julian most likely viewed Lawrence’s utopian project with a jaundiced eye and would have been relieved to learn that the Florida scheme never got beyond the planning stages. Julian had literary ambitions of his own at this time, and had won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford a few years before. His journals from this period reveal that he entertained his own utopian reveries, but these tended to be more grandiose than those of his younger brother. In 1913, when he had just arrived in the United States to begin his teaching career at Rice, Julian compared himself to the calm and confident leader depicted in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. He wrote, “Bacon’s chief counselor on that utopian island wore a smile as though he pitied men. I wish to wear in my heart the knowledge of my service to them.”2 In the last years of his life, Bacon had sketched his vision of a planned society predicated on a commitment to careful scientific research and the development of new technologies. This prosperous and secretive island state was located somewhere in the Pacific, “beyond the Old World and the New,” but its commitment to maintaining and augmenting its power through the steady advancement of applied science proved to be influential, especially during the late seventeenth century when its “college of light” would become the model for the Royal

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Society, an association that would come to count Britain’s most prominent scientists, including several Huxleys, among its members.3 As different as the musings of Julian and Aldous Huxley were at the time, both were influenced by the rising wave of utopian thought that characterized the new century. In the twentieth century, the conviction that society could be fundamentally reshaped according to a new and better blueprint would leave the realm of speculative fiction and enter the flesh-and-blood world of political action on an unprecedented scale. While the term “utopian” had long been a synonym for ethereal and impossible, it now seemed plausible to imagine the gradual engineering of real utopias, crowned by states whose technology could render them both omniscient and omnipotent, and thus capable of remaking the human race in the image of their ideological vision. Such technologically empowered utopias would come to be seen as a palpable menace by writers such as the Russian émigré Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev’s call to resist the imposition of any utopian order upon the human race became the epigraph to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1932: “Utopias seem very much more realizable than we had formerly supposed. Now we find ourselves facing a question that is painful in a new kind of way: how to avoid their actual realization.”4 The utopian movements that alarmed Berdyaev would prove to be at least as passionate as the religious movements that had divided Europe following the Reformation. The catastrophes of the early twentieth century imbued ideological movements for the transformation of the human condition—whether they were inspired by the doctrines of the Left or Right—with the same intensity, sense of spectacle, and propensity to destroy heretics that had been exhibited by religious zealots in earlier times. This trend reached a heightened pitch in the 1930s when the global economic collapse seemed to expose the weaknesses of classical liberalism and underline what many saw as the necessity of social and economic planning on an unprecedented scale. The author of the original Utopia found admirers across the political and cultural spectrum during the Great Depression. In 1935, Sir Thomas More was canonized by the Vatican in Rome, while his most famous book was made required reading in schools across the Soviet Union.5 By the mid-twentieth century, competing visions of the ideal society would be a ubiquitous element in the great ideological and geopolitical conflicts of the time, including the Second World War, the Cold War, and the plethora of local revolutions and proxy wars that punctuated the global trend of decolonization after 1945. By the end of the Cold War,

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however, the idea of utopia had become profoundly unfashionable. In the last decade of the twentieth century, the historian Russell Jacoby lamented that “a utopian spirit—a sense that the future could transcend the present—has vanished. . . . Someone who believes in utopias is widely considered either out to lunch or out to kill.”6 Because so many of the bloody ideological struggles of the twentieth century had been at least justified, if not caused, by competing visions of the ideal society, it may seem only fair that the concept of utopia would be greeted with a greater degree of ridicule and even alarm by the end of that century. On the other hand, as Jacoby has pointed out, the abandonment of all efforts to imagine how “the future could transcend the present” can threaten to suffocate any prospects of intelligent political or social reform, even at the stage of speculation. One of the most common objections to utopian thought is the claim that the goal of creating an ideal society is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. Perhaps for this reason, utopian fictions have often contained, or been predicated upon, the idea that human nature, along with nature itself, could be improved upon by the application of reason and skill to the unruly processes of life itself. Even in Thomas More’s Utopia, there is an intimation of this. The job of hatching chicken eggs on the island of Utopia is not left to hens any longer, as the rational improvement of the process has led to the creation of large hatcheries: “They breed an infinite multitude of chickens in a very curious manner; for the hens do not sit and hatch them, but a vast number of eggs are laid in a gentle and equal heat in order to be hatched, and they are no sooner out of the shell, and able to stir about, but they seem to consider those that feed them as their mothers, and follow them as other chickens do the hen that hatched them.”7 When Aldous Huxley applied this idea to the mass production of human beings in Brave New World, he foresaw the creation of citizens who would, in a fashion reminiscent of the young chicks in the hatcheries of More’s Utopia, regard the state itself as their mother and father. The utopian possibilities opened up by new discoveries in the life sciences had long commanded Julian’s attention. The domestication of the human species was evolving from a strictly moral project, as T. H. Huxley had framed it in Evolution and Ethics, into an endeavor that would draw on social engineering informed by the guidance of experts in such fields as eugenics, ectogenesis, biological engineering, and psychopharmacology. This general convergence of managerial and technological expertise came to be known as technocracy after the First World War,

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and the speculations of Julian and Aldous Huxley about the growing role of scientific and technical expertise in society during the interwar decades reflected their divergent views on the contemporary drift toward political and economic centralization. In a series of lectures that he delivered in Philadelphia in January 1931 and published later that year, Julian Huxley explored the myriad innovations he hoped might emerge from current research in applied biology, including the possibility of “bringing up babies in incubators instead of in their mothers bodies.”8 Julian cautioned that human ectogenesis, as the process was called, was a long way from being practical, but added that a biologist in Baltimore had made some significant progress with incubating rabbit fetuses outside the womb. If the process could be applied to human beings, Julian predicted, the benefits would be manifold: “If ectogenesis were possible we could play all the tricks we liked on the early development of man,” because “it is only during early development that there is the possibility of effecting any large alterations in the fundamental plan of the organism.” Among the improvements on the human species he saw as possible through ectogenesis was the enlargement of the human brain, since “the limit to human brain power probably lies in the size of the female pelvis, which cannot give birth to babies with heads above a certain size. Abolish this cramping restriction and you could embark on an attempt to enlarge the human brain.” This would not be the only improvement that would be possible to engineer in the human species. Julian foresaw a day when “ectogenesis would make it possible to practice an intensity and rapidity of eugenic selection enormously beyond what can be done if the human species keeps to its ancestral methods of development; but that is another story.”9 That story would of course be told, in far less optimistic terms, by the biologist’s younger brother in Brave New World. Whereas Julian had imagined the ways that this new technology could be used to expand human intelligence, Aldous predicted that, given the apparent proclivities of the modern state, it would more likely be used to enhance state control over the mass of humanity, and even to breed a caste of workers with low intelligence and stunted bodies to perform menial labor. As a scientist with an abiding interest in the possibilities of rational planning, Julian viewed the growing role of such technical expertise in society as a positive trend and welcomed the greater centralization that it would bring with it. He imagined that a more technocratic style of governance could sweep the antiquated restraints of religious superstition in the

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cultural realm and the outdated practices of laissez-faire economics and narrow nationalism in the political realm. As a writer with a growing interest in religious mysticism, Aldous quite naturally took a different approach. While sharing his brother’s distaste for both laissez-faire economics and militant nationalism, Aldous could not imagine that the contemporary trend toward economic and political centralization could be anything but oppressive. He also believed that advances in science and technology could be beneficial to both individuals and society, but only if they were carefully vetted and selectively adopted after a thorough consideration of their probable impact on everyday life. Precisely for this reason, Aldous viewed the general trend in the twentieth century toward economic and political centralization with great alarm, and came to argue during the late 1930s that the best hope for the human race lay in a thoroughly decentralized economy supported by locally useful technologies, such as solar power, and by local endeavors, such as small-scale agriculture and light industry, that could evade the control of centralized governments and large industrial concerns. During the interwar period, Julian would articulate his advocacy for centralization through his studies of large-scale economic and political planning projects around the world. For his part, Aldous would signal his distaste for centralization in Brave New World and develop his ideas about decentralization in his treatise Ends and Means and in his first California novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In that novel, the rustic Mr. Propter, who is in many respects a mouthpiece for the author’s own views, discusses his personal attempt to build a solarpowered water heater for his home as an experiment in Jeffersonian democracy. Mr. Propter reasons that too great a reliance on utility companies for energy is a recipe for tyranny, and thus concludes that any technology, such as solar power, that allows individuals and families to generate power for themselves is an important means for protecting not only their economic but also their political liberty.10 In 1932, the same year that Aldous released Brave New World for publication, Julian Huxley published A Scientist among the Soviets. Unlike many of his colleagues, Julian had never evinced any great admiration for either Marx or Lenin. Because of his passion for rationally planned societies, however, he presented a largely enthusiastic account of his tour of the Soviet Union. He praised what he believed to be the economic achievements of the first Five-Year Plan, admired the energy and athleticism on display at state-sponsored cultural events, and lauded the Soviet commitment to public investment in scientific research.11 In

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the spring of 1931, Julian had invited his younger brother to join him on his tour of the USSR, but Aldous had declined, citing his need to focus on the completion of his next novel. In the summer of 1931, just as Julian Huxley was researching his generally laudatory account of the Potemkin utopia that he had been shown in the USSR, Aldous Huxley was writing a novel he called his “bad utopia,” Brave New World. Conceived first of all as a spoof on the most recent utopian novel by H. G. Wells, the novel was demanding too much of his time. That Wells novel, Men Like Gods, presented a vision of a supremely rational utopia that Julian had admired a great deal. In his review for Nature, Julian had been particularly drawn to Wells’s vision of a scientific society that had not only transformed nature but succeeded in “the alteration of human nature itself.”12 Aldous Huxley’s letters from that summer indicate that his own opinion of the Soviet Union, informed by his reading of such former Bolsheviks as Nikolai Berdyaev and P. S. Romanov, was for the most part very grim. Aside from his concession that Western countries might have to develop their own versions of economic planning to deal with the crisis of the Great Depression, Aldous Huxley saw the Soviet regime as an unmitigated disaster for the people who lived under it. Nearly a decade before other British Leftists would be shocked by the HitlerStalin Pact, Aldous also counted more similarities than differences between the methods and consequences of Communism in the Soviet Union and Fascism in Italy, where he had lived in the mid-1920s. As he saw it, both regimes evinced the rapid evolution of managerial society that was spreading across the world in the twentieth century. Huxley’s sense of technocracy as the common denominator across political boundaries is reflected in the arch hodge-podge of character names throughout Brave New World—for example, Benito Hoover, Lenina Crowne, Polly Trotsky, and Mustapha Mond—the last of these combining the title of Turkish nationalist and secular leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk with the influential British industrialist Sir Alfred Mond. Whether they were intentional or not, the parallels between Brave New World and his brother’s fawning account of Soviet modernization schemes can be striking. While Julian admires the fit bodies of young Soviet students at “a physical culture demonstration that had been addressed by Stalin himself,” Aldous peoples the World State with athletic optimists and lavishes extra care on his physical description of the beautiful Lenina Crowne.13 While Julian Huxley praises the ubiquity of state-sponsored crèches for infants and children and admires the use of

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community singing to enliven daily work and imbue Soviet society with a lively esprit de corps, Aldous describes the Pavlovian nursery schools of the World State in great detail, envisions a popular “Community Sing” as the state-sponsored replacement for religion, and even denotes the “Arch Community-Songster of Canterbury” as the replacement for the old titular head of the Church of England. Aldous reiterated in a letter to their father that he’d had to decline Julian’s invitation to join him on a visit to the Soviet Union in order to complete Brave New World, and he made no secret of his personal distaste for Stalin’s regime. In this letter, Aldous described the most recent accounts he had heard about life in the Soviet Union as “distinctly depressing” and recommended the writings of the dissident novelist P. S. Romanov as among the best contemporary sources on life there.14 Although admiration for the ambitious economic initiatives of the USSR was commonplace among British intellectuals in the early 1930s, Aldous telegraphed his own sentiments to the readers of Brave New World by using the words of the anti-Soviet Russian émigré Nikolai Berdyaev as the epigraph to the novel. In stark contrast to Julian’s optimism about the utopian possibilities of state planning in the USSR, the passage from Berdyaev’s The New Middle Ages that Aldous used to open Brave New World warned of the dangers of the modern utopia and sounded a call for passionate resistance to any and all utopian schemes. For the thematic structure of the novel, Aldous drew on Berdyaev’s favorite author from pre-Soviet Russian literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky. As the English writer and critic Rebecca West noted, Brave New World is at its core a technocratic retelling of Dostoevsky’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. Parallels to Dostoevsky notwithstanding, Aldous stayed close to his roots as a ruthless satirist. Composed in a Swiftian spirit of broad and sometimes malicious satire, Brave New World is replete with one-shot jokes that say more about the world of 1931 than they do about the distant future. Its topical character names and constant allusions to contemporary trends such as jazz music, miniature golf, and cinema signal that Brave New World was less an ominous prophecy of the distant future than a scattershot satire of the present. Although H. G. Wells saw the novel as a malicious attack on his own visions of the future, its more direct allusions are to Julian Huxley’s work. Brave New World echoes Julian’s speculations in What Dare I Think? about how the ingestion of hormone supplements might one day help individuals to stabilize their metabolisms and maintain their

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youthful energy and active libidos far into middle age.15 The universal use of soma, a miracle drug combining “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol” with “none of their defects,” also echoes Julian Huxley’s speculation on the possible benefits of designing new psychoactive drugs in What Dare I Think? In fact, Julian’s speculation concerning the potential uses of such designer drugs even anticipates Aldous Huxley’s 1953 experiments with mescaline. Julian had informed his readers that “a Mexican cactus” (i.e., peyote) can yield “a drug which will promote the strength of visual imagery in thinking and will make some people hallucinate.” He also lamented, more than two decades before his brother published The Doors of Perception: “The fact seems to be that most of us are loath to consider this possibility of opening new doors, for the reason that the drugs which are now used deliberately for that purpose, like opium, alcohol, and cocaine, are so readily abused.” But modern chemistry held the promise of producing “a combination of pharmacological substances, each in the right amount and right proportion, which would be capable of toning up a man’s faculties,” but with “no bad after-effect, other than what is already exerted by our nervous, rushing, modern lives.”16 Julian’s vision of a carefully crafted pharmaceutical that, possessing the euphoric and hallucinogenic qualities of more powerful substances, would fit into the daily routine of a modern urbanite as easily as coffee or tea is a close analog to the soma described in Brave New World. At one point in Brave New World, Aldous makes a sympathetic, if somewhat arch, allusion to his older brother’s philosophical outlook when he describes the situation of a scientist who has run afoul of the World State concerning his research into evolutionary biology. Julian Huxley’s recent books, including Essays of a Biologist and Religion without Revelation, had argued explicitly that evolution could be accurately described as progress and that the continuous development of more complex species with a greater capacity for consciousness imbued the broad history of evolution with a clear direction and sense of purpose. According to the censorship protocols of the World State in Brave New World, Julian Huxley’s favored gospel of progress would have to be classed as a dangerous heresy. In a passage concerning the routine censorship of science in World State, the urbane but resolute World Controller, Mustapha Mond, reviews a biology treatise that, with its emphasis both on statistical methods and on an intimation of a larger purpose behind evolution, bears a striking similarity to Julian Huxley’s style of research and to his philosophical conclusions:

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“A New Theory of Biology” was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title page: “The author’s mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical, and so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published.” He underlined the words. “The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary.” A pity he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you started admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond . . . some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.17

While this passage reads like an indirect tribute to Julian’s research, it may also contain a bit of fraternal ribbing. Having one’s view of evolution and its meaning branded a dangerous heresy in a totalitarian state can only be seen as a compliment. However, given Julian Huxley’s famously domineering personality, the fact that this biologist faces possible exile to St. Helena, the same island where Napoleon was sent for his final exile, might also be evidence of a younger brother giving his eldest sibling a knowing jab with the tip of his pen.18 Concerning the official religious rituals of the World State, Aldous Huxley echoes his brother’s emphasis on the cultural significance of Henry Ford in “The Tissue Culture King,” and then goes much further, making Ford the literal messiah of the World State. At first, the substitution of the letter T, as in Ford’s Model T, for the cross of Christianity reads like yet another one-shot joke, raising the question of why Aldous sees fit to repeat the reference as much as he does. If we consider the visual impact and logic of each symbol, however, the conversion of the cross into the T becomes much cannier than it first appears. If one considers how the upward reach of the cross is negated by its conversion into a capital T, then the symbol of the new religion takes on an evocative power that is something more than a mere reference to a popular car produced on an assembly line. Here is the emblem of a civilization that looks to nothing higher than itself and that recognizes no transcendent values that might challenge its own trinity of “Community, Identity, and Stability.” The frenetic consumerism that Aldous Huxley saw as ascendant in his own time did not claim to have a telos; but, Brave New World seemed to say, there is in fact a teleological vision of the perfect

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civilization implicit in the language and imagery of most modern advertising, and here is what that civilization would look like. It would be a prison in which the physical and emotional desires of human beings would be exalted and overfed, while their spiritual need to reach for something higher than themselves would be, like the upper portion of the cross, severed and negated. Aside from taking aim at American consumerism, Soviet modernization schemes, and the biological musings of his elder brother, Brave New World also attacked the Fabian optimism of George Bernard Shaw. Although Shakespeare and the Bible are deemed as too dangerous and subversive to be read by the citizens of Aldous’s dystopia, the works of Shaw are deemed so utterly harmless that “he is one of the very few whose works have been permitted” to survive the thoroughgoing purge of art and literature carried out by the World State.19 Aldous also gleefully strafed the work of H. G. Wells and the entire science fiction genre that he had helped to create. The elements in Brave New World that targeted Wells were conspicuous enough to not only upset the author himself but also alienate many science fiction fans. When Brave New World was discussed by the denizens of fandom on the letters page of Hugo Gernsback’s pulp science fiction magazine Wonder Stories (Gernsback had lost control of Amazing Stories to the muscleman publisher Bernarr MacFadden in 1929), the response was almost universally negative. The readers who bought Gernsback magazines for their visions of futuristic cities, flying cars, and adventurous tales of space exploration were instinctively offended by a story that took so many elements from the young genre (including some of Gernsback’s own prognostications, such as sleep learning and television) and rearranged them into a hellish vision from which suicide was the romantic hero’s ultimate escape.20 In the early 1930s, science fiction fans were hardly alone in dreaming of a brighter future in a society carefully managed by scientists and engineers. In the three years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in November of 1932, this popular impulse toward technocracy was stronger in America than at any time before or since. In the United States, the radical economist Thorstein Veblen had laid the basis for the technocracy movement right after the Great War by envisioning a new sort of economic revolution in which scientists and engineers, in the place of Marx’s proletariat, would form the ascendant class. Veblen reasoned that engineers, with their practical experience of recognizing waste and increasing efficiency, could manage the way goods and services are

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priced in a modern economy far better than the marketplace. Even Lenin, in spite of his professed loyalty to Marx’s proletariat, could not avoid placing similar faith in the dazzling power of technologies that had barely been realized in Marx’s time. Thus Lenin would draw on Fordist ideas about rational management during the early 1920s and declare his faith in the transformative role of technology with such statements as “The soviets plus electricity equals communism.”21 Although the American vogue for laissez-faire economics in the 1920s made Veblen’s ideas much less fashionable for a time, the stunning market failure of 1929 and the collapse that followed created a new interest in his theory that the economic affairs of society could be managed better by technical experts and engineers than by bankers and entrepreneurs. The broader concept of placing experts in charge of the economy was clearly reflected in the popular term “Brain Trust,” used to denote FDR’s team of economic and technical advisors after he took office in March 1933.22 In the inaugural issue of his short-lived magazine Technocracy Review, Hugo Gernsback reveled in the possibility that a real shift toward rule by scientists and engineers, necessitated by the current economic collapse, might be imminent. Inspired by the activism of a charismatic and mercurial engineer named Howard Scott who had helped to stage a recent conference promoting technocracy at Columbia University, Gernsback hit his readers with a rapid-fire burst of portentous questions about the near future: “Is America Headed for: A Soviet of Engineers? Socialism? Communism? Fascism? Anarchy and Chaos? A New Era of Capitalism? No one yet knows the answer to this question. . . . [M]omentous changes—desperate struggles of social economic and political forces—are on the way.”23 Given the aura of excitement that still surrounded new technologies and trends such as radio, aviation, and hydroelectric dams, the fantastic imagery of science fiction seemed to draw much of its credibility from the rapid rate of change during the early twentieth century. Twenty years before Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, Hugo Gernsback had penned the alphanumerically titled Ralph 124C  41+ and published it in serial installments in his magazine Modern Electrics. Other technological utopias had been written, but this one was notable for its relentless buoyancy and for its astounding catalog of inventions: television (Gernsback was the first to coin the term) and the hypnobioscope (a device for sleep instruction that foreshadows hypnopaedia, a key element in Brave New World). Later Gernsback included more of

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what he called “scientifiction” stories in his technical magazines, and in 1926 he launched Amazing Stories, a pulp journal dedicated exclusively to the genre that his readers had come to call, with less originality but more common sense, simply “science fiction.” Julian Huxley’s only completed science fiction story, “The Tissue Culture King,” published first in the Yale Review, was soon reprinted in Amazing Stories.24 The impact of Amazing Stories, with its iconic covers and illustrations by Frank R. Paul, was soon felt not only in the world of the pulps but also in film and in the steadily growing medium of comics. Its impact crossed not only the Atlantic but also class boundaries in Britain. Kingsley Amis, in his description of the history of science fiction, describes the numerous imitators of Gernsback’s pulps on British newsstands and the deep appeal of their colorful covers and stories, especially during the dreary interwar years. From pulp writers like Hugo Gernsback to widely lauded authors like H. G. Wells, certain utopian themes became ubiquitous to the genre that now dared to speak its name. It is perhaps not surprising that, born in an age of empires and growing up between two world wars, this popular genre churned out pulps, comic strips, and films that reveled in a fascination, not only for gargantuan airships and gleaming cities but also for gigantic empires and the shining promise of a single world government. In the 1910s, Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ depicted the United States as a consumer’s paradise in which Ralph and his young sweetheart cap off a summer’s day of shopping, tennis, and private air travel by watching a gigantic Fourth of July fireworks display from the roof of Ralph’s home. This display, while still symbolic of American identity as embodied especially in its technological prowess, is no longer a celebration of national sovereignty, for it begins with a spectacular tribute to the “World Governor.”25 Just a few years later H. G. Wells’s 1914 novel, The World Set Free, would depict the first use of atomic weapons ever rendered in fiction and follow this cataclysm with the hopeful vision of enlightened global rule by a world parliament. Partially inspired by his irritation with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Wells refined this vision of a cataclysmic war followed by the establishment of a World State in his 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come, which he would later revise into a screenplay for the 1936 film Things to Come. As in his earlier works, the vision of a future world government that Wells advanced in the 1930s still showed traits inherited from the real-world model of British colonialism. After a cataclysmic world war reduces a midsize British city called Everytown to a

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medieval state of barbarism, hope comes in the form of a pilot who lands a futuristic aircraft among the ruins of Everytown and informs the local chieftain that his power is meaningless and that he can relinquish the silly pretense of his authority voluntarily, or see it eliminated by a superior force. The enlightened and powerful pilot hails from the city of Basra, which in the 1930s still remained a center of British colonial activity in the Middle East. A decade later, this idea of the colonials returning the spirit of civilization to the ruins of the metropole would be lampooned in Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence. As a starting point for their imaginative tales about the potential social and cultural impact of technocracy in general and biotechnology in particular, both of the Huxley brothers owe a greater debt to Julian Huxley’s friend and colleague J. B. S. Haldane, whose 1923 work Daedalus is a masterpiece of speculative fantasy, far beyond its early description of ectogenesis. At the outset of this piece, Haldane recalls his experience on the Western Front in World War I, and observes that if visitors from another planet had beheld that landscape of trenches, tanks, airplanes, and gas warfare, they might logically conclude that they were looking at a planet in which machines had become the dominant species while human beings were now reduced to the level of scurrying insects. From this starting point many of his peers would have segued into a critique of machine culture and industrial society informed by the spirit of Ruskin or Morris, but Haldane, a resolute Marxist and materialist, embraced what he saw as the progressive forces of science and technology and launched into a long and purportedly scientific reverie on how these forces would transform human life and society in the remainder of the twentieth century. Haldane’s vision of what would come to pass in the twentieth century combines Saint-Simone’s blithe optimism concerning the socially transformational power of science and technology with an acidic Marxian critique of long-standing social conventions. He begins his discourse with the observation that the first people to drink the milk of cows, a food that we now think of as natural and wholesome, were almost certainly regarded by their contemporaries as overturning the sacred canons of God and nature. As Haldane saw it, the discoveries and innovations of scientists and engineers would be more subversive in the coming decades than the works and manifestos of the most self-consciously seditious artists and political activists. While these discoveries and innovations would be greeted at first as heresies and abominations, in the long run the revolutionary changes engendered by science and

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engineering would not only expand human knowledge and technological prowess but also help to make human societies more egalitarian and just. Haldane envisions how the ancient problem of human hunger might be solved by the new technology of life. While Charles Fourier had once dreamed that the oceans of the world would turn into something like lemonade at the advent of the millennium, Haldane imagined how a genetically engineered species of algae might turn the oceans of the earth purple and convert their waters into an inexhaustible source of nourishment for the human race.26 Seeing himself as at once an heir to Darwin’s scientific discoveries and to Marx’s historical vision, Haldane imitates both Darwin and Marx in this key respect: he divorces progress not only from conscience but from consciousness. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the grand visions of progress outlined by thinkers such as Condorcet, Henri de Saint-Simone, or Jeremy Bentham had at least one thing in common with each other and with the social thought of earlier epochs: they all required the conscious foresight and sustained effort of human society in order to become a reality. This reflected the conviction, which was universal before Darwin, that all creative activity required the guidance of some directing intelligence. The idea of evolution, as outlined by preDarwinian thinkers such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, still rested upon the fundamental assumption that all forms of progress were directed by some form of conscious effort, whether by a deity or by the individual members of a species relentlessly striving toward self-improvement over the course of eons; in other words, the Lamarckian paradigm still allowed one to think that the path that led to the human race was still paved with good intentions of one kind or another. In contrast to its religious and Enlightenment antecedents, the Darwinian paradigm of evolution through random mutation and natural selection left no room for the conceit of conscious intention. The process by which random mutations could prove more or less adaptive to a given environment could plausibly explain the creation of more and more complex species. It could even explain the emergence of a species as complex and self-conscious as Homo sapiens, and for a growing number of scientists and intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, it did. But it could not, for the vast majority of them, justify that evolution or imbue it with meaning. Natural selection, because it made random mutation the engine of change rather than the conscious choice of a deity or the striving of individual organisms, offered scant material on which to build a theodicy.

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For Julian Huxley, the increasing complexity, power, and consciousness engendered by evolution was proof in itself that progress was an inherent trait in the very of substance of the universe, and that it was the destiny of the human race to continue that progress. In this respect, his vision of the future was closer to J. B. S. Haldane’s and even, though Julian would not likely have admitted it, to Hugo Gernsback’s. Aldous Huxley’s critique of this vision of progress, on the other hand, was not simply the return to romanticism or the escape into esoteric Orientalism that many of his critics took it to be. Although Aldous borrowed tropes and ideas from the romantic poets and from East Asian religions, his critique of the technocratic view of progress owed a great deal to Bertrand Russell’s own critique as expressed in his rebuttal to Haldane entitled, appropriately enough, Icarus, or the Future of Science.27 Haldane was well aware that industrialists and governments poured resources into scientific and technological research for the sake of enhancing their own advantage in the fields of economic competition and military conflict, but he was convinced that the various genii released by new scientific and technological discoveries would themselves be a revolutionary force for advancing social progress. Like Veblen, Haldane placed the emerging class of practical scientists, engineers, and managers that had come to be known as “technocrats” in a redemptive role roughly analogous to Marx’s proletariat. Because the mental labor of these individuals actually created wealth, and because their discoveries in science and technology were grounded in a larger reality that transcended the local loyalties of religion, class, or nationality, the work they did was bound to be progressive in the long run, even when the goals of their employers in government and business were short-sighted and reactionary. Citing the example of the ways the technological horrors of the recent Great War had made the desire for a world government much more widespread than ever before, Haldane argued that “it is the tendency of applied science to magnify injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move, turns at last and extinguishes the evil at its source.”28 For roughly half a century before World War I, increasingly modern wars such as the U.S. Civil War, the Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War had been all been reported and photographed enough to make it abundantly clear that war in the industrial age was capable of producing horrors unprecedented in scale. None of this, however, had stopped the nations of Europe from greeting the advent of a general war in 1914

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with something like romantic glee. Likewise, the idea that broad commercial and social interdependence generated by communications and transportation technology had rendered modern war not only absurdly horrific but also absurdly expensive had been famously promoted by Norman Angell in the years before the First World War, both in his lecture tours and in his best-selling and widely translated book The Great Illusion.29 The fact that a new European war had come nonetheless, in spite of what many educated Europeans could clearly see about its horror and its economic futility, led observers such as Bertrand Russell to conclude that Haldane’s vision of technology as an inevitable catalyst for social progress (even with all of its caveats about the human race perhaps needing to experience one more world war or two before fully embracing the need for global government) was far too optimistic. Bertrand Russell, who had become friends with Aldous at Garsington during the First World War, crystalized his profound doubts about Haldane’s prophecy of technological and social progress in his essay Icarus, or the Future of Science, and later expanded his critique of such optimism in his 1931 book, The Scientific Outlook. Russell argued that as long as nation-states and industrial concerns were the chief source of finance for scientific research, the fruits of new technological discoveries would naturally serve the interests of those who were already powerful and wealthy. New technologies would not be inherently liberating but would likely lead to new and more sophisticated tools for exploiting and enslaving the human race. Whereas Haldane’s model of future innovation had been the genie who could neither be controlled by his master nor be put back in the bottle, Russell’s vision of future scientific innovation was more analogous to the golem who lives only to serve and multiply the power of his master. Astonishing advances in weaponry would not make war unthinkable to the leaders and military officers who wage war; rather, these advances would simply make war that much more unbearable for the hapless foot soldiers and civilians who would inevitably bear the brunt of its horrors. On the home front, miraculous advances in communications technology, such as radio, cinema, and cheaply printed books and magazines, would not lead to a more democratic or cosmopolitan culture, but would instead merely enhance the already considerable power of politicians and industrialists to propagandize, manipulate, and distract the mass of humanity. As noted earlier, Aldous Huxley was inspired by Russell’s argument when he wrote Brave New World, and he would expand upon this critique a generation later in his 1945 essay, Science, Liberty, and Peace.

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Although Aldous Huxley would have his share of differences with Bertrand Russell, especially over the Second World War, and Julian Huxley would not always see eye to eye with J. B. S. Haldane, especially during the Cold War, it is fair enough to say that Haldane’s vision of progress was generally seconded by the writings of Julian Huxley, while Aldous Huxley’s writings on the idea of progress read like a grand elaboration of Russell’s critique. When Brave New World was about to go to press, Aldous wrote to his publisher in September 1931 to say that he had been inspired by Russell before writing Brave New World and that he viewed his own work as very similar to Russell’s own writings, “forecasting exactly similar biological methods of training humanity.” Expressing the hope that his novel would be released at the same time as Russell’s next book, he added, “I’m pleased that there should be a serious book confirming the thesis of the novel.”30 While the movement that Howard Scott advanced under the aegis of Technocracy, Inc., faded from prominence after its 1932 conference at Columbia University, and Gernsback scrapped Technocracy Review after a few issues to move on to more lucrative publishing ventures such as Sexology in 1933, the basic idea that a coterie of engineers and technical experts should play a major role in the governance of national economies remained very much alive throughout the 1930s.31 The highly centralized economies of the USSR, Italy, and Germany seemed to be weathering the Depression better than their laissez-faire counterparts, and Julian Huxley was one of many intellectuals in England and America who believed it would be possible to borrow the idea of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan without importing the brutality of Stalinism. The organizations that Julian helped to found, such as the Political and Economic Planning group and the Next Five Year group, were dedicated to this project.32 PEP, which continued to operate for decades, was one of many projects on which Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson would collaborate. If organizations may be said to have genealogies, it’s worth noting here that the environmentalist groups that Julian helped to found after World War II, based on a similar ethos of scientific research and rational planning, were the direct progeny of the technocratic groups that Huxley and Nicholson founded in the thirties, and they often shared the same personnel and office space: “After the war [PEP] moved to an office in Belgrave Square, which it shared with the Nature Conservancy, then run by Max Nicholson.”33 It was in the United States, however, that Julian saw the greatest potential for experiments in technocratic planning during the 1930s.

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When Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office resulted in the formation of similar coteries of experts, dubbed the Brain Trust by the American press (and known, characteristically, as the “Brains Trust” in Britain), Julian Huxley took an immediate interest. The New Deal project that inspired his greatest enthusiasm was the Tennessee Valley Authority. After traveling to the Tennessee Valley to study the project and the social and ecological problems that it was meant to address, Huxley published a short book to explain its significance to the British public. In TVA: An Adventure in Planning, all of Julian Huxley’s enthusiasms for ecology, eugenics, and even global government inform his analysis of the project. In describing the Tennessee Valley prior to the project, he laments the degradation into which even those of the best genetic “stock” can sink without the benefits of sound social, ecological, and economic management: Much of the rural area of the valley was inhabited by peasant farmers, who, although originally of excellent British stock, had in their mountain isolation too often developed into poverty-stricken poor-whites. Primitive in their reproductive habits as in their farming methods, they multiplied rapidly until they presented a typical Malthusian population, pressing hard upon its means of subsistence. . . . With the removal of the forest cover, and with the failure to apply fertilizers, the soil rapidly lost its fertility and large amounts of it were simply washed away. After a few brief years, the slope was no longer worth bothering about, and was abandoned in favour of a fresh cleared area nearby, so that in the heart of the most modern of countries you could find shifting cultivation of the type usually associated with primitive African tribes.34

Before analyzing Julian Huxley’s view of the TVA as model of conservation and economic planning, it seems appropriate here to make some parenthetical observations about his evolving views on racial matters during this period. In the early 1930s Julian Huxley was contracted by the publishing firm Jonathan Cape to collaborate with the ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon, the zoologist Alexander Carr-Saunders, and the historian Charles Singer to produce a thorough rebuttal to the racist pseudoscience of “Hitler’s nonsensical rantings about race and the dangers of contaminating the purity of the so-called Aryan race.”35 These ideas were then finding a growing audience in Britain thanks to the efforts of British Fascists such as Oswald Mosely. The product of their collaboration, We Europeans: A Survey of “Racial” Problems, published in 1935, disputed the very concept of race. As Julian put it, the

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biological and historical evidence gathered together in We Europeans “demonstrated conclusively that there was no such thing as a ‘pure race’ anywhere in the world, and that there were no unchanging racial characters.” Most important, given the Nazi obsession with eugenics, Julian and his colleagues argued that “the qualities and achievements of each so-called race or ethnic group were determined mainly by environment and cultural history, and only to a minor extent by heredity.”36 In the United States, We Europeans was honored with the Ansfield-Wolf Book Award in 1937 for its contribution to combating racism.37 Even while Julian argued that the term “race” was unscientific, however, he continued to make statements such as the following, from his Galton Lecture of 1936: “I regard it as wholly probable that true negroes have a slightly lower average intelligence than the whites or yellows.”38 In his roughly three decades of continued work and activism after 1945, Julian Huxley appears to have refrained from making this sort of comment, though he did not publicly reconsider or repudiate statements such as this that he had made before the Second World War. Returning to the ecological ideas presented in Julian Huxley’s study of the TVA, it is useful to consider their wider context. The Indian journalist and environmental historian Ramachandra Guha described three broad streams of environmental thought that have dominated most discourse about the relationship between human beings and nature since the early twentieth century: “agrarianism, wilderness thinking, and scientific industrialism.”39 Julian Huxley’s vision, as articulated in TVA: An Adventure in Planning, indicates that his ideas about environmental policy leaned toward scientific industrialism while borrowing some elements of wilderness thinking. Because his was the first major study of the Tennessee Valley Authority by a foreign observer, the positive view of large dam projects that Julian presented in this book would prove to be influential throughout the world. In his account of the TVA and its achievements, Julian argued that it had succeeded not only in its primary mission of rural electrification and job creation, but also in combating soil erosion and flooding, creating new landscapes and waterways of great scenic beauty and recreational value, and invigorating the local population. The historian J. R. McNeill describes how, over the next several decades, large dam projects inspired by the example of the TVA would be built by all varieties of government in all corners of the earth, as “Communists, democrats, colonialists, and anticolonialists all” saw their appeal and embraced “the image they suggested: an energetic,

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determined state capable of taming rivers for social good.” As a result of this trend, the three decades following World War II saw an explosion of dam construction worldwide, until, “during the 1960s, more than one large dam (15m or higher) was completed per day on average. The historic climax came in 1968.”40 Aside from his enchantment with its scale, power, and vast command of expertise, Julian Huxley found other reasons for admiring and promoting the TVA. His growing concern with maintaining the ecological integrity of the land also led him to admire the achievements of the TVA in the area of soil preservation. The TVA’s efforts to fight soil erosion through reforestation and flood control are detailed in his book, and Julian highlights the social as well as ecological value of these projects. The TVA was now making rapid progress in transforming the landscape: Already, as a result of only ten years’ work, provision has been made for the conservation of the natural beauty of the region and the permanent development of its wild life; the Valley has become one of the major tourist centres of the U.S.A. and recreation in it brings in at least $100 millions annually to the region; the health and happiness of its citizens and its visitors has [sic] been increased; and—not least important—the people of the Valley have become conscious not only of the economic but also of the social importance of its recreational resources.41

As Julian makes a special point of noting, the process by which this land was restored had its own parallel social importance. By employing young laborers from the Civilian Conservation Corps to carry out the bulk of the reforestation, the wise planners of this project had made sure that “no less than 75 million seedlings have thus been planted in the Valley by American boys who would otherwise have been out of work.”42 Most important for Julian Huxley, the TVA provided evidence that the concerns about centralization voiced by his younger brother were unfounded. Julian concluded that the grand project of the TVA had “succeeded in demonstrating that there is no antithesis between democracy and planning, and that planning can not only be reconciled with individual freedom, it can be used to enhance and enlarge them.”43 As Juliette Huxley noted in her memoir, Julian was, as early as 1941, already interested in the possibilities for large-scale planning not only of national economies but also of the postwar global economy.44 In the managerial success of the Tennessee Valley Authority he saw a template that could be exported, with appropriate revisions, to development projects all over the postwar world, from the Middle East, to the heart of Europe:

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The TVA idea, of planned development of natural regions such as river valleys, has already found its way into the world’s general thinking. TVA ideas and methods are helping to guide the growth of new planning agencies such as the Middle East Supply Council; studies are being made of how a set-up of general TVA-type could be adapted to serve as an international instead of a national agency (thus among other things undercutting and transcending nationalist sovereignties, as the TVA undercuts and transcends States’ rights and boundaries), and adjusted to promote the planned development of regions of greater backwardness, like parts of Africa.45

While Julian’s excitement about the global possibilities inherent in programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority certainly foreshadowed the postwar boom in dam building and other large-scale projects, it would be wrong to assume that it was the TVA itself that had inspired him to think on such a scale. As early as the 1920s Julian Huxley was already committed to the prospect that careful planning by experts could reshape the world and was immersed in so many projects that his wife compared him, in a backhanded compliment, to Lord Curzon.46 The historian Thomas Metcalf details how the movements for utilitarian reform in the nineteenth century had grown out of the British Empire, with its diverse experiments in overseas governance, and observes that James Mill’s History of British India laid the foundations for “an enduring British belief in the value of good government provided by British experts.”47 Thus, from the beginning the aspirations of utilitarian reformers had been global in scale, and Julian Huxley merely continued this tradition into the twentieth century. When Aldous Huxley satirized the goals and methods of such utilitarian planning in Brave New World, Julian Huxley was ready with a response. In his book If I Were Dictator, published in 1934, Julian contends that if Great Britain were to embrace something like a command economy, it could beat totalitarian societies such as Germany and the USSR at their own game: This country is now the most favourably situated of all countries in the world as regards to the application of science and skill to industry. (Up till recently first or at least equal place would have been assigned to Germany, but as a result of Nazification and its anti-machine philosophy that is no longer so.) We are a small community in which the exchange of ideas is a quick process. . . . We have a large body of men with high scientific and technical attainment. . . . We have a favourable financial position, the advantages of big resources of raw materials at home and abroad, and stimulus provided by being part of an Empire.48

In response to those who maintained that a laissez-faire economic system was essential to the maintenance of a free society, Julian argued that

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the freedoms afforded by the laissez-faire system were deceptive: “The freedom of opinion of nineteenth century Western industrialism was largely illusory because it had little effect upon the fundamental course of economic events.”49 In addition to presenting Julian’s vision of the possibilities of a planned society, If I Were Dictator also argued that Fascism and Communism, for all of their horrific traits, reflected a primitive response to the now undeniable reality that the human species was in charge of its own destiny and could no longer defer that responsibility to an invisible and unaccountable deity. In a sense, Julian saw these totalitarian movements as the first “social religions” of an age that had come to be dominated completely by the power of human agency: Now that disaster and uncertainty are springing from man’s own nature and his own creations, he can no longer shift the burden of responsibility off his own shoulders on to God; the religion of inner destiny is upon us, and it will inevitably concern itself with the community and the super-personal forces at work within it—a social religion, not a God-religion. . . . Fascism and Communism are attempts to build up such a social religion. But just as many of the early attempts to build-up God-religion were crude and in many respects repulsive, so the early attempts at social religion can scarcely help being crude and repulsive in many of their aspects. In denouncing Fascism we shall get a clearer view of its place in the scheme of things if we remember some of the manifestations of early God-religions, with their beast-men Gods, their resistance to change, their privileged hierarchy, their exploitation of human fear and longing.50

Following this analogy further, Julian reasoned that, just as the ancient Hebrews had struggled against primitive forms of idol worship and human sacrifice in the Bronze Age, so rational men like himself, who were the progenitors of a new, more scientific, and more humane social religion would have to struggle and prevail against the primitive and destructive social religions of Fascism, Communism, and extreme nationalism. In 1943, when he delivered his own Romanes Lecture on the fiftieth the anniversary of his grandfather’s publication of Evolution and Ethics, he would return again to this theme that democratic nations such as Britain and the United States needed to embrace a cohesive yet scientific ideology, which he called “evolutionary humanism,” in their battle against Fascist militarism. For all of their differences, both Julian and Aldous Huxley saw the trends in America as harbingers of what was to come for Great Britain, and probably the world. Whatever rough beast was now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, it had probably been conceived some-

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where at the nexus of American industry and mass culture. After his move to Los Angeles in 1937, Aldous Huxley would develop his own ideas about the evolving scene in the United States before and during the Second World War. Among British intellectuals during this period, technocracy and American mass culture were frequently viewed as though they were two sides of the same coin, and so it is not always easy to disentangle Aldous Huxley’s views about technocracy from his views about the United States. Aldous first visited America in 1926, and betrayed no intimation that he would move there eleven years later. In contrast to Julian, he seemed to have had a stronger emotional response to the vast possibilities, both positive and negative, embodied by the United States in the early twentieth century. In his writings of the late 1920s Aldous Huxley produced a diagnosis of American culture that was extremely bleak. In Jesting Pilate, his 1926 account of his tour with Maria Huxley around the world, he described the culture of America, and especially Los Angeles, as a dynamic vortex of nonstop commerce, sensation, and material acquisition in which the values of Western civilization itself were irredeemably distorted.51 In his 1926 journey across the United States, Aldous Huxley saw in American popular culture a force more destructive to traditional values than the most virulent strain of intellectual nihilism. He reasoned that while most people were rendered immune by their natural instincts to the philosophical negation of values, those same vital instincts could leave them vulnerable to the distortion of values by a mass-produced and visually dazzling culture— especially if that culture could fuse the strictly materialistic logic of commerce with the soothing rhetoric of religion. If the average person were presented with a rational argument that there was no logical basis for the values he held dear, Aldous reasoned, he would most likely ignore that argument and cling to his cherished visions of the beautiful, the true, and the good. But if that same person were immersed in an economy where constant acquisition and consumption were the rule, and bombarded by this culture with ever more enticing and distracting sensations, he would become steadily more susceptible not to a negation but to a redefinition of his values at the hands of politicians, publicists, and advertisers. Where his ancestors had valued learning for its own sake and sacrifice for the sake of others, he might come to accept a commercial species of egalitarianism that spurned learning as an elitist pursuit and embraced business as a form of “service” implicitly comparable to the work of the saints. In the city of Los Angeles especially, with its technologically sophisticated industry of distractions, its eclectic

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marketplace of new religions, and its surfeit of grand nightspots, beautiful bodies, and gleaming automobiles, Aldous Huxley saw the apotheosis of a new culture that would be the death of everything that his ancestor Mathew Arnold had argued that culture should be. In the year following his first visit to the United States, Aldous Huxley published an essay in Harper’s entitled “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age.” In it he expanded upon some of the observations he had just begun to develop in Jesting Pilate. But whereas the tone of Jesting Pilate had been that of the bemused observer, Aldous here took on the mantle of the prophet, declaring: “The future of America is the future of the world. Material circumstances are driving all nations along the path in which America is going.” It was therefore necessary to study “the good and evil features of American life,” because they revealed “in a generally definite and highly developed form, the good and evil features of the whole world’s present and immediately coming civilization.”52 Unfortunately for America in the 1920s and the whole world in the decades to come, the “evil features of American life” seemed to outnumber the good by a wide margin in Aldous’s estimation. After acknowledging the advantages bestowed by the accelerated advance of the machine age, such as greater longevity, more leisure time, more opportunities to travel, and more access to culture through print, film, and radio, Aldous set about tallying the negatives. More leisure would be a wonderful thing for the propagation and advance of high culture across the world, provided the majority of people were wise and diligent enough to spend it well, but, as current trends in America indicated, they were not: A great many men and women—let us frankly admit it, in spite of all our humanitarian and democratic prejudices—do not want to be cultured, are not interested in the higher life. For these people existence on the lower, animal levels is perfectly satisfactory. Given food, drink, the company of their fellows, sexual enjoyment, and plenty of noisy distractions from without, they are happy. They enjoy bodily, but hate mental, exercise. They cannot bear to be alone, or to think. Contemporary urban life, with its jazz bands, its negroid dancing, its movies, theaters, football matches, newspapers, and the like, is for them ideal.53

Sounding the alarm of an intellectual aristocrat who sees a double threat in the proliferation of not only demotic but also “negroid” culture, Aldous here sounds a note resonant with Julian Huxley’s depiction of modernity and science run amok among African savages. This passage also combines Matthew Arnold’s old fears about the triumph of philistinism with con-

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temporary fears about the rising numbers of the “unfit” and what Oswald Spengler called race suicide. The trends in America all boded ill for the advance of true culture in the “machine age.” In fact, Aldous reasoned, “unless some system of eugenics is practiced” in the future, the vast majority of people would continue to regard the “notion that one can derive pleasure from arduous intellectual occupations” as “merely absurd.”54 In this new “machine age,” the logic of the marketplace also worked against the advance of culture. “The tendency of what may be called the spiritual industries,” such as film and radio, “is to coalesce into great combinations.” In the current global economy, “iron, oil, and textiles are controlled by a few great trusts.” Aldous observed that “the same is coming to be true of newspapers, the cinema, the radio, and the phonograph,” with disastrous consequences for the advance of culture: “The great trust eliminates small individual ventures and aims at securing the maximum number of customers for the fewest products. Hence the advantage is always to produce what is lowest.”55 In light of this trend toward mediocrity, Aldous argued that the old Victorian dream of social progress through expanded education was probably a delusion. Whereas T. H. Huxley had made the expansion of education among the working classes his paramount goal at the School of Mines for over three decades, Aldous criticized the notion of propagating liberal education as an example of Victorian sentimentality that would ultimately have to be abandoned: “To our fathers, and to a lesser degree ourselves, it seems just and reasonable to give all children the same abstract, liberal education. This principle has been practically applied, and its disappointing results have made us begin to wonder if it is a sound one. To our children and grandchildren it will without doubt seem fantastic and absurd.”56 In “The Outlook for American Culture” many of the themes that Aldous Huxley would develop in Brave New World are already clear: the ubiquitous logic of mass production and mass consumption, the necessity of some form of eugenics, and the creation of a single global civilization with a consumer culture pitched to the lowest common denominator and committed to nonstop distraction. “In 3000 a.d.,” he wrote, “one will doubtless be able to travel from Kansas City to Peking in a few hours. But if the civilization in these two places is the same, there will be no object in doing so.”57 In this passage, Aldous was if anything too cautious in estimating the pace at which a uniform consumer culture could cover nearly every corner of the planet. In his 1928 novel, Point Counter Point, Aldous would employ his favored device of idle banter among the idle rich to give voice to his

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thoughts about the toll that the juggernaut of industrial civilization was exacting on nature as well as culture. At a cocktail party, when a rising young politician named Everard Webley (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the British Fascist Oswald Mosley) invokes the virtues of “progress,” he is treated to a stinging rebuttal by the biologist Lord Edward Tantamount: “Progress! You politicians are always talking about it. As though it were going to last. Indefinitely. More motors, more babies, more food, more advertising, more money, more everything, forever.” He concludes with a finger-jabbing j’accuse: “You think we’re being progressive because we’re living on our capital. Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre—squander them all. That’s your policy.”58 In this attack, Lord Edward anticipates the environmentalist critique of technological progress and economic growth that Aldous would expand upon considerably after 1945, though it would not become a common part of Western political and economic discourse until the 1960s. By the mid-1930s, Aldous Huxley’s former student from Eton was also expressing his distaste for the gospel of progress that writers and thinkers such H. G. Wells had been promoting for over two decades. In 1937, George Orwell noted that the years since the First World War had witnessed a transformation in the attitude of his peers toward the Wellsian idea of progress through social engineering and mechanization. “A generation ago,” Orwell declared in The Road to Wigan Pier, “every intelligent person was in some sense a revolutionary; nowadays it would be nearer the mark to say that every intelligent person is a reactionary.”59 Orwell, who by this time had significant differences with Aldous Huxley concerning the efficacy of pacifism in the face of the Third Reich, still praised his former Eton instructor for scoring a direct hit in his spoof of H. G. Wells. Surveying the numerous and increasingly redundant utopian stories Wells had turned out since publishing A Modern Utopia in 1905, not to mention the pulp science fiction tales and World’s Fair press copy of similar ilk, Orwell observed that “the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines.” Where does it all lead? As Orwell saw it, “finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men.” To make sure that the rotund Wells could not miss this personal dig, Orwell added: “Of course in their daydreams of the future the little fat men are

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neither fat nor little; they are Men Like Gods. But why should they be? All mechanical progress is towards greater and greater efficiency; ultimately, therefore, towards a world in which nothing goes wrong. But in a world in which nothing went wrong, many of the qualities which Mr. Wells regards as ‘godlike’ would be no more valuable than the animal faculty of moving the ears.”60 As a socialist, Orwell faulted the ubiquitous cult of Wellsian progress mainly for the deleterious effect that it had on the public perception of proposed socialist reforms. Orwell remarked that in contemporary Britain, “socialism as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development, but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion.” Pointing to the poverty of current socialist discourse, he observed that “this idea [of progress] is implicit in, for instance, most of the propagandist stuff that is written about the rapid mechanical advance in Soviet Russia. (the Dneiper [sic] Dam, tractors, etc., etc.).”61 The aggregate effect of such propaganda was disastrous: “The socialist world is above all things an ordered world, an efficient world. But it is precisely from that vision of the future as a sort of glittering Wells-world that sensitive minds recoil.”62 Julian Huxley and his colleagues in the think tank known as Political and Economic Planning (PEP) tended to advocate just the sort of technocratic socialism that George Orwell found so repugnant and counterproductive. After having lampooned social engineering and technological utopianism in Brave New World, Aldous increasingly advocated small-scale and decentralized responses to the global economic disaster of the 1930s. He alludes to this ideal in Brave New World in the form of island communities where independent minds such as Helmholtz Watson could find some degree of autonomy from the World State. It finds further expression in Mr. Propter’s musings about solar power and independence from large utility companies in Aldous’s first Los Angeles novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. These values would also inform the author’s personal experiments in living “off the grid” in the Mojave Desert during the Second World War.63 In his classic study of the idea of progress, J. B. Bury had speculated that just as the medieval belief in Providence was gradually displaced by the notion of progress in the modern era, the Enlightenment belief in progress toward a utopian goal would ultimately give way to some unforeseen successor: “Another star, unnoticed now or invisible, will climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions will react to its influence, human plans will respond to its guidance. It will be the criterion by which

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Progress and all other ideas will be judged.”64 Since Bury wrote these words, the decline in our collective faith in progress has been reflected in the rapidly falling stock of utopian fiction. In the Victorian era, when faith in the idea of progress was perhaps at its peak across the English-speaking world, the genre of utopian fiction produced works, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, that enjoyed enormous popularity and influence. The years following the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 saw the publication of several influential dystopian classics, beginning with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We in 1922, followed by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1932, and finally, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four in 1949. In the succeeding half century, prominent critics, philosophers, and historians such as Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin all pointed to the dangers of the utopian dream by highlighting its connections to the great totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. As Berlin put it, if a regime is predicated on the idea that utopia is possible, it will very likely reason that “no amount of oppression, cruelty, repression, coercion will be too high” to achieve “the ultimate salvation of all men.”65 By the late twentieth century, dystopian fiction had become a staple of popular culture, while the genre of utopian fiction had practically disappeared. It is likely that the success of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World played no small part in this cultural shift. However, as a child of the Victorian era, Aldous could never completely abandon the idea that progress toward something better was at least a possibility. Even as he sparred with his older brother Julian about the meaning and nature of human progress, Aldous still had a fascination with utopian experiments such as the Oneida colony in upstate New York and the Llano del Rio colony, which had once prospered near his home in the Mojave Desert. With characteristic pragmatism, Aldous maintained that such utopian experiments have, even when they failed, “contributed to our knowledge of that most difficult and most important of all arts—the art of living together in harmony with benefit for all concerned.”66 In their distinct ways Julian and Aldous each dared to confront a vexing problem that had haunted the utopian imagination since the dawn of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Malthus had framed his Essay on the Principle of Population as a direct challenge to the utopian schemes of the Marquis de Condorcet and William Godwin.67 This was the enduring dilemma of how an ideal society, freed from the old population checks of war, famine, and pestilence, could survive and prosper without exceeding the carrying capacity of its habitat. While Malthus

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had raised this issue specifically in connection to human population and food supply, Julian and Aldous Huxley would highlight the ecological context of utopian thought in relation to a far broader range of issues, including resource extraction, soil erosion, and the preservation of biodiversity. And while Malthus had crafted his arguments with the intention of attacking the utopian and reformist ideas of his contemporaries, Julian and Aldous Huxley both sought to integrate their ideas about ecology with their visions of an ideal polity. In Julian’s case, this awareness of the ecological context of any possible utopia led him to help found the IUCN in the late 1940s and the WWF in the early 1960s. For Aldous, an acute sense of the ecological dimensions of utopian thought influenced both his nightmare visions, as presented in Brave New World and Ape and Essence, and the dream of a plausible utopia that he attempted to sketch in Island. In the early twenty-first century, when so many of the utopian schemes of the high modern era strike contemporary readers as at once banal and sinister, it is this ecological foundation beneath the utopian discourse of Julian and Aldous Huxley that remains pertinent to the problems of our time.

chapter 3

Spiritual Biology True science and true religion are twin-sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious; and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis. —Thomas Henry Huxley, “Science and Religion” (1859)

In the winter of 1927–28, Julian and Juliette Huxley rented a cabin near the village of Les Diablerets, high in the Swiss Alps. They brought their young children, Anthony and Francis, and persuaded Aldous and Maria, along with their son, Matthew, to winter there as well. All of the children were under ten, and with Juliette’s mother and a few other relatives and nannies as part of the mix, this was a very full house, with days given over to cross-country skiing, sledging, and the construction of an igloo for the boys, well crafted by Julian and Aldous to last the winter through. On Aldous’s invitation D. H. and Frieda Lawrence “settled in the Chalet Beau Suite, a few steps away.”1 In a division of labor that must have seemed natural—or at least extremely advantageous—to the men at that time, Julian, Aldous, and D. H. spent hours writing in longhand while, as Juliette recalls, “Maria and I busied ourselves typing manuscripts hot from the pen.”2 Maria worked double time, typing the work of both Aldous and D. H., while Juliette typed for Julian. By this arrangement, three books emerged from that winter at Les Diablerets: The Science of Life, which Julian had written in collaboration with H. G. Wells and his son G. P. Wells; Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley’s most ambitious novel of the 1920s and the one that marks the beginning of his pivot from knowing satire toward philosophical mysticism; and D. H. Lawrence’s erotic novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which would 86

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inspire censorship battles and litigation for decades to come. In her memoir, Juliette recalled that after reading the completed manuscript of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she remarked in a cross tone to D. H. that he should name the book “John Thomas and Lady Jane, since that was really all it was about.” Lawrence, to her amazement, observed that “many a wise word was spoken in anger” and declared that he would now adopt her proposed title for the new book: “Orioli, the Printer in Florence, was alerted—but later Lawrence was rightly persuaded that it would not be to the advantage of the book to wave so flagrant a flag. So it went back to Lady C.”3 Although Lawrence was playful in his sparring with Juliette over the frank sexuality of his fiction, he was positively explosive in his arguments with her husband, especially concerning science and religion. He condemned Julian as “an expurgated version of a man” and excoriated the science of evolutionary biology that was Julian’s lifework.4 When Julian gently reminded D. H. of the extensive evidence that already supported Darwin’s theory of evolution, the writer would alternately fume that “all scientists are liars” or, growing red in the face, pound his solar plexus and declare, “Evidence doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t feel it here.”5 Aldous remained a cool observer for most of these arguments, though he occasionally chimed in to defend his brother’s position. For the rest of the holiday, Julian “mercifully kept quiet” in response to D. H.’s provocations.6 Aldous was bemused by D. H.’s suspicion of evolutionary biology, but found his energy and his commitment to reconciling the earthly vitality of Pan with the transcendent vision of the Gospels to be intriguing. Lawrence was a close friend, and still a source of artistic inspiration for Aldous. He would draw on some of his more passionate rants as material for the character of Mark Rampion in Point Counter Point.7 However they may have differed in their reactions to the impromptu sermons and jeremiads of D. H. Lawrence that winter, Julian and Aldous Huxley both maintained, in contrast to Lawrence, that nothing in evolutionary biology was inherently hostile to the religious impulse in human beings. For Julian, evolution was progress writ large, and could serve as an inspiration for the future social and cultural progress of the entire human race. For Aldous, evolutionary biology confirmed a literal kinship between our own species and every other living thing on this planet, and this kinship provided a scientific justification for precisely the sort of Dionysian worldview that Lawrence advocated. While Lawrence saw science and religion as mortal enemies, Julian and Aldous,

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like their grandfather, continued to regard them as sisters, if seen in the clearest light. Even as they arrived at very different conclusions, Julian and Aldous Huxley each sought to articulate a worldview that was religious in its depth and power and yet fully compatible with both the long-standing methods of scientific research and the most current discoveries of evolutionary biology. This project had historical precedents in the Deist thought of the late eighteenth century, though the Deist paradigm of the “book of nature” had been made untenable, no less than traditional Christianity, by the destabilizing discoveries of Lyell and Darwin. In the mid-nineteenth century, an even more ambitious attempt to reconcile science and religion had been posited by thinkers such as Auguste Comte. Although Comte’s ideas made less headway in Britain, his call for a rational religion was echoed by the Victorian liberal politician Lord John Morley, who maintained that it was both possible and necessary to forge a new creed for the human race from the methods and discoveries of science. If science had a way of knocking the legs out from under the most cherished and comforting beliefs of the human race, it seemed reasonable to hope that it might also offer an inspiring vision of the universe and our place in it to fill the void. In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Paine signaled this concern when he confessed in The Age of Reason that he had intended to save the publication of his thoughts on religion for “a more advanced period of life,” but that the advent of the French Revolution, with its “total abolition of the whole national order of the priesthood” had compelled him to promote his views on natural religion, “lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.”8 Less than a century later, in the midst of the cultural upheaval that followed the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, T. H. Huxley was motivated by a similar sense of urgency to explore religious questions, through his participation in intellectual salons such as the Metaphysical Society and X Club.9 Although he was not the professional revolutionary that Tom Paine had been, T. H. Huxley shared a similar sense of exhilaration in helping to foment a scientific and intellectual revolution on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially in challenging the power of clerical authority and received dogma. On the other hand, Huxley also sensed, and perhaps more acutely than Paine had, the danger that, in the frenzy of this necessary destruction, many might “lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.” Unlike

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many who had rejected literal belief in the scriptures, T. H. Huxley did not so much raise the banner of écrasez l’infâme as attempt to rescue what he saw as the fundamental moral truths of traditional religion from the accoutrements of myth and dogma. T. H. Huxley even used the imagery of the Old Testament to praise skeptical inquiry, and the rejection of dogmatic belief, as the most fundamental religious virtue: Elijah’s great question, “Will you serve God or Baal? Choose ye,” is uttered audibly enough in the ears of every one of us as we come to manhood. Let every man who tries to answer it seriously ask himself whether he can be satisfied with the Baal of authority, and with all the good things his worshippers are promised in this world and the next. If he can, let him, if he be so inclined, amuse himself with such scientific implements as authority tells him are safe and will not cut his fingers; but let him not imagine he is, or can be, both a true son of the Church and a loyal soldier of science.10

As T. H. Huxley saw it, adherence to dogmatic belief in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary was a sin every bit as grave as the idol worship condemned by Elijah. The response of those with more traditional religious views to this sort of rhetorical construction has been well documented, as in the case of the American clergyman who, upon hearing that T. H. Huxley had been invited to deliver the inaugural address at the founding of Johns Hopkins, sniffed, “It was bad enough to invite Huxley. It were better to have asked God to be present. It would have been absurd to ask them both.”11 For all the controversy his defense of Darwinian evolution engendered, T. H. Huxley’s ideas about religion were largely derived from a Baconian principle that was commonplace in Anglo-American thought during the nineteenth century. Bacon had argued against the arbitrary limitation of human knowledge but also warned against what he saw as the misguided inquiry into the relationship between positive knowledge about the natural world on the one hand and normative wisdom about morality and the scriptures on the other. He declared that men should study nature to learn the power of God, study scripture to learn the will of God, and, above all, be wise enough never to conflate these two fields of inquiry.12 The sound scholar would not look to scripture, but to observation and experimentation for knowledge about the natural world. Conversely, it was not wise to search the natural world for moral instruction and religious truth, as these were to be found, as Bacon advised, in scripture. Eventually, Bacon’s paradigm would be stripped of its overt religious language by David Hume in the late eighteenth century and more fully codified by G. E. Moore in the early

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twentieth.13 In the United States this Baconian logic would render the secularization of academia more palatable to Americans in the nineteenth century, and it would even make it possible for many Americans, though far from all, to accept Darwinian evolution as an aspect of natural science that need not dislocate or even disturb their religious faith. Even in the late twentieth century, as the Kulturkampf regarding evolution and religion continued to rage in school boards across the United States, evolutionary biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould could find little to improve upon in the Baconian paradigm; his proposition that religion and science had “separate magisterial realms” was essentially the same vision that Bacon had put forward dressed up in different language.14 Given his long-standing admiration for the empirical ethos of Francis Bacon, it is not surprising that T. H. Huxley’s ideas about the proper relationship between science and religion flowed through very similar channels. As he saw it, while science deserved intellectual autonomy from religion in its attempt to understand the cosmos, that autonomy could not be construed as a mandate to attack the ethical teachings of religious tradition. In an 1859 lecture to his students at a workingmen’s college, Huxley told his students to avoid not only the self-imposed ignorance of the religious bigot but also the temptation to belittle religion: “Despise both bigotry and scoffing doubt, and regard those who encourage you in either, whether they wear the tonsure of a priest, or the peruke of a Voltaire, as your worst enemies.”15 As T. H. Huxley saw it, the danger of strict adherence to religious dogma was that it would blind one to new knowledge about the cosmos. The danger implicit in the arrogant scoffing of the skeptic was that it would blind a student to the rich repository of moral teaching in the Bible and in other religious traditions. Julian and Aldous Huxley also tried to avoid these extremes as they formed their own ideas about the relationship between science and religion in the twentieth century. As they watched the influence of traditional religion declining in the world around them, they both agreed that the void left by religion in the modern psyche would not remain empty for long; ideologies of the Left and Right, cults of nature, aesthetics, youth, or ethnic identity would rush in to fill the emptiness. While Julian attempted to forge his own scientific substitute in Religion without Revelation, Aldous kept a keen eye on the plethora of quasi-religions and pseudoreligions that proliferated in the aftermath of World War I. After his first visit to the United States in 1926, Aldous described the phenomenal success of the Ku Klux Klan as being, in part at least,

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another manifestation of the human thirst for religion: “The craving for ritual and ceremony is strong and widespread. . . . The Ku Klux Klan would never have achieved its post-war success if it had stuck to plain clothes and committee meetings. Messrs. Simmons and Clark, the resuscitators of that remarkable body, understood their public. They insisted that on strange nocturnal ceremonies at which fancy dress should not be optional but compulsory. Membership went up by leaps and bounds.”16 While observing that over “the last two or three hundred years the religions of the West have manifestly decayed,” Aldous argued that this historical trend “does not mean that they are definitively dead.”17 As the hunger for a religious framework persisted in the modern world, political movements of both the Left and the Right became increasingly imbued with zealotry and, as Aldous observed, even with the pageantry and ritual of traditional religion. Both Julian and Aldous saw the void left by traditional religion as a major challenge for the future of humanity, and they saw many of the passions that rushed in to fill it as not only foolish but dangerous. They each tried to address the question of what might fill this void on the level of the individual and on the broader level of societies and nation-states. Although the answers they developed were broadly different, each bore a close relation to evolution and the life sciences, and to the ecological framework that supports our species. In 1917 Julian Huxley wrote a short essay in which he mischievously addressed the perennial questions of religion and philosophy in the spirit of a contemporary ad for shaving razors. Alluding to the old concept of Occam’s razor, Julian wrote: “What the philosophers and theologians require is a razor. The absolute badly needs a haircut; at present he is too much like Paederewski—he has more nimbus than is necessary more even that [sic] is decent. . . . As for God, he should really have his beard trimmed. . . . ‘The Agnostic Razor’ would keep its edge indefinitely provided that it was regularly and properly stropped, the best materials for the strop being hard fact and experience.”18 While Julian Huxley mocked the pretensions of theologians and contemporary philosophers such as Josiah Royce who leaned too hard on such concepts as the Absolute, he also eschewed a purely materialistic view of human affairs. In a 1917 lecture on biology at Rice University, he warned his students to be “on guard against all the hasty and stupid generalizations of over-zealous and under-imaginative biologists who try to apply general laws of their science directly to human problems.” Because of the very complex mental capacity of human beings, such a mechanistic

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approach to human affairs was doomed to fail. “The biology of man, in the true and widest sense of the term . . . is primarily a mental problem. As scientists come to see this and all its implications, so we may come to a scientific treatment of human affairs.”19 Julian saw the evolution of human consciousness as rooted in biology, but his conception of biology was remarkably expansive. The combined discoveries of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and the life sciences could be resolved, as he saw it, into a single normative command: evolve. As the universe had evolved from the simple to the complex, and as organisms on earth had evolved from the basic process of reproduction to the more intricate and revolutionary phase of feeling and thinking, the culture of mankind itself must reject the merely reproductive process of tradition and embrace the universal process of evolution. During his time at Rice University, Julian Huxley developed a conception of a new kind of religious tradition, which he would later articulate in Religion without Revelation, and continue to promote throughout the rest of his long career. In this blueprint for a future global religion, the wonders of scientific discovery would assume the place once occupied by miracles and revelation, and an evolving and selfcorrecting body of thought would replace dogma and tradition. Of course, the revelations and prophecies had offered clear directives to the human race about how it should behave and where it was going, and Julian Huxley argued that the directives and prophecies of scientific discoveries were no less explicit. The question of exactly what this sort of evolution would be in human terms was impossible to answer precisely, but Julian Huxley’s vision of Evolutionary Humanism posited the development of a human race whose culture would become, parallel to the processes of physical and biological evolution, more complex, more dynamic, and more intelligent over time. In the 1920s and 1930s, eugenics would play a significant role in Julian Huxley’s discussions of Evolutionary Humanism, but in his years at Rice it was neither central nor indispensable to his vision. In the notebook that he kept as a young professor at the Rice Institute, Julian Huxley coined the term “spiritual biology” to describe what he saw as the new vistas and responsibilities for the life sciences in the twentieth century.20 Arguing that the biologist’s studies should not be strictly limited to the material properties of life, but should also seek to encompass such nonphysical aspects of human life as politics, war, erotic love, and religion, Julian expanded on these ideas in a series of public

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lectures he gave in Houston on themes such as “Biology and the State,” “Biology and War,” “Biology and Sex,” and, perhaps most fundamental to the focus of his writings for the following four decades, “Biology and Religion.”21 For the first time in his capacity as a public authority on evolution, Julian Huxley was breaking with his grandfather’s strict separation of the natural sciences and the realm of human ethics. When T. H. Huxley had reasoned in Evolution and Ethics that the contemplation and promotion of human ethics had nothing to gain from the scientific study of nature, he was affirming a separation that had been expressed by Bacon in broad religious terms, articulated by Hume in philosophical terms, and refined by Kant in the heady language of German metaphysics. About a decade after T. H. Huxley’s death, the British philosopher G. E. Moore articulated this principle of separating normative thinking on human ethics from the positive investigation of nature with the simple observation that it would be impossible to build a bridge, however desirable it might seem, from “is” to “ought.”22 When Julian Huxley attempted, in his Houston lectures, to do just that, he was not merely breaking with tradition. His thoughts on “spiritual biology” can be viewed as a revival of the Deist project of a religion based on the “book of nature” that so captivated the thinking of Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and the artist and naturalist Charles Willson Peale.23 These Deists had drawn meaning from a Newtonian sense of design and equilibrium in the universe. With the growing evidence in the early nineteenth century of geological instability, the extinction of species, and other proof of volatility in earth’s history, the Deist conception of the book of nature rapidly became obsolete. Adjusting to the new scientific landscape, Julian Huxley’s variety of natural religion grew from a Darwinian rather than a Newtonian paradigm, and so embraced change instead of clinging to a false sense of stability. In a poem entitled “Evolution: At the Mind’s Cinema” Julian Huxley condensed his conception of evolution, not merely as process, but as a cosmic revelation to the human mind. The fact that, in Homo sapiens, matter had become conscious of itself and could, through symbols, pass thoughts and ideas across generations, represented a new phase of evolution: Life leaves the slime and through all ocean darts; She conquers earth, and raises wings to fly; Then spirit blooms, and learns how not to die,—

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Nesting beyond the graves in others’ hearts. If this thy past, where shall thy future climb, O Spirit, built of Elements and Time?24

Whereas Deists had framed their own static conception of nature as an enduring scripture, or “book of nature,” to be read for moral instruction, Julian here cast the more volatile view of nature engendered by Darwinism as cinema, a dynamic and thoroughly modern form of revelation. However, even as he embraced the dynamism of natural selection, Julian’s philosophy took a step in the direction of religion that might have seemed archaic even to Darwin. Whereas Darwin stressed that natural selection favored only those species best fitted to survive and reproduce in a given environment, Julian Huxley invested evolution with a meaning and direction that he was never shy about calling progress. He sometimes hastened to add that he did not believe that all forms of biological change as the result of natural selection were worthy of being called progress; a species, like an individual or civilization, could indeed regress. But the general trend of evolution, Julian argued throughout his career, was overwhelmingly progressive: from simplicity to complexity, from passivity to power, from the dull sentience of a simple nervous system to the dazzling and self-conscious complexity of the human brain. Moreover, the pattern of moving from simplicity to complexity did not apply merely to biological evolution. It had been the pattern of stellar evolution and chemical evolution before the advent of life, and it had been the pattern of social, religious, and intellectual evolution since the advent of the human race.25 Beholding the power of nature in its full magnificence should inspire human beings to further the cosmic process of evolution on the intellectual and cultural level, where it was destined to proceed even faster than it had in its ever accelerating stellar, chemical, and biological phases. Not only did Julian find the spectacle of evolution sufficient to convince him that there was indeed a powerful purpose to life on earth and to human civilization, but he also believed that its system of order and direction would be enough to inspire and unite the whole human race if only it were communicated to all with sufficient clarity. Julian Huxley’s attempt to develop a religious viewpoint without recourse to a supernatural being or beings had less in common with the dialectical materialism of his Marxist colleagues such as J. B. S. Haldane and H. J. Muller than with the monism of his grandfather’s contemporary Ernst Haeckel. In Religion without Revelation, Julian wrote: “I personally believe in

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the uniformity of nature, in other words, that Nature is seen to be orderly once we take the trouble to find out the way of her orderliness, and that there are not two realms of reality, one natural the other supernatural and from time to time invading and altering the course of events in the natural.”26 This monistic view of the cosmos was easily integrated with the mechanistic paradigm of ecology that dominated Anglo-American discourse in the fledgling science during the early twentieth century.27 Unlike strict materialists, who denied the existence of spiritual phenomena, Julian argued that such phenomena were embedded within the substance of the cosmos itself. As the young biology professor saw it, this approach had the benefit of transcending the Manichean conflict between religion and science, while imbuing the study of nature with a profound spiritual significance. Julian Huxley took John Morley’s declaration that “the next great task of science will be to create a religion for humanity” as his marching orders, and throughout his career all of his efforts to popularize science were colored by his deep conviction that the knowledge of humanity’s place in the universe as revealed by Darwin had a deep religious significance.28 In the long run, Julian would not succeed in founding the new “religion without revelation” that he had envisioned in the 1920s. However, by the end of his life he would come to see his own role in the rise of a transnational environmental movement, growing out of his promotion of the life sciences, as one of his proudest achievements.29 Julian remained convinced that scientific knowledge, because it purportedly carried no baggage from any provincial religious or cultural tradition, was uniquely suited to provide the basis for a new and universal religious movement. Aldous Huxley’s congenital hauteur and reflexive distaste for anything that resembled propaganda made it impossible for him to follow his older brother’s attempts to fashion a new rational religion for the mass of mankind. Thus, whereas Julian followed the path of the secular evangelist, promoting his views through pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and the building of transnational institutions, Aldous followed the path of the secular mystic, attempting to distill the direct experience of what he alternately called God or “the ultimate ground of being” through fasting, yoga, meditation, and, most famously in the last decade of his life, hallucinogenic drugs. While Aldous Huxley expressed great reverence for the ideas of some Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, he was by nature suspicious of religious institutions. The one Christian denomination for which he had the most respect, the Society of Friends,

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was not surprisingly the one with the loosest and most ad hoc ideas about its own ecumenical and social organization. As he revealed in his writings on comparative religion, the Abrahamic religious traditions that Aldous admired were precisely the ones that were least involved in the affairs of the world or with any historical mission, such as the Sufi tradition in Islam, the Kabala tradition in Judaism, and the mystics and the metaphysical poets in Christianity. And although Aldous resolutely refused to identify himself with any named religious tradition, the teachings of Gautama Buddha appear to encapsulate the views that he expressed most consistently from the mid-1930s until his death. When Theodor Adorno labeled Aldous, in his essay on Brave New World, as a Buddhist, he knew that there was much in Aldous Huxley’s writings to recommend that classification even if the author himself would have rejected it. Unlike the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism does not purport to have a historical mission. In fact, as Aldous Huxley understood it and expressed in his 1939 novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, the discipline of nonattachment taught by Buddhism offered an escape, not only from history but also from time itself. In his survey of mystical traditions in The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous elaborated on the idea that spiritual liberation involved an escape from time and was thus wholly unrelated to any conception of historical progress: In the words of the eminent orientalist, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, ‘The Mahayanist believer is warned—precisely as the worshipper of Krishna is warned in the Vaishnavite scriptures that the Krishna Lila is not a history, but a process forever unfolded in the heart of man—that matters of fact are without historical significance’ (except, we should add, insofar as they point to or themselves constitute the means—whether remote or proximate, whether political, ethical or spiritual—by which men may come to deliverance from selfness and the temporal order).30

While Aldous developed a conception of religion very different from Julian’s, investing much more importance in the religious and especially mystical traditions of the past, he nevertheless began from the same starting point of biology from which his older brother’s thinking had originated. Aldous explicitly rooted his idea of religious truth in biology in a wide range of texts, from Jesting Pilate and Eyeless in Gaza in the twenties and thirties to The Doors of Perception and Island in the fifties and sixties. In Jesting Pilate, his sardonic travelogue of 1926, Aldous describes his visit to the laboratory of J. C. Bose, a groundbreaking Indian scien-

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tist who had developed exquisitely sensitive instruments to measure what might be called the “heartbeat” of plants and even to uncover evidence that these living things, like us, can feel pleasure and pain. He further describes how Bose’s research seems to suggest the possibility that “everything, including the ‘inanimate,’ is alive”: Life exists. Even the most strict and puritanical physicists are compelled, albeit grudgingly, to admit this terribly disquieting fact. Life exists, manifestly, in a small part of the world we know. How did it get there? There are two possible answers. Either it was, at a given moment, suddenly introduced into a hitherto inanimate world from outside by a kind of miracle. Or else it was, with consciousness, inherent in the ultimate particles of matter, and, from being latent, gradually extrinsicated itself in ever increasingly complicated and perfect forms. In the present state of knowledge—or ignorance, put it how you will—the second answer seems more likely to be correct.31

Although there is certainly some possibility that Aldous Huxley’s qualified support for the findings of Dr. Bose in this passage is purely ironic, this seems unlikely, as Aldous expressed precisely the same idea in the context of a lecture on ecology almost forty years later.32 While he concurred with J. C. Bose that even the humblest of biological entities shared the divine attributes of consciousness, Aldous would also put forward the parallel argument in Eyeless in Gaza that even the most revered forms of divine experience, such as the mystical raptures of saints and mystics, are grounded in biology: “[A] rapture is always a rapture, whatever it’s due to. Whether it’s champagne or saying OM, or squinting at your nose, or looking at a crucifix, or making love . . . we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul.”33 The idea that informed this speculation, that a change in physiology could liberate the mind from its mundane preoccupations and expose it to a broader and more powerful source of awareness, was derived from Aldous’s early readings of William James and Henry Bergson, and it continued to frame his discussion of the common mystical experience that he believed had inspired all major religious traditions, and that he called the “perennial philosophy.” Aldous drew considerable inspiration from mystics and poets such as Meister Eckhart, Thomas Traherne, and William Blake, and also from the broad taxonomies of human religious experience pioneered by religious groups such as the Vedanta Society. In his attempts to square the traditions of mysticism with evolutionary biology, Aldous was also influenced by some American mystics such as Richard Bucke, who had coined the phrase “cosmic consciousness,” and the Gandhi biographer Richard Gregg.34

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The similarities between descriptions of the mystical experience in Eyeless in Gaza and The Doors of Perception reveal how consistent Aldous Huxley’s conception of mystical experience remained across the decades. A common denominator in both texts is the premise that we can find the light of the sacred virtually anywhere, so long as we achieve a certain physiological state. Compare, for instance, the sense of illumination that Anthony Beavis finds from a few glasses of champagne to the sense of illumination that his creator derives from his first experience with mescaline and visit to the World’s Largest Drugstore in Los Angeles. In Eyeless in Gaza, Anthony Beavis has his doors of perception opened momentarily by some good champagne and so is able to commune with the infinite, even at a table of overprivileged college boys reciting limericks and recounting their exploits in business, sex, and hunting: Alone of the party, Anthony was silent. Speech would have compromised the delicate happiness he was then enjoying. That last glass of champagne had made him the inhabitant of a new world, extraordinarily beautiful and precious and significant. The apples and oranges in the silver bowl were like enormous gems. Each glass, under the candles, contained, not wine, but a great yellow beryl, solid and translucent. The roses had the glossy texture of satin and the shining hardness and distinctness of form belonging to metal or glass. Even sound was frozen and crystalline. The Young Lady of Kew was the equivalent, in his ears, of a piece of sculptured jade, and that violently futile discussion about grouse seemed like a waterfall in winter.35

In The Doors of Perception, Aldous’s description of his visit to the World’s Largest Drugstore employs many of the same elements. The observer, his critical faculties mercifully overridden by a change in brain chemistry, is able to see past the coarseness and vulgarity of his surroundings—in the first case the crass braggadocio of privileged young men, and in the second case the crass commercialism of a Los Angeles drug store in the Eisenhower era. His brain chemistry altered, he is able to let the transcendent beauty of things in themselves, whether they are glistening apples on a dinner table or glistening rows of merchandise in an American drugstore, shine forth upon his consciousness. The similarity between these passages also suggests something that should be obvious: The Doors of Perception, though it is usually taken to be a book about the nature of the mescaline experience, is first and foremost a book about the mind of Aldous Huxley. Given the spectacle of the 1960s counterculture and the enduring controversies that it has engendered, there has been a natural tendency to look at Aldous Huxley’s writings on hallucinogenic drugs through

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the prism of subsequent trends with an eye to assessing his influence on those who followed him. It’s worth remembering, however, that Aldous had predecessors of his own in this field. Havelock Ellis, whom Aldous cites as an influence on the ideology of his utopian community in Island, dosed himself with peyote in his gas-lit London flat in the 1890s and wrote an essay expounding on the significance of his experience.36 In the spring of 1914, when Julian was doing his teaching and fieldwork in Texas and Aldous was an underclassman at Balliol, the wealthy American bohemian Mabel Dodge Luhan conducted what she called “an experiment in consciousness” in her Greenwich Village apartment by ingesting peyote buttons with friends in a bohemian simulacrum of a Native American Kiowa ceremony.37 Baudelaire’s descriptions of his life as a connoisseur of hashish were at least amusing enough to Aldous that he was sure to bring a copy of Baudelaire to Harvard when he was invited to participate in an LSD study group there with Timothy Leary and others. William James’s experiments with laughing gas also did not escape Aldous’s notice, and he referenced them in his own speculations about the potential uses of hallucinogens. James’s contention that other worlds of consciousness lay in wait for us just beyond the edges of our quotidian experience was a powerful idea for Aldous, and one confirmed by his own experience.38 If Aldous Huxley’s famous experiments with hallucinogenic drugs had antecedents before the First World War, so did his interpretation of their significance. In an early letter to Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist who would give him his first dose of mescaline that year, Aldous cited Henri Bergson’s conception of how the human processes experience. This Bergsonian paradigm would guide his interpretation of his first experiment with mescaline, described in The Doors of Perception, as well as of his later experiments with psilocybin and LSD: It looks as though the most satisfactory working hypothesis about the human mind must follow, to some extent, the Bergsonian model, in which the brain with its associated normal self, acts as a utilitarian device for limiting, and making selections from, the enormous possible world of consciousness, and for canalizing experience into biologically profitable channels. Disease, mescaline, emotional shock, aesthetic experience and mystical enlightenment have the power, each in its own way and to varying degrees, to inhibit the functions of the normal self and its ordinary brain activity, thus permitting the ‘other world’ to rise into consciousness.39

Certainly, Aldous Huxley’s vivid and compelling description of his experiences generated a vast public interest in these substances and was

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one of the factors that contributed to their widespread use. Shortly after the publication of The Doors of Perception, Aldous’s British publisher, Chatto & Windus, received a flood of letters requesting information on how to obtain doses of mescaline.40 Aldous Huxley’s loyal editor throughout the greater part of his career was Harold Raymond. The correspondence between these two men was always more than professional in content; Aldous would write to his editor concerning his artistic aspirations as he conceived and completed his various projects, and Harold Raymond was always prepared to offer a friendly but candid opinion of the author’s latest work. When Aldous sent in the manuscript for The Doors of Perception, his editor received it with great interest but also with a healthy dose of wry skepticism. In his first letter after receiving the manuscript, Raymond speculated that a soft drink containing mescaline might well put Coca-Cola out of business and perhaps inaugurate a new golden age of civilization. He then went on to put the question more directly: would mescaline in the water supply of a major city create a city of saints and poets?41 Such ideas and questions were a natural reductio ad absurdum that Aldous had already answered in The Doors of Perception, and that he would address at greater length in Heaven and Hell and Island. This variety of hallucinogen, which Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond came to call a “psychedelic” in the mid1950s, was not a ticket to enlightenment or even a guaranteed recipe for an epiphany. If the subject were in the wrong psychological or spiritual state, psychedelic experience could as easily take him to hell as to heaven. But if one’s physical, psychological, and spiritual state were properly prepared, the use of psychedelic drugs such as mescaline or LSD could result in what Aldous called, in a phrase he openly borrowed from Catholic thought, a “gratuitous grace” that could help an individual make significant progress along the spiritual path. It is also important to note here that the populist style of a figure like Timothy Leary was antithetical to Aldous Huxley’s avowedly non-egalitarian approach to intellectual and spiritual culture throughout his life. Although he enjoyed Leary’s company, he had little patience for his antics and once compared him to an Irish schoolboy obsessed with the gleeful pastime of irritating the schoolmasters, in this case the Psychology Department and administration of Harvard University. While Leary aimed to popularize the use of psychedelics, Aldous felt their use should be reserved to a small minority of educated and serious users willing to take them under carefully controlled circumstances. In light of the popular drug culture that emerged in the sixties and seventies, Harold Raymond’s offhand joke about a mescaline soft drink

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seems more prescient than anyone might have imagined at the time. The three decades following World War II would not just witness an increasing popularization of highbrow culture, as evidenced by the fashionable acceptance of abstract expressionism, existentialism, and Bauhaus architecture by millions of college-educated Americans. These decades would also see the emergence of a self-conscious popular culture that would arise and, reveling in the irony of its perpetual newness and perpetual obsolescence, assert its superiority over the eternal and transcendent pretensions of traditional high culture. While Huxley, as a distinguished intellectual aristocrat, could insert as many caveats as he liked about the right sort of people using these substances under the right sort of circumstances and with the right sort of intentions, the tenor of the times guaranteed that the populist, sloganeering, and self-consciously mischievous style of Leary would become more influential, not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom and Europe as well. Whereas Aldous drew from the poetry of William Blake to describe his first experience with mescaline, the next generation of psychedelic enthusiasts would lift a phrase from the ad copy of DuPont, raising the banner in the late 1960s of “Better living through chemistry.”42 Almost twenty years after the publication of The Doors of Perception, one of the most articulate critiques of the psychedelic movement came from Julian Huxley’s colleague and pioneering environmentalist Max Nicholson. While Julian had kept largely private his reservations about the growing vogue for pharmaceutical mysticism that followed Aldous Huxley’s death, Nicholson was blunt. Surveying the pervasive anomie of the early 1970s, he wrote: “What then remains? Some of the fugitives, in disturbingly increasing numbers, turn to drugs for the escape route and for the transcendental release which neither revealed religion, nor the grandiose ostensible alternatives of the affluent or the Marxist society can plausibly afford them. But, setting aside all moral considerations, there is evidently no future in a society so spiritually and intellectually insolvent that many of its most sensitive citizens can see no satisfaction for themselves except in chemically induced insensibility.”43 Jiddu Krishnamurti sounded a similar note in commenting on the psychedelic movement that he had seen growing steadily in California since the publication of The Doors of Perception: The intellectual who has played with various theories—Vedanta, Zen, Communist ideals and so on—is now turning to the golden drug that will bring about dynamic sanity and harmony.

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. . . No dynamic golden pill is ever going to solve our human problems. They can be solved only by bringing about a radical revolution in the mind and the heart of man. This demands constant work, seeing and listening, and thus being highly sensitive. The highest sensitivity is the highest intelligence, and no drug ever invented by man will give this intelligence.44

The phrase “the intellectual who has played with various theories” could of course apply to any number of figures who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs in the fifties and sixties, but the passing reference to Vedanta and Zen brings to mind those psychedelic pioneers whom Krishnamurti counted among his friends, including Aldous Huxley. For some of Aldous Huxley’s critics, the problem was not merely his experiments with hallucinogens and his eclectic mysticism, but the fact that he had ever set aside his prodigious gift for satire to pursue philosophy in the first place. At the very beginning of Aldous’s career as a novelist, Malcolm Cowley had written of him: “When he is complaining or mocking Mr. Huxley can rise to real heights of bombast; at such times he writes good mouth-filling stuff with a little of the Elizabethan spirit, but with more acidity. It is for his satires then, that he is to be valued, rather than any groping toward a philosophy.”45 Throughout his career as a writer, Aldous Huxley would be shadowed by critics who, while praising his skills as a satirist, would condemn his forays into philosophy and religion, with or without the aid of pharmaceuticals. The oversimplified image of Aldous as the spiritual seeker and Julian as the strict secularist was solidified by the popular press in the late 1940s. In the spring of 1947, Life Magazine ran a four-page profile of the Huxley brothers, complete with photographs of a tanned and pensive Aldous at his typewriter and a serious and vaguely aristocratic Julian posing before an oil portrait of his grandfather. Given the abiding importance of religion in American culture and the air of controversy long associated with the Huxley name, it should not be surprising that a succinct treatment of Julian and Aldous Huxley’s religious views emerged on page 1. The omniscient voice of Life Magazine described Julian as “the materialist, denying the need for religion or God. At the other pole stands Aldous preaching the faith that all religions are one and God is everywhere.”46 The reality was of course more complex. While many of Aldous Huxley’s writings, such as The Perennial Philosophy, would use the term “God,” Aldous’s cosmology was not much more theistic than his eldest brother’s. In the summer of 1963, not long before Aldous died, he wrote a note to Julian to express praise for his

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recent article “Religion without God”: “I liked enormously your article, Religion Without God. Very good. Even in the 14 cent[ury] Eckhart c[oul]d say, ‘Why do you prate about G.? Everything you say about Him is untrue.’ The only thing that mattered really was the divine experience.”47 Although Aldous had routinely used the term “God” as shorthand for what he also called “the spiritual ground of being,” he did not believe in the anthropomorphic God of history depicted in the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions any more than Julian did. In fact, the goal of distilling philosophy from religion that Aldous was engaged in was in many ways similar to Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to cull only the moral philosophy and not the miracles from the Gospels, although Aldous was extending the project to several major religions instead of just one. And even though Julian had quit using the term “God” because of what he saw as its connotations of both anthropomorphism and dualism, he was, like generations of modern philosophers since Spinoza, still looking for a guiding intelligence and goodness in the fabric of the cosmos. Perhaps the difference between the two Huxley brothers was epitomized by the textual source that Aldous used to justify his reservations. While Julian had alarmed people by dropping “God” from his vocabulary and jumping straight into a discourse on the intellectual virtues of Darwin and Freud, Aldous reached back into the Middle Ages and grounded his critique of excessive talk about “God” in the observations of Meister Eckhart. For many religious conservatives, both of the Huxley brothers went too far in their penchant for free thought, but Aldous Huxley’s commanding knowledge of the Judeo-Christian tradition made his statements appear more like the iconoclasm of a religious reformer than that of a modern nihilist. If one defines theistic religion as the belief in an anthropomorphic God, then both of the Huxley brothers would have to be classed as atheists. If, on the other hand, one classifies any way of thinking that claims to see a clear purpose in human life and the structure of the universe as religious, then both Huxley brothers were indeed religious. When the Texas branch of the American Legion raised alarms over Julian Huxley’s “atheism” during his tenure at UNESCO, he protested his deep religiosity and pointed to Buddhism as proof that the absence of belief in a deity and a deep sense of religious feeling were in no way incompatible.48 Conversely, when Aldous Huxley applied for U.S. citizenship in 1953, the recently passed McCarranWalter Act required that the fifty-nine-year-old author vow that he was prepared to protect America by bearing arms or else to justify his

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pacifism with a clear religious affiliation.49 Aldous Huxley, though famous by then for both his pacifism and his religious mysticism, resolutely refused to justify his stance on religious rather than philosophical grounds, and was consequently denied U.S. citizenship.50 Although they took very different paths, both of the Huxley brothers tried to integrate the science of evolutionary biology with their own deepest religious intuitions. Whereas Julian called his worldview “religion without revelation” in the 1920s, the vision that Aldous developed over the course of his lifetime might aptly be called revelation without religion. In some ways, both projects owed something to the naturalistic theodicies of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, respectively. In the long run, both of them would anticipate major elements in the quasireligion of postwar environmentalism. But neither worldview has ever threatened to displace traditional religion anytime soon. Regarding the relationship between reason and faith, Heinrich Heine once remarked, “In dark ages people are best guided by religion as in a pitch black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.”51 There is a wonderful ambiguity in this metaphor. Faith is at once equated with blindness but also with the acquisition of an invaluable sense that allows one to navigate a world gone dark. And this sense must be trusted before it can be learned; it must be acquired through faith, rather than reason. The sighted man who finds himself lost in the darkened city cannot ask the blind man for directions and then assess them by the light of his own intellect; rather, he must, like a child, take the blind man’s arm and be led by one who can navigate the darkness. And for who knows how long? Written in the first half of the nineteenth century, Heine’s anticipation of a coming daylight of reason in which the blind man’s help would no longer be necessary seemed consonant with contemporary history, as he understood it. As the twentieth century ground on from world war to depression to world war, many found compelling reasons to believe they were witnessing the arrival of a new sort of dark age, one that might be made even longer, as Winston Churchill once speculated, “by the lights of a perverted science.” It is not surprising that some of the most distinguished artists and intellectuals with the most liberal pedigrees, from T. S. Eliot to Aldous Huxley, found themselves reaching for the arm of the blind man. On the other hand, some avowedly secular intellectuals, such as Julian Huxley, continued to rely solely on the power of their own capacity for reason to navigate this new landscape. There is

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very much to admire in this, especially since the deliberate abandonment of reason caused so much misery in the twentieth century, as in times before and since. On the other hand, there lurks in the secular sermons of Julian Huxley a vague sense of panic, as if his long to-do lists of new and exciting projects for mankind as the new managing director of “the biggest business of all” served the same purpose for their speaker that whistling past the graveyard has long served for educated souls. As the environmentalist movement has grown since the mid-twentieth century, many of its critics have pointed to its religious overtones as evidence that environmental concerns are less than rational. This argument is understandably tempting to those who would seek to undermine or overturn environmental regulations, but it ignores the fact that our thinking about nature and about our sense of what is sacred have been intertwined for a very long time. Every political system, as it seeks to govern how human beings interact with one another, also seeks to govern, to a greater or lesser extent, how human beings interact with nature. From the smallest band of hunter-gatherers to the largest empire, every human polity has had rules, explicit or implicit, about the use of the natural resources such as animals, plants, wells, and rivers that constitute the common supply of food and water. One powerful acknowledgment of this in Western culture may be the fact that the first murder depicted in the Abrahamic tradition occurred over the management of natural resources and over which variety of cultivation, whether of animals or of plants, was of the greatest value and was thus most pleasing to God. The fact that Cain and Abel’s argument was about theology rather than, say, the nutritional value of meat versus grain, or the relative environmental impact of herding and farming, indicates another fact that is nearly as true now as it was in the Bronze Age: arguments about how to use and develop natural resources are very often framed in religious terms rather than merely in the terms of the resources themselves. When people are engaged in a practical struggle over the relationship between human beings and nature, they often frame that struggle, as Cain and Abel did, as an argument about human beings and the divine. One reason for this may simply be the oft-noted habit that human beings have had, both individually and collectively, of justifying their material ambitions in the language of religion. It is easy enough to find examples of this pattern from just about any period in history. There is, however, another reason why the rules that various polities have made about the human relationship to nature have been frequently expressed or justified in the language of religion. Put in the simplest

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terms, the reason is this: nature does not negotiate. When the gifts of nature, such as food, water, or clement weather are available to human beings, they seem to be exactly that—gifts, which have arrived as the result of a volition that does not belong to us. Likewise, when the opposite face of nature has shown itself, the face of drought, famine, or unpredictable violence, nature has also seemed to manifest an underlying force or forces that human beings could scarcely understand, much less communicate with. While interactions between individuals and groups can be difficult enough, human beings at least have the advantage of belonging to the same species and thus knowing firsthand what other human beings are liable to want, need, and consider fair. For this reason a whole host of human interactions, including commerce, sex, and war, can and do take place across the barriers of language and culture. But even if we are convinced that there is some force behind an artesian well or a hurricane, a force that has feelings or thoughts in some way like our own, any attempt to preserve the well or prevent the hurricane by negotiating with that force is likely to be difficult. Any being or beings capable of creating such wonder and horrors must be quite different from us. Thus, for most of history, our steady need for the endowments of nature and our recurrent horror at its power have imbued the human conception of our ecological environment with a deep religious cast, as manifested in such varied examples as the Chinese conception of the emperor’s mediation between heaven and earth; the belief expressed in all three Abrahamic religions that the wrath of God was expressed in natural disasters; and the worship of trees and mountains by many animistic cultures around the world. As many partisans of scientific knowledge have noted, the discoveries that have led to the disenchantment of nature or the displacement of man from the most central place in nature’s scheme have met with fierce resistance from religious authorities seeking to maintain a more orthodox view of both the natural world and the place of humanity within it. The human drive to invest our experience of nature with religious significance has always been very strong, however, even for those, such as Julian and Aldous Huxley, who saw themselves as committed to science and its ethos of skepticism. The Huxley brothers took their place in a long line of rational thinkers who integrated a religious element in their conceptions of our place in nature and our future as a species. Although Francis Bacon believed that a conscious program of expanding human knowledge would give us an unprecedented power over nature, he made sure to put orthodox

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religion squarely in the center of the scientific culture he envisioned in The New Atlantis. In the eighteenth century, even such outspoken critics of religious orthodoxy as Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson put considerable stress on a sacred relationship between man and nature. If the Bible was not a reliable source of religious truth for mankind, the “book of nature” surely was. And if the rapture of religion was too reminiscent of the dangerous zealotry that gripped much of Christendom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then the rapture of nature promised an experience of the divine that, for all its power, did not threaten to divide people along sectarian lines. Even for the self-proclaimed agnostics such as T. H. Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, or Herbert Spencer, the contemplation of nature could not readily be disentangled from a sense of religiosity. For monists such as Haeckel and Spencer, nature was not merely God’s testament as it had been to the Deists—nature itself was God. Although T. H. Huxley rejected this view, he still put nature in the center of his religious paradigm, as the very whetting stone against which human beings must sharpen their sense of ethics and capacity for civilization. For these descendants of the Enlightenment, if there were no nature, it would be necessary to invent it.

chapter 4

Ape and Essence The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. —Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940

In December 1938, the London Zoo acquired three panda bears that had recently been captured in Szechuan Province. When Conservative Member of Parliament Winston Churchill expressed an interest in a private visit to the zoo to see the pandas up close, Julian Huxley, who had been director of the zoo since 1935, was happy to oblige. While touring the grounds, Churchill inquired how, in light of the growing likelihood of another war with Germany, the zoo planned to deal with the possible bombardment of London. Julian responded that he had ordered his staff to shoot any dangerous animals that might be set free as the result of such an emergency. Churchill stood perfectly still for a moment, lost in his own thoughts. “What a pity.” he said. When Julian looked puzzled, the stout MP elaborated: “Imagine a great air-raid over this great city of ours—squadrons of enemy planes dropping their bombs on London, houses smashed to ruins, fires breaking out everywhere—corpses lying in the smoking ashes—and lions and tigers roaming the desolation in search of the corpses—and you’re going to shoot them! What a pity!”1 Julian did not elect to change the zoo’s policy 108

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regarding the treatment of escaped predators during an air raid, but he did issue orders, as the war approached, to have the most dangerous animals removed to the zoo’s rural facility at Whipsnade. Fortunately, the zoo was spared any serious damage during the Blitz, and Julian, with characteristic dedication to the cause of science, took detailed notes on how various species reacted to the air raids.2 During the Second World War, Julian and Aldous Huxley found themselves in frequent disagreement, not only about the best response to the challenge of Fascism, but also regarding the idea of progress and its relationship to the war itself. Although he had been careful to argue in the 1920s that progress was not inevitable, Julian tended to see the accelerated centralization of liberal democracies such as the United States and Britain in response to depression and war as a harbinger of more rapid social progress. Conversely, Aldous viewed such centralization as signaling a global drift toward totalitarianism that transcended ideology. Their argument about this trend toward centralization was imbued with a greater urgency by the looming war in the late 1930s, and it became particularly intense once the Allied powers embraced the practice of total war in the early 1940s. Julian viewed the fight against the Axis powers as not only necessary and just but also beneficial to his long-cherished goal of expanding the role of scientific and technical expertise in political-economic life in the liberal democracies and, once the war was won, across the world. Aldous, in his 1937 pacifist treatise, Ends and Means, did not deny that Nazism was a profound evil, but he reasoned that the forces of centralization accelerated by wartime mobilization would ultimately transform liberal democracies such as Britain and the United States into totalitarian societies themselves. Moreover, he argued that the increased funding and prestige for scientists and technical experts engendered by military mobilization was in fact a trap that would cost them both their moral integrity and intellectual autonomy. The stark nature of this difference in the brothers’ viewpoints became apparent in the war’s immediate aftermath. When the existence and work of the Manhattan Project became publicly known in August 1945, Julian Huxley expressed an almost boyish excitement at the possibilities that this unprecedented endeavor in state-sponsored science and technology had opened up for the literal transformation of the world. Aldous, on the other hand, viewed it as nothing less than the subjugation of science to militaristic nationalism and to the most destructive instincts in human nature. As he saw it, the governments of the Allied powers were also susceptible, especially under the stress of

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total war, to the allure of what Churchill called “the lights of a perverted science.” Some prominent historians of twentieth-century international relations have called the two world wars together “Europe’s second thirty years war.”3 Ironically, the young Aldous Huxley himself seems to have intuited this very early when he wrote to Julian in February 1915, “Quite a considerable portion of my acquaintances . . . are now at the front. . . . I suggest that the war be over in September, in order that the relics of them may come back for the Michaelmas term. But as I expect this is going to be a Thirty Years War, I regard the prospect as unlikely.”4 Given the broad continuities linking these twentieth-century cataclysms, and the relative brevity of the interlude between them, it may be useful to look at how Julian and Aldous Huxley each responded to the First World War as a key to understanding their response to the Second. In the early months of the First World War, Julian Huxley, while still a professor at Rice, speculated with his characteristic optimism, “It may be that the European cataclysm is in some way connected with Humanity’s coming of age, perhaps the initiation-ceremony for approaching manhood.”5 The outbreak of hostilities in Europe was certainly a turning point for Julian himself, as it would bring an end to his teaching career at Rice. In 1916, he briefly considered taking part in a peace conference sponsored by Stanford University president David Starr Jordan in Switzerland, and asked his father, as well as his younger brother Aldous, for advice. Aldous noted Julian’s quandary in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, while expressing his own cautious admiration for the project: “I think this peace thing sounds fairly efficient and useful: it proposes to hold a meeting of belligerents and neutrals in Berne, where a campaign is apparently to be designed for making simultaneous propaganda in all the countries. . . . He seems very doubtful and applies to both my father and myself for advice. My father is of course against it. To me it seems quite good and efficient as an organization.”6 Julian did not elect to take part in this conference, but instead returned to Britain in 1917 for military training and deployment. Within the year, he was serving on the Italian front for the British Army Intelligence Corps. As he later observed, the Great War “released an academic person like myself from the grooves of thought in which he was professionally bound. . . . The war, a senseless denial of thought, was a great promoter of thinking.”7 As Julian noted in the 1920s, his military training at Aldershot proved to be the time when he would formulate many of the ideas about a new religious vision for modern times that would be based

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on the principles of evolutionary biology, and that he would promote, first as “Scientific Humanism” and then as “Evolutionary Humanism,” for the rest of his career. For Aldous Huxley, the war years were also a period of intellectual awakening. Although he was precluded from serving because of his poor eyesight, Aldous had initially shared in the general antipathy toward Germany during the early months of the war, and his letters from that period feature a number of erudite, though generally sophomoric, jabs at the grandiose pretensions of German Kultur. Saddened by the loss of so many friends and alarmed by the curtailment of civil liberties at home, however, Aldous ultimately drew closer to the perspective of the conscientious objectors, such as Bertrand Russell and D. H. Lawrence, whom he came to know at Garsington, the rural estate of the liberal aristocrat Lady Ottoline Morrell. In March 1916, a few months after his first visit to Garsington, Aldous wrote to Julian, “At the beginning I shd. have liked very much to fight; but now, if I could (seeing all the results), I think I’d be a conscientious objector, or nearly so.”8 At Garsington also, he made the acquaintance of T. S. Eliot and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and he fell in love with a young and wraithlike Belgian refugee named Maria Nys, who would become his wife until her death from cancer in 1955. In the aftermath of World War I, Aldous did some work for the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, a League of Nations program that turned out to be the institutional precursor to UNESCO. He would nonetheless maintain, in keeping with the voice of his satirical novels during this period, a fairly jaundiced view of most enterprises for reforming or improving the world. The early 1930s saw a period of despair in Aldous Huxley’s life that coincided with his return to London during the depths of the Great Depression. Ideas about mysticism, which had often been in the background of his fiction and prose since the 1910s, now came to the forefront. Although Aldous had been a strong critic of both Tolstoy and Gandhi in his earlier writings, he began in the mid1930s to express deep admiration for their advocacy of nonviolence and economic decentralization. Aldous’s friendship with the Anglo-Irish historian and mystic Gerald Heard strengthened these tendencies, and soon both Heard and Huxley were regular public speakers for the Anglican pacifist Dick Sheppard’s movement, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU). While Julian Huxley and his associates at Political and Economic Planning (PEP) argued during the Depression that the drive toward rational planning of economic, social, and political affairs on the broadest

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scale possible was the next phase in the evolution of human civilization, Aldous took the opposite position. In his 1937 treatise, Ends and Means, Aldous observed that the ideas advocated by PEP were little more than the product of a predictable shift in fashionable thinking: “Before the World War only Fabians talked about a planned society. During the War all the belligerent societies were planned . . . for the purpose of carrying on the hostilities. Immediately after the War there was a reaction, natural enough in the circumstance, against planning. The depression produced a reaction against that reaction, and since 1929 the idea of planning has achieved an almost universal popularity.”9 Aldous acknowledged that the current vogue for social and economic planning was understandable in light of the economic slump and the emerging challenge from Germany, but he warned that, “in the process of trying to save our world or part of it from its present confusion, we run the risk of planning it into the likeness of hell and ultimately into complete destruction. There are cures which are worse than disease.”10 After condemning in detail the brutal and oppressive socioeconomic programs of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union under Stalin, Aldous argues in this section of Ends and Means that ambitious programs for socioeconomic planning in liberal democracies such as Britain have been inspired by a desire for military preparedness and thus contain the seeds of totalitarianism, even if they are not totalitarian to begin with: Most of the essays in large-scale planning attempted by the democratic powers have been dictated by the desire to achieve military efficiency. Thus, the attempt to coordinate the British Empire into a self-sufficient economic unit was a piece of planning mainly dictated by military considerations. Still more specifically military in character have been the plans applied to the armament industries, not only in Great Britain, but also in France and the other democratic countries, for the purpose of increasing production. Like the Fascist plans for heightening military efficiency such essays in planning are bound to make matters worse, not better.11

Aldous concluded, “ ‘The defence of democracy against Fascism’ entails inevitably the transformation of democracy into Fascism.”12 While Julian Huxley, along with most of the British Left in the late thirties, had called for military preparedness and collective security in the face of rising Fascism on the European continent, Aldous had joined Gerald Heard and the Peace Pledge Union in urging resistance to any such effort. As American isolationism became a more vexing issue for Britons in the face of rising Fascist aggression, the gap between Julian

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figure 8. Aldous and Maria Huxley at Boulder Dam, ca. 1938. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

and Aldous Huxley on this issue only widened. As Aldous Huxley toured the United States in 1937, arguing that America should keep out of any commitments that would involve it in another European war, he was making essentially the same argument as Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement. While eschewing Lindbergh’s fawning admiration for the Luftwaffe, Aldous reasoned that embracing the methods of modern warfare, even against a regime as terrible as the

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Third Reich, would inevitably undermine the humanity and corrupt the democratic institutions of any country that became involved in the coming struggle.13 In the autumn of 1938, when Britain and France capitulated to Hitler’s demand for annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, Aldous wrote to his friend Naomi Mitchison, “Chamberlain’s choice between evils was the better one. It seems to me better that five million or more people who would have been killed in a war should have their lives prolonged if only for a short time.” Striking the pose of a detached Brahmin, Aldous also speculated in this letter that democracy itself might be dying out across the world, but that there remained hope for the human race in the individual practice of spiritual self-cultivation, which even the global triumph of totalitarianism would not be able to eliminate.14 Julian, who toured the United States himself in the late autumn of 1941 on behalf of the British Ministry of Information, had advocated military preparedness during the 1930s, and now lobbied, albeit cautiously, for greater U.S. involvement in the war. Whereas Aldous had outlined his rationale for pacifism in Ends and Means, Julian published his own treatise a few years later on war and domestic politics: Democracy Marches, in which he made the case that the total mobilization of people and resources required to defeat the Axis powers would actually strengthen democratic values and institutions within the Allied democracies, especially by hastening the abandonment of old laissez-faire economic policies and bolstering the role of government services in health, education, and public welfare.15 Both brothers recognized that the war was driving a global process of centralization in which the power of applied science and managerial expertise was attaining an unprecedented importance, a trend that Bertrand Russell had described in the early 1930s and that the American intellectual James Burnham dubbed “the managerial revolution” at the outset of the Second World War. For Julian, this process had the potential, especially in the sort of political landscape that would follow an Allied victory, to transform human affairs for the better. Once Fascism had been soundly defeated, the victorious Allied powers could apply the brand of benevolent expertise embodied in technocratic programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority to solving the problems of poverty, population control, and conservation across the entire world.16 For Aldous, the managerial revolution that the war was accelerating had this single consequence that trumped all of the others in importance: the great powers of the world, whether

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they classed themselves as empires of some master race, proletarian dictatorships, or liberal democracies, were all joining a life-and-death race to become more highly centralized, more effectively militarized, and, as a consequence, more irrevocably oppressive. While Aldous would not go so far as to posit any sort of moral equivalency among the contending powers in the Second World War, he did see them as marching on the same road toward the same destination. By the time Britain entered the war in September 1939, many who joined the Peace Pledge Union in 1934 had abandoned the pacifist cause as impractical and even immoral in the face of Nazi aggression. As George Orwell would argue in the pages of the Partisan Review during the war: “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. . . . The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.”17 Orwell’s ire in this letter was directed at the diehard Anglican pacifist and poet D. S. Savage, who had taken up residence in a rustic farmhouse far from London during the blitz.18 But, as Orwell saw it, the continued adherence to pacifism by British intellectuals, wherever they resided, was the worst kind of intellectual hypocrisy. Julian, who stayed in London during the bombing campaign, described the experience in one of his transatlantic radio talks at the time. He recalled driving with a colleague through the streets of London during a raid in October 1940: We put our tin hats on, I got my car out, and ran him down through streets that were, literally, all but deserted, owing to the violence of the raid and the barrage. On the way we began exchanging confidences. We both, it turned out, had been really frightened for a bit after the collapse of France. Visions of invasion, of being trapped like rats and unable to escape from these islands, of concentration camps (we both had been a good deal too liberal in public for the Gestapo’s taste) had fixed themselves into our unwilling brains. . . . It hadn’t made us less determined to fight but it had been an additional horror to fight against. But then the horror had receded. It became clear not only that Britain could defend itself, but that a spirit of leadership, a sense of mission, was asserting itself in what had seemed a lethargic nation.19

In light of the fears Julian expressed here, it’s worth noting that the Gestapo (apparently uninformed about Aldous’s emigration to the United States) regarded both Julian and Aldous Huxley as dangerous enough to order their immediate apprehension upon a successful German invasion of Great Britain. A few months after the fall of Berlin, the

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Manchester Guardian reported that “Himmler’s Gestapo prepared for the invasion of England in 1940 by compiling a list of more than 2,300 persons . . . whose arrest was to be ‘automatic’ after the Wehrmacht’s victory. The list is contained in a booklet found in the Berlin headquarters of the Reich Security Police.” Aside from targeting Allied leaders such as Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, the list included many prominent British writers, artists, and scientists who had been outspoken in their opposition to Fascism. Julian and Aldous shared this honor roll with numerous friends and associates, including J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Rebecca West, and H. G. Wells.20 In practical terms, the war meant that Julian’s Political and Economic Planning group began to have a greater role in public affairs, with Julian doing public relations work for the Ministry of Information, while his friend and PEP cofounder Max Nicholson was put in charge of managing transatlantic shipping logistics for Britain.21 In Democracy Marches, Julian made the case that Britain’s mobilization against the Nazis was making the United Kingdom a far more democratic society and was solidifying many of the social reforms that he and his colleagues in Political and Economic Planning had worked to effect since the early days of the Depression. Although he was over fifty years of age when Britain went to war against Germany in 1939, Julian Huxley was eager to serve the war effort in any way he could. In her autobiography, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, Juliette Huxley describes her deep apprehension in the fall of 1941 when Julian volunteered to serve the Ministry of Information by crossing the Atlantic to promote the British war effort directly to the American public: “He was catching a transport leaving from a northern port in the deep secrecy which now shrouded every sailing as the German submarines were swarming the seas like hungry sharks.”22 When Julian arrived in New York, just days before Pearl Harbor, he was asked by an American reporter at the gangplanks if he wanted the United States to enter the war. According to his memoirs, he gave a qualified response: “Yes, but only under certain circumstances.” This was simplified in the press as “He Wants War,” and Julian received a torrent of hate mail, including a specimen of human excrement. Days later, after Pearl Harbor, the hate mail stopped, and Julian recalled, “I was welcome everywhere I went.”23 After this trip to the United States, he was not welcome back at the London Zoological Society, however. Many Fellows in the Zoological Society of London had nurtured a dislike for Julian Huxley’s personality and his management style and had regarded his attempts to popular-

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ize the life sciences by showing films at the zoo as a cheapening of the institution. When he traveled to America in 1941, he inadvertently gave his detractors in the Zoological Society of London a strategic opportunity to move against him. Even though his trip was sponsored by the Ministry of Information for the express purpose of promoting the British cause to a still skeptical and isolationist American public, and involved a somewhat risky transatlantic crossing during a period of intensified submarine warfare, his critics in the Zoological Society of London refused to see either patriotism or valor in his expedition.24 On the contrary, Julian faced a chorus of criticism for neglecting his duties as director of the zoo, and drew the pointed accusation that he had turned the post into little more than a “sinecure.”25 Julian and his allies in the council fought back, and he received public letters of support from such notables as Kenneth Clark and H. G. Wells, but by the end of 1940 his opponents at the Zoological Society of London had driven him out.26 Julian Huxley had initiated a number of significant reforms while managing the affairs of the zoo from 1935 to 1942. He gave the zoo at Regent’s Park an expanded mission of public education regarding science, evolution, and conservation, and created a new publication, ZOO Magazine, to serve this purpose. He helped to launch the Whipsnade Animal Park, a place where animals could roam in open fields rather than live in pens and cages. As noted by historian Peder Anker, Huxley hired a number of Bauhaus architects who had recently fled the Continent to design zoo facilities, such as the helicoidal penguin ramp designed by Berthold Lubetkin and his company, Tecton.27 In a film about the new Bauhaus look at the London Zoo under Julian Huxley’s management, Moholy Nagy declared that for the first time, animal habitats were no longer being designed to imitate their natural habitats, but rather to be simple and hygienic environments that would showcase their natural qualities.28 In addition to finding work for Bauhaus luminaries, Julian also used his position at the London Zoo to help other European intellectuals who came to England to flee the Third Reich. The animal dwellings built under Julian Huxley’s tenure stressed simplicity, mathematical elegance, and hygiene.29 In this controlled setting, Julian’s passions for rational planning, education, and ecology at once combined and reinforced one another. In large part because of the stunning advances in applied science and technology that it had helped to accelerate, the conclusion of the Second World War witnessed more than the ascendancy of the United States to

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the position of global dominance once held by Great Britain. It also witnessed the ascendancy of Homo sapiens as the decisive power in determining the future direction of life on earth. In his environmental history of the twentieth century, J. R. McNeill cited 1945 as the year when the global economy, with its attendant consumption of resources and proliferation of pollution, began a long and completely unprecedented acceleration in growth after the prolonged slump of the thirties.30 For most observers, though, the advent of the “atomic age” was a more dramatic indication than any economic statistic of the human race’s new Promethean power over the rest of life on earth. In Francis Bacon’s fable of technocracy, The New Atlantis, the expansion of scientific knowledge does not impinge upon the authority of religious scripture, as knowledge of nature reveals only the power of God, while the study of scripture is the key to understanding God’s will. The Baconian practice of maintaining a divided but parallel sovereignty for science and religion anticipates a polity much like the United States in the mid-twentieth century, a society that could be technically advanced enough to produce the atomic bomb, but religiously conservative enough regard its creation, as President Truman did in his announcement of the Nagasaki bombing, as evidence of God’s divine Providence.31 It’s not surprising that when intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleague Max Horkheimer reacted in horror to the course that Western civilization had taken during the Second World War, they directed so much of their contemporary critique at the United States, and so much of their historical critique squarely at Francis Bacon and his systematic division of intellect and affect.32 The Manhattan Project, with its pervasive stress on compartmentalization necessitated both by its complexity and its secrecy, embodied Bacon’s methods and confirmed for all, with terrifying force, his fundamental dictum that “knowledge is power.” Just a few months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Julian Huxley gave an address at Madison Square Garden in New York in which he outlined the possibilities for civilian applications of the new type of power that had been harnessed by the Manhattan Project. Keeping his discussion of its military applications brief, Julian suggested, as many politicians such as Bernard Baruch would soon recommend, that somehow atomic weapons should be placed under the control of the newly founded United Nations. Inspired by recent conversations with J. D. Bernal, Julian’s real area of interest was in how these superexplosives might be used in new civil engineering projects that would dwarf the achievements of the Tennessee Valley Authority and literally trans-

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form the surface of the earth.33 After proposing the use of “atomic dynamite” to build new dams and replace the Panama Canal with a new waterway by obliterating a section of Central America, he moved on to even more remarkable adventures in planning: Those are easy projects. But there are other more spectacular possibilities. How many people realize that we could alter the entire climate of the North Temperate Zones by exploding a few dozen or at most a few hundred atomic bombs at an appropriate height above the polar regions? As a result of the immense heat produced, the floating polar ice sheet would be melted: and it would not be reformed. It is a relic from the last Ice Age, and survives today because most of the heat from the sun is reflected from its surface. If it were melted, most of the sun’s heat during the polar summer would be absorbed by the water and raise the temperature of the Arctic Ocean. Ice would form again each winter: but it would not cover nearly so large an extent as now, and would be thin enough to be melted in the succeeding summer.34

In some respects, Julian’s desire to connect the new technology of the atomic bomb to the optimist technocratic culture of the TVA reflected the facts on the ground. Although the TVA had begun operation years before the Manhattan Project was even conceived, the TVA facility of Oak Ridge had become essential to the Manhattan Project during World War II. Strengthening this connection, the longtime head of the TVA , David Lilienthal, would take command of the newly created Atomic Energy Commission in the autumn of 1946. Like many at the time, Julian hoped that discovering civilian uses for nuclear explosives might help to shift their administration from military to civilian control. The New York Times reported Julian’s optimistic talk on atomic energy and related it to his tireless campaign for the scientific planning of societies and economies and for the ultimate goal of global government: Atomic power could make an old dream come true. Over and over again it has been asserted that if science and technology were rationally utilized, there would be a reasonable standard of life for every human being on earth. Huxley admitted the difficulty of realizing the economic millennium, but held that at least technical problems are now much easier to solve than ever before. “The proviso is that we set about the job with the right aim in view and by the right methods.” And what is the right aim and what are the right methods? To Dr. Huxley both are wrapped up in international control of atomic energy and hence in social planning on a world-wide scale.35

Of course, “atomic dynamite” would prove not only much more poisonous than Julian Huxley seemed to realize in December of 1945, but also much less amenable to either civilian or international control.

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As the half century following Hiroshima and Nagasaki would reveal, neither the governments of the Western or the Eastern blocs were particularly responsible in their production and testing of these weapons. Reviewing the record in the United States alone, the historian J. R. McNeill observed: “No component of military-industrial complexes enjoyed greater subsidy, protection from public scrutiny, and latitude in its environmental impact than the nuclear weapons business.” Because of this lax scrutiny and lack of accountability to democratic institutions, “a half-century of weapons production around the United States left a big mess, including tens of millions of cubic meters of long-lived nuclear waste.” Although the weapons were mercifully never used during the Cold War, they still inflicted significant damage on the country that produced them. By the end of the twentieth century it was estimated that even a partial cleanup from their production would “take 75 years at a cost of $100 billion to $1 trillion, the largest environmental remediation project in history. Full clean up is impossible. More than half a ton of plutonium is buried around Hanford alone.”36 Thus Julian Huxley’s lecture on “atomic dynamite,” like other artifacts of the period immediately following the advent of the bomb, appears naïve not only for its low estimation of the danger of these weapons but also for its high estimation of the level of responsibility that governments would show in handling this new power. As when he had warned against a facile belief in “inevitable progress” during the 1920s, Julian Huxley did attempt to qualify his optimism about the boundless possibilities of the postwar world, with a warning about the inherent moral hazards of the human condition. The atrocities that came to public attention toward the end of the Second World War, and especially the discovery of Nazi death camps by Allied forces in the closing months of the European war, led both brothers to lament that human nature was not as amenable to progress as many had supposed at the outset of the twentieth century. In his introduction to Evolution and Ethics, 1893– 1943, Julian Huxley observed: The behavior of our enemies, with the Japanese atrocities and the final horror of the Nazi camps, have revealed that what we have regarded as selfevident principles of morality have not been in the least self-evident to large sections of the human species. Evidently, men and women can be conditioned, trained, and selected until they become not merely capable of sporadic acts but systematic policies which fill us with horror. But they are men and women, not creatures of another and inherently different race or species from ourselves; and we do well to remember that there, but for the grace of God, go we.37

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Julian Huxley’s closing caveat that the capacity for socialized madness and cruelty is common to all humanity distinguishes his remarks here from some of the more facile and Manichean rhetoric typical of wartime, but it still leaves a great deal unsaid about the moral hazards of total war. One need not be a relativist or advocate of moral equivalency to observe that the air war conducted by the Allies in places like Dresden and Tokyo involved the routinization of methods of warfare that had been considered by Americans and Britons to be beyond the pale of civilization when employed by Germany and Japan in the 1930s, or to be deeply troubled, as both Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard were in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the implications of “the Bomb” for the moral standing of scientists everywhere.38 The years following the Second World War were a period of frenetic activity for Julian Huxley, though they proved to be a time when his grand vision of global leadership by scientists and technical experts through the organs of UNESCO and other international organizations would run into serious opposition. Although Julian Huxley had been chosen to lead UNESCO at its inceptions, the U.S. State Department had agreed to approve his position as the first director-general only according to terms that shortened his service from the six years prescribed by the UNESCO bylaws to a mere two-year tenure.39 Furthermore, his views on biology and society had aroused the ire not only of religious conservatives in the United States but also of Lysenkoists in the Soviet Union.40 In a letter to his cousin Gervas Huxley in 1947, Aldous remarked on the seemingly insurmountable challenges posed by the UNESCO work and the strain they had placed on his brother: “We saw Julian and Juliette on their way through to Mexico. . . . [Julian] was cheerful on the surface, though basically very pessimistic, in the sense of not seeing how it was going to be possible, in the current nationalistic frames of reference, to achieve any real unity—and further being able to see how, with the Russians resisting every attempt to mitigate national sovereignty, there could be any change in the patterns which condition all our collective thinking, feeling and action.”41 While the international work that Julian Huxley did during and after the Second World War was usually exhausting and often frustrating, during the 1940s his profile and network of connections around the world grew dramatically. Although his grand ambition that UNESCO might somehow create a vanguard community of scientists and intellectuals that could help to guide and accelerate the future evolution of the human race fell mostly on deaf ears, his more pragmatic initiatives for UNESCO did bear fruit.

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A multivolume world history based on the history of science rather than religious or political history was ultimately published in the late fifties, as well as research on the Man and Biosphere program, which he helped to initiate.42 As will be discussed further in the following chapter, he also helped to found an important auxiliary to UNESCO in 1947, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “Besides being a moralist,” Aldous Huxley wrote, “the historian is one who attempts to formulate generalizations about human events. It is only by tracing the relations between acts and their consequences that such generalizations can be made.”43 Aldous Huxley’s pacifism in the face of Fascism was based, as he saw it, on his understanding of the laws of cause and effect. Opposing the Nazi military machine militarily would mean building a corresponding military machine in the Allied countries. In the long run, such a vast apparatus would, as Aldous saw it, destroy democracy from within. While the surviving correspondence between Aldous and Julian reveals no conflict over their separate paths during World War I, the writings of Julian Huxley during the early 1940s reveal a very public disapproval of his younger brother’s political and philosophical position. In fact, Julian’s critique of Aldous’s philosophy during the Second World War was part of a chorus of criticism from prominent British intellectuals such as C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and George Orwell aimed at his maintenance of a strictly pacifist position in the face of the steady advance of Fascist militarism in the late 1930s. In spite of this opposition, Aldous maintained the conviction that, as with the Thirty Years War he described in Grey Eminence, any military solution would lead only to further conflicts followed by further military solutions, ad infinitum. As he surveyed the career of Cardinal Richelieu’s mentor Father Joseph during the religious tumult and violence of the early seventeenth century, Aldous believed he could discern the seeds of Europe’s second Thirty Years War in the twentieth century. And, when he looked at the geopolitical map taking shape during World War II, he believed he could see the outlines of even more terrible conflicts in the future. Thus, by his reasoning, there was little to be won in the military defeat of Fascism that would not be thoroughly lost in due time. Given the personal investment that Huxley’s former Eton student George Orwell made in opposing Fascism in Spain during the 1930s, this dismissive treatment of the anti-Fascist cause reveals a stark contrast between the two most famous dystopian writers of the twentieth century. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia betrays his stark disillusionment

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with Marxism in general and with the Soviet Union in particular, but it also reveals his staunch commitment to fighting against totalitarianism of both the Right and the Left. The political pacifism of Aldous Huxley, which could be read to imply an ultimate moral equivalency among all of the belligerent governments in the Second World War, could not have been more alien to Orwell’s thinking. This difference becomes especially apparent in their evolving attitudes toward Mohandas K. Gandhi. Recalling her first encounter with Aldous in the early thirties, the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo reports that he had no interest whatsoever in Gandhi or his philosophy.44 Later, however, under the influence of Gerald Heard and Dick Sheppard, Aldous developed a strong affinity for Gandhi’s thought, as he understood it. In the early fifties, he even sought, with the Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal, to develop a feature film about the Indian leader.45 Orwell, who would have dismissed Gandhi from a Marxist viewpoint in the early thirties, continued in the late forties to have very strong reservations about him, this time from a liberal perspective. In his essay “Thoughts on Gandhi,” written shortly after his assassination, Orwell highlights the severe religiosity of Gandhi’s worldview and argues that Western liberals who sense an affinity between Gandhi’s philosophy and their own are engaged in a convenient and comforting self-deception.46 At roughly the same time that Orwell was declaring that satyagraha and Western liberalism were incompatible, Aldous Huxley was asserting in Science, Liberty and Peace that the process of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi had developed was the only remaining form of resistance to the modern and thoroughly armed industrial state that could be both moral and effective. Aside from the inspiration that he came to draw from Tolstoy and Gandhi, Aldous Huxley’s tendency to advocate an uncompromising vision of economic, political, and spiritual autarky was also influenced by the physical context of his life in Southern California.47 Life in and around Los Angeles enabled a number of émigré intellectuals to exist in isolation and cultivate a sense of distance from the economic, political, and cultural affairs of American society and of the world at large, while paradoxically living close to one of the most dynamic centers of American cultural and economic power.48 In After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, the character of Mr. Propter expresses many of Aldous Huxley’s ideas regarding decentralization. In a remarkable exchange between Mr. Propter (based loosely on Huxley’s friend Gerald Heard) and Jo Stoyt (based directly on newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst), Huxley lays out his argument for simple living and economic decentralization.

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In this exchange, Mr. Propter argues that the development of solar energy and other decentralized sources of energy is necessary for the salvation of Jeffersonian democracy.49 ‘What the hell has Jeffersonian democracy got to do with it?’ said Mr. Stoyt with mounting irritation. “Can’t you believe in Jefferson and have your current wired in from the city?” “That’s exactly it,” said Mr. Propter; “you almost certainly can’t.”50

Mr. Propter’s conviction that new technologies could decentralize and democratize many of the elements of an economy that had become highly centralized in the nineteenth and twentieth century reflects the thinking of many writers whom Aldous Huxley found persuasive at the time, especially the agrarian reformer Ralph Borsodi. In his 1933 book, Our Ugly Civilization, Borsodi advocated using new technologies to take production out of the factory and return it to the home and country.51 Even before Aldous left London for Los Angeles in 1937, his attraction to pacifism, vegetarianism, and Eastern philosophy was interpreted by many of his contemporaries in Britain as evidence that the brilliant satirical novelist who had savaged Bloomsbury as effectively as Fleet Street in the 1920s had now somehow gone soft in the head. Many blamed the fast friendship between Aldous and Gerald Heard, a man whose ideas about religion and science Julian openly regarded as ridiculous.52 Some critics even saw in the Heard-Huxley partnership compelling evidence that Aldous, for all his brilliance, was too willing to surrender his critical faculties to the force of commanding personalities and miraculously reductive systems of thought.53 This pattern was evident to his critics not only in his friendships with men like D. H. Lawrence and Gerald Heard but also in his promiscuous flirtation with fringe cures and causes, such as the Bates Method for restoring sight without glasses, parapsychology, the theories of William H. Sheldon regarding body type and personality, and, ultimately, psychedelic drugs.54 In retrospect, there seems a grain of truth and a bushel of exaggeration in this critique. The point that Aldous Huxley’s pacifism could at times be profoundly unrealistic is readily verified by some of the proposals that he and Heard published just before the advent of the war, such as the idea of holding an international conference in which the “have not” imperial powers, such as Germany and Italy, might negotiate the acquisition of some overseas colonies currently held by the “have” imperial powers such as Britain and France. If realpolitik is often criticized for its cynicism while pacifism is dismissed as hopelessly naïve,

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this proposal is in a category of its own for being breathtakingly cynical and astonishingly naïve all at once. Likewise Huxley’s stand-in character of Mr. Propter is monotonous and vaguely contemptible as he describes the fall of Barcelona with a Brahminical detachment in the pages of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.55 Few would dispute that Aldous’s pacifist position during the Second World War would have resulted in the triumph of Fascism if it had been widely adopted in Britain and the United States—the countries where he was actively promoting the idea. And the spiritual hauteur with which he promoted his ideas still possesses the power to irritate an otherwise sympathetic reader, even across the gulf of decades. On the other hand, the accusation that Aldous’s pacifism indicated a slackening of his intelligence or critical sense is hard to maintain if one considers his more carefully constructed analyses. While the pamphlets that Aldous wrote for the Peace Pledge Union betray the weaknesses shared by many works written as part of an impassioned and evolving political debate, the more considered arguments that he wrote on the eve of and toward the conclusion of the Second World War are the work of an insightful thinker in full command of his powers of reason, argument, and moral imagination. Ends and Means, which Aldous published in 1936, is not only a serious consideration of matters of war and peace, but also a probing investigation of what exactly constitutes progress in the life of a polity and the individuals whom it comprises. Far from rejecting the idea of progress for a vaguely Orientalist regimen of spiritual cultivation, as so many of his critics had charged, Aldous here sought to free the idea of progress from abstraction and identify a real index by which social and political progress could be measured. That criterion was compassion for others, or the value that had long been denoted in Christian terminology as charity. If progress is to be assessed according to the criterion of charity, the preparation for war, however much justified by the danger and moral repugnance of Fascism, would still represent a backward step in the evolution of Britain and the United States. The noble end of defeating Fascism would ultimately be corrupted by the brutal means of militarizing the societies and economies of Britain and the United States. The ploughshares of civilian industry would be hammered into four-engine bombers, and the tactics of civilian bombardment that the Nazis had pioneered in Spain in the 1930s would be embraced and improved upon by the very Western nations that had reacted with horror to the news of Guernica. Furthermore, Aldous predicted, the economies of whichever nations won the war

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would be so distorted by the militarization they had undergone during the war years that they would come to rely on the continued production of armaments and the development of new weapons systems for their very stability. Looking back at the use of aerial bombardment during the Second World War by the United States especially, and on the role that the production of sophisticated weaponry came to play in the U.S. economy throughout the Cold War era and beyond, it seems that the broad prognostications that Aldous presented in Ends and Means about the power of war to transform cultural and political values were very perceptive, even if Huxley’s more specific predictions about the rise of dictatorships in the Allied democracies were much less so. Although Aldous Huxley’s pacifism was thoroughly savaged by C. Day Lewis in Britain, Jacob Zeitlin articulated a more perceptive critique of his position. An antiquarian book dealer, salon keeper, and impresario of literary talent, Zeitlin is an important figure in the history of literary Los Angeles and a pivotal figure in the career of Aldous Huxley. When Aldous was new to L.A., it was Zeitlin who suggested that he write for the studios. As a well-known bookseller and literary impresario, Zeitlin helped Aldous to distribute his first treatment for a possible film project (an abortive satire entitled “Success”), and also put him in touch with the producers who hired him to develop such films as Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. As a satirist, Aldous soon rankled some prominent Angelinos with his depictions of the city in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and it was not long before he received some pointed criticism in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. When a Times columnist accused Aldous of snobbery in his attitude toward Los Angeles, Zeitlin quickly drafted a note to defend his friend. Although the note remained unpublished, it tells us something about their friendship and Aldous Huxley’s view of Los Angeles in 1939: Yesterday I read a note in your column in the TIMES with reference to Aldous Huxley. Not only were the statements made there untrue but they also indicate a prejudice on your part unbecoming of a person in your position. I happen to have spent a great deal of time with Mr. Huxley. . . . Rather than looking down his nose at Southern California and Hollywood, he was quite definitely impressed and most enthusiastic about what was taking place and its possibilities. He expressed himself as believing that Los Angeles had the possibility of becoming one of the greatest cities in the world and his reaction to a great many of the small every-day facts of our life here was kindly and enthusiastic.56

Clearly, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan had ruffled many feathers among the prominent citizens of Los Angeles. Jacob Zeitlin’s papers

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contain a letter from the president of Occidental College, who took Aldous’s depiction of the president of “Tarzana College” in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan to be a caricature of himself, and bewailed the presence in the City of Angels “of these English writers who come to America, who never really know us, who are inevitably outsiders and who write as Dickens and Huxley, who jeer as the Hollywood English actors jeer!”57 Perhaps because of his strong and abiding admiration for Aldous, however, Jake Zeitlin would not remain silent when he felt that his friend’s views were seriously misguided. In November 1938, a number of authors issued statements against the increasingly virulent and deadly wave of anti-Semitism that was being fomented by the German government and that had recently culminated in Kristallnacht. Aldous had refused Zeitlin’s personal request that he participate in this protest. Alluding to the root causes of such horrors, he had compared the mere expression of opinions against them to the sort of misguided medicine that would treat only the pustules of smallpox without getting at the disease itself. Zeitlin answered this reasoning with a letter that combined his characteristic humility with his formidable directness: While I am in sympathy with your broader and more objective attitude toward oppression, . . . I cannot keep from expressing my own less general and of course more subjective feelings. The corpus humani is badly diseased. . . . In the realm of healing sick civilizations little is known. Even in human medicine physicians know very little but they do not cease from trying. When death is a certainty they do not give up nor neglect the most remotely possible measures. . . . Forgive me for my impulsiveness and presumption. You are much more wise than I, you are much more learned in the history and ways of this world-sickness. But I cannot be philosophic nor quiet and cannot let pass even the slimmest possible means of helping.58

Given Aldous Huxley’s enormous fame and the heavy patina of Anglophilia in Hollywood culture during this period, many Angelinos admired Huxley not because they had read or understood his novels but merely because they thought they should. Others dismissed him as a highbrow snob on a similarly slim amount of evidence. While Zeitlin always had enormous respect for Aldous, his erudition, and his artistry, he also addressed him on an equal basis as friend, business associate, and intellectual sparring partner. In the coming decades Zeitlin and Aldous Huxley would remain close friends, and Zeitlin would continue to express his vociferous disagreement with Aldous whenever he felt compelled to

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do so, as he did, for example, when Aldous’s fascination with mysticism led him to embrace and advocate the use of hallucinogenic drugs.59 At the small house in the Mojave Desert where he and Maria spent most of the war years, Aldous would expand on his vision of spiritual self-cultivation and the promotion of peace in his next serious work of nonfiction, The Perennial Philosophy. The term “perennial philosophy” had been coined by Gottfried Leibniz to suggest a universal philosophy behind the diverse religious traditions of the world. In the twentieth century, a group of philosophers including René Guenon and A. K. Coomaraswamy further developed this idea, which, paradoxically, is antimodern in its affirmation of tradition, and yet strikingly modern in its universalism.60 Although Aldous quotes Coomaraswamy in The Perennial Philosophy on the subject of Indian art, he does not appear to be adhering to the precepts of the twentieth-century school of religious thought known alternately as Perennialism or Traditionalism. Rather, he is looking for the common denominator of ethical teaching and selfcultivation in various religious traditions, and trying to distill, in a manner comparable to Jefferson’s treatment of the Gospels, the philosophical component of each religion from its inherited accoutrements of myth and dogma. This project was primarily philosophical, as reflected in its title, but it did have a religious dimension. Although he did not subscribe to any particular religious dogma, Aldous did share the conviction of many mystics that the disciplined cultivation of mind and body could give an individual a glimpse, or perhaps more than a glimpse, into the fundamental and eternal nature of the universe. Thus, while Julian’s view of progress gave him an intensely historical orientation, the belief that a mystical apprehension of ultimate truth was attainable through the proper cultivation of the nervous system led Aldous to embrace a set of values that were essentially ahistorical, and gave primacy to the cultivation of the self over the improvement of society. Nonetheless, Aldous did not abandon his engagement with society. Aside from embracing an ascetic way of life at Llano during the war, he also collaborated with his friend Gerald Heard on the promotion of a school for religious education in what was at that time the sparsely populated landscape of Orange County. The mission statement of Trabuco College was a result of their collaboration, and a telling expression of their response to the war: Humanity is failing. We are starving—many of us physically, all of us spiritually—in the midst of plenty. Our shame and our failure are being blatantly advertised, every minute of every day, by the crash of explosives and the flare

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of burning towns. . . . We have to educate ourselves to discard our old values, for they were false. We have to learn that God is the only Reality, and that the whole visible world is real only in so far as He constantly sustains it. Behind these words is more than “just another formula.” Behind them lies the live, intense, unutterably vivid Truth—a truth which can only be apprehended through a slow hard lifetime of study, prayer and disciplined, ascetic living.61

Like many schemes to reform society by founding a new school or utopian community, Trabuco College was a short-lived project. The school closed in 1947, owing not only to a dwindling level of public interest but also to a lack of focus in the goals and methods that had been elaborated primarily by Gerald Heard.62 During its brief heyday, however, the college served as an important crossroads, drawing the interest of the seminal religious scholar Huston Smith to the eclectic spiritualism of Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley and serving as a loose model for the Esalen Institute, which would emerge at Big Sur less than two decades later.63 Aldous Huxley’s view of social and political issues would also find expression in his first nonfiction book after the end of World War II, Science, Liberty and Peace.64 In the context of Aldous Huxley’s evolving political thought, perhaps the most compelling arguments in Science, Liberty and Peace concern pacifism and the development of nonviolent methods for effecting political change. As noted earlier, many of the pacifist schemes that Aldous had advanced in the thirties appeared hopelessly unrealistic in the face of the militaristic expansionism of Germany and the other Axis powers. One of the arguments that he had advanced against collective security—namely, that when democratic societies prepare for and engage in modern warfare, they sacrifice many of the key elements of democracy such as openness and public accountability—had at least been partially borne out by the increased centralization and secrecy of government projects during the war. While one could make the case that the TVA had strengthened democracy in the United States, it was hard to find the same sort of virtues in such sprawling and entirely secretive initiatives as the Manhattan Project and its successors. As Robert Oppenheimer observed in 1945, the multiple cloaks of secrecy involved in the Manhattan Project marked a departure from the open exchange of ideas and information that had been a longstanding principle not only of democracy but also of science itself.65 And if Aldous had been at least partially right about the dangers posed by exigencies of war to the values of democracy in Britain and the

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United States during World War II, he was on even firmer ground when he used the most practical reasoning possible to defend nonviolent resistance as a method of effecting political change in the aftermath of the war. In the simplest terms, Aldous argued that, thanks to advances in technology, it was now impossible for armed resistance to be effective against a modern state. Comparing the world of the late 1940s to the age of European political upheavals in 1848, he observed: In 1848 the sporting gun was a match for the muskets of the soldiery, and a barricade made of overturned carts, sandbags and paving stones was a sufficient protection against cavalry and muzzle loading cannon. After a century of scientific and technological progress no weapons available to the masses of people can compete with those in the arsenals controlled by the ruling minority. Consequently, if any resistance is to be offered by the many to the few, it must be offered in a field in which technological superiority does not count.66

Among all of the observations and conjectures in Science, Liberty and Peace, this is perhaps the most prophetic, as, in less than a decade, the civil rights movement would begin to transform the American political landscape and change the laws and social policies of the most powerful government on earth using the very methods that Aldous described. In light of his already stated views on the direction that scientific research and development had taken in an age of total war, it would surprise no one that Aldous’s specific response to the advent of the bomb itself was a good deal less sanguine than Julian’s speculations on the geo-engineering potential of “atomic dynamite.” The most vivid and imaginative manifestation of Aldous Huxley’s response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was Ape and Essence, a grotesque parable of a postapocalyptic Los Angeles. This new vision of where our species might be headed sold briskly in the early years of the Cold War era, even as Brave New World maintained steady sales.67 During the economic and demographic boom of the fifties and sixties, Brave New World and its younger cousin, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, became widely assigned texts in high schools across America. As thousands of baby boomers filed into newly constructed schools built in an anonymous knock-off of the Bauhaus style, practiced “duck and cover” drills as preparation for a nuclear strike, and enjoyed the fruits of a popular culture that was at once more sexualized and more standardized than anything that had come before it, the visions of both Aldous Huxley and his one-time Eton student George Orwell were naturally compared, not as works of literature, but as prophetic descriptions of a future that seemed to be arriving with alarming speed.

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One aspect of Western postwar popular culture that drew Aldous Huxley’s sustained attention was the seismic shift just beginning in sexual mores. In light of his own sexual experiences, it seems that Aldous might have welcomed this change as liberating, but he did not. In fact, his correspondence and publications during the late 1940s reflect his growing view that the more sexualized tone of popular culture in the United States and other Western nations was indicative not of greater freedom, but of an emerging culture of control. Aldous cited the political significance of the Marquis de Sade in his introduction to the 1946 edition of Brave New World. He made the provocative claim that, compared to de Sade’s vision, the political and economic aspirations of other revolutionaries were far less significant: Robespierre had achieved the most superficial kind of revolution, the political. Going a little deeper, Babeuf had attempted the economic revolution. Sade regarded himself as the apostle of the truly revolutionary revolution, beyond mere politics and economics—the revolution in individual men, women and children—whose bodies were henceforward to become the common sexual property of all and whose minds were to be purged of all the natural sexual decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilization. . . . Sade was a lunatic and the more or less conscious goal of his revolution was universal chaos and destruction. The people who govern the Brave New World may not be sane (in what may be called the absolute sense of the word); but they are not madmen, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution.68

Two years later, in a letter to George Orwell concerning the recent publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous would reiterate his conviction that “the first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution—the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at the total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology—are to be found in the writings of the Marquis de Sade.”69 Although Aldous Huxley claimed in the thirties that he had written Brave New World almost as prank, he came to take its claim to prophecy quite seriously in the postwar era, expressing to Orwell his contention that his own vision of the future was more likely to be realized than the one described in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In his book Brave New World Revisited, Aldous even claimed that his prophecy showed every indication, in America’s Augustan age of tailfins and tranquilizers, of arriving many centuries sooner than expected. In other words, the “bad utopia” had evolved from an arch jab at H. G. Wells into a serious vision of the future, and then into a prophecy whose proof lay in the present.

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Certainly Aldous had no difficulty finding evidence all around him to nurture this enhanced status for Brave New World, but the direction that his career as a writer had taken might also help to explain the growing importance he was willing to invest in his futuristic satire of 1932. When the novel first went to press, he had been enjoying great fame as the author of such satires of contemporary English life as Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point. His sketch of the future, in relation to the contemporary novels that preceded and followed it, stood out as a detour, a slumming expedition into the cartoonish genre of science fiction, whose readers, as evidenced by the letters that Gernsback published, sensed his antagonism to their airbrushed fantasies of a technocratic future for the human race. In fact, Wells himself had struck back at Aldous, employing him as the model for a Luddite sculptor named Theotocopoulos (the given name of El Greco, an artist whose “intestinal” religious imagery Aldous had admired and written about extensively) in his 1935 novel The Shape of Things to Come. In the 1936 Alexander Korda film, for which Wells wrote the screenplay, Cedric Hardwick plays this parody of Aldous Huxley with a vengeance, as he leads a failed rebellion to stop the technocrats’ latest and most ambitious project, an expedition to the moon. Turning from his artwork, he declares that, “man must have a rest” from the ceaseless march of progress, so as to focus on the eternal truths. Wells vented his full anger at Brave New World when he penned the fate of Theotocopoulos and his followers: as they rush to the launch pad to stop the moon-shot, they are incinerated by the fire of progress—in this case the blast of a rocket engine—as the mission to the moon proceeds right on schedule.70 Because Aldous relied on magazine work for a good portion of his income, he had to write for the American market and cater to its expectations, if not in the conclusions that he drew, at least in the subject matter that he addressed. If the bulk of the American reading public associated the name Aldous Huxley with the futuristic vision of Brave New World rather than the smart-set satire of Point Counter Point, then he was happy to write essays about the future for the Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, Esquire, or Playboy. But while Huxley catered to his readers’ appetite for visions of the future, he was not inclined to trade in the visions of gee-whiz optimism popular in the early Cold War era. In Science, Liberty and Peace he argued that scientific research and technological innovation, as long as they were funded by the drive of governments and industries for enhanced power and profit, would lead only to the more efficient exploitation of nature and the more effective enslavement of the human race.

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This theme of the corruption of science by militarism was central to Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence. Using the screenplay as a narrative device, Aldous presents a stark allegory of the new role of science in the age of total war: The scene darkens: there is a noise of gunfire. When the lights come up again, there squats Dr. Albert Einstein, on a leash, behind a group of baboons in uniform. The Camera moves across a narrow no-man’s land of rubble, broken trees and corpses, and comes to rest on a second group of animals, wearing different decorations and under another flag, but with the same Dr. Albert Einstein, on exactly the same string, squatting at the heels of their jackboots. Under the tousled aureole of hair, the good, innocent face wears an expression of pain and bewilderment. The Camera travels back and forth from Einstein to Einstein. . . . “Is that you, Albert?” One of the Einsteins hesitantly inquires. The other slowly nods his head. “Albert, I’m afraid it is.”71

Aldous Huxley’s correspondence from two years later indicates that his imagery hit home, perhaps more than he had hoped. In a letter to his friend the Bengali scholar and poet Amiya Chakravarty, Aldous wrote: “What you say about Einstein having been offended by my use of his name in Ape and Essence distresses me very much. I thought that I had made it perfectly clear that I was using him—just as I had used Faraday and Pasteur—as an embodiment of science . . . to show—what is, alas, sufficiently obvious—that the labours of disinterested truth-seekers are constantly used to serve the purposes of the lower human passions.”72 Aldous saw the various religious and cultural traditions of the human race as vulnerable to a similar kind of degradation. In the closing pages of Ape and Essence, Aldous Huxley suggests that, in the age of globalization, the world was hastening toward its destruction because Eastern and Western societies had borrowed the worst traits from each other. It was as if the Prince of Darkness himself had “persuaded each side to take only the worst the other had to offer. So the East takes Western nationalism, Western armaments, Western movies and Western Marxism; the West takes Eastern despotism, Eastern superstitions and Eastern indifference to individual life.” This satanic bargain had made it inevitable that “mankind should make the worst of both worlds.” The satanic priests who run the Los Angeles of the future then pause to imagine in horror what might have happened if “East and West” had somehow managed to borrow only the best from the other: “Eastern mysticism making sure that Western science should be properly used;

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the Eastern art of living refining Western energy; Western individualism tempering Eastern totalitarianism. . . . Why it would have been a kingdom of heaven.”73 Here in the closing pages of Ape and Essence, Aldous Huxley’s vision of Pala, the utopian community that he would portray in his last novel, was born. In Island, Aldous depicted a pacifist state that would ultimately be powerless to repel the annexation by the neighboring state of RendangLobo, ruled by the dictator Colonel Dipa. Huxley’s depiction of the fall of Pala to Colonel Dipa in some ways recalls his description of the fall of Barcelona to Generalissimo Franco in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. In both cases, Aldous attempts to counterbalance the historical tragedy in the foreground with meditations on the consolations of eternity and the “divine ground of being.” In a passage cut from the published version of Island, however, the teachings of the Old Raja, who founded the island utopia, indicate a more critical view of the absolute pacifism than Aldous had advocated during World War II: “A good king, say the Buddhist scriptures, is one who rules adandena asatthena, without punishment and without sword. Basing themselves on the injunction, ‘Resist not evil,’ Tolstoyan Christians say the same thing. But history makes it clear that once evil has become rampant, non-resistance to evil is very difficult and may lead to consequences no less disastrous than violent resistance.”74 Although this passage does not elaborate on how a Tolstoyan nonresistance to evil could be disastrous, the plot of Island at least furnishes an example of how one society’s commitment to pacifism would leave it completely vulnerable to a malevolent invader. According to the internal logic of Huxley’s novel, the culture of Pala was doomed either way: If it embraces military preparedness, it would corrupt its culture from the inside out with the seeds of militarism. If it eschews military preparedness, as its leaders chose to do, it is doomed to conquest as soon as the outside world sniffs the temptation of its oil reserves. At the dawn of the decade that turned jet travel and satellite communication into mundane realities, what was called the “forbidden island” of Pala could no longer remain forbidden, and thus it could not avoid the influences, beginning with the seductions of consumerism and culminating in the madness of militarism and ecological devastation, that characterize the outside world. Seen in this light, Island can plausibly be read as Aldous Huxley’s third global dystopia and possibly his grimmest. The first, set many centuries in the future, at least offered the escape of exile to one of the various islands untouched by the World State. Huxley’s

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second dystopia was set just over a century hence, and as horrific as it was, the novel’s protagonist and his lover could still flee the hellscape of Los Angeles and try to start a new life in the uncharted territory of the northern lands. Island, on the other hand, offered its characters no lasting option for escape. Written from the perspective of Will Farnaby, a tabloid journalist seeking out new oil-drilling opportunities for the industrialist who owns his paper, Huxley’s last novel cast the postwar culture of economic globalization from a distinctly dystopian light, illustrating how ruthless and effective postwar consumerism could be at locating, conquering, and despoiling every possible refuge from itself. In this sense, Aldous Huxley’s last novel reaffirms the mordant pessimism about human progress that had characterized so much of his fiction since the 1920s. Will Farnaby’s attempt at self-redemption in the last chapter of Island, however, still affirms the author’s durable conviction that an individual could transform his or her own consciousness and, in the process, bring a modicum of light into the generally dark landscape of human affairs. In fact, the concept of self-transformation became an increasingly prominent and influential element in the thinking of both Julian and Aldous Huxley in the 1950s and 1960s. One reason for this trend may have been that the idea of completely transforming society, though it had enjoyed a vogue during the economic crisis of the thirties, had, because of its association with totalitarianism, come to be viewed with acute suspicion during the Cold War era. Julian had experienced this personally when his book UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy had created a firestorm of reaction, especially in the United States. Aldous, whose work since the mid-1930s had called with increasing urgency for a revolution in individual consciousness, found a growing audience for his ideas in the 1950s, and not merely because of the sensation caused by The Doors of Perception. Aldous refined his ideas on self-transformation in his essays and lectures on “human potentialities” during the last decade of his life, while for Julian the desire to expand human consciousness and capabilities was expressed in a new term that he would coin in the 1950s: Transhumanism.

chapter 5

We Are Amphibians Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible. —Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643)

In November 1870, T. H. Huxley gave perhaps his most memorable lecture to the Metaphysical Society in London, entitled “Has a Frog a Soul, and What is the Nature of that Soul, Supposing it to Exist?” He opened the lecture by observing, “If the leg of a living frog be cut off, the skin of the foot may be pinched, cut, or touched with red-hot wire, or with a strong acid, and it will remain motionless.” He then added that if the same actions are performed on “the other leg, which remains in connection with the body . . . it will be instantly retracted as far as possible from the irritating agent, while the animal will show signs of pain, and attempt to get away.”1 The remainder of his lecture described, with the same level of explicit detail, other experiments conducted upon the body and nervous system of a living frog, all with the stated objective of determining whether such animal responses could be classed as purely mechanistic, as René Descartes had asserted, or constituted evidence of an autonomous vital spirit, or “soul,” within all living fauna, as the eighteenth-century vitalist Robert Whytt had believed. The lecture was disturbing and its conclusions were left deliberately ambiguous. Nearly twenty years later, one attendee, the Unitarian minister Richard H. Hutton, would recall: The Metaphysical Society can hardly be said to have a mind of its own on the question of whether a frog has a soul or not. And I do not suppose that Prof. Huxley himself had any distinct opinion on it. . . . But the real object of Huxley’s paper was to bewilder; and, with a great part of the Metaphysical 136

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Society he certainly succeeded—all the more perhaps, that he himself was very uncertain what the legitimate inference as to the consciousness of the frog ought to be.2

Apart from the sense of nausea that we might expect the precise description of a vivisection to elicit, the lecture derives its power to disturb from its implicit premise: the frog is us. When Descartes reasoned that animals had no souls and that all of their reactions to pain or stimulation were purely mechanical, he still presumed that man was a special creation, categorically different from all animal life in his possession of a rational mind and immortal soul. In the eighteenth century, materialists such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie ventured to apply the mechanistic model to human beings as well, but such views remained on the margins of philosophical discourse. With the publication of The Origin of Species, all of this began to change. If human beings were not made in the image of the Deity, there remained no theological firebreak between the human race and the flora and fauna with which we share this planet. If a frog possessed nothing that remotely resembled a soul, as Professor Huxley’s vivisection implicitly suggested, then why on earth would we? He made this point explicit four years later when he wrote: “It is quite true that, to the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally true to men; and, therefore, all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes in the brain-substance.”3 Although he would not exempt it from the laws of physiology and chemistry, T. H. Huxley still regarded the phenomenon of consciousness, both animal and human, as a profound mystery that the life sciences had scarcely begun to understand. From his first major work, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, to his final treatise, Evolution and Ethics, T. H. Huxley was wrestling with a wide range of scientific questions, but there were two that commanded his sustained attention as both a biologist and an ethical thinker. These were, in the simplest terms, who are we? and what is our place among the other living things on earth? T. H. Huxley’s answers to these questions found their most complete expression in Evolution and Ethics: We are uniquely moral beings, and the origin of our moral sense remains a profound mystery since it stands in opposition to the forces of nature both within and without. Whatever the source of our moral nature, it is our duty to protect it by defending—and expanding whenever possible—the walled garden of civilization in which a moral life is possible. Julian Huxley’s answer to these

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same questions sought to transcend his grandfather’s Victorian dualism by identifying human progress with the cosmic process of evolution. Julian declared that we are the self-aware product of billions of years of evolution. Now that the very process of evolution had, in the human race, become aware of itself it was our job to manage life on earth and continue the process of evolution, into what Julian called its “psychosocial phase.” Whereas T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics harkened back to the stern morality of the stoics, Julian’s optimistic vision of evolution anticipated the speculative theology of Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideas Julian would promote and defend in the 1950s. For Aldous Huxley, this utopian dream of a rational religion that could seamlessly integrate evolution and theology seemed less tenable. Comparing the project of a fully rational religion to the growth of hydroponic flowers, Aldous observed that most human religions would still grow from a soil rich with the dung of superstition. “Like dirtless farming, dirtless spirituality is likely to remain, for a long time, an exception.”4 In the meantime, his answer to the questions that his grandfather had struggled to answer was simple and direct: We are amphibians, and we must learn to make the best of all the worlds that we inhabit. Rather than seeking to conquer nature within and without ourselves, we must strive to understand and integrate both our biological inheritance and our latent spirituality. On a social level, this meant for Aldous revering the intricate beauty and delicate equilibrium of nature, while carefully striving to fulfill the real (as opposed to the manufactured) needs of ourselves and our community. On an individual level, this meant recognizing the fundamental wisdom of own bodies, while cultivating the sense of transcendent peace and oneness with creation that Aldous saw as the underlying goal of the world’s major religious traditions. Julian also employed the amphibian analogy in his keynote essay for The Humanist Frame in 1961. For Julian the amphibian was the perfect emblem for human evolution at this juncture in the history of life on earth. Developing an idea that he had first presented at the University of Chicago’s centennial celebration of the Origin of Species in 1959, Julian observed that our emergence from the realm of instinct into what the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin had called the noösphere was as great a transformation as the first emergence of our amphibian ancestors from the sea: Turning the eye of an evolutionary biologist on the situation, I would compare the present stage of evolving man to the geological moment, some three hundred million years ago, when our amphibian ancestors were just estab-

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lishing themselves out of the world of water. They had created a bridgehead into a wholly new environment. No longer buoyed up by water, they had to learn to support their own weight. . . . So with ourselves. We have only recently emerged from the biological to the psychosocial area of evolution, from the earthly biosphere into the freedom of the noösphere. . . . No longer supported by a framework of instincts, we try to use our conscious thoughts and purposes as organs of psychosocial locomotion and direction through the tangle of existence; but so far with only moderate success, and with the production of much evil and horror as well as some beauty and glory of achievement.5

In the amphibian that must support more of its own weight outside the water, Julian found a trope that suggested freedom not only from a life guided purely by inherited instinct but also from the guidance of dogma and tradition. As professional and intellectual specialization continued to accelerate in the postwar decades, the amphibian metaphor favored by Julian and Aldous Huxley took on a new salience. In 1959, C. P. Snow famously lamented that the sciences and humanities had bifurcated into “two cultures,” each incapable of and unwilling to understand the language of the other.6 Resisting this trend, Julian and Aldous Huxley still saw themselves as bridge builders, even as they worked above chasms of incomprehension and suspicion that seemed more formidable than ever. As early as the 1940s, Aldous had embraced the Roman term for bridge builder, pontifex, to describe the overarching goal of his work as a writer. This metaphor, rooted in history rather than biology, struck the same note. Wrestling with the subject of education across the disciplines, Aldous declared that the trend of overspecialization was a procrustean bed that had virtually maimed human consciousness in the industrial age. He reasoned that no branch of science, art, or education could afford to ignore the amphibious nature of human consciousness.7 For Aldous, the rejection of rationality ran just as counter to our amphibious nature as a rigid adherence to rationality. In a BBC interview he gave just a few years before his death, Aldous Huxley observed that D. H. Lawrence’s romantic attempt “to go back to the dark gods and the dark blood and so on” was “one of those fatal examples of trying to make everything conform to the standard of only one world. Seeing that we are amphibians—it’s no good.”8 Here was an image to which Aldous returned like a frog to pond water. As his friend and biographer Sybille Bedford recalled, “Man, as Aldous never ceased to point out, is a multiple amphibian. Concerned about his relation to the universe at one moment, with other occupations and desires the next.”9

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In the foreword to a book of essays by his friend Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1954, Aldous detailed his vision of the human condition: “Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds—the given and the homemade, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols. In our thinking we make use of a great variety of symbol-systems—linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, musical, ritualistic. Without such symbol-systems we should have no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, not so much as the rudiments of civilization: in other words, we should be animals.”10 Although such symbol systems are indispensable to human civilization, Aldous reasoned, they could also be profoundly dangerous, because of our tendency to invest a greater reality in symbols themselves than in the things that they represent. In the sciences, the careful use of symbols as contingent models to describe reality has allowed us “in some small measure to organize and control the elementary forces of nature.” But, because of our dogmatic relationship to our symbol systems, in “the domain of politics and religion, on the other hand,” we use our newfound power over nature to create “instruments of mass murder and collective suicide.”11 In the case of the sciences, “the explanatory symbols were well chosen, carefully analysed and progressively adapted to the emergent facts of physical existence.” In the case of politics and religion, on the other hand: symbols originally ill-chosen were never subjected to thoroughgoing analysis and never re-formulated so as to harmonize with the emergent facts of human existence. Worse still, these misleading symbols were everywhere treated with a wholly unwarranted respect, as though, in some mysterious way, they were more real than the realities to which they referred. In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.12

As Aldous saw it, our amphibious life in the worlds of both sensory experience and symbolic reasoning had intensified both our vices and our virtues, beyond what they would be if lived as a purely animal existence. Our penchant for creating and worshipping symbols has transformed “the animal’s intermittent greed into the grandiose imperialisms of a Rhodes or a J. P. Morgan,” and its “intermittent love of bullying into Stalinism or the Spanish Inquisition.” Most dangerously, our worship of symbols has transformed “the animal’s intermittent attachment to its territory into the calculated frenzies of nationalism.” On the other hand, the wise use of symbols “can also transform the animal’s intermittent kindliness into the lifelong charity of an Elizabeth Fry or a Vincent

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de Paul; the animal’s intermittent devotion to its mate and its young into that reasoned and persistent co-operation which, up to the present, has proved strong enough to save the world from the consequences of the other, the disastrous kind of idealism. Will it go on being able to save the world? The question cannot be answered.”13 Unfortunately, Aldous continued, the advent of nuclear weaponry and the ubiquitous persistence of nationalism meant that, for the time being at least, “the odds in favour of the idealists of co-operation and charity have sharply declined.”14 In a later essay, “The Education of an Amphibian,” Aldous expanded upon his earlier statements about our amphibious nature, arguing, “Whether we like it or not, we are amphibians, living simultaneously in the world of experience and the world of notions. . . . Our business as human beings is to make the best of both these worlds.”15 Aldous Huxley’s use of the amphibian metaphor hearkens back to the observations of Thomas Browne, a seventeenth-century theologian and pioneer of scientific observation whom Aldous had read and admired for his wide-ranging assessment of the human situation. Julian Huxley’s friend and colleague Joseph Needham was an outspoken admirer of Thomas Browne and found his amphibian metaphor especially relevant to the relationship between science and religion in the twentieth century. In the midst of the seventeenth century, Browne observed: We are onely that amphibious piece between a corporal and spiritual Essence, that middle form that links those two together, and makes good the Method of God and Nature, that jumps not from extreams, but unites the incompatible distances by some middle and participating natures. That we are the breath and similitude of God, it is indisputable, and upon record of Holy Scripture; but to call ourselves a Microcosm, or little World, I thought it only a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neer judgement and second thoughts told me there was a real truth therein. For first we are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures which onely are, and have a dull kind of being, not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of Plants, the life of Animals, the life of Men, and at last the life of Spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existences, which comprehend the creatures, not onely of the World, but of the Universe. Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.16

Browne’s declaration that “Man is that great and true Amphibium” reflected his attempt to articulate a more harmonious vision of the

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human condition in a century of bloody religious warfare following the Reformation and the broad “metaphysical shudder” engendered by the Copernican revolution.17 Transcending the stark Pauline dualism between “the spirit” and the “the flesh,” Browne points to the ontological development of each individual human being across “five kinds of existences” spanning a path of increasing consciousness and complexity from life at its most basic form as a “rude mass” to “the life of Plants, the life of Animals, the life of Men, and at last the life of Spirits.” This individual experience of evolving complexity and more refined levels of consciousness disposes us to live “in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.” In his declaration that human consciousness was inherently capable of bridging these worlds, Browne anticipated the ultimate integration of science and religion. In his book The Great Amphibium, Joseph Needham described Browne’s own life as emblematic of such integration: “While taking part in the foundation of exact biology, he remained at one and the same time a person of real piety and a literary artist of the very first class. He is therefore of particular interest to us as a perfect example of harmonious inner life.”18 In the twentieth century, torn by bloody ideological wars and shadowed by another “metaphysical shudder” in the wake of the Darwinian revolution, the amphibian trope took on a new life in the work of Julian and Aldous Huxley. Where Aldous had seen a supple metaphor to describe the ambiguity of the human condition, Julian saw the perfect emblem for our evolutionary progress as a species. During and after the Second World War, Julian Huxley saw himself as defender of the idea of progress, and formulated extended responses to the intellectual critiques of secular progressivism advanced by neo-orthodox theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and by Aldous as well. Discussing the idea of progress in his book New Bottles for New Wine, Julian noted, “Among its most recent assailants is my brother Aldous. He refers, for instance, to ‘the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress.’ ”19 In one of the texts to which Julian was alluding, Aldous had written: Between 1800 and 1900 the doctrine of Pie in the Sky gave place, in a majority of Western minds, to the doctrine of Pie on the Earth. . . . In our days, the revolutionary believers in Pie on the Earth console themselves for their miseries by thinking of the wonderful time people will be having a hundred years from now, and then go on to justify wholesale liquidations and enslavements by pointing to the nobler, humaner world which these atrocities will somehow or other call into existence.20

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Since the days of T. H. Huxley’s famous debate with Bishop Wilberforce, the Huxley name had come to connote the skeptical and progressive values of the Enlightenment. However, the divergent views of Julian and Aldous Huxley regarding progress had their roots in two very different conceptions of the term “enlightenment” itself. For Julian, the term’s most important connotation remained the intellectual and political movement that Kant had celebrated in his 1784 essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?” (“What is Enlightenment?”). For Aldous, whose work as a novelist and essayist compelled him to wrestle with human problems primarily on the level of the individual, the more important form of enlightenment was spelled with a lowercase e and possessed a quasireligious meaning. For Aldous, enlightenment demanded the attainment of a new and more profound level of consciousness as different from ordinary consciousness as the state of being awake is from being asleep. While an undergraduate at Balliol, Aldous had written to his brother about his conviction that a more profound state of consciousness, described by mystics from various traditions, was possible.21 Throughout the following half-century, he remained convinced that attainment of this transcendent consciousness, epitomized by figures as diverse as St. John of the Cross and Siddhartha Gautama, was a real possibility for himself, and he never abandoned his attempts to achieve it. In his earliest novels, Aldous Huxley’s fascination with mysticism is apparent, even if it is sometimes camouflaged as nothing more than Peacockian satire. In the 1930s, this fascination with mysticism would take center stage, and he would come to argue that the goal of any worthwhile community or society was to make the individual’s progress toward a higher level of consciousness and compassion possible. Thus, the debate between Julian and Aldous Huxley about the nature of progress began well before their public disagreements in the 1940s, and it grew from their differing conceptions of this term. For Julian, Enlightenment was a historical process predicated on the universal acceptance of science and reason. For Aldous, enlightenment was the individual achievement of a higher state of consciousness that transcended everything—including the cherished Huxleyan values of science and reason. It is instructive to compare the fortunes of these two conceptions of enlightenment after 1945. The eighteenth-century model of Enlightenment as historical progress through the universal acceptance of science and reason came under sustained attack from all sides. Stealing a page from Max Weber, Frankfurt School Marxists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that Enlightenment thought had led to

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the systematic disenchantment of the world and the conversion of virtually everything into a commodity for exchange. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, on the other hand, criticized the Enlightenment worldview for its failure to recognize the persistence of human evil, even in an age of reason. Niebuhr argued that human evil had its root in a persistent need for self-affirmation, a problem with roots too deep to be solved by the universal acceptance of science and reason. Niebuhr also argued that the problems of humanity could not be addressed by the universal attainment of prosperity, even though this was the promise implicit in both Western liberalism and Marxist-Leninism during the Cold War era. In time, the purported universality of Enlightenment thought proved to be yet another target for its critics around the world. As the process of decolonization accelerated through the 1950s and 1960s, many values and ideas that had once been framed as universal were now condemned as little more than stalking horses for European political, economic, and cultural hegemony. In North America and Europe, the politics of the counterculture framed itself in opposition to what many saw as a doomed culture of technocracy in both the Western and the Eastern blocs. The idea that the scientific method could unveil universal truths that transcended culture had been central to Julian Huxley’s vision of a rational religion that could unite the world. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the epistemic claims of science soon came under a sustained attack that radically expanded upon the observations of Thomas Kuhn and created a whole cottage industry of postmodern critiques of what came to be glibly dismissed as “the Enlightenment project.” If the historical meaning of the term “Enlightenment” favored by Julian Huxley fell on hard times after the Second World War, the quasireligious meaning of the term favored by Aldous seemed to enjoy a surge of popularity across the industrialized world, partly due to his own efforts at broadening its meaning. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the lowercase e form of enlightenment favored by Aldous was associated almost exclusively with Eastern religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. One of Aldous Huxley’s great achievements as a writer and a scholar was to decouple the meaning of the term “enlightenment” not only from Eastern religion but from religion itself. Well before his famous experiments with psychedelic drugs, Aldous Huxley pioneered a form of secular mysticism that would profoundly alter how individuals across the world conceive of both science and spirituality. By articulating a perennial philosophy that transcended the world’s

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major religious traditions, Aldous Huxley did a great deal to liberate spiritual self-cultivation, as an individual endeavor, from the institutional confines of religion. Furthermore, by conceiving of his own spiritual quest as series of experiments, Aldous attempted to liberate the scientific spirit of inquiry and experimentation from an institutional culture of scientific research that he believed had been severely compromised, especially by its ties to militarism, in the twentieth century. By the late 1950s, Julian and Aldous Huxley found that they shared a little more common ground, particularly concerning the subject of religion. In 1957, the year that Julian revised Religion without Revelation, Aldous wrote to him with his own views on the subject: “To my mind the problem of religion is one which has to be approached operationally. If you do A, then B is likely to happen; if you do X, then you will probably get Y. The great merit of the oriental systems of philosophy is that they are all of them forms of transcendental pragmatism. Pure speculation is not their primary concern. Their metaphysics and their theology are devised in order to explain certain types of immediate experience.” While Aldous Huxley’s sweeping statement here about the nature of “oriental systems of philosophy” has to inspire a great deal of skepticism in any reader familiar with the diversity of intellectual and cultural traditions across Asia, the younger Huxley’s emphasis on practice over metaphysics is striking. Aldous here proposes that we view religion as another human artifact or tool for achieving a desired set of results in our day-to-day lives. His passing claim that “transcendental pragmatism” is universal among Asian religions is easily refuted, and he does not even bother to support it in this letter. However, the concept of “transcendental pragmatism” he introduces here would form the basis of the utopian way of life depicted in his last novel. Aldous expands upon this idea by arguing that “a sensible and realistic religion should be one that is based upon a set of psycho-physiological operations designed to help individuals realize their potentialities to the greatest possible extent (we normally live at about twenty percent of capacity).” Here Aldous is on the cusp of coining the phrase “human potentialities,” which would first take root at Esalen with his 1960 lecture on that theme and then become one of the key concepts of the counterculture in succeeding decades.22 By the late 1950s, Julian and Aldous Huxley came closer to one another in their answer to the same fundamental questions with which their grandfather had wrestled throughout his career. Addressing the question of who we are, both Julian and Aldous embraced the metaphor

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of the amphibian, though for different reasons. For Aldous the amphibian was not only a perfect metaphor for our multifaceted nature but also a warning against the trap of religious or materialistic dualism. These were themes that he explored in his penultimate work of fiction, The Genius and the Goddess, an engaging novella that playfully explores the dazzling multiplicity of human consciousness as it engages with everything from sex, death, and adultery to the quantum mechanics of Erwin Schrödinger.23 For Julian, the amphibian metaphor was also valuable in its rejection of dualism, but especially because amphibian species were themselves the perfect emblem of evolutionary progress, venturing boldly from their old exclusive element of aquatic life into something entirely new. The imperiled status of amphibians in the twenty-first century has cast a bright light on the most vexing riddle that Julian and Aldous inherited from their frog-dissecting grandfather: What is our place in nature? In their own attempts to wrestle with this essential question, Julian and Aldous Huxley each made important and distinct contributions to the birth of a new cultural and political movement to protect endangered species and habitats around the world. Their efforts to create new institutions and provoke new ways of thinking about our relationship to the rest of life on earth helped to create the global environmentalist movement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Julian Huxley exercised his greatest impact on building the institutional foundations of the movement through the creation of such transnational organizations as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Aldous Huxley, for his part, did more to help shape the quasi-religious and ethical basis of global environmentalism, through his pacifism, his eclectic mysticism, and his proposal for a new ethos of compassion and reverence not only for all living things but also for the inanimate elements of the natural world, such as rocks and mountains. In the broadest terms, the divergent visions of human ecology that Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley articulated during the postwar era helped to promote, respectively, what historians have called the progressive and the pastoral strains of environmental thought and activism. Julian’s legacy can be seen not only in the organizations he founded but also in the pragmatic philosophy that informs the joint efforts of transnational NGOs, governments, and even some corporations to create reforms such as the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion and the 1997 Kyoto

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figure 9. Julian and Aldous at the San Diego Zoo, 1958.

Accords on climate change. Aldous Huxley’s legacy is visible in the quasi-religious philosophy of the Deep Ecology movement, whose advocates cite his works, especially The Perennial Philosophy and Island, as seminal influences.24 However, in light of the passionate determination with which Julian and Aldous Huxley each resisted the twentieth-century trends of intellectual specialization and compartmentalization, it seems both facile and unjust to pigeonhole their ideas and achievements according to the academic categories of progressive and pastoral environmentalism. In fact, Julian Huxley’s vision of human ecology, for all of its grandiose

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emphasis on “man’s destiny” as the new director of evolution on earth, actually placed an unprecedented stress on the preservation of wild habitats and endangered species. Although advocates of Deep Ecology have dismissed Julian Huxley’s ideas as anthropocentric, his work with the IUCN and the WWF should rank him as one of the pioneers of the more biocentric environmentalism that emerged in the sixties and seventies. Conversely, although Aldous Huxley’s somewhat pantheistic view of nature has earned him a place in the intellectual pantheon of the Deep Ecology movement, his conception of human ecology was always informed by a strong commitment to the old, Fabian vision of a society ruled by technical experts, with a concomitant dedication to such utilitarian methods and goals as the classing of human beings according to their alleged psychophysical typologies, and a program of statesponsored eugenics. Not surprisingly, the praise expressed for Aldous Huxley by supporters of Deep Ecology tends to minimize or completely obscure these aspects of his postwar thought. In assessing the environmental thought of Julian and Aldous Huxley in the postwar era, it is important to consider first their distinct ideas and activities, and then to explore the areas where they shared common ground and thus transcended the traditional dichotomy between pastoral and progressive environmentalism. The influential early-twentiethcentury conservation movement in America was predicated less on the idea that wilderness had an inherent value of its own than on an increasingly pervasive sense of anxiety about maintaining the masculinity, and thus the racial and political fitness, of the nation. In the decades following 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner cited the frontier experience as the key to formation of the U.S. national character and democratic institutions, the closing of that frontier and the steady disappearance and despoliation of wild places aroused a growing sense of dread, especially among the urban and northeastern intelligentsia. The outcome of John Muir’s failing struggle to save Hetch Hetchy indicated that growing American cities still took a very utilitarian view of the wilderness, especially in the West, but the popular enthusiasm that greeted the feral fantasies of Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs indicated that the wilderness had become enshrined in the popular imagination as a place where the individual male could rediscover his truer, more masculine self and escape the enervating influence of an urban culture that was, as Teddy Roosevelt had described it, “flabby.” In an era when national identity was frequently framed in explicitly racial terms, the maintenance of wilderness was seen as important not only for

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the health of the individual but also for the vitality of the race. Thus, the element of Tarzan’s nature that made him so successful in the wild was his Anglo-Saxon pedigree, and the hidden powers the wilderness animated in Jack London’s characters, whether they were Teutonic men or German shepherds, came from the soundness of their breed. This paradigm of the wilderness as a sort of whetting stone against which the white man could sharpen both his masculinity and his racial identity never completely disappeared from the American scene, but it became less prominent in the decades following 1945. A newer sense of the wilderness as a fragile system, the balance of which could easily be disrupted or destroyed by human interference, emerged in the writings of such American naturalists as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. This was a view of nature that was also much closer to the view promulgated by both Julian and Aldous Huxley as early as the 1930s. Today the term “environmentalism” almost universally denotes a commitment to protecting the flora, fauna, and habitats of the natural world from degradation or destruction as a result of human activity. However, the first use of the term in this sense recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1970. For most of the twentieth century the term instead denoted a school of psychology that put greater or exclusive emphasis on an individual’s environment rather than his or her genetic inheritance. When we consider the emphasis that both of the Huxley brothers put on nature over nurture in explaining human behavior, it is clear that neither of them was an environmentalist in this earlier sense of the term. If we consider how often both of them sounded neoMalthusian alarms about human overpopulation and how early each of them wrote about such problems as soil depletion, habitat destruction, and the anthropogenic extinction of other species, it is clear that both Julian and Aldous Huxley were pioneer environmentalists long before the term took on the meaning that it has today. As early as the interwar period, when most intellectual discourse in the transatlantic world was dominated by political concerns, Aldous Huxley was writing about the depletion of fossil fuels as an inevitable consequence of industrial society, and Julian Huxley was writing about the destruction of irreplaceable habitats in colonial Africa. In a 1957 essay entitled “Transhumanism,” Julian Huxley’s declared that the human race had now become responsible for the future of evolution, and he elaborated the importance of this development with a business metaphor, declaring that “man . . . has been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution. . . .

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What is more, he can’t refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth.”25 Within the context of the essay, this grand declaration has two distinct, though related, meanings—one pertaining to human evolution and the other to human ecology. In terms of human evolution, Julian Huxley argued throughout his career that mankind had, since the advent of writing, detached itself from the logic of natural selection and entered what he called “the psychosocial phase” of human evolution. Although the term “Transhumanism” has come to denote the technological augmentation of our species, Julian Huxley was less interested in such ideas than he had been during the 1920s and 1930s. In this phase of his career, he did not disavow the idea that technology or eugenics might play some role in the physical evolution of the human race, but he came to believe the far greater factor would be the competition among ideas and idea systems to determine which would prove most influential in guiding the path of human civilization. Julian’s promotion of Transhumanism as a new ideology for the human race was predicated on his conviction, which he reiterated over several decades, that human activity had become the decisive force affecting the future of all species on the planet. The movement of Julian Huxley’s thinking toward this second conclusion was already apparent in the 1920s. He introduced this concept in his 1926 science fiction story, “The Tissue-Culture King,” which depicted an ecology in the interior of Africa radically altered by one man’s experiments in biotechnology, indicating his awareness that recent strides in the applied sciences had the power literally to transform nature in unpredictable ways. Julian’s first and very successful foray into the nature film genre, the Oscar-winning Private Life of the Gannett, ended with a plea far from typical in the 1930s to protect the Gannett and its habitats from the encroachment of industrial civilization.26 As noted earlier, Julian Huxley employed Bauhaus architects to create modern and hygienic animal habitats at the London Zoo that in no way attempted to mimic their natural habitats. The first habitats of their kind at any modern zoo, these Bauhaus creations reflected his growing intimation that the fate of other species was inextricably entwined with the fate of industrial civilization. Immediately after the Second World War, this conviction that the future of the human race was tied to the future of other species came to the fore when Julian became the first director-general of UNESCO. As a biologist, Julian fought to “put the ‘S’ in UNESCO,” thereby turning

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what had initially been conceived of as a cultural organization into a clearinghouse for scientific research with a special emphasis on ecological endeavors, such as the Man and Biosphere program.27 In 1947, Julian also used his clout as UNESCO director-general to create a branch organization dedicated to the protection of wildlife and habitats. He would later describe his role in the creation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature: I have a special interest in the International Union, for I had a considerable personal share in creating it. When I was Director-General of UNESCO, I fought for the principle that the preservation of nature was a legitimate activity for UNESCO to undertake, and was eventually able to establish this principle in accordance with the general policy of UNESCO . . . we took steps to create such an organization for the preservation of nature, and it came into being after a meeting at Fontainebleau in the late 1940s.28

When one considers the devastation of so many European cities during the Second World War, and the tremendous emphasis on economic reconstruction that naturally dominated the attention of most leaders in the years immediately following 1945, Julian Huxley’s achievement in rallying official support in Europe for conservation is indeed remarkable. In his own history of the environmental movement, Max Nicholson describes at length how Julian initiated a meeting between British and European conservationists in Switzerland that laid the groundwork for the foundation of the IUCN.29 As postwar reconstruction had barely begun, it had been impossible to establish such an ambitious program in 1946, but, Nicholson wrote, “the Swiss promoters . . . persevered and, exactly a year later on June 30–July 1 1947, they assembled, after better preparation, a conference at Brunnen drawn from 24 countries, at which it was agreed to establish” a provisional version of the IUCN. “Julian Huxley, who had meanwhile become the first Director-General of UNESCO, energetically embraced the project, and convened in 1948 at Fontainebleau at which a draft constitution [of the IUCN] . . . was adopted.”30 While UNESCO was already committed to protecting archaeological assets classified as “world heritage sites,” the creation of the IUCN as an auxiliary organization solidified the commitment of UNESCO to protecting habitats, as well. Julian saw the problems of human ecology as being intimately related to the issue of population, and he maintained a strong commitment to international efforts to promote population control throughout the Cold War era. In 1959, he attended a conference on family planning in New Delhi, along with Jawaharlal Nehru. In his address to the conference, Julian boasted of his early commitment to birth control as he

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observed the widespread change in public attitudes around the world over the past several decades: In 1927 I attended the International Population Conference at Geneva in which Margaret Sanger played a leading role. . . . Much has happened in the 32 years that have elapsed since then. Public interest in the problem of population has grown in an astonishing way. It was then an unpopular subject, kept alive by a handful of devoted pioneers: today you can hardly open a newspaper . . . without seeing some reference to population pressure and even to the once-unmentionable topic of birth-control. Important nations like India and Japan have embarked on official policies aimed at reducing birth-rates and a Pope has commended the subject of mounting population to the consideration of all good Catholics.31

In addition to affirming his support for birth control, this passage reflects Julian Huxley’s faith in the role that institutions, governments, and even religious leaders must play in the promotion of reform. This faith in institutional solutions to social and ecological problems led Julian to promote government-sponsored conservation through the establishment of national parks during the postwar era, particularly as more European colonies in Africa were in the process of becoming independent republics. In 1961, he wrote to the minister of natural resources in Zomba, Nyasaland (now Malawi): You will, I hope, remember my mentioning to you the desirability of establishing a National Park on the Nyika Plateau in Nayasaland, and your replying that you would be interested to consider the question further. May I now say that I consider that the question is urgent. I hope very much that the authorities . . . will give it their fullest consideration. If a National Park were established there it could readily be integrated with the National Parks of Eastern Africa . . . this would undoubtedly bring considerable revenue . . . and . . . it would speedily become a source of national prestige for the territory throughout the world.32

Julian continued to maintain strong ties to UNESCO, even after more than a decade had passed since his tenure as its director-general. In the early 1960s, he maintained a correspondence with René Maheu, the director-general of UNESCO.33 Julian reported to Maheu the findings of a 1961 conference on the preservation of wildlife and habitats in Africa, and continued to push for international support for national parks across Africa: “[T]he Arusha Conference was extremely successful. . . . The IUCN, which is affiliated with UNESCO, is following up the conference with a continuation of its African Special Project, by sending a team of two experts to any African country which requests their ser-

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vices. . . . I might add that there exist in a number of African countries semi-official organizations concerned with National Parks, which are doing excellent work and should be supported with financial and technical assistance wherever possible.”34 Throughout the 1960s, Julian Huxley continued to work ceaselessly for the cause of national parks in Africa, touting their benefits as a source of tourist revenue and international prestige. In 1965, he wrote to British minister of overseas development Barbara Castle to promote the establishment of a new national park to protect the unique habitats of Tanzania.35 He also wrote to numerous African leaders, such as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. In response to Julian’s pleas for conservation the private secretary of Haile Selassie replied, “We are pleased to be able to inform you that as a result of the recommendations of the UNESCO Advisory Mission of October 1963, headed by yourself, . . . the general direction of a Wildlife Conservation Board has now been established . . . to ensure that they are conserved and managed for the maximum benefit of present and future generations.”36 In a reference to his brother Julian’s achievements in promoting the preservation of wild habitats in Africa, Aldous would later note in his university lectures: “The great wild species of Africa survive at all solely because there are national parks in various parts of Africa where these animals are carefully protected . . . for the benefit of science and for the delight of people who wish to go outside the all too human world and see what the rest of the creation looks like.”37 Julian Huxley’s conservation efforts inspired the admiration of not only his brother but also other prominent conservationists. In 1961, the American intellectual and pioneer of environmentalist thought Lewis Mumford expressed his strong interest in Julian Huxley’s postwar vision: “I’ve been reading you with great pleasure . . . both in the original, in ‘New Bottles for New Wine’ and in quotation, in Waddington’s ‘The Ethical Animal’; and I wish there were some prospect of our conversing at length on, & carrying further some of the matters you so ably bring forward.”38 For Julian Huxley the creation and expansion of transnational institutions was a natural response to environmental crises. If environmental degradation was a global problem, the solution was to be found in global governance. Alluding to the “space race” of the early 1960s, Julian Huxley mused in a lecture entitled “Human Ecology”: I would say that we have to get away from the idea of a race, and begin to think in terms of a balance, an ecological idea, the continuing process of

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adjustment between people and resources. Such a balance, of course, must be a dynamic and moving one. . . . The president of the United States periodically reports on the state of the nation. It might be a good thing if the Secretary-General of the United Nations were periodically to report on the state of the balance between man and nature.39

Julian Huxley exercised a growing influence as a transnational conservationist in the fifties and sixties, when he threw his support behind Rachel Carson’s efforts to ban DDT and cofounded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to fight the rapid rise of species extinction in the postwar era. In his evolution from a young professor at Rice University in the 1910s to a global environmental activist in the 1960s, Julian had pioneered the popularization of science through print, film, and radio in the twenties and thirties, and during the Cold War he brought these same skills to the promotion of conservation. Julian’s promotion of such causes as birth control and wilderness conservation, through print and broadcast media, during the fifties and sixties proved highly effective, as when his campaign to expose habitat destruction in Africa culminated in the WWF’s founding in 1961. Whereas before he had promoted ecology and conservation within the framework of the British Empire, during the Cold War era Julian pursued the same goals within a complex matrix of transnational organizations such as the Commonwealth, the United Nations, UNESCO, the IUCN, and, ultimately, the WWF. At age eighty-three, he was still active in the environmental movement, lending his voice to A Blueprint for Survival, a summary of the threats posed by unrestricted industry and overpopulation that became an international best seller in 1972.40 Aldous Huxley’s contribution to the evolution of environmentalism after World War II was no less significant, though quite different in tone. Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley’s friend and biographer, recalls that he was often fond of saying, “Il faut cultiver notre oasis,” in a sly paraphrase of Voltaire’s dictum at the close of Candide. In light of the tremendously ambitious and managerial worldview that guided his brother’s career, the simplicity and modesty of this idea is striking. Whereas Julian exhorted the human race to recognize itself as the managing director of “the biggest business of all,” Aldous exhibited even less faith than the world-weary Candide in the potential of human beings to improve the world around them. After all, a garden is the product of human agency, and was, in the thinking of T. H. Huxley, the clearest metaphor for the potential of human civilization. By replacing “garden” with “oasis,” Aldous would not go so far as to imply that human beings can

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make the world a better place through their efforts, but only that they might be able to maintain some blessed corner of it, and protect it from destruction. In the late 1940s, Aldous was expressing serious doubts in the novel Ape and Essence, and in essays such as “The Double Crisis,” about even that possibility. In 1948, he expressed the urgency of the global situation to his son, Matthew: “The more I read on the subject, the clearer it seems that we must all get together on a world conservation policy upon which the various nations can possibly agree, because having enough to eat is the one thing that interests everybody equally.”41 In his brief but cogent survey of global environmentalism, the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha calls the years immediately following World War II the Age of Ecological Innocence, stressing that the earlier ecological activism of conservationists such as George Perkins Marsh and John Muir had largely been obscured by the philosophies of limitless economic growth stressed by governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and by the political and strategic exigencies of the Cold War itself.42 Like many historians of environmentalism, Guha identifies Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as the single greatest factor in making ecology a major theme in public discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.43 In a period when the doctrine of economic growth without limits was becoming a privileged dogma on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the alarms that Aldous Huxley sounded in his 1948 essay “The Double Crisis” were hardly well received. In fact, the essay was greeted with rejection letters from Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Life and from Norman Cousins at the Saturday Review of Literature. In the opening salvo of this essay, Aldous declares: The human race is passing through a time of crisis, and that crisis exists, so two speak, on two levels—an upper level of political and economic crisis and a lower level of demographic and ecological crisis. That which is discussed at international conferences and in the newspapers is the upper-level crisis—the crisis whose immediate causes are the economic breakdown due to the War and the struggle for power between national groups possessing, or about to possess, the means of mass extermination. Of the low-level crisis, the crisis in population and world resources, hardly anything is heard in the press, on the radio, or at the more important international conferences.44

In his 1946 introduction to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley had quoted Tolstoy’s observation that the most effective form of censorship was not to suppress a new idea as heresy, but merely to draw a veil of silence over it as though it were not important enough to refute. Given his long and lucrative career as a contributor of essays to American

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magazines, it seems quite possible that “The Double Crisis” was rejected not for lack of import or literary merit, but because it ran directly counter to the most cherished economic and political ideas of American industry and government in the immediate aftermath of World War II. As the editor of Life Magazine wrote, “That article ran head on into an argument on the facts among our editors. The opposite opinion to Mr. Huxley’s is widely held here.”45 After being rejected by virtually every major American journal, “The Double Crisis” was eventually published in the UNESCO Courier in 1949, thanks to its acceptance during the last year of Julian Huxley’s tenure as UNESCO director-general. Much of the substance of “The Double Crisis” is a neo-Malthusian jeremiad that fails to account for two developments that would at least mitigate if not solve the world’s population problem in the postwar era. The first of these trends was the development of new methods for combating soil erosion in the postwar decades, such as the application of synthetic fertilizers in the fifties and sixties, as well as the more gradual adoption of other methods of soil preservation such as crop rotation and organic agriculture. The other trend that Aldous did not take into account was the fact that in industrializing societies, population growth tends to fall, especially if industrialization is accompanied, as it usually is, by expanded education and employment opportunities for women. On the other hand, some of the observations that Aldous makes in “The Double Crisis” are remarkably prescient, especially regarding the unequal distribution of certain industrial resources, such as fossil fuels: Natural monopolies in raw materials are even more politically dangerous than natural monopolies in food. When located in the territory of a strong nation, deposits of minerals necessary to industry are a standing temptation to the abuse of military and economic power; when located in that of a weak nation, they are a standing temptation to aggression from abroad. . . . Research should be deliberately organized for the purpose of discovering universally available substitutes for these relatively rare and most unevenly distributed minerals. If successful, such research would have two beneficial results: it would break the natural monopolies which are so politically dangerous; and it would help our industrial civilization to shift from its precarious basis in the exploitation of rapidly wasting assets to a more secure, a more nearly permanent foundation.46

The persistent problem of military aggression engendered by such “natural monopolies in raw materials” would be a pivotal theme in Huxley’s last novel, Island, and it would later become an even more crucial factor in the Middle East. Furthermore, the solution that Aldous Huxley pro-

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poses, of funding research to discover “universally available substitutes” for such “unevenly distributed” resources is remarkable in the way that it foreshadows the twenty-first century drive to develop renewable substitutes for fossil fuels. One remarkable sign of the evolution of Aldous Huxley’s ecological thinking during the Cold War era was his changing view of Romanticism. Although he had sharply criticized the Romantic ethos in the interwar decades, he embraced it in the postwar era, laying the basis for his articulation of a more biocentric view of human ecology. In the 1920s Aldous had written an essay with the intriguing title “Wordsworth in the Tropics” in which he took Wordsworth and the other Romantics to task for their worship of nature: “The Wordsworthian adoration of Nature has two principle defects. The first, as we have seen, is that it is only possible in a country in which Nature has been nearly or quite enslaved to man. The second is that it is only possible for those who are prepared to falsify their immediate intuitions of Nature. For Nature, even in the temperate zone, is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic.”47 Aldous continued his attack on Wordsworth in this essay by likening him to an Anglican minister who had exalted a sentimentalized vision of the English landscape as a substitute for orthodox religion. In the decades following World War II, however, he developed a new affection for the poet of the Lake District. In one of his lectures at the University of California at Berkeley Aldous confessed without shame: “I am an old and unregenerate Wordsworthian; I regard Wordsworth as among the four or five greatest English poets and as a man who contributed insights of enormous importance in regard to what our relationship towards the natural world should be. Wordsworth’s whole idea was that man and nature are closely interlinked, that our morality goes right back into our relations with the world, and that our sense of the divine can be most powerfully mediated through our relations with the world of nature.”48 What the environmental historian Bob Pepperman Taylor has called “the spiritualization of nature” gained a new lease on life from Aldous Huxley,49 whose credentials as a satirist and social critic gave his newfound reverence for nature an urbane piquancy that the writings of most English Romantics had lacked. Where Wordsworth had drawn his inspiration from the Lake District, Aldous Huxley, an Angelino for more than a quarter-century, drew his inspiration from the deserts of the American Southwest: Picking one’s way between the cactuses and the creosote bushes one hears, like some tiny whirring clockwork, the soliloquies of invisible wrens, the

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calling, at dusk, of the poor wills and even occasionally the voice of homo sapiens—six of the species in a parked Chevrolet, listening to the broadcast of a prize fight, or else in pairs necking to the delicious accompaniment of Crosby. But the light forgives, the distances forget, and this great crystal of silence, whose base is as large as Europe and whose height, for all practical purposes, is infinite, can co-exist with things of a far higher order of discrepancy than canned sentiment or vicarious sport.50

A generation later, the philosophical and quasi-religious impact of Aldous Huxley’s writings could be seen in the Romantic mysticism of the Deep Ecology movement. In Deep Ecology Bill Deval and George Sessions cite Aldous Huxley first in cataloging the ideas and philosophies that have shaped the movement: Deep ecology is radically conservative in that it articulates a long-established minority stream of religion and philosophy in Western Europe, North American and the Orient. . . . In The Perennial Philosophy (1945), Aldous Huxley surveyed many of the religions and philosophies of the world looking for common themes. He found that they characteristically began with an account of the world that placed humans in the wider scheme of things. . . . Spiritual growth and human maturity developed from the “enlightenment” of realizing that our narrow isolated social self is an illusion—that in reality we are intimately connected with all the natural processes around us.51

In his study of the strong religious current in environmentalism, the historian Thomas R. Dunlap also points to the seminal influence of Aldous’s thought, and particularly The Perennial Philosophy, on succeeding generations of postwar environmentalists.52 Although Aldous Huxley was not, as his brother was, committed to institution building in the Cold War era, he was engaged in communicating his ideas at some of the most prominent research universities in the United States, such as the University of California, MIT, and Harvard. One of the points that Aldous stressed in the university lectures that he gave during the late fifties and early sixties was the inextricable relationship between biology and politics. Regarding the 1956 Suez Crisis, he declared that politicians were ignoring “the fundamental reason Egypt has been so troublesome to the West in recent years: It is a biological reason; these people cannot live on their resources and they must throw their weight around so as somehow to get people who have capital to invest in their country.”53 Closer to home, Aldous also viewed the feverish production of new weapons systems in the deserts of the southwestern United States through

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the prism of the life sciences: “In brand new reservations, surrounded by barbed wire and the FBI, not Indians but tribes of physicists, chemists, metallurgists, communications engineers, work with the frenzy of termites” to create “a steady stream of marvels, each more expensive and each more fiendish than the last.”54 For a countervailing force that might check this destructive juggernaut, Aldous looked deep into the well of evolutionary biology: “Applied science is a conjurer, whose bottomless hat yields the softest Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas. . . . But I am still optimist enough . . . to bet that the non-human otherness at the root of man’s being will ultimately triumph over the all too human selves who frame the ideologies and engineer the collective suicides. For our survival, if we do survive, we shall be less beholden to our common sense . . . than to our caterpillar and cicada sense.”55 Whereas in the 1920s Aldous had alluded to the Darwinian paradigm to mock Wordsworth’s romantic vision of nature, he now attempted a synthesis: a poetic affirmation of our connection to the web of life, firmly rooted in the science of evolutionary biology. He also echoed his earlier poem “The Cicadas,” which exalted the noise of these strange insects as an affirmation of life. Published in 1931 in an eponymous volume, the poem concludes: Clueless we go; but I have heard thy voice, Divine unreason! harping in the leaves, And grieve no more; for wisdom never grieves, And thou hast taught me wisdom; I rejoice.56

For Aldous, the Darwinian paradigm of evolution was not a cause for religious despair, but a call to reaffirm our fundamental connection to the same complex web of life that Charles Darwin had described in the Origin of Species when he wrote: “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”57 Darwin’s poetic aside about the “tangled bank” of living things had been something of a grace note in the Origin of Species. However, Darwin’s research soon inspired the German biologist Ernst Haeckel to coin the term Oecologie in 1866 to describe the complex web of relationships between living things and their environment. When Aldous Huxley discussed the significance of ecology in the twentieth century, he was alluding not merely to this link between the young

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science of evolutionary biology and the slightly younger science of ecology. He believed that he had uncovered a fundamental connection between the findings of modern science and our most ancient religious intimations. In the first of a series of lectures that he gave at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1959, Aldous Huxley noted the centennial of The Origin of Species and argued that the advent of Darwinian evolution remained a revelation of profound significance for human civilization. But whereas many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century students of Darwin had found in his theory of evolution a new justification for laissez-faire economics or imperialism, Aldous found a different meaning in Darwin’s theory a century after its first publication. Reviewing the development of Western faith, he argued that primitive religions, with their animistic worldview, had placed the human race in an intimate relationship with nature, while later religions, especially Christianity, had divorced mankind from nature and had even established the pernicious dogma that other living creatures on earth were mere things, over which mankind could exercise an absolute dominion. By establishing a solid scientific basis for the familial relationship between Homo sapiens and the other species on earth, Aldous reasoned, Darwinian evolution offered modern human beings a much needed chance to escape the alienation from nature that Judeo-Christian theology and Cartesian thinking had imposed on them, and to reestablish the connection between human beings and nature that had been so prominent in primitive religion. This return to a greater intimacy with nature would be superior to primitive religion, however, because it would not be based on superstition but on solid science. To describe how he envisioned the evolution of Western thought regarding man’s relationship to nature, Aldous employed the image of an ascending spiral. Darwinian science placed the human race in roughly the same relationship with nature as experienced in the age of sacred woods and fertility cults, but on this circuit around the spiral, that relationship would be experienced on a higher level of awareness because it was based on scientific knowledge rather than the mere authority of tradition. Aldous gave this idea more direct expression in Island, first by acknowledging the philosophical and moral chaos that had followed the Darwinian revolution, and then by pointing to a new sense of kinship with the rest of life on earth that evolutionary biology seemed to affirm. Parodying Alexander Pope’s famous couplet about Isaac Newton (“Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said ‘Let Newton

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be!’ and all was light”), Will Farnaby, the cynical protagonist of Island, quips, “God said, ‘Let Darwin be,’ and there was Nietzsche, imperialism, and Adolf Hitler.” To which Shanta, who is teaching Farnaby about the culture of Pala, presents an extended response: “All that,” she agreed. “But also the possibility of a new kind of Wisdom for everybody. Darwin took the old totemism and raised it to the level of biology. The fertility cults reappeared as genetics and Havelock Ellis. And now it’s up to us to take another turn up the spiral. Darwinism was the old Neolithic wisdom turned into scientific concepts. The new conscious wisdom— the kind of wisdom that was prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and Tantra—is biological theory realized in living practice, is Darwinism raised to the level of compassion and spiritual insight.”58

The image that Aldous offers to illustrate this point is a statue that Will and Shanta are admiring as they have this conversation: an icon of the Buddha serenely smiling in meditation while the deadly cobra Muchalinda, the King of the Snakes, is coiled around his body. Upon seeing this statue, Will Farnaby immediately notes the tremendous gulf that separates this image of symbiosis between the Buddha and the serpent, on one hand, and the villainous role ascribed to the serpent in the JudeoChristian tradition, on the other. More than a decade before “environmentalist” became a common journalistic term for conservationist, Aldous Huxley observed how the meaning of the term was evolving in the twentieth century.59 He critiqued its old meaning and anticipated the way it would be used in the future: “In the nineteenth century, the environmentalist school spoke of the environment as conditioning and creating cultures but left out of account altogether the fact that cultures condition the environment—that man has certainly done almost as much to change the environment as the environment has done to mould the course of history.”60 A perceptive student of American conservationist thought, Aldous praised the groundbreaking work of George Perkins Marsh in the 1860s: “The first great classical work on the subject was written by George Perkins Marsh, . . . [who] collected all of the European material to date on the subject of man and nature and set it forth in a kind of philosophical context. One of the precursors in the field, it remains an extremely valuable book.”61 Aldous was also among the earliest to praise the research and advocacy of such midtwentieth-century conservationists as William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn.62 While Julian and Aldous Huxley had disagreed on many vital issues, especially during the Second World War, it is worth noting how much their views converged concerning not only environmental but also

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cultural preservation. The best example of this convergence may be their views concerning the island of Bali. Because of his connections to UNESCO, Julian Huxley was acutely aware of Bali’s cultural and biological inheritance, and he saw both as threatened by the booming tourist industry of the 1950s. In 1956, Julian urged that steps be taken for the preservation of Balinese culture, which he compared to the preservation of biodiversity: Most foreign residents prophesy that Bali’s vital culture is doomed, and will wither and die within ten or fifteen years. This may be over-gloomy, but certainly Balinese culture is in danger, and will die out or be debased by bastardized westernization unless something is done to check its decline. . . . A traditional culture, like a wild species of animal or plant, is a living thing. If it is destroyed, the world is the poorer; nor can it be artificially re-created. But being alive, it can evolve to meet new conditions. It is an urgent but sadly neglected task of the present age to discover the means whereby the flowerings of culture shall not be extinguished by the advances of science and technique, but shall cooperate with them in the general enrichment of life. And in coping with this task we must not forget that population increase can make it more difficult, by forcing people to think of how merely to stay alive, less of how to live.63

Julian further argued that organizations such as UNESCO must help protect Balinese culture not as a museum piece, but as a living culture with the capacity to change—on its own terms, as part of a changing world. If a unique culture such as the one that had flourished on Bali is destroyed, the world has lost it forever. But, if it remains alive, “it can evolve to meet new conditions.” While he did not visit the island of Bali, Aldous Huxley did pass through the Indonesian archipelago in 1926, and he described in Jesting Pilate both its alluring beauty and its steady destruction by resource extraction. This travel narrative is characteristically wry and ambiguous. As he travels by train through the heart of the tropics, he confesses his gratitude for the luxury and security afforded by modern technology, but he cannot eradicate the personal fantasy that there, somewhere behind the passing veil of rain forest, is an alien and yet perfectly tranquil world waiting to accept him into its bosom. Aldous recognizes this as a fantasy, but he also sees it as a valuable fantasy. This tropical idyll, along with his reflections on mysticism and religion in this same section of Jesting Pilate, is the first green shoot of what would one day grow into his vision of Pala and its culture as depicted in Island. Aldous would attempt in Island to lay out his vision of human society that combined his conception of religious fulfillment with his long-

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standing concerns about ecological sustainability. While Shakespeare wrote The Tempest as his last play, and Francis Bacon wrote The New Atlantis in the last year of his life, Aldous Huxley’s Island, also written as he neared death, aspired to combine some of the poetic vision of the former and the rigorous empiricism of the latter. In contrast to Thomas More’s Utopia, which had been the vision of a single philosopher-king in the person of King Utopus, Aldous Huxley’s Pala emerged from the integrated vision of two founders linked to different cultural traditions. The Eastern tradition is represented by the nineteenth-century Palanese king Murugan, who encounters Western science when he requires surgery for a tumor. That surgery is performed by a British navy surgeon named Andrew MacPhail, who finds that, though he sees himself as a man of science, he must make a leap of faith.64 This happens when MacPhail determines that Murugan requires surgery immediately, but realizes no anesthetics are available. Remembering an article he had read (and dismissed) on the use of hypnotism in lieu of chemical anesthesia, he decides to give it a try. The miraculous success of this lastditch effort forms the basis of his future friendship and political partnership with the king. Modern medicine, birth control, and the scientific method all come to Pala, where they are tempered, thanks to Murugan’s wise rule, by such Eastern traditions as maithuna yoga, meditation, and a Buddhist ethic of moderation and balance. Will Farnaby, the deeply wounded and wisecracking protagonist in Island, finds himself in this unique society after his boat has been wrecked at sea. Andrew MacPhail, the Prospero who created this world, has long since died, but his reasons for leaving European society were in many ways similar to those of the rightful duke of Milan. And as with Bacon’s New Atlantis, the small island nation of Pala keeps itself hidden from the outside world and sends its emissaries out only to gather knowledge with other nations, not to engage in diplomacy or commerce. Aside from being located in roughly the same corner of the world as Bacon’s New Atlantis, the island nation of Pala shares a further similarity in its combination of science and religion, though in Bacon’s utopia, Christianity is the state religion, while Huxley chose an easygoing strain of Mahayana Buddhism tempered by Tibetan Tantra and Western skepticism to be the prevailing religion among the Palanese. Of course, while the similarities between Aldous Huxley’s Island and the visions of Shakespeare and Bacon are remarkable, the differences are also very much worth noting. While Shakespeare’s Tempest mocks the idea of utopia in the long-winded discourses of Gonzalo on his vision for

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an ideal “commonwealth,” Island takes the idea of a utopian society quite seriously, even if it does not expect such a society to be unmolested for long in the modern world. And while Bacon’s imaginary kingdom of Bensalem in The New Atlantis is adequately armed to prevent any intrusion from the outside world, the kingdom of Pala is pacifist and therefore utterly defenseless against the ruthless machinations of Colonel Dipa, the military strongman who runs the neighboring nation with the backing of Western Cold War allies and the blessing of a British media magnate and a few multinational oil companies. In other words, while Prospero’s governance was his method for biding his time and engineering his return to Naples, MacPhail’s Pala is a deliberate alternative to Western civilization. And while Bacon’s Bensalem is a country that looks out for its own interests, the Palanese are a people who, by and large, seek to transcend their own individual and material needs. As skeptical as Aldous Huxley was about the vision of technical and social progress promoted by H. G. Wells, and, somewhat more cautiously, by his brother Julian, he never showed very much affinity for the radical critique of science and technology put forward by Frankfurt school thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer laid a fair share of the blame for the horrors of the Second World War at the feet of Baconian science, which they saw as an epistemology that had sprung not from a purported will to knowledge but an obvious will to power. Erasing any distinction between pure and applied science, Adorno and Horkheimer portrayed the Baconian method as nothing more than an instrument for enhancing man’s power over nature. Seen through the Baconian lens, all of creation becomes a disenchanted mass of raw materials for a seamless process of scientific investigation and technological exploitation, and thus even the most notorious horrors of the Holocaust, such as Mengele’s experiments in making soap from human ashes, follow a certain logic already implicit in the Baconian worldview. Even when Aldous had warned about the dangerous risk presented by new technologies of enhancing the power of dictators or multiplying the damage that human beings could inflict upon the planet, he never extended his critique of applied science and technology to an anti-rational critique of science. While Aldous stated that the scientific worldview could describe only some aspects of reality and not others, he always held up the scientific method as a model not only of inquiry but also of morality. Reflecting this view, Aldous Huxley’s Pala is not a society that hides from the modern world; it is a society that is careful to import the

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best of what the modern world has to offer—namely, science, skepticism, improvements in medicine and agriculture—while assiduously excluding the worst. In explaining the small-scale economy of Pala, Dr. Robert MacPhail declares, “Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”65 And, as many of the various regimes of the postcolonial world were racing to industrialize, arm themselves, and placate their populations with the fruits of consumerism, Pala had hitherto managed, thanks to its lack of good ports and its relative isolation, to follow a different path. In Aldous Huxley’s unabridged manuscript of Island, the philosophical musings of Andrew MacPhail, presented in “Notes on What’s What,” are far more extensive and coherent. Aldous Huxley’s editors in London and New York worried that this material would weigh the book down with nonnarrative material and so, after conferring without his knowledge, they each wrote to Aldous and urged him to cut as much as possible of this material. Approaching the age of sixty-nine and weakened by his struggle with cancer, the author agreed to these radical cuts. Given Aldous Huxley’s continuous success as an essayist since the 1920s, as well as the ample precedent for long discursive interludes by novelists such as Melville and Dostoevsky, it seems that the aging author could have made a very sound case for keeping this material, but, eager as he was to see Island published before his death, he did not. This is very unfortunate, as the Old Raja’s musings, written in a direct and vernacular style, weigh lightly on the narrative frame of the novel in its unabridged form. However, the radically edited version of “Notes on What’s What” lacks coherence, leaving puzzling gaps that interrupt the flow of Island.66 The primary subject of the Raja’s musings is the amphibious nature of all human beings, especially as they seek to reconcile the symbols that they use to describe and understand the world with the infinitely more complex realities of their physical environment, as well as their own psychological and physiological dynamics. In the excised passages of Island, Aldous sought to address a number of issues that would become increasingly important to artists and liberal arts scholars in the decades following his death: our relationship to signs and symbols, our relationship to our ecological niche, and our understanding of our own consciousness. Concerning the theme of semiotics, the Old Raja reflects that language was the tool that empowered human beings to behave in ways many times nobler but also many times more debased than the behavior of any other species:

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Language accumulates and embalms knowledge. It also accumulates and embalms pseudo-knowledge which, when we act upon it, guarantees that everything we do shall be more or less completely inappropriate. Language relates individuals to their culture; but may relate them so devouringly that they lose the capacity to be spontaneously creative themselves. Language provides us all with a character and a persona; but the mask has a way of sticking to the face, the character overlays the temperament and if it is ill chosen (and how often the comedians miscast themselves!) clashes with what we congenitally are, so that we are forced to spend our best energies in an endless, pointless, utterly fruitless civil war. Such, then, is the word—father of science and charity, of heroism and art; only begetter of nonsense, cruelty and superstition.67

As the Old Raja sums it up in another passage from his little book, “Thanks to language, man is a creature praeternaturally intelligent, courageous, charitable. Thanks equally to language he is a creature praeternaturally stupid, fear-ridden and malignant.”68 According to “Notes on What’s What,” the human capacity for making symbols is among the sharpest and most dangerous of double-edged swords. Over the course of several generations following the time of Andrew MacPhail, this view comes to permeate Palanese culture, and the Palanese people’s methods for educating children are modeled on these precepts from the Old Raja’s musings. In a key passage, which was among those expurgated from the published version of Island, MacPhail exhorts the parents and teachers of Pala to “teach seeing before you teach reading. Teach hearing before you teach music. Teach t[a]sting along with table manners. Teach feeling every time you give the child a bath. Teach him, before he comes to gymnastics or dancing, to recognize the sensation of flexing a muscle, of drawing a breath, of letting go or making a voluntary movement.”69 At the heart of the Old Raja’s approach to education is an awareness of our tendency to invest our signs and symbols with greater importance than the things they were invented to represent. In exploring this theme, Aldous Huxley’s final novel reflects the emerging obsession with semiotics in contemporary literature and criticism, but the author’s concern with signs and symbols had deeper roots. In another unpublished passage from “Notes on What’s What,” Aldous connects the Old Raja’s educational philosophy to the Buddhist concept of namarupa, or name and form. Expanding on his vision for the education of children, Andrew MacPhail implores: “Teach them that individual things exist in their own right and are not merely concrete illustrations of abstract words. Teach them a little later about the creation of

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our human world by nama-rupa, name and form. Teach them too that things owe their thing-hood to the names we assign to the class of which they are members. Teach them that what is given is always a profusion of relationships, for which names do not exist or are woefully inadequate.”70 From this fundamental principle that signs and symbols are tools for understanding the world, and not values in themselves, the Old Raja develops the argument that a pragmatic and provisional approach to language is the best guard against fanaticism and the violence that it engenders: “Teach them, above all, to take no arrangement of words too seriously. It is fatally easy to kill in the name of a dogma; it is blessedly difficult to kill in the name of a minimum working hypothesis.”71 The phrase “minimum working hypothesis” first appeared in Aldous Huxley’s writings about religion during the Second World War. In an essay that he published for a volume entitled Vedanta and the West, edited by his friend Christopher Isherwood, Aldous argued that sentimental humanism and Wordsworthian nature worship both made very little progress in the field of advancing human charity, because they lacked a “minimum working hypothesis” to explain transcendent experiences.72 On the other hand, revealed religions offered explanations for such experiences that were too dogmatic and thus impeded progress in their own ways. Reframing religion as a variety of “research” comparable to science, Aldous argued that a minimum working hypothesis was essential to its progress. In addition to anticipating later discourse on semiotics, Island would also be a seminal text for the Deep Ecology wing of the environmental movement. Bill Deval and George Sessions cite Aldous Huxley’s last novel as a work that articulated the principles of Deep Ecology, before that movement had a name.73 When Deval and Sessions cite Island as a precursor to Deep Ecology, however, they leave out two elements of its social structure that are far more than incidental. The first of these is the regular use of psychedelic drugs or “moksha medicine” by the citizens of Island, at the behest of its educators and governors. While it is hardly surprising that Aldous Huxley made the state-sponsored chemical maintenance of its citizens a regular feature of his “bad utopia” in Brave New World, it is at least problematic that he made it such an essential element in his sketch of a good utopia. Granted, the properties of “moksha medicine” are not as anaesthetizing as soma is in Brave New World, but the regular recourse to “medicine,” as Aldous has his characters call it, implies a persistent sickness in the human condition that no reform of social structure, however enlightened, and no course of

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education, however enlightening, can hope to get rid of. This regular reliance on pharmaceutical aids to enlightenment also contradicts one of the basic teachings of Buddhism, the religious tradition that Aldous cites as the guiding philosophy of Pala, and that Deval and Sessions emphasize in their discussion of Island. The second element in Island almost universally overlooked by those who still praise the book as a blueprint for a better society is the strong emphasis not only on eugenics but on the government’s classification of citizens according to their physical type. Among his strongest admirers, Aldous Huxley’s continuing endorsement of eugenics in the postwar era tends for the most part to be ignored, along with other intellectual hobbyhorses that show up in his writings, such as his passionate endorsement of the Bates method for restoring sight, the Alexander method for improving coordination and personal well-being, and the system devised by William H. Sheldon for classifying human character types. In Island, Sheldon’s methods for identifying the psychological profiles of individuals based on their body types provides one of the unintentionally disturbing moments in this otherwise benign portrait of an ideal society. At one point Will Farnaby listens to a long explanation of the process the government of Pala follows in identifying potential troublemakers, and then applies a regimen of pharmaceutical control (“three pink capsules a day”) to those children who might become delinquents, before they can become a danger to the peace and tranquility of the island. In such moments, a cold and distinctly Orwellian wind blows through the trees in what for all intents and purposes looks like the perfect blueprint for an easygoing hippy commune in the South Pacific.74 For all of its considerable influence on the counterculture and environmental movements of the sixties and seventies, Island seems a book that remains only partially understood. Because the published text of Aldous Huxley’s last novel was so thoroughly expurgated, it is fair to say—over half a century after it hit the shelves—that an informed discussion of Island among readers and critics has yet to begin. Even though they had often disagreed openly over major issues, including war, the nature of progress, and the apparent promise of new technologies such as nuclear fission, Aldous and Julian Huxley remained in agreement about such fundamental problems as overpopulation, the threat posed by human activity to the biosphere, and the need to find a path for the development of human consciousness that could confront the same needs and questions addressed by the great religious traditions, unburdened by dogma or superstition. True to his

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amphibious vision of the human condition, Aldous would not embrace a Manichean worldview, pitting his philosophy against his brother’s. In fact, as they both grew older, he saw much more common ground between them. As self-described amphibians, Julian and Aldous shared a number of traits that were both rare and endangered in a world of ironclad ideologies and minute specialization. On the occasion of his brother’s sixty-eighth birthday, Aldous (who was already past sixty himself) wrote: Many happy and happier returns! Yes, it is hard to feel old, to be quite serieux, as the aging bourgeois ought to be! We both, I think, belong to the fortunate minority of human beings who enjoy the mental openness and elasticity of youth, while being able to enjoy the fruits of an already long experience. Why there should be so few of this sub-species of homo sapiens, or why the majority of men and women, and even adolescents should develop mental arterio-sclerosis forty or fifty years before they develop physical arterio-sclerosis is a great mystery. And yet the fact is obvious. Most people encapsulate themselves, shut up like oysters, and go through life barricaded against every idea, every fresh and unconceptualized impression.75

Although Aldous framed his description of these traits in biological terms, classing himself and his brother as part of “subspecies of homosapiens,” the hope that he held out for addressing this problem was not predicated on eugenics here, but on a more supple approach to thinking and teaching; the fundamental task at hand was to “learn how to teach children and adults to retain their openness. But the practical problem is as yet hardly considered by professional educators.”76 In the last nonfiction book to be published in his lifetime, Aldous wrote a response to C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures that stressed the possibility of integration. In Science and Literature, Aldous reasoned that the goal of science was to describe the physical universe in irreducibly public terms, while the very different but complementary goal of literature was to explore and describe the irreducibly private world of psychological and spiritual experience. As far as integrating the two cultures of science and literature, this was something that Aldous Huxley had been doing all his life. Precluded from pursuing a medical career by his early loss of eyesight, he had never abandoned his abiding interest in science or medicine. In her remembrance of Aldous Huxley written shortly after his death, Sybille Bedford recalls that while stacks of unsolicited literary journals sent to the Huxley home remained unread and even unopened, the only two journals that Aldous actually saw fit to read religiously throughout his life were Nature and The Lancet.77

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Aldous viewed the resistance to specialization and the maintenance of his broad array of interests as keys to his mental and spiritual youth. A great admirer of Goya, he was especially fond of a lithograph that the artist created in his old age. It depicted a very old man with a long beard walking with two canes below the caption Aun Aprendo (“I am still learning”). In a commencement address to the graduating class at the Happy Valley School in Ojai, California, on whose board he served as one of the founding directors along with his friends J. Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal, Aldous elaborated on this theme: The mystery of the premature hardening of the mental arteries would seem to be a special case of that more general mystery—the mystery of temperament, of inherited constitution, of original sin, as the theologians like to call it. But meanwhile there is something that can be done to postpone the onset of the disease. A steady will to go on learning, an effort to remain open and elastic—these will certainly be helpful. . . . Our purpose is to teach our students to wish to go on educating themselves. And for our graduates our valedictory wishes can be summed up in a single phrase: May you go on learning!78

As a writer who maintained a steady interest in the sciences, Aldous was in some ways the mirror image of his brother, a scientist who wrote and published poetry throughout his career while cultivating relationships with some of the most notable artists and architects of the twentieth century. In addition to sharing Aldous’s defiance of specialization, Julian invested the act of learning itself with a cosmic significance. In the late fifties he declared, “It is thus part of man’s destiny to be the necessary agent of the cosmos in understanding more of itself, in bearing witness to its wonder, beauty, and interest, in creating new aids to and mechanisms for existence, in experiencing itself, and so introducing the cosmos to more new and more valuable experiences.”79 Their shared commitment to remaining intellectual amphibians was probably made easier for Julian and Aldous by their initial inheritance of fame as Huxleys, and by the aristocratic aplomb that both of them, but especially Aldous, brought to the role. Although they flirted with many ideas that were far beyond the pale of both respectability and credibility by the specialized professions, they usually explored these ideas with such easygoing detachment that it was hard to dismiss their opinions, however surprising, as those of a crackpot or charlatan. Thus, Aldous could promote his ideas about parapsychology and mesmerism long after these ideas were no longer well received among scientists, and

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Julian could endorse the ideas of Father Teilhard de Chardin without sullying his immaculate reputation as an atheist. In spite of their disagreements in the thirties and forties about the nature of progress and the efficacy of pacifism, Julian clearly remained convinced that he and Aldous had essentially the same views about the body of ideas that would eventually coalesce into what would be called the human potential movement in the seventies and eighties.80 When he invited Aldous to contribute an essay to an upcoming volume he was editing called The Humanist Frame, Julian wrote: “I take it you would agree that the potentialities of man—his unrealized possibilities—are the strongest possible motive for action in a humanist frame. One should make clear in a broad way the appalling extent to which human possibilities are now not realized and end up with very exciting suggestions as to new possibilities and ways of realizing them.”81 Although the somewhat imperious way in which the elder Huxley made these suggestions might well have irked his younger brother, the writings of Aldous Huxley throughout the postwar era indicate that he agreed with Julian about the primacy of these goals, even if they often disagreed about the means of attaining them. After Aldous’s death from cancer in the autumn of 1963, Julian’s public statements on the relationship of our species to the rest of life on earth would reflect his deepening respect for his younger brother’s insights. Aldous passed away quietly on Friday, November 22. Although he had been in considerable physical pain, he asked for a reduction in opiate pain medicine in the last days of his life. From his deathbed, he wrote out a request for an injection of LSD. This was administered by Laura Archera Huxley after her consultation with Dr. Max Cutler. His remains were cremated the following morning without ceremony. That Sunday, at the suggestion of his son, Matthew, Laura invited Christopher Isherwood and a few other close friends to the house for tea. In his memory they retraced the walk that Aldous had taken every day for as long as he had been able. Aldous’s favorite thinking walk stretched along the canyon north of Mulholland Drive to “the tree-lined reservoir that he had called the Lake.”82 A more formal service would take place in England. At the Society of Friends Meeting House in London on December 17, 1963, Julian Huxley gathered Aldous Huxley’s family, friends, and acquaintances together to remember him. The list of guests was illustrious, including Kenneth Clark, Stephen Spender, and Yehudi Menuhin, who played the Bach Chaconne for the assembled mourners.83

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Convinced that the obituary in the London Times had not adequately reflected Aldous’s life and achievements, Julian wrote to the paper five days after his death, stating: “I feel that you did not do full justice to the scope of his mind and spirit. Besides being a brilliant and many sided man of letters, he possessed an extraordinary range of knowledge in the diverse fields of science and medicine, music, art, and architecture, and had achieved a comprehensive and indeed prophetic vision of existence.”84 To present a more complete account of his brother’s life and achievements, Julian put together a memorial volume over the course of the next several months. Published in 1964, the book features essays of remembrance by Aldous’s friends across several decades, including T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Victoria Ocampo, and Isaiah Berlin. As an intellectual historian, Berlin discussed the profound and liberating influence of Aldous Huxley’s early novels on the generation that came of age during the 1920s. Huxley’s powerful influence during that decade was acknowledged even by his harshest critics, but the importance of his work after his move to California was less widely appreciated, especially in Britain. For Berlin, however, the work that Aldous did in the second half of his life was no less significant than his work in the twenties and thirties. He declared that Aldous had been a visionary artist and thinker on the “frontier between the old astrology that was passing and the new astronomy that was beginning in the sciences of man.”85 Of course, Julian had spent much of his life exploring the same territory, from the vantage point of the sciences. In the early 1970s, Laura Archera Huxley highlighted the common interest that Julian and Aldous had in the innate potential of our species: “Both Aldous and Julian have, through different routes . . . contributed to the ennoblement of the human race and to its becoming conscious of its immense potentialities for intelligence, wellbeing and compassion.”86 As Julian and Aldous Huxley had each sought to integrate the practice of science and religion, their deeper goal was to integrate the individual human aspirations, such as curiosity and faith, that had given rise to science and religion in the first place. Julian Huxley’s efforts to popularize science had been aimed, throughout his career, at arresting the growing divergence between science and human concerns in public discourse. In a spirited response to the pessimism expressed by C. P. Snow in “The Two Cultures,” Julian observed that the real implications of science were widely misrepresented: A common reproach to the present age is its too scientific character, leading to man’s feeling himself not only small and helpless in a vast, inhuman cosmos, but alien to it. The ideological answer to that I have already indicated—

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man is not alien to the cosmos, but, by way of evolving life, a direct product of it. Neither is he so small or helpless. As a recent writer has pointed out, he is just about mid-way on the scale of size between an atom and a star. And he has more knowledge and more control of his environment than anything else of which we know.87

This instinctive defiance of contemporary anomie had its roots in the Victorian age. As Julian wrote of his grandfather: “His life reminds us that even in these modern days of specialization it is still possible to be a whole man, to cultivate every aspect of life: moral, emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, social, and political; still possible to be a whole man, not merely a professional specialist, however eminent.”88 In this respect Julian and Aldous, for all their differences, were both stewards of the same family tradition. For all of the dramatic changes that they both witnessed in the twentieth century, Julian and Aldous Huxley were wrestling with a very old set of problems in their attempts to negotiate and perhaps to reconcile the chiasmus of apparent opposites: humanity and nature, science and religion. Humans have always wrestled with the natural world around them, and within themselves they have always struggled to reconcile those things that they know as cold, hard facts with the more delicate substance of their aspirations and beliefs. Nearly a century after his grandfather published On the Origin of Species, the physicist Sir Charles Galton Darwin published a little volume entitled The Next Million Years, in which he attempted to predict the long-term future of the human race. In perhaps the book’s most memorable phrase he bluntly stated, “Man is wild animal.” Because human beings would never submit themselves to the strict selective breeding that had led to the creation of domesticated animals, the human race, in spite of the trappings of civilization, could not truly be described as domesticated. And because the human race is apparently unwilling to shape its own evolution in the same manner by which it has shaped the evolution of domestic species, it must submit to the Malthusian logic that rules the evolution of wild animals.89 Aldous praised The Next Million Years as “an interesting little book,” but disagreed with its broad conclusions: This is a rather gloomy point of view and I don’t think it is entirely justified. Sir Charles [Galton] Darwin does not give credit to the human race for the extraordinary amount of ingenuity it has and its ability to get out of the tight corners which it gets itself into, and perhaps he does not give credit to the human race for its exceptional toughness. The human species is probably the toughest species of all animals. It can exist in every conceivable kind of

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environment, and it can stand the most appalling strains and stresses, apparently better than almost any other species. Therefore it may be that this longrange view, which has certain philosophical justifications, may prove to be wrong, owing to the remarkable capacity of man to spring surprises.90

One of the surprises that Aldous hoped the human race might spring in the near future would be to end what he had described in Ape and Essence as the essentially parasitic relationship between industrial civilization and the rest of life on planet earth. By the end of the 1960s, this concern came to dominate Julian’s thinking as well, as he parted with much of the glib technological optimism that had characterized his writing in earlier decades. In the wake of the international sensation caused by the first moon landing in the summer of 1969, Julian Huxley joined his longtime friend and colleague Max Nicholson in issuing a joint statement published in the London Times: By briefly visiting the moon man has won, at some expense, a clearer insight into his earthly environment. Besides the moon’s naked inanimate lithosphere of mineral substances, the earth supports a realm of living creatures, plant and animal, which is gradually becoming known as the biosphere. Emerging from that living layer, the human species has quite lately begun to create, as Teilhard de Chardin pointed out, an intangible but even more significant noosphere, or realm of human feelings and ideas. This agency of psychosocial change is steadily evolving toward greater universality and continuity all the time.91

Whereas Aldous Huxley had implicitly dismissed the idea of putting humans on the moon as irrelevant to the real problems of life on earth, Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson saw the photographs of the earth that the Apollo missions generated as invaluable for the new perspective they gave to the human race. This was an opinion shared by many environmental activists in the United States, most notably Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand.92 And yet, even though Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson hailed the creation of the “technosphere” that had made the Apollo missions possible, they also warned that industrial-scale technology had “acquired a life of its own. By creating it man has reached the moon, but through his Frankenstein tendency to let it outrun his powers of forethought and control he has imperiled the welfare of the earth and his own tenure on it.”93 When one considers the tenor of the warning that Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson issued in the fall of 1969, it seems apparent that Julian had come to embrace some of his late brother’s deep reservations about the nature of vast

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figure 10. “Il faut cultiver notre oasis.” Earthrise, 1968. Photograph by NASA.

technological projects such as the U.S.-Soviet space race. Given the relative elasticity of Aldous’s mind, however, there is a fair chance that if he had lived to see the first photographs of the earth from space, he would have also reckoned them worth the cost. More than any other photograph from the twentieth century, the image of the earth rising over a barren lunar landscape confirms Aldous Huxley’s favorite dictum: “Il faut cultiver notre oasis.” The ethos that unified the lives of Julian and Aldous Huxley might best be expressed by E. M. Forster’s simple maxim “Only connect.” The two brothers were driven by a common passion to do exactly that. Each struggled to preserve the vital connections between science, religion, and the arts in an era driven by specialization. Julian Huxley’s project of creating a secular religion based on the ongoing discoveries of

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science was his attempt to infuse a new dynamism into the realm of religion and to transcend the misguided dualism between matter and spirit that he saw as fueling the “war” between science and religion. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian and apocalyptic novels, Brave New World and Ape and Essence, showed how the modern fetish for compartmentalization, and especially the separation of science from ethics, threatened nothing less than the destruction of the human race. Perhaps because evolution has programmed our species to respond to fear, the dystopian tropes of Aldous Huxley’s fiction have had a far greater impact on our thought and culture than Julian Huxley’s vision of a new religion that would embrace the methods and values of science. On the other hand, some of the more radical concepts that Julian articulated in his lifetime, such as the idea of self-directed evolution, or Transhumanism, have found a growing number of influential adherents in the twenty-first century.

Epilogue The Future of Our Species

Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. —Ophelia to the King, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

The physicist Niels Bohr loved to quote an “old Danish proverb” that “prediction is always difficult, especially of the future.”1 In contrast to twentieth-century “futurists” such as Alvin Toffler, Julian and Aldous Huxley were not in the habit of making specific predictions about future trends and events. On the occasions that they did, their record was mixed. Although they foresaw the power of Homo sapiens to radically change the biosphere through pollution, radiation, and the creation of transgenic species, their essays and speculative fiction did not discern the emerging trend of climate change through the widespread combustion of fossil fuels, even though some of their contemporaries anticipated this phenomenon. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the value of meditating on the future of our species consists primarily in the production of forecasts. While making grand predictions is an invitation to arrogance, the quiet contemplation of the possible demands humility and hope. At their best, Julian and Aldous Huxley were humble in their claims to knowledge and hopeful in their outlook. Their fundamental goal was not to predict the future, but to offer us a sharper sense of the stunning possibilities latent in the present. For all of their differences, both brothers possessed the same synergistic combination of wonder and skepticism that their grandfather had hailed as the driving force behind the advance of science. Beyond this common trait, they also shared a common insight. Each foresaw that the scientific revolution and the technologies it yielded would change 177

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much more than our understanding of where we had come from and our place in nature. In the long run, and in ways that no one could predict, science and technology would change who we are. This intimation had some precedent. In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon had used the fable of The New Atlantis to illustrate his conviction that the human condition could be transformed for the better in a society committed to scientific research. After the Darwinian revolution, however, a growing number of intellectuals began to approach the problem from the other way round, arguing that society could not make progress until the human beings who composed it were systematically improved. For T. H. Huxley’s friend and colleague Sir Francis Galton, this meant breeding people for intelligence and general fitness the same way we breed domesticated species—a practice that he called eugenics. In Evolution and Ethics, T. H. Huxley attacked eugenics, reasoning that such an approach to love and marriage, and to the treatment of the sick and infirm, would strike at the heart of those sentiments of empathy and compassion that are the binding substance of any human society. For precisely the same reasons, he also rejected the fundamental premise of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, that we should apply an ethos of “survival of the fittest” to human affairs.2 In spite of such critiques, Galton’s idea of eugenics continued to gather influential adherents. One factor here was a broad shift in the scientific consensus about the nature of heredity. An older generation of reformers had used the logic of Lamarckian evolution to argue that human beings raised in an improved environment would pass on improved traits to future generations. However, when the research of August Weismann discredited the Lamarckian premise that acquired traits could be heritable, the pendulum swung with a vengeance from nurture back toward nature.3 The vogue for eugenics enjoyed a growing influence among liberal reformers in the early twentieth century, including the most outspoken and influential son of T. H. Huxley. Rejecting the arguments of his father, Leonard Huxley would embrace eugenics, publishing a treatise in 1926 titled Progress and the Unfit that called for policies of forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” and even for the euthanasia of premature infants.4 H. G. Wells, who had been one of T. H. Huxley’s students at Imperial College in London, not only embraced eugenics but contemplated more radical methods for improving humanity. In his 1895 essay “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” Wells declared: “We overlook only too often that the living being may be regarded as raw material, as something

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plastic, something that may be shaped and altered . . . and the organism as a whole developed far beyond its apparent possibilities.”5 Writing more than a half-century before the discovery of DNA, Wells sketched a very crude approach to altering living organisms, including performing surgical grafting on human beings, although he did not presume that any new traits created in this fashion would be heritable. The precedent that Wells set at the turn of the century would light the way for scientists such as J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal to further explore the plasticity of the human body and brain in their writings soon after the First World War. While Haldane’s Daedalus, or Science and the Future extolled the virtues of ectogenesis and anticipated genetic engineering, J. D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil explored the possibility of merging the human brain directly with machines, foreshadowing the concept of the “cyborg” (short for cybernetic organism) coined by the inventor Manfred E. Clynes and the physician Nathan S. Kline in the early 1960s.6 This gradual but tectonic shift from reforming society to reshaping human beings themselves had been intuited by the author Robert Louis Stevenson in his late Victorian fable “The Four Reformers.” As a group of utopian reformers discuss which institution to abolish first, debating the relative merits of doing away with law, property, marriage, and religion, one settles the argument by declaring boldly that their first goal should be “to abolish mankind.”7 In a fundamental way, this story says something about the broad trajectory of Julian and Aldous Huxley in the twentieth century. Both began their careers as public intellectuals with a liberal faith in the ability to solve human problems by reforming human institutions. While they never abandoned that creed entirely, the emphasis of their vision shifted, like that of Stevenson’s reformers, toward the transformation of human beings themselves. Julian would call this self-directed evolution Transhumanism, while Aldous, stressing the element of consciousness, would frame it more broadly as a search for new “human potentialities.” Julian’s promotion of Transhumanism during the 1950s exercised a discernible influence on the pioneers of the movement to enhance the human brain and body through science and technology. In 1965, the popular science writer D. S. Halacy published an introduction to the concept of cyborg technology, which was then being seriously explored as a future aspect of space travel, and cited Julian Huxley’s concept of the transhuman as an apt term for “a superior being aware of his potential and able to work toward it because of his knowledge.”8 Inspired in

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part by Aldous Huxley, the psychologist and philosopher Abraham Maslow also employed the term “transhuman” to describe exemplary forms of what he called “self-actualization” through greater awareness. However, the more technologically oriented use of the term would become predominant in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Less than a decade after Julian’s death, intersecting developments in a variety of new technologies began to make the idea of self-directed human evolution more plausible. In 1984, the author Thomas Pynchon observed the potential of several new technologies to coalesce and transform the human condition: “If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come . . . when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge.” Pynchon warned that the transformations wrought by this convergence “will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed.”9 While Pynchon expressed a bemused sense of apprehension about what lay ahead, others would welcome the possibility of our self-transformation through technology with unmitigated enthusiasm. When Julian Huxley first coined the term “Transhumanism” in 1951, he was affixing the suffix -ism to a word root that had its origins in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. In grandiose terms, Julian declared that, “the truth of the transhumanist approach and its central conception is larger and more universal than any previous truth.” Transhumanism was “bound in the long run to supersede lesser, more partial, or more distorted truths, such as Marxism, or Christian theology, or liberal individualism,” though it might “assimilate those of their elements that are relevant to itself.”10 In the late 1980s, the Iranian American futurist F. M. Esfandiary (having adopted the futuristic nom de guerre FM-2030) published his definitive manifesto in favor of technological enhancement, Are You a Transhuman?11 Although FM-2030 would die before the dawn of the new millennium, his promotion of Transhumanism bore fruit. By the late 1990s, as the Internet made it more possible than ever before for like-minded individuals to form ad hoc communities across national boundaries, the Transhumanist movement further coalesced with the founding of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in 1998. At the same time, the goals of human enhancement through genetic engineering and other new technologies came to be advocated by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, the affluent inventor Ray Kurzweil, and the Harvard biologist George Church.12 The movement also inspired criticism. In the spring of 2011, the Catholic intellectual Fabrice Hadjadj gave an address at UNESCO

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headquarters in Paris concerning what he saw as the great moral question of our time. For Hadjadj, that question revolved around the meaning of a single term, Transhumanism. Aware that he was speaking at the headquarters of an institution that Julian Huxley had helped to found, Hadjadj aimed his critique directly at Julian’s vision for the future of our species. Juxtaposing Dante’s coining of the verb transumunar to describe his ascent to Paradise in The Divine Comedy with Julian Huxley’s concept, Hadjadj framed these two visions of transcending the human condition as diametrically opposed: It is the very definition of man that is at stake in our encounter. And therefore the very future of man. Man is seeking something beyond. He is transhuman by nature. But how is the “trans” of the transhuman realized? With culture and openness to the transcendent? Or with technology and genetic manipulation? . . . So then, here is my simple question: should we take Julian Huxley as our guide, or should we take Dante? Is the greatness of man in the technical facility to live? Or is it in this laceration, in this openness that is like a cry to Heaven, in this appeal to what really transcends us?13

Although the Transhumanist movement that disturbed Hadjadj was named by Julian Huxley, it would be facile to credit or blame him for its existence. Even if Julian Huxley had not speculated after World War I about the possible advantages of technologically altering human heredity, or coined the term “Transhumanism” in the 1950s, the broader cultural and technological trends of the twentieth century would most likely have proceeded on the same course. For example, the widespread popularity of cosmetic surgery and psychoactive drugs across the industrialized world stands as evidence that large numbers of human beings, given the means, are eager to alter their bodies and brains. Steady advances in genomics, bioelectronics, and pharmaceuticals suggest that our descendants will, in the not too distant future, have the option to make more fundamental changes. In light of the impact that these shifts in technology and culture are likely to have on our species, the lifelong dialogue between Julian and Aldous Huxley is remarkable not only for its prescience but also for its sense of depth. Their nuanced explorations of what it means to be human, now and in the future, did more than treat the human condition as an engineering problem. While contemporary discussions of Transhumanism frequently stress the augmentation of human cognition, strength, and longevity through technological means, Julian and Aldous Huxley framed the question of what our species may become in the

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most fundamental terms. Employing paradigms from ancient mystical traditions as well as the emerging science of ecology, Julian and Aldous Huxley called for a broad expansion of human consciousness, concerning not only our potential as a species but also our place within a vast, complex, and interdependent web of life. Like many other utopian stirrings with a strong technological component, the contemporary Transhumanist movement has tended to view technology through the prism of its desire to achieve control over nature—this time human nature. Aldous Huxley was especially eloquent when he warned that attempts to control human nature could lead to a dismal dead end for the human race. But he was not alone in that assessment. In December 1931, a few months before the publication of Brave New World, Winston Churchill published his essay “Fifty Years Hence” in The Strand. Soon reprinted for American readers in the pages of Popular Mechanics, Churchill’s essay mused on such possibilities as nuclear energy, as well as meat generated from tissue cultures instead of livestock. Anticipating a key element of Brave New World, Churchill opined that unscrupulous governments might expand upon such developments in applied biology and one day mass-produce their citizens “under glass” so as to generate workers with strong muscles and weak minds. Condemning this idea outright, the conservative MP argued that it was something that “Christian civilization” would never countenance, though such practices might emerge, Churchill speculated, in totalitarian societies such as Stalin’s Soviet Union.14 From a far more secular perspective, Bertrand Russell sounded his own warning that powerful state or industrial interests might use the life sciences to reshape the human mind and body for their own ends. In the closing pages of The Scientific Outlook (1931), Russell observed that the originally poetic motives of science had now been eclipsed by the will to power: “Science in its beginnings was due to men who were in love with the world. They perceived the beauty of the stars and the sea, of the winds and the mountains.” Russell lamented that “as science has developed, the impulse of love which gave it birth has been increasingly thwarted, while the impulse of power, which was at first a mere campfollower, has gradually usurped command in virtue of its unforeseen success.”15 Echoing T. H. Huxley’s argument in Evolution and Ethics, Russell alluded to a higher moral sense in human beings, the function of which was to check the base will to power that we retained from our ancestors. Because science and technology placed so much power in the hands of human beings, the old will to power—now grossly overfed—

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threatened to crowd out such traits as love and wonder that had required centuries of civilization to nurture and develop. Surveying the dangers posed by this newly expansive will to power, Russell called for a “new moral outlook” that would liberate science from the quest for mere material advantage and reaffirm “respect for what is best in man.” In the absence of such respect, he warned, “scientific technique is dangerous.” On the other hand, if science can reclaim its original sense of awe and reverence for the beauty of nature, both human and nonhuman, it has the power to liberate man “from bondage to the slavish part of himself. The dangers exist, but they are not inevitable, and hope for the future is at least as rational as fear.”16 Shortly after his younger brother’s death, Julian Huxley praised Aldous as “the greatest humanist of our perplexed era” because he exemplified the very ethos that Russell called for here. Aldous had “used his gifts to . . . keep alight humanity’s sense of responsibility for its own and the world’s destiny” and to lend new power to “its belief in itself and its vast unexplored potentialities.”17 The amphibian metaphor favored by Julian and Aldous Huxley speaks to both of these themes. In the self-transformations that constitute the amphibian life cycle, the Huxley brothers saw a living symbol of our potential to transform ourselves, both as individuals and as a species. In the twenty-first century, environmental historians such as Charles C. Mann have pointed to this very capacity for “behavioral plasticity” as the last best hope for Homo sapiens.18 The survival of amphibians has become precarious because of a growing list of environmental catastrophes, and our own species faces significant dangers as well. It seems a safe bet that both of the Huxley brothers would have regarded contemporary warnings about amphibian decline in the present with the same seriousness with which they both responded to Silent Spring half a century ago. But beyond serving as a canary in the coal mine whose greater sensitivity to environmental threats acts as an early-warning system, the humble amphibian has also been a powerful muse—a living source of inspiration that offers to free us, at least for a time, from the man-made obsessions that threaten to consume our world. In the spring of 1946, as the Cold War was ramping up and the United States was preparing to conduct its first peacetime atomic bomb tests in the South Pacific, George Orwell was sojourning on the remote Scottish island of Jura to compose his own dystopian classic, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although his mind was saturated with the horrors of the human present and its possible future, he still took time to admire the

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seasonal bacchanal of our amphibian kin. In “Thoughts on the Common Toad” he wrote: How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating . . . and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.19

Aware of the horror and stupidity that plagues our civilization and threatens our very existence, Orwell nonetheless delighted in “watching the toads mating” and in sensing the approach of spring. This was the same sort of earthy inspiration that had spoken to Julian since childhood, and that he fought to protect with his conservation work across the world. This was the muse that Aldous had dubbed our “cicada sense” and that he felt might save our species—if only we would pause to hear it—around us and within ourselves. This turn toward the muse of wilderness, both without and within, broke with the worldview that their paternal grandfather had articulated with such confidence. In the last decade of the Victorian era, T. H. Huxley presented a moral cosmology in Evolution and Ethics that was conceived in the image of empire itself, with the human race subduing and “colonizing” the amoral realm of nature. The catastrophes of the twentieth century ultimately compelled both of the Huxley brothers to abandon this cast of thinking. In an era of total warfare, exponentially more powerful armaments, and growing environmental devastation, the moral paradigm that had informed that Victorian vision of our place in nature was now irrevocably inverted. Whereas T. H. Huxley had conceived of human civilization as a sheltered garden in the midst of a threatening wilderness, it now seemed that the rare flower requiring vigilant protection was the wilderness itself, and that human civilization had come to embody the menacing constellation of forces outside the garden wall.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to countless individuals for their support in the completion of this project, but this selected list will have to suffice. The shortcomings in this manuscript are of course all mine, but whatever merits it may have owe something to the help I have received from so many people. I would like to thank Charlie Capper, Arianne Chernock, William Keylor, Jon Roberts, and Edward Rafferty for their advice and support in the earliest days of this project. I also thank Charles Dellheim and James T. Dutton, both of whom helped guide me through my Ph.D. work at Boston University; Bron Taylor, for taking an interest in this project and for introducing me to so many Huxley scholars; Laura Huxley, for sharing her memories of Aldous—and for her inspiration and advice; Dana Sawyer, for his remarkable kindness and for his insights into the life and work of Aldous Huxley; my colleague and friend Robert Wexelblatt, for his warm encouragement and brilliant advice; my friend Jacob Darwin Hamblin, for introducing me to so many emerging scholars of Cold War science and political activism; my friend Roger Eardley-Prior (one of those emerging scholars), for sharing his discoveries concerning the Menton Statement and its connection to Julian Huxley; Jens Boel and Mahmoud Ghander at the UNESCO archives in Paris, for their help and hospitality; the staff at Fondren Library at Rice University, for being so patient and helpful; the helpful librarians at UCLA Special Collections, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Reading, and the Zoological Society of London, 185

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for the same; and the Center for the Humanities at Boston University, for its generous support with travel expenses and licensing fees connected to the publication of this book. For the images in this book, I would also like to thank the M. C. Escher Foundation, the Regents of the University of California, the National Portrait Gallery (London), NASA, and Wikimedia Commons. Portions of this manuscript were published in Environmental Histories of the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010), the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (2011), and the Aldous Huxley Annual (2014). In each case I would like to thank the editors and publishers of those editions for their kind permission to reprint those sections appearing here. My sincere thanks go out to J. R. McNeill and Corinna Unger at the German Historical Institute; to David Lazar at Cambridge University Press; to Bron Taylor at the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture; and to Bernfied Nügel at the Aldous Huxley Annual. I would also like to thank my late parents, Rupert J. Deese and Helen Deese, for being such exemplary amphibians, and my wife, Isadora, for helping me survive all the phases of this project with her patience, wisdom, and compassion. Finally, I would like to thank my three inquisitive, rambunctious, and vital sons, Nick, Charlie, and Leo, for whacking me, every day, out of my abstractions and back into the rough-andtumble of life on earth.

Notes

introduction 1. Yogi Berra, The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said! (New York: Workman, 1998), 118. 2. Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942). 3. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 71. 4. P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000), 17–18. 5. Julian Huxley, “Transhumanism,” in New Bottles for New Wine (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 14. 6. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1922), 50. 7. Julian Huxley, “The Tissue Culture King,” Yale Review, April 1926; repr. in Amazing Stories, August 1927. 8. Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964). 9. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 48. 10. For an excellent discussion of Aldous Huxley’s influence on the human potential movement in post–World War II California, see Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 11. For a selection of essays by a range of contemporary thinkers on Transhumanism, see Max More and Natasha Vita-More, eds., The Transhumanist Reader (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). To keep abreast of current discourse among advocates of Transhumanism, visit the website of Humanity + (formerly the World Transhumanist Association) at http://humanityplus.org/. 187

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12. In a conversation recalled by Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley advised, “Become a cheerleader for evolution. That’s what I did and my Grandfather before me.” Huxley quoted in David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (New York: Anchor, 1991), 354. More than a decade after her husband’s death, Juliette Huxley included the “so busy trying to be a Huxley” quip in her memoir, and ascribed it to the popular author Jerrard Tickell. Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree (Topsfield, MA: Salem House, 1986), 205. 13. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of “Huxleyan” in 1889, and also includes this 1909 use of the term from The Meaning of Truth by William James: “Your genuine truth-lover must discourse in huxleyan [sic] heroics, and feel as if truth, to be real truth, ought to bring eventual messages of death to all our satisfactions.” 14. T. H. Huxley. “Evolution and Ethics,” Romanes Lecture, 1893, in T. H. and Julian Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943 (London: Pilot Press, 1947). 15. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911). 16. Julian Huxley, The Conservation of Wildlife and Habitats in Central and East Africa (Paris: UNESCO, 1961). 17. Julian Huxley, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 154. 18. Julian Huxley, “Biology, the Individual, and the State,” Rice Institute public lecture, probably from 1916, in Box 57, Folder 6(d), Julian Huxley Papers, Fondren Library, Woodson Research Center, Rice University, Houston, TX (hereafter, Julian Huxley Papers). In this lecture, Julian elaborates further on the role he believes that social living has played in human evolution: “What was it that caused this higher form of mind to arise in one branch, while in the other it never came? . . . The answer can scarcely be doubtful: the enlarged and perfected mind arose as a direct result of community-life. . . . Darwin himself confessed that the altruistic instincts of man were a great stumbling-block to him; but if we believe that community life came before the final upward mental development that changed man’s ancestor into man—if we believe that this mental development was the product of the community life, then the whole matter becomes as clear as day.” 19. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 79. 20. Lysenkoism was the doctrine promoted by Trofim Lysenko and favored by Stalin that environmentally acquired traits could be inherited. For example, Lysenko argued that exposing seed stocks to refrigeration produced new crop strains that could thrive in colder climates. For Julian Huxley’s full critique of Lysenkoism, see Julian Huxley, Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949). 21. Julian Huxley, with Alfred C. Haddon, We Europeans, A Survey of “Racial” Problems, with a Chapter on Europe Overseas by A. M. Carr-Saunders (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935). In the 1930s Julian Huxley was among the most outspoken critics of the intra-European “race” theory of the Nazis, but his own views on race and ethnicity retained a regrettable bias, especially against people of African descent, that he had exhibited since at least the 1920s. 22. Julian Huxley, What Dare I Think? (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931); idem, If I Were Dictator (New York: Harper & Bros., 1934).

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23. Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells, Reshaping Man’s Heritage (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1944), 5. 24. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address,” January 17, 1961, Eisenhower Presidential Library, http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/ online_documents/farewell_address.html (accessed May 31, 2014). 25. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 5. 26. In his 1927 book Religion without Revelation, Julian Huxley describes an epiphany he had in Colorado Springs that began his drive to create a secular religion based on the principles of evolution. Here he reaffirms the declaration of the Victorian scientist and liberal politician John Morley that “the next great task of science will be to create a religion for humanity.” Julian Huxley, Religion without Revelation (New York: Harper & Bros., 1927), 82. 27. Julian Huxley, “New Bottles for New Wine: Ideology and Scientific Knowledge,” in New Bottles for New Wine, 126. 28. T. H. Huxley, “The Comtist Utopia,” Fraser’s Magazine 80 (July 1869), 2. 29. Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy (New York: Public Affairs Press, 1947), 13. 30. Tim LaHaye, Mind Siege: The Battle for Truth (New York: Thomas Nelson, 2003), 83. 31. For Julian, the habit of speculating about the moral and philosophical meaning of evolution, though almost universal among his grandfather’s generation, would put him profoundly out of step with the professional culture of twentieth-century biology, especially after 1945. See Michael Ruse, The Philosophy of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 112. 32. Julian Huxley, Memories, Vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 181. Julian Huxley’s autobiography indicates elsewhere that this unnamed “former colleague” was the historian Sir Ernest Baker: “He and I had previously quarreled over my attitude toward established religion when I was professor of biology at King’s College, London, of which he was Principal. . . . I scented trouble, rightly suspecting that he would attack my pamphlet.” Ibid., 2:16. 33. Victor Dorn to Julian Huxley, December 6, 1946, UNESCO Archives. 34. Huxley, UNESCO, 45. 35. Kate Kellaway, “How the Observer Brought the WWF into Being.” Guardian, November 7, 2010. 36. Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson, “Problems of Man’s Deteriorating Environment,” London Times, October 7, 1969, Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson Papers, in Julian Huxley Papers. 37. Menton Statement, 1970–71, text in English and other languages, Fellowship of Reconciliation Records, Collection, DG 13, Section II, Box 2. 38. Juliette Huxley, The Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 234. 39. Gary Werskey, The Visible College (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1978), 54. 40. Aldous Huxley, introductory essay to Complete Etchings of Goya (New York: Crown, 1943), reprinted in Collected Essays (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), 161.

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41. Laura Archera Huxley, interview with the author, Los Angeles, July 2, 2006. 42. Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 74–75. 43. Regarding wind power, Aldous wrote to Julian in December of 1946: “The most obvious power source hitherto inadequately exploited is wind. I gather that the experimental wind turbine which has been producing fifteen hundred kilowatts in Maine has proved entirely satisfactory. If scientists genuinely want to contribute to peace and well being, they can collectively and intensively consider the yet more efficient development of such wind turbines.” Aldous Huxley, Letters, ed. Grover Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 557. 44. Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace (New York: Harper & Bros., 1946), 1. The original source for this quote was Tolstoy’s essay “Modern Science,” published in New Age, no. 31 (March 1898). 45. Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace, 1. 46. Ibid., 57, 69. 47. Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, 161–67. 48. Aldous Huxley, “The Greatest Threat to Liberty,” in Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (London: Allan Wingate, 1949); repr. in the UNESCO Courier, no. 10 (October 1958), 4–5. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Aldous Huxley, “The Double Crisis,” UNESCO Courier, April 1949. 51. Julian Huxley, Preface to Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 20. 52. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Mariner Books, 2002), 296. 53. Isaiah Berlin in Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, 149. 54. “Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal.” C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942; repr., San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001), 37. 55. Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D., Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (New York: Rodale Books, 2004). 56. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 362.

chapter 1 1. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1983), 172. 2. William Irvine, Apes, Angels, and Victorians (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 306. 3. Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973; repr., Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 2. 4. The London Times noted, “Huxley had a rare power of winning the regard and affection of his pupils, and many of them, unknown to fame, came to do him reverence.” “Unveiling of the Huxley Memorial,” Times, April 30, 1900, 12. 5. Ibid. The assassination attempt had occurred on April 4, 1900. 6. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 4. 7. Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, May 1908, Letters, 26–27.

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8. Julian Huxley, Memories, Vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 71. According to Julian’s son Francis Huxley, the “beauteous K.” was a young woman named Katherine Fordham, who later described Julian as “really unmarriagable.” Francis Huxley, introduction to May Sarton, Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 14. 9. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:70–71. 10. Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002), 31. 11. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:97–102. 12. Ibid., 102. 13. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 61–62. 14. Ibid., 63. 15. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:70. 16. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 111. 17. Ibid., 83. 18. Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1968), 117. 19. Juliette Huxley, The Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 141–42. 20. Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 426. 21. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 105, 295. 22. Francis Huxley, introduction, 14. 23. In a brief review of her 1958 memoir, A Political Virgin, the editors of the Saturday Review noted: “Viola was an organizer. Inspired by her visit to Germany with Goebbels, she founded the American Youth Congress which she says was ‘snatched away’ from her by the Communists.” Saturday Review 41 (1958). Although she cultivated ties with liberal leaders such as Eleanor Roosevelt, authorities in the White House were at one point alarmed by unconfirmed rumors of pro-Axis espionage. Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2001), 193. 24. Juliette Huxley, The Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 137. 25. Ibid., 163. 26. Aldous Huxley, Island (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 86. 27. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (New York: Doubleday Doran & Co., 1928), 160. 28. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1922), 50. 29. J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1930). 30. Aldous Huxley, Island, 107–10. 31. Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making the “Man of Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. 32. T. H. Huxley. “Evolution and Ethics,” 42. 33. A good example of such an unforeseen consequence is the rabbit infestation that took over Australia as a result of the very effort to transplant English flora and fauna that T.  H Huxley idealizes here. In a classic example of

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“ecological breakout,” rabbits proliferated in Australia in a way that they never had in Britain, where local predators had kept their numbers in check. “The greatest rabbit invasion took place in Australia. . . . [A] squatter named Thomas Austin successfully introduced rabbits in Victoria in 1859. . . . By 1870, rabbits were a pest in much of the country. . . . Western Australia built a 2,100-kilometer fence from 1902 to 1907 to safeguard the wool clip, then Australia’s most valuable export. But rabbits easily breached this Maginot line, latterly called the ‘bunny fence,’ and munched their way across the country.” McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 254. 34. Rosalind Williams, The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 35. T. H. Huxley, American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology (New York: D. Appleton, 1877), 124. Some of T. H. Huxley’s countrymen took a dimmer view of the emerging American empire, though, like Huxley, they viewed its ascendancy as enmeshed in the dynamics of biological evolution. In his 1871 Darwinian fantasy The Coming Race, Edward Bulwer-Lytton offered a thumbnail sketch of “the magnificent future that smiled upon mankind—the flag of freedom should float over an entire continent, and two-hundred millions of intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of revolvers, should apply to a cowering universe the doctrine of the Patriot Monroe.” Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2002), 44. 36. In his study of Edwardian culture, Jonathan Rose details the fascination with parapsychology and spiritualism among British intellectuals in the early twentieth century and explains how recent scientific discoveries concerning electromagnetism and radiation seemed to enhance the plausibility of psychic phenomenon. Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986). As late as the 1920s, even a Marxist materialist such as J. B. S. Haldane saw parapsychology and “spiritualism” as promising fields for future research. Haldane, Daedalus. 37. Julian Huxley, “The Tissue-Culture King,” 481. 38. Ibid., 481–82. 39. Ibid., 483. 40. Ibid., 484. 41. Ibid., 486. 42. Ibid., 490. 43. Ibid., 495. It’s likely that this aside reflected Julian Huxley’s own frustration with the limits that public opinion sometimes put on science, such as the anti-evolution laws passed by Tennessee and other U.S. states. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 496. 46. Ibid., 498. 47. Bernays was a leader in the field of public relations in the 1910s and 1920s and had clients as diverse as Procter & Gamble, United Fruit Company, and Calvin Coolidge. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928). 48. Julian Huxley, “The Tissue Culture King,” 499.

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49. Ibid., 500. In late-twentieth-century culture the “tin foil hat” became emblematic of conspiracy theories, based on the premise that some paranoid individuals wear tinfoil or aluminum foil helmets to protect themselves from government mind control. Thus, in contemporary Internet parlance, one who readily believes in conspiracy theories is dismissed as belonging to the “tinfoil hat” society. For an amusing MIT study on this phenomenon, see Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, and Noah Vawter, “The Effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study,” Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 17, 2005, http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/. This tongue-in-cheek study was profiled by the website Bostonist.com in “Hey Crazy—Get a New Hat,” November 15, 2005, http://bostonist.com/2005/11/15/hey_crazyget_a_ new_hat.phphttp://bostonist.com/2005/11/15/hey_crazyget_a_new_hat.php (accessed September 30, 2013). 50. Julian Huxley, “The Tissue-Culture King,” 503. 51. Ibid. 52. In her memoir, Juliette Huxley cites the passage from Huckleberry Finn about conscience that she and Julian were both fond of quoting: “If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does I would pison him.” Juliette attributed her reflexive sense of guilt to her strict Swiss upbringing. Juliette Huxley, The Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 16. 53. Julian Huxley, “The Tissue-Culture King,” 504. 54. Aldous Huxley to Edith Wharton, March 19, 1932, in Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters, 267. 55. John G. Slater, introduction to Bertrand Russell, A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927–1942 (London: Routledge, 1996), xxii; Bertrand Russell, review in New Leader (March 11, 1932), 9. 56. Charlotte Haldane, review of Brave New World, in Nature 129 (April 23, 1932), 597–98. 57. Matthew Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy” (1869), in The Portable Matthew Arnold (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 475. 58. For more concerning Aldous Huxley’s friendship and correspondence with Mencken, see David Bradshaw, The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses, 1920–36 (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). 59. “Brave New World” (radio broadcast), CBS Radio Workshop (January 27 and February 3, 1956). 60. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 87. 61. Ibid., 88. 62. Ibid., 89. 63. Theodor Adorno, Prisms (originally published as Prismen [Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955]), trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (1967; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 102. 64. In East Asia, T. H. Huxley’s lecture had a profound impact. Translated by the reformer Yen Fu, it became a manifesto for Chinese advocates of modernization. Although T. H. Huxley’s arguments in Evolution and Ethics were meant to counter the Social Darwinism of his friend Herbert Spencer,

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the Darwinian state of nature described in the book was taken by many Chinese as emblematic of the fierce competition among empires in the modern world, and the book was hailed among reformers as a clarion call for modernization. For more on T. H. Huxley’s impact in East Asia, see Pusey, China and Charles Darwin. 65. By the 1920s, the application of Taylorism or “scientific management” to all fields of productive endeavor was identified by Europeans as “a characteristic feature of American civilization.” League of Nations, International Labour Office, Scientific Management in Europe (Geneva, 1926), 7–8, quoted in Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy,” Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970), 28. 66. T. H. Huxley described his mother as a woman with a remarkable “rapidity of thought” and credited his own native intelligence almost exclusively to her. “There is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit.” T. H. Huxley, Autobiography and Selected Essays (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1909), 4. 67. J. G. Ballard, review of Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (by Nicholas Murray), in The Guardian (April 13, 2002). 68. Ruse, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, 112.

chapter 2 1. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 88. 2. Journal entry, 1913, Box 58, File 11, Julian Huxley Papers. 3. Joyce Oramel Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), 294. Huxley family members invited to be Fellows of the Royal Society were T. H. Huxley, 1851; Andrew Huxley (half-brother to Julian and Aldous), 1955; Julian Huxley, 1956. 4. From Nikolai Berdyaev, The End of Our Time (1924), translated into English by Peter Fitting as “Utopia, Dystopia, and Science Fiction,” in Gregory Claeys, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 140. In Brave New World, Aldous presents the epigraph in French. In its entirety it reads: “Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: comment éviter leur réalisation définitive? . . . Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique moins ‘parfaite’ et plus libre.” 5. René Dubos, The Dreams of Reason—Science and Utopias (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 44. 6. Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics in the Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xi. 7. Thomas More, Utopia (1516), trans. Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 44. 8. Julian Huxley, What Dare I Think? 53. 9. Ibid., 53–55.

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10. Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 148–52. 11. Julian Huxley, A Scientist among the Soviets (New York: Harper & Bros., 1932). 12. Julian Huxley, review of H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods, in Nature 111 (May 5, 1923), 591–94. 13. Julian Huxley, A Scientist among the Soviets, 14; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, 42. 14. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 349–50. 15. Julian Huxley, What Dare I Think? 60–62. 16. Ibid., 67–68. 17. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, 162. 18. Laura Huxley recalled that Aldous saw Julian’s overbearing personality as a source of conflict in his work and family life (interview with the author, July 2, 2006). Some examples of this trait can be found in his correspondence with his brother, even later in life. For example, in a letter inviting Aldous to contribute an essay to The Humanist Frame in 1959, Julian spent half a page telling the internationally renowned author and essayist exactly what he should write, before concluding, “However I naturally leave the treatment entirely to you and hope that you will use this opportunity to say just what you want to say.” When Aldous submitted an essay that did not conform to Julian’s guidelines, he received another letter from Julian with a full page of suggested changes pertaining not to matters of grammar or fact, but the style and substance of the text. Julian Huxley Papers, Box 3, File 26. 19. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, 33. 20. Mike Ashley and Robert A. W. Lowndes, The Gernsback Days (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004), 206–7. 21. Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage, 1995), 397. 22. William E. Aken, Technocracy and the American Dream, 1900–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 23. Hugo Gernsback, ed., Technocracy Review, no. 1 (February 1933), inside cover, Hugo Gernsback Papers, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY (hereafter Hugo Gernsback Papers). 24. Julian was also working on a science fiction novel in the 1920s regarding the effects of genetic technology on human reproduction, but he never finished this project. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:107. 25. Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (1911; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 118. 26. Krishna Dronamraju, ed., Haldane’s Daedalus Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92. 27. Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924). 28. Haldane, Daedalus. 29. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (London: W. Heinemann, 1911).

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30. Aldous Huxley to Prentice, September 9, 1931, Chatto & Windus Papers, Reading Room, Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, UK (hereafter Chatto & Windus Papers). 31. Unlike Technocracy Review, Gernsback’s magazine Sexology remained in print until 1967. Hugo Gernsback Papers. 32. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:210. An antecedent to PEP called the Coefficients had been founded by Sydney and Beatrice Webb in 1902 and had included Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells among its members. Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 132. 33. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:211. 34. Julian Huxley, TVA: Adventure in Planning (Cheam, Surrey, UK: Architectural Press, 1943), 9. 35. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:216. 36. Ibid. 37. Ansfield-Wolf Book Award, http://www.anisfield-wolf.org/winners/winners-by-year/ (accessed June 14, 2012). 38. Garland E. Allen, “Julian Huxley and the Eugenical View of Human Evolution,” in C. Kenneth Waters and Albert Van Helden, eds., Julian Huxley: Biologist and Statesman of Science (Houston: Rice University Press, 1992), 200. 39. Ramachandra Guha, How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 74. 40. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 158–59. 41. Julian Huxley, TVA, 53. 42. Ibid., 30. 43. Ibid., 135. 44. In November 1941, Julian “went to see Atlee and Eden who were both interested in the Reconstruction problems for after the war.” Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 181. 45. Julian Huxley, TVA, 135. 46. “Think of Lord Curzon . . . but for God’s sake don’t emulate him. . . . I could not bear it if you were as magnificent as him . . . you are already running a great risk of it. . . . Of course there is that great and experienced truth, that no man is a hero to his wife; but what if you were the exception?” Juliette Huxley to Julian Huxley, ca. 1927, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 4, Folder 3. 47. Thomas Metcalf, The Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 31. 48. Julian Huxley, If I Were Dictator (New York: Harper & Bros., 1934), 27. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Ibid., 160–61. 51. Jesting Pilate takes its title from Bacon, whose variation on John 18:38 provides the book’s epigraph: “ ‘What is truth?’ asked jesting Pilate, and did not wait to hear the answer.” 52. Aldous Huxley, “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 155 (August 1927), 265. 53. Ibid., 267. 54. Ibid.

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55. Ibid., 269. 56. Ibid., 271. 57. Ibid., 269. 58. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, 68–69. 59. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1958), 234. 60. Ibid., 225. 61. Ibid., 221. 62. Ibid., 222. 63. On their forty-acre ranch at Llano del Rio, Aldous and Maria lived in a very rustic and diminutive farmhouse, grew a fair portion of their own food, and got by with occasional electricity from a small generator. Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, 161–67. 64. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London: MacMillan & Co., 1920), 352. 65. Isaiah Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 47. 66. Aldous Huxley, “Ozymandias” (1956), in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, Volume 5, 1939–1956, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 309. 67. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798; repr., New York: Prometheus Books, 1999), 123. For an excellent treatment of Malthus and his contemporaries, see John Avery, Progress, Poverty, and Population: Re-reading Condorcet, Godwin and Malthus (London: Routledge, 1997).

chapter 3 1. Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 116. 2. Ibid., 115. 3. Ibid., 122. 4. Ibid., 121. 5. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 192. 6. Juliette Huxley, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 118. 7. Aldous later explained, “Rampion is just some of Lawrence’s notions on legs. The actual character of the man is incomparably queerer and more complex than that.” Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 202. 8. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794; New York: Willey Book Company, n.d.), 5. 9. The Metaphysical Society was a group of prominent Victorian scientists who met to discuss metaphysical issues. The X Club was a dinner club, auxiliary to the Metaphysical Society. For more on these associations, see Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 10. T. H. Huxley, Aphorisms and Reflections from the Work of T. H. Huxley, Selected by Henrietta Huxley (London: Macmillan & Co., 1908), 14. 11. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 21. For an insightful and illuminating survey of the first

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American Protestant reactions to Darwin, see Jon H. Roberts, Darwin and the Divine: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 12. For a detailed discussion of Bacon’s philosophy of nature, see John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 13. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740; repr., New York: Prometheus Books, 1992), 469. 14. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999), 1–11. 15. T. H. Huxley, “Science and Religion,” The Builder 17 (January 1859). 16. Aldous Huxley, “The Substitutes for Religion” (from Proper Studies, 1927), in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 2:253. 17. Ibid., 249. 18. Unpublished essay, 1917, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 58, File 1. 19. Julian Huxley, lecture notes, December 1917, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 58, File 1. 20. Notebooks, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 58, File 1. 21. Julian Huxley, lecture notes, December 1917, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 58, File 1. 22. George Edward Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903). 23. Charles Willson Peale’s conception of nature as a sacred text imbued his efforts to teach natural history to the American public with a religious urgency. See David C. Ward, Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 24. Julian Huxley, The Captive Shrew and Other Poems of a Biologist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932), 45. 25. The most concise explanation of this view is found in Julian Huxley’s June 11, 1943, Romanes Lecture, Evolutionary Ethics (London: Oxford University Press, 1943). 26. Julian Huxley, Religion without Revelation, rev. ed. (New York: Mentor Books, 1957), 45. 27. In his account of ecological discourse in the British Empire between 1895 and 1945, Peder Anker identifies two broad schools: the mechanistic school of ecology led by Arthur Tansley in Britain, and the holistic school led by Jan Smuts in South Africa. Julian Huxley, influenced by the mechanistic ecology of Tansley, rejected the Holism of the South African General Jan Smuts. In his memoirs, Julian recalls attending a lecture with Aldous: “We once went together to a lecture by General Smuts, and though we found him personally charming, were not impressed by his doctrine of ‘holism,’ which attempted to include everything on earth, human minds and human societies, in a single all-embracing system. This, like Bergson’s élan vital, seemed to us both unscientific and pseudo-mystical, failing both in immediate and in evolutionary relevance, and in biological accuracy.” Julian Huxley, Memories, 2:98. 28. Quoted in Julian Huxley, Religion without Revelation, rev. ed., 82. 29. Julian Huxley, Memories, 2:79.

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30. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 51–52. 31. Aldous Huxley, “Jesting Pilate” (1926), in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 2:495. 32. “The truth, as we are beginning to realize, is that even things should not be treated as mere things. They should be treated as though they were parts of a vast living organism.” Aldous Huxley, The Politics of Ecology: The Question of Survival (Santa Barbara, CA: Fund for the Republic, 1963), 6. 33. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (New York: Harper & Bros., 1936), 100. 34. Bucke, a friend and biographer of Walt Whitman, considered spiritual growth and biological evolution to be intimately related: “The simple truth is that there has lived on earth, ‘appearing at intervals,’ for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in act [sic] of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth.” Richard Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1900; repr., Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1961), 318. 35. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, 98. 36. Havelock Ellis, “Mezcal: A New Artificial Paradise,” Contemporary Review (January 1898). See also Havelock Ellis, My Life: Autobiography of Havelock Ellis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 67. 37. Jay Stevens highlights Dodge’s recollection of her peyote ceremony with artist Raymond Johnson: “ ‘Raymond went out and found a green branch to make the arrow and he found the eagle feathers. For a fire he laid a lighted electric bulb on the floor with my Chinese Red shawl over it. . . .’ Raymond, Dodge wrote, swallowed his first peyote button and proceeded to howl like a dog while she floated above it all . . . filled with smug laughter for all the ‘facile enthrallments of humanity . . . anarchy, poetry, systems, sex, society.’ ” Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), 9. 38. Aldous was also open to listening to friends who were critical of his experiments with psychedelics, such as Jake Zeitlin, or to those who were pointedly indifferent to them, such as Krishnamurti. For more on the reactions of Aldous Huxley’s social circle to his use of mescaline and LSD, see David King Dunaway, Aldous Huxley Recollected: An Oral History (London: Sage, 1995). 39. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 668. 40. Here is a typical, unsigned response from Chatto & Windus: “Thank you for your letter of 23rd May regarding your difficulties in obtaining mescaline. As far as we know, it is still considered a dangerous drug and is not available to members of the general public. . . . [Aldous] has had a great number of letters asking where one can obtain this drug and of course he has been unable to help.” Chatto & Windus to H. G. Ginn, Esq., May 24, 1957, Chatto & Windus Papers. 41. Harold Raymond to Aldous Huxley, August 31, 1953, Chatto & Windus Papers.

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42. Tom Dalzell, ed., Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang (London: Routledge, 2008), 65. 43. E. M. Nicholson, The Environmental Revolution: A Guide for the New Masters of the World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1970), 13–14. 44. Jiddu Krishnamurti, “The Only Revolution” (1969), in The Second Krishnamurti Reader (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002), 159–60. 45. Malcom Cowley, Review of Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley, The Dial 70 (January 1921), 73. 46. “The Huxley Brothers,” Life (March 24, 1947). 47. Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, June 11, 1963, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 3, File 26. 48. Julian Huxley, Memories, 2:88. 49. Reflecting the heightened nationalism of the early Cold War era, the McCarren-Walter Act required immigrants to affirm that they would be willing to take up arms for the United States. The law allowed for conscientiousobjector status only in the case of persons whose religion explicitly forbade violence. 50. Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, 226, 305–8. 51. Heinrich Heine, quoted in Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 376.

chapter 4 1. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:268. 2. The camels appeared to be “surprisingly calm” in the face of the Blitz. “When a bomb fell within ten yards of the camel house, . . . [i]t certainly looked as if they hadn’t troubled to get up.” Quoted in Ronald W. Clark, Sir Julian Huxley (London: Phoenix House, 1960), 80. 3. For example, William R. Keylor has made this designation, observing that the interwar years “can scarcely be regarded as an era of peace. It was instead, as French military commander Ferdinand Foch predicted at the end of the First World War, ‘a twenty year truce.’ ” Keylor, The Twentieth Century World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43. 4. Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, February 1, 1915, in Aldous Huxley, Letters, 65–66. 5. Julian Huxley, “Biology, the Individual, and the State,” Rice Institute public lecture, 1916, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 57, Folder 6(d). 6. “Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell,” ca. August 17, 1916, Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters, 31. 7. Julian Huxley, Religion without Revelation (New York: Mentor Books, 1957), 85. 8. Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, March 31, 1916 in Aldous Huxley, Letters, 95–97. 9. Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (New York: Harper, 1937), 28. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

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13. Aldous quoted Charles Lindbergh’s 1936 address in Berlin to support his contention that war preparation by the liberal democracies would likely destroy their own democratic institutions. “Can a democracy defend itself—which means, since (as [C. A.] Lindbergh remarked at Berlin) there is now no such thing as defensive war: can it attack and be attacked with thermite, high explosives and vesicants—and remain a democracy?” Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, July 1936, Aldous Huxley, Letters, 407. 14. “Letter to Naomi Mitchison,” October 8, 1938, in Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters, 357. 15. Julian Huxley, Democracy Marches (New York: Harper & Bros., 1941). 16. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960). First published in 1941, Burnham’s description of a world in which traditional nations would be effectively supplanted by regional power blocs in a constant state of competition provided the template for the unending war between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia depicted in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 17. George Orwell, “Pacifism and the War,” Partisan Review 9 (1942). 18. Although they had both been prominent supporters of the PPU, D. S. Savage would criticize Aldous Huxley for drifting, along with Gerald Heard, away from the pacifist movement and into a devotion to eastern mysticism that Savage rejected as ahistorical and unchristian. D. S. Savage, Mysticism and Aldous Huxley: An Examination of Heard-Huxley Theories (1947; repr., Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969), 19–21. 19. Julian Huxley, “The Unifying Effect of War,” in Democracy Marches, 2. 20. “Nazi’s Black List Discovered in Berlin,” Manchester Guardian, September 14, 1945, Guardian Century, http://www.theguardian.com/century/1940– 1949/Story/0,,127730,00.html (accessed June 1, 2014). 21. Max Nicholson obituary, Manchester Guardian, April 28, 2003. 22. Juliette Huxley, The Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 181. 23. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:262. 24. Julian Huxley File, Zoological Society of London Archives, Zoological Society of London, UK. 25. Memorandum of March 1942, Zoological Society of London Archives. 26. Juliette Huxley, The Leaves of the Tulip Tree, 184. 27. Peder Anker, “The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/modernity 12, no. 2 (2005), 229–51. 28. New Architecture of the London Zoo, film by Moholy Nagy for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Zoological Society of London, 1936. The film, which features elephants and other animals in sleek Bauhaus habitats, can be seen at the website of the Moholy Nagy Foundation, http://www. moholy-nagy.org/Films_Zoo%20Architecture.html (accessed April 26, 2014). 29. Anker, “The Bauhaus of Nature.” 30. “The fastest growth came in 1950 to 1973, but the whole period following World War Two saw economic growth at rates unprecedented in human experience.” McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 5. 31. “We thank God that it has come to us instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” Harry

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Truman, August 9, 1945, quoted in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 6. 32. “Bacon’s view was appropriate to the scientific view that prevailed after him. The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that he had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (original published as Dialektik der Aufklarung, 1944), trans. John Cumming (1972; repr., New York: Continuum, 1994), 4. 33. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:289. 34. Julian Huxley, “Atomic Energy,” Julian Huxley Papers, Box 65, File 14. 35. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Science in Review: Julian Huxley Pictures the More Spectacular Possibilities That Lie in Atomic Power,” New York Times (December 9, 1945). 36. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 343. 37. Julian Huxley, preface to Evolution and Ethics, 1893–1943, vii. 38. Leo Szilard, who had conceived of how a fission bomb would work sooner than any other physicist of his generation, was also among the very first to oppose its use on civilian targets. Robert Oppenheimer, who said famously in 1945, “Physicists have now known sin,” opposed the creation of the hydrogen bomb and had his security clearance revoked after Edward Teller and others accused him of having Communist sympathies. Before the war, Julian Huxley had expressed similar concerns about the changing role of science: “[Julian] Huxley was one of those scientists who in September 1935 issued a statement which spoke of the bombing of civilians as ‘the most barbarous perversion of science and industry that has yet occurred in human history.’ ” Clark, Sir Julian Huxley, 76. 39. James P. Sewell, UNESCO and World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 56. 40. Huxley, along with the American biologist H. J. Muller, admired the aggressive scientific research policies of the USSR, but did not hesitate to criticize the dogmatic traits of Soviet genetics. “I am interested but sorry to hear what you say about the predominance of Michurinism in the U.S.S.R. On the other hand, there is no question that the real geneticists are coming back.” Julian Huxley to H. J. Muller, December 12, 1956, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 24, Folder 6. 41. Aldous Huxley to Gervas Huxley, November 14, 1947, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 3, File 26. 42. This was the UNESCO History of Mankind, the first volume of which, entitled Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization, by Jacquetta Hawkes and Leonard Woolley, was published in 1964. The Man and Biosphere (MAB) program, launched in 1970, grew out of Julian Huxley’s vision that conservation should be a part of the UNESCO mission. 43. Aldous Huxley, “Grey Eminence” (1941) in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 5:5.

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44. Victoria Ocampo, in Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, 73. 45. Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, 273–74. 46. George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Harvest Books, 1981), 175. 47. For an illuminating study of Los Angeles during World War II, see Otto Friedrich, City of Nets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 48. Discussing the emergence of the counterculture in California during the fifties and sixties, Jay Stevens writes, “Everything was bigger, newer, faster, shinier in California. It was the jewel in technocracy’s crown. . . . So it was only fitting that it was there that the exodus from ‘normalcy’ began.” Stevens, Storming Heaven, x. 49. Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 148–52. 50. Ibid., 149. 51. Borsodi writes, “As domestic machines are perfected, as they approach more nearly to the state of perfection to which the automobile has already attained, it is possible that they may tend to restrict factory production to that heavy-manufacturing to which the factory is best adapted.” Ralph Borsodi, This Ugly Civilization (New York: Harper & Bros., 1933), 38. 52. Julian Huxley, Memories, 1:217. 53. Referring to his friendships with D. H. Lawrence and Gerald Heard and their influence on his work, one American critic wrote, “For all his intelligence, Huxley cannot resist a dominant personality.” W. Y. Tyndall, “The Trouble with Aldous Huxley,” American Scholar (Fall 1942), quoted in Murray, Aldous Huxley, 148. 54. Huxley’s book on the Bates Method, The Art of Seeing, was condemned by many critics as pernicious for promoting the message that people could do without their glasses if they followed a regimen of eye exercises. Also deeply influenced by William H. Sheldon and his conviction that human personalities correspond to clear categories of body type, Aldous incorporated into Island many of Sheldon’s ideas for categorizing individuals. 55. “Barcelona had fallen. But even if it had not fallen, even if it had never been besieged, what then? . . . Those who build up the structures of civilization are the same as those who undermine the structures of civilization.” Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1993), 308. 56. Jacob Zeitlin Papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter Jacob Zeitlin Papers), Box 1, Folder 2. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Dunaway, Aldous Huxley Recollected, 121. 60. For more on Guenon and Coomaraswamy, see Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 61. Aldous and Laura Huxley Papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter Aldous and Laura Huxley Papers), Box 1, Folder 2b. 62. Dana Sawyer, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 172.

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63. Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 31–33. 64. Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace. 65. Oppenheimer lamented that “secrecy strikes at the very root of what science is, and what it is for.” Robert Oppenheimer, speech at Los Alamos Lab, November 2, 1945, http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/ OppyFarewell.shtml (accessed June 1, 2014). 66. Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace, 4. 67. In a letter dated March 1, 1949, Aldous’s New York editor Cass Canfield wrote to him: “ape and essence is selling steadily, and we have shipped so far something over 23,000 copies, in connection with which figure some allowance has to be made for returns, but not much in this case I think. brave new world is doing splendidly. I note that we shipped 5,800 copies in ’48 and 2,900 this year.” Aldous and Laura Huxley Papers, Box 5, Folder 1b. 68. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, 8–9. 69. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 604. 70. Things to Come, directed by Alexander Korda (1936; DVD, London: Image Entertainment, 2001). 71. Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence, 30. 72. Aldous Huxley to Amiya Chakravarty, May 6, 1950, in Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters, 395. 73. Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 137–38. 74. Aldous and Laura Huxley Papers, Box 59, Folder 4.

chapter 5 1. T. H. Huxley, “Has a Frog a Soul, and What is the Nature of that Soul, Supposing it to Exist?” 1870, Metaphysical Society Papers (unpublished collection), 2 vols., Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Oxford, UK, 2657e.1. 2. Richard H. Hutton, “Has a Frog a Soul?” New York Times, September 15, 1895. 3. T. H. Huxley, “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History” (1874), in Gordon L. Miller, ed., Nature’s Fading Chorus: Classic and Contemporary Writing on Amphibians (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), 76. 4. Aldous Huxley, “Miracle in Lebanon” (1956), in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 5:243. 5. Julian Huxley, “The Humanist Frame,” in Julian Huxley, ed., The Humanist Frame (New York: Harper & Bros., 1961), 19–20. 6. C. P. Snow, quoted in “The Two Cultures,” New Statesman, January 2, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-capital/2013/01/c-p-snow-twocultures (accessed June 5, 2014). Julian expressed the hope that his “integrated idea-system” of evolutionary humanism “could bridge the gap between Sir Charles Snow’s ‘two cultures’ and heal the two sides in the ideological cold war.” Julian Huxley, “Introduction,” in ibid., 6.

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7. Aldous Huxley, “The Education of an Amphibian,” (1956) in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 5:191. 8. Aldous Huxley, BBC interview with John Chandos (recorded by Lansdowne Studios, July 1961), quoted in Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 211 (emphasis in original). 9. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 294. 10. Aldous Huxley, Foreword to J. Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom (New York: Harper & Bros., 1954), 9. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Aldous Huxley, “The Education of an Amphibian,” in Adonis and the Alphabet and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), 9. 16. Browne, Religio Medici, 48. 17. George Williamson, “Mutability, Decay, and Seventeenth-Century Melancholy.” English Literary History 2, no. 2 (September 1935), 121–50. 18. Joseph Needham, The Great Amphibium: Four Lectures on the Position of Religion in a World Dominated by Science (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1931), 45. 19. Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 20. 20. Aldous Huxley, “Adonis and the Alphabet” (1956) in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 5:312. 21. “One cannot escape mysticism; it positively thrusts itself, the only possibility, upon one.” Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, December 1915, in Aldous Huxley, Letters, 88. 22. Kripal, Esalen, 85. 23. Schrödinger was also an admirer of Aldous’s philosophy, singling out the metaphysical underpinnings of The Perennial Philosophy for praise in his 1944 lecture “What Is Life?” Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 90. 24. Bill Deval and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Layton, UT: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985), 80–83. 25. Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 13–14. 26. Mitman, Reel Nature, 79 27. The Man and Biosphere program (MAB) was launched by UNESCO in 1970 as a clearinghouse for information on endangered ecosystems throughout the world. For more information on this program, see http://www.unesco.org/ mab/mabProg.shtml. 28. Krishna R. Dronamraju, If I Am to Be Remembered: The Life and Work of Julian Huxley, with Selected Correspondence (Singapore: World Scientific, 1993), 187. 29. “In 1946 Julian Huxley, then chairman of the official committee to draw up plans for conservation of wildlife in England and Wales, proposed to bring a party to inspect the Swiss National Park . . . the Swiss hosts [took] the opportunity to assemble a number of conservationists from other European countries and to arrange a miniature impromptu conference, meeting both before and

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after the field excursion.” E. M. Nicholson, The Environmental Revolution: A Guide for the New Masters of the World. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), 195. 30. Ibid. 31. “Population Planning and Quality of Life,” New Delhi, 1959, Max Nicholson and Julian Huxley Papers, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 2, Folder 2. 32. Julian Huxley to Hastings Banda, October 5, 1961, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 32, Folder 4. 33. Director-general of UNESCO from 1961 to 1974, René Maheu was the first Frenchman to lead the organization and the first director-general to serve two successive mandates. 34. Julian Huxley to René Maheu, November 1961, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 32, Folder 5. 35. Julian Huxley to Barbara Castle, MP, April 3, 1965, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 38, Folder 6. 36. Yohannes Kidane Marian to Julian Huxley, November 14, 1965, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 40, Folder 2. 37. Aldous Huxley, The Human Situation, ed. Piero Ferrucci (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 17. 38. Lewis Mumford to Julian Huxley, August 9, 1961, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 32, Folder 2. 39. “Human Ecology—Population and Conservation,” lecture delivered at the University of Natal, 1961, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 11, Folder 11. 40. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 29. 41. Sexton, Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley, 395. 42. Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), 63–68. 43. “Translated into twelve languages, Silent Spring had a striking impact on the resurgence of environmentalism throughout Europe. . . . In Britain the book provoked a furious debate in the House of Lords; outside that august body, it came to the attention of the biologist Julian Huxley.” Ibid., 73. 44. Aldous Huxley, “The Double Crisis,” supplement, UNESCO Courier 2, no. 3 (1949), 6–9. The original manuscript of this essay is also available in the digital archives of UNESCO at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001480 /148059eb.pdf (accessed April 29, 2014). 45. Oliver Jensen, Editor at LIFE Magazine, to John Fischer at HARPER’S, May 31, 1949, Aldous and Laura Huxley Papers, Box 5, Folder 1b. 46. Aldous Huxley, “The Double Crisis.” 47. “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” from Do What You Will (1929), reprinted in Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays, 3. 48. Aldous Huxley, The Human Situation, 37. 49. Bob Pepperman Taylor, Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 81. 50. Aldous Huxley, “The Desert,” (1956)in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, 5:296. 51. Deval and Sessions, Deep Ecology, 80

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52. Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 77, 114, 116, 133. 53. Aldous Huxley, The Human Situation, 48. 54. Aldous Huxley, “The Desert” (1956), 5:296. 55. Ibid., 5:301. 56. Aldous Huxley, The Cicadas and Other Poems (New York: Doubleday, Doran, & Co., 1931), 63. 57. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Madison, WI: Cricket House Books, 2010), 363. 58. Aldous Huxley, Island (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 238–39. 59. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first instance of “environmentalist” being used in this sense in 1970. 60. Aldous Huxley, The Human Situation, 13. 61. Ibid., 14. 62. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 587. 63. Julian Huxley, “Population and Human Fulfillment,” in New Bottles for New Wine, 191. This essay was originally published under the title “World Populations” in Scientific American, March 1956. 64. MacPhail’s aspirations and profession invite comparison with those of Thomas Henry Huxley. Aldous Huxley sets the first encounter between Murugan and MacPhail in the 1840s, the same decade when his grandfather was a field surgeon for the HMS Rattlesnake in Australia and Southeast Asia. Like Aldous’s grandfather, MacPhail left behind the severe Protestantism of his upbringing for the pursuit of a scientific career. And, just like T. H. Huxley, he has taken a position as a surgeon on a British navy ship for the opportunity it affords to collect specimens and conduct fieldwork in Australia and Southeast Asia. The character’s surname is a tribute to another figure whom Aldous admired, Dr. Percy MacPhail, who ran a hospital for the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. Aldous marveled at MacPhail’s success in combating local diseases and improving health and sanitation, and he was equally impressed with the character of the man he described to his father as “a saint-like old Scotsman.” Aldous Huxley, Letters, 367. 65. Aldous Huxley, Island (Harper & Row, 1962), 177. 66. Bernfried Nugel, “Aldous Huxley’s Revisions in the Final Typescript of Island,” in Bernfried Nugel, ed., Now More Than Ever: Proceedings of the Aldous Huxley Centennial Symposium (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1994), 230–33. 67. Aldous Huxley Papers, Box 59, Folder 4. 68. Island MS, 72, 2009 Aldous Huxley Papers, Box 59, Folder 1. 69. Island MS, 71, 2009 Aldous Huxley Papers, Box 59, Folder 1. 70. Island MS, 75, 2009 Aldous Huxley Papers, Box 59, Folder 1. 71. Island MS, 75, 2009 Aldous Huxley Papers, Box 59, Folder 1. 72. Aldous Huxley, “The Minimum Working Hypothesis,” in Christopher Isherwood, ed., Vedanta for the Western World (Los Angeles: Vedanta Society of Southern California, 1945), 33–35. 73. Deval and Sessions, Deep Ecology, 170. 74. Aldous Huxley, Island (Harper & Row, 1962), 185. 75. Aldous Huxley, Letters, 749.

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76. Ibid. 77. “Sybille Bedford,” in Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, 108. 78. Aldous Huxley, Commencement Address at Ojai Happy Valley School, June 14, 1951, Aldous and Laura Huxley Papers. 79. Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 121. 80. For a good primary source of New Age and human potential thought in this period, see Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy (New York: Tarcher, 1987). As a testament to his influence, the book contains more than twenty references to Aldous Huxley, most of them to The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. 81. Julian Huxley to Aldous Huxley, August 7, 1959, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 3, File 26. 82. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 740–41. 83. Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 455. 84. Julian Huxley, letter to the editor, Times (London), November 27, 1963. 85. Berlin in Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, 149. 86. Laura Archera Huxley to the Board of Trustees of the Huxley Institute for Bio-social Research, August 12, 1971, Julian Huxley Papers, Box 3, File 43. 87. Draft of paper entitled “Evolutionary Humanism,” Max Nicholson and Julian Huxley Papers, Box 1, Folder 1. 88. Julian Huxley, T. H. Huxley: A New Judgment (reproduction of a BBC broadcast) (London: Watts & Co., 1945), 32. 89. Sir Charles Galton Darwin, The Next Million Years (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 115–23. 90. Aldous Huxley, The Human Situation, 98. 91. Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson, “Problems of Man’s Deteriorating Environment,” Times (London), October 7, 1969, Max Nicholson and Julian Huxley Papers, Julian Huxley Papers. 92. In the late sixties, Brand lobbied NASA to release the first photographs of the whole earth, shot by astronauts on the Apollo missions, to the general public. In 1966, he printed buttons with the slogan “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” John Tierney, “An Early Environmentalist Embracing New Heresies,” New York Times (February 27, 2007). 93. Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson, “Problems of Man’s Deteriorating Environment.”

epilogue 1. Walter J. Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 320. 2. T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1897), 37. 3. It’s worth noting here that in the early twenty-first century, the growing field of epigenetic research has suggested that some acquired traits, such as improved cognitive function in mice, may indeed be heritable. See Emily Singer, “A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?” MIT Technology Review (February

Notes | 209

4, 2009), http://www.technologyreview.com/news/411880/a-comeback-forlamarckian-evolution/ (accessed May 3, 2014). 4. Leonard Huxley, Progress and the Unfit (London: Watts & Co., 1926), 40–41, 46. 5. H. G. Wells, “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” Saturday Review (January 19, 1895), reprinted in H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 36. 6. Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs in Space,” Astronautics (September 1960). 7. Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 471. 8. D. S. Halacy, Jr., Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman, with an introduction by Manfred Clynes (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 11. 9. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times (October 28, 1984). 10. Julian Huxley, “Knowledge, Morality, Destiny,” Third Annual William Alanson White Memorial Lecture, 1951, in Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (New York: Harper & Bros., 1957), 260. 11. FM-2030, Are You a Transhuman? (New York: Warner Books, 1989). 12. See Nick Bostrom, “Why I Want to Be Posthuman,” in Max More and Natasha Vita-More, eds., The Transhumanist Reader (West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2013); Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin Books, 2005); George Church, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 13. Sandro Magister, “In Paris, the Dispute Was about God, But about Man First,” Chiesa Espresso (April 1, 2011), http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/ articolo/1347333?eng=y (accessed June 28, 2013). 14. Paul K. Alkon, Winston Churchill’s Imagination (Lewisburg, Ohio: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 162–63. 15. Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (London: Routledge, 2001), 216. 16. Ibid., 222. 17. Julian Huxley, in Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley: A Memorial Volume, 24. 18. Charles C. Mann, “State of the Species: Does Success Spell Doom for Homo Sapiens?” Orion (November–December 2012), http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7146 (accessed January 19, 2014). 19. George Orwell, “Thoughts on the Common Toad,” in Miller, Nature’s Fading Chorus, 130.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 96, 118, 143, 164, 202n32 After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Huxley, A), 20, 61, 83, 96, 123–27, 134, 203n55 agnosticism, 11, 23, 91, 107, Amazing Stories, 3, 42, 66, 68. See also Gernsback, Hugo America First movement, 113 Amis, Kingsley, 68 amphibians, vi, 4, 19–21, 138–42, 146, 169–70, 183–84, 190n54, 204n3; Browne, Thomas on, 4; Huxley, Aldous and, vi, 19–21, 138–42, 146, 169–70, 183; Huxley, Julian and, vi, 19–21, 138–39, 142, 146, 169–70, 183; Lewis, C. S. on, 190n54; metaphor of, 20–21, 138–39, 141–42, 146, 183; Orwell, George on, 184; survival of, 20, 146, 169, 183 Angell, Norman, 72 Anker, Peder, 117, 198n27 Anthropocene, the, 2 anti-Fascism, 122 anti-Semitism, 127 Ape and Essence (Huxley, A), 2, 15, 21, 52, 69, 85, 130, 133–34, 155, 174, 176, 204n67 Apollo program, 12, 174, 208n92. See also NASA Arnold, Matthew, 3, 30, 47, 49–50, 80 atomic age, the, 118, 201–2n31

Bacon, Francis, 41, 57, 89–90, 93, 106, 118, 163–64, 178, 196n51, 198n12, 202n32; New Atlantis, The, 57, 107, 118, 163–64, 178 Baillot, Juliette. See Huxley, Juliette Bali, 162 Barcelona, fall of, 125, 134 Baruch Plan, 15 Bates Method, 124, 168, 203n54 Baudelaire, 99, Bauhaus, 101, 117, 150 Beatles, the, 13 Bedford, Sybille, 34, 139, 154, 169, 197n7, 205n8 Bellamy, Edward, 84 Belle Époque, the, 6 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 58, 62–63, 194n4 Berlin, Isaiah, 19, 84, 172, Bernal, J. D., 37, 118, 179 Bernays, Edward, 45, 192n47 Berra, Yogi, 1 Bible, the, 66, 89, 90, 107 biological engineering, 59. See also synthetic biology birth control, 54, 151, 152, 154, 163 Blake, William, 97, 101 Bohr, Niels, 177 “book of nature,” 88, 93–94, 107 Borsodi, Ralph, 16–17, 124, 203n51 Bose, J. C., 96–97 Bostrom, Nick, 180, 209n12

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Brand, Stewart, 174, 208n92 Brave New World (Huxley, A), 1–2, 13–14, 20, 31–32, 38, 45, 48–50, 52, 58–68, 72–73, 77, 81–85, 96, 130–32, 155, 167, 176, 182, 194n4 Brave New World Revisited (Huxley, A), 22, 131 British Empire: Huxley, T. H. on, 41; ecology and conservation in, 154, 198n27; economic integration of, 112; overseas governance of, 77. See also If I Were Dictator Browne, Sir Thomas, 4, 20, 136, 141–42 Bucke, Richard, 97, 199n34 Buddhism, 40, 96, 103, 144, 163, 168; Zen, 101, 102, 161, Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 192n35 Burnham, James, 114, 201n16 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 148 Bury, J. B., 83 California, University of, 157, 158, 160 Cambridge, University of, 29, 38 Canfield, Cass, 204n67 Carson, Rachel, 18–19, 149, 154–155; Silent Spring, 18–19 Chakravarty, Amiya, 133 Chardin, Teilhard de, 138, 171, 174 Charterhouse School, the, 28 Chernobyl, 16 Christianity, 10, 11, 20, 49, 64, 65–66, 88, 95, 96, 125, 134, 160, 161, 163, 180, 182 Church, George, 180, 209n12 Churchill, Winston, 104, 108, 110, 116, 182, civil rights movement, 130 climate change, 48, 119, 147, 177 Clynes, Manfred E., 179 Cold War, 9, 15–17, 21, 58, 73, 120, 126, 130, 132, 135, 144, 151, 154–55, 157–58, 164, 183, 185–86, 200n49, 204n6 Coming Race, The, 192n35 Communism, 10, 62, 67, 78 Community Sing (in Brave New World), 63 Condorcet, Marquis de, 70, 84 conservation movement: African, 152–54; American, 74, 148; European, 151, 205n29; global, 11–12, 146, 155; and Huxley, Aldous, 18, 146, 155, 161; and Huxley, Julian, 11–12, 74, 76, 114, 117, 146, 151–54, 184, 202n42, 205n29; and Huxley, T. H., 39; and IUCN, 146; and

Marsh, George Perkins, 155, 161; and Muir, John, 155; and TVA, 74, 76, 114; and UNESCO, 11–12; and WWF, 146, 154. See also environmental movement Coolidge, Calvin, 192n47 Coomaraswamy, A. K., 96, 128, 203n60 Copernican revolution, 142 “cosmic consciousness,” 97 counterculture, 13–14, 55 Crome Yellow (Huxley, A), 2, 37, 132 Crowne, Lenina (char. in Brave New World), 32, 49, 50, 62 Crutzen, Paul, 2 cyborgs, 179 D’Aranyi, Jelly, 30–31 Darwin, Charles, 4, 20, 22–23, 39–40, 70, 87–88, 89–90, 93–95, 159–161, 188n18, 194n64, 198n11; defense of, 89–90; Huxley, Julian influenced by, 94; Origin of Species, The, 88, 159–60, 173; paradigm of, 70, 93, 159; revolution of, 3, 21, 23, 142, 160, 178; evolutionary theory of, 22–23, 39–40, 70, 87, 89–90, 160. See also Darwinism, Social Darwin, Charles Galton (grandson of CD), 173 Darwinism, Social, 6, 40, 178, 193n64, 197n11 Darwin’s bulldog (T. H. Huxley), 5, 40 Dawkins, Richard, 11, 53 Deep Ecology movement, 147–48, 158, 167 de Gaulle, Charles, 116 Deism, 88, 93–94, 107 de Sade, Marquis, 131 Descartes, René, 136–37 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 164, 202n32 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley, A), 13, 64, 96, 98–101, 135, 208n80 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 63, 165 “Double Crisis, The” (Huxley, A), 18 Drummond, Jack, 8 DuPont chemical, 101 Eckhart, Meister, 95, 97, 103 ectogenesis, 37, 49, 52, 59–60, 69, 179 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 9, 98 Eliot, T. S., 13, 104, 111, 172, Ellis, Havelock, 99, 161 Ends and Means (Huxley, A), 61, 109, 112, 114, 125–26 Enlightenment, the, 16, 70, 83, 104, 143–44 environmental movement: and Brand, Stewart, 174; and Carson, Rachel, 155;

Index and Deep Ecology, 148, 167; European, 151, 206n43; global, 146, 155; history of, 9, 18, 148–149, 151, 155, 157–58, 161; and Huxley, Aldous, 146, 149, 154, 157–58, 161, 167–68; and Huxley, Julian, 146, 148–49, 153–54, 161, 174, 206n43; and Island, 167–68; and IUCN, 12; and moon landing, 174; and Mumford, Lewis, 153; and Nicholson, Max, 174; and Silent Spring, 206n43; and UNESCO, 12. See also conservation movement Esalen Institute, 129 Esfandiary, F. M. (aka FM-2030), 180 eugenics, 11, 40, 52, 59, 74–75, 81, 92, 148, 150, 168–69, 178; Huxley, Aldous and, 52, 81, 148, 168–69; Huxley, Julian and, 11, 59, 74–75, 92, 150; Huxley, T. H. and, 40, 178; Nazis and, 75 evolution: amphibians and, 4, 19, 139, 146; Darwinian paradigm of, 70, 159; emblems of, 19–20, 138, 142, 146; Huxley, Aldous on, 4, 64, 87, 112, 138, 159–60, 173, 176, 188n12; Huxley, Julian on, 2, 4, 7, 11, 19, 53–54, 64–65, 71, 87, 92–94, 117, 121, 138, 142, 149–50, 176, 179, 188n18, 189nn26,31, 192n43; Huxley, T. H. on, 2–3, 5–6, 11, 22–23, 38–40, 89, 93, 192n35; Lawrence, D. H. on, 87; pre-Darwin history of, 70; and religion, 3–4, 11, 19, 90–91, 93, 189n26, 199n34; and Transhumanism, 2, 149–50, 176, 179–80. See also evolutionary biology evolution, Lamarckian, 70, 178 evolutionary biology, 1, 10, 56, 64, 87–88, 97, 104, 111, 138, 159–60. See also evolution Evolutionary Humanism, 78, 92, 111, 204n6 Eyeless in Gaza (Huxley, A), 32, 34, 96–98 Fabian Socialism, 6, 49, 66, 112, 148 Farnaby, Will (char. in Island), 135, 161, 163, 168 Fascism, 62, 67, 78, 109, 112, 114, 116, 122, 125 First World War. See World War I Five-Year Plan, 61, 73 FM-2030. See Esfandiary, F. M. Ford, Edward Onslow, 23 Ford, Henry, 45, 65. See also Fordism Fordism, 48, 67 Foxe, Brian (char. in Eyeless in Gaza), 32–34

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Frankenstein, 174 Freud, Sigmund, 103 Fukushima, 16 Gandhi, Mohandas, 16–17, 97, 111, 123 Garsington Manor, 7, 13, 72, 111 Geddes, Patrick, 39 Genius and the Goddess, The (Huxley, A), 146 George, Henry, 16 Gernsback, Hugo, 42, 66–68, 71, 73, 132. See also Amazing Stories Gestapo, 115–116 Gould, Stephen Jay, 90 Great Britain, 9, 77, 78, 101, 112, 116, 115, 118, Gregg, Richard, 97 “Grey Eminence” (Huxley, A), 122 Guenon, René, 128, 203n60 Guha, Ramachandra, 75, 155 Hadjadj, Fabrice, 180–81 Haeckel, Ernst, 6, 94, 107, 159 Halacy, D. S., 179 Haldane, J. B. S., 8, 14, 37, 49, 69–73, 94, 116, 179, 192n36; Daedalus, 38, 49, 69, 179, 192n36 Happy Valley School (Ojai, California), 170 Harvard University, 99, 100, 158 Hascombe (char. in “The Tissue Culture King”), 41–48 Heard, Gerald, 36, 111–12, 123–24, 128–29, 201n18, 203n53 Heine, Heinrich, 104 Heyerdahl, Thor, 12 Hinduism, 144, 162 Hitler, Adolf, 62, 74, 108, 114, 161. See also Third Reich, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 62 Horkheimer, Max, 118, 143, 164, 202n32 Huckleberry Finn, 47, 193n52 human potential movement, 4, 20, 171, 187n10 human sexuality, popular culture and, 14, 130–131, 196n31; Huxley, Aldous and, 32, 34, 146; Huxley, Julian and, 35–36, 191n8; same-sex relationships and, 36 Hume, David, 89, 93, Hutchinson, Mary, 34–35 Huxley, Aldous, 27fig., 113fig., 147fig.: on amphibians, vi, 19–21, 138–42, 146, 169–70, 183; and Bacon, Francis, 163–64; birth and death of, 1, 13, 18, 171–72; on birth control, 54, 163; and

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Huxley, Aldous (continued) Buddhism, 96, 144, 163, 168; career of, 1, 5, 12, 14–15, 21, 24, 31, 52, 100, 102, 111, 123, 132, 155, 169–70, 179; and Carson, Rachel, 19, 149; and conservation movement, 18, 146, 155, 161; and Deep Ecology movement, 148, 158, 167; on death, 31; on drugs, psychedelic, 3–4, 49, 64, 95, 98–102, 124, 128, 144, 167, 181, 199n38; and environmental movement, 146, 149, 154, 157–58, 161, 167–68; and Goya, Francisco, 15; and Gandhi, Mohandas, 16–17, 123; and Hinduism, 144; and human potential movement, 4; and Huxley, T. H., 5; on evolution, 4, 64, 87, 112, 138, 159–60, 173, 176, 188n12; and League of Nations, 17, 111; and Llano del Rio colony, 17, 84, 128, 197n63; and Los Angeles, 15, 79, 83, 98, 123–24, 126, 130, 133, 135; on meditation, 3, 95, 161, 163; on mysticism, 1, 4, 86, 97, 101–2, 104, 111, 128, 133, 143–44, 146, 158, 162, 201n18, 205n21; on nuclear power, 15–16, 126, 141, 168; and Oneida colony, 84; and pacifism, 7, 82, 104, 114, 122–26, 129, 134, 146; on popular culture, American, 79, 131; popular culture iconography, of, 13; on religion, 1, 3, 15, 19, 63–65, 71, 79–80, 90–91, 95–96, 101–4, 124, 128, 138, 140–41, 144–45, 157–58, 160, 167, 172–73, 175–76; on Romanticism, 71, 157; on sexuality, 14, 32, 34, 36, 80, 130–31; on solar power, 16, 54, 61; and Shakespeare, William, 66, 163; and technocracy, 62, 79; and Tolstoy, Leo, 16–17, 111, 123, 155; and UNESCO, 17–18, 111, 121–22, 156, 206n44; on wind power, 54, 190n43 Huxley, Aldous, works of: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 20, 61, 83, 96, 123–27, 134, 203n55; Ape and Essence, 2, 15, 21, 52, 69, 85, 130, 133–34, 155, 174, 176, 204n67; The Art of Seeing, 203n54; Brave New World, 1–2, 13–14, 20, 31–32, 38, 45, 48–50, 52, 58–68, 72–73, 77, 81–85, 96, 130–32, 155, 167, 176, 182, 194n4; Crome Yellow, 2, 37, 132; Doors of Perception, 13, 64, 96, 98–101, 135, 208n80; “The Double Crisis,” 18; Ends and Means, 61, 109, 112, 114, 125–26; Eyeless in Gaza, 32,

34, 96–98; The Genius and the Goddess, 146; “Grey Eminence,” 122; Island, 5, 17, 19, 36, 38, 50, 52, 85, 96, 99–100, 134–35, 147, 156, 160–68, 203n54; Jesting Pilate, 79–80, 96, 162, 196; The Perennial Philosophy, 96, 102, 128, 147, 158, 205n23, 208n80; Point Counter Point, 36, 81, 86–87, 132; Science, Liberty and Peace, 16, 72, 123, 129–30, 132 Huxley, Gervas (cousin of Aldous and Julian), 30, 121 Huxley, Julia Arnold (mother of Aldous and Julian), 22, 27, 31, 34 Huxley, Julian, 26fig., 33fig., 47fig., 147fig.: on amphibians, vi, 19–21, 138–39, 142, 146, 169–70, 183; and Bacon, Francis, 57; birth and death of, 1, 5; on birth control, 114, 151–52, 154; on Buddhism, 103; career of, 2, 6–7, 9, 12, 21, 37, 52, 56–57, 92, 94–95, 110–11, 114, 116–17, 150, 154, 172, 179; and Carson, Rachel, 18, 149, 154; and conservation movement, 11–12, 74, 76, 114, 117, 146, 151–54, 184, 202n42, 205n29; on death, 37; on drugs, psychedelic, 64, 101; and environmental movement, 146, 148–49, 153–54, 161, 174, 206n43; on evolution, 2, 4, 7, 11, 19, 53–54, 64–65, 71, 87, 92–94, 117, 121, 138, 142, 149–50, 176, 179, 188n18, 189nn26,31, 192n43; and Huxley, T. H., 5–6; on hydroelectric power, 8, 74, 75–77; and IUCN, 5, 12, 54, 85, 146, 148, 151–52, 154; and London Zoo, 108, 117, 150; and Ministry of Information, 7, 9, 114, 116–17; and Newdigate Prize, 57; and Next Five Year group, 73; on nuclear power, 17, 119–20, 168; and Political and Economic Planning group, 73; on religion, 1, 3, 15, 19, 63–65, 71, 79–80, 90–91, 95–96, 101–4, 124, 128, 138, 140–41, 144–45, 157–58, 160, 167, 172–73, 175–76; and Royal Society, 194n3; on sexuality, 36; and TVA, 8, 74–77, 114, 118–119, 129; on Transhumanism, 2, 4, 20, 135, 149–50, 176, 179–81; and UNESCO, 1, 9–12, 103, 121–22, 135, 150–56, 162, 202n42; and WWF, 1, 5, 12, 54, 73, 85, 146, 148, 154; and Zoological Society of London, 7, 116–117, 185, 201n28

Index Huxley, Julian, works of: Essays of a Biologist, 64; If I Were Dictator, 8, 77–78; The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, 6, 56; Memories, 189n32, 191n8, 191n9, 191n11, 191n15, 195n24, 196n32, 196n33, 196n35, 198n27, 198n29, 200n48, 200n1, 201n23, 202n33, 203n52; New Bottles for New Wine, 142, 153; Religion without Revelation, 64, 90, 92, 94–95, 145, 189n26; The Science of Life, 9, 86; “The Tissue Culture King” 2, 41–47, 50, 65, 68, 150; “Transhumanism,” 2, 149; TVA: Adventure in Planning, 196n34; What Dare I Think?, 8, 49, 63–64 Huxley, Juliette (née Baillot, wife of Julian), 7, 33fig., 35fig., 36, 76, 86, 116, 188n12, 191n8, 193n52, 196nn44,46 Huxley, Laura Archera (second wife of Aldous), 13, 15, 171–72, 185 Huxley, Leonard (father of Aldous and Julian), 22–23, 26fig., 29, 178; Life and Letters of T. H. Huxley, 22 Huxley, Margaret (sister of Aldous and Julian), 22, 27–28 Huxley, Maria Nys (first wife of Aldous), 13, 125, 17, 34, 34fig., 36, 79, 86, 111, 113fig., 128, 197n63 Huxley, Matthew (son of Aldous), 13, 15, 32, 86, 155, 171 Huxley, T. H., 5–6, 10–11, 13, 22–25, 24fig., 26fig., 30, 38–41, 47, 52–53, 59, 81, 88–90, 93, 107, 136–38, 143, 154, 178, 182, 184, 192n35, 193n64, 194nn66,3, 207n64; on America, 40–41, 192n35; on amphibians, 136; on British empire, 40–41; and Buddhism, 40; and East Asia impact, 193n64; and Geddes, Patrick, 39; on education, 39, 81; on eugenics, 40, 178; on evolution, 2–3, 5–6, 11, 22–23, 38–40, 89, 93, 138, 192n35; Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, 2, 137; Evolution and Ethics, 23, 40, 52, 59, 93, 137–38, 182, 184; on religion, 10–11, 38–41, 86, 88–89, 93, 107; and Royal Society, 194n3; and the School of Mines, 39, 81; “Science and Religion,” 86; on Social Darwinism, 193n64; and Wells, H. G., 39, 178 Huxley, Trevenen “Trev” (brother of Aldous and Julian), 25, 27–32, 38 If I Were Dictator (Huxley, J), 8, 77–78 Ilma, Viola, 35–36

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India, 25, 39, 40, 77; Huxley, Aldous in, 96–97; Huxley, Julian in, 151–152 International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, 17, 111 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 5, 12, 54, 73, 85, 122, 146, 148, 151–52, 154 Isherwood, Christopher, 36, 167, 171–172 Islam, 96, 103, 105 Island (Huxley, A), 5, 17, 19, 36, 38, 50, 52, 85, 96, 99–100, 134–35, 147, 156, 160–68, 203n54 Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells), 43. See also Wells, H. G. James, William, 97, 99, 188n13 Jefferson, Thomas, 61, 93, 103, 107, 124, 128 Jesting Pilate (Huxley, A), 79–80, 96, 162, 196 Joyce, James, 54 Judaism, 89, 96, 103, 105 Kant, Immanuel, 93, 143 Kennedy, John F., 1 Kline, Nathan S., 179 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 101–2, 140, 170, 199n38 Kristallnacht, 127 Kulturkampf, 90 Kurzweil, Ray, 20, 180, 209n12 Kyoto Accords (1997), 146 LaHaye, Reverend Tim, 10–11 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 70. See also evolution, Lamarckian La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 137 Lawrence, D. H., 13, 57, 86–87, 111, 124, 139, 197n7, 203n53 League of Nations, the, 17, 111, 194n65 Leary, Timothy, 99, 100–101, 188n12 Left, British, 62, 112, Lenin, V. I., 61, 67, 144 Lewis, C. Day, 122, 126 Lewis, C. S., 20, 190n54 Life Magazine, 102, 156 Lindbergh, Charles, 113, 201n13 Llano del Rio colony, 17, 84, 128, 197n63 London, Jack, 148 London Zoo, 108, 117, 150. See also Zoological Society of London Los Angeles: and Huxley, Aldous, 15, 79, 83, 98, 123–24, 126, 130, 133, 135; and World War II, 15, 203n47

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LSD. See psychedelic drugs Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 99 Lysenkoism, 7, 188n20 MacPhail, Andrew (char. in Island), 163–66, 207n64 Maheu, René, 152, 206n33 maithuna yoga, 163 Malthus, Thomas, 40, 74, 84–85, 149, 156, 176, 197n67 Man and Biosphere program, 122, 151, 202n42, 205n27 Manhattan Project, the, 17–18, 109, 129 Mann, Charles C., 183 Marsh, George Perkins, 155, 161 Marx, Bernard (char. in Brave New World), 51 Marx, Karl, 61, 66–67. See also Marxism Marxism, 37, 69–71, 94, 101, 123, 133, 143–44, 180, 192n36: and Bernal, J. D., 37; and Haldane, J. B. S., 37, 69–71, 94, 192n36; and Huxley, Julian, 61; and Muller, H. J., 94; and Orwell, George, 123 Maslow, Abraham, 180 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 158 McCarran-Walter Act, 103 McNeill, J. R., 9, 20, 75, 118 Mead, Margaret, 12 meditation, 3, 95, 161, 163 Melville, Herman, 165 meme theory, 53 Mencken, H. L., 50, 193n58 Menton Statement, the, 12, 185, mescaline. See psychedelic drugs “metaphysical shudder,” 142 Metaphysical Society, the, 88, 136, 197n9 Mill, James, 77 Ministry of Information (British), 7, 9, 114, 116–17 Mitchison, Naomi, 114 Model T, Ford, 65 Mojave Desert, 17, 83, 84, 128, 157–158 Mond, Mustapha (char. in Brave New World), 50, 62, 64–65 Montreal Protocol (1987), 146 Moore, G. E., 89, 93 More, Thomas, 58–59, 163; Utopia, 59, 163 Morley, John, 88, 95, 189n26 Morrell, Ottoline, 110–11 Morris, William, 41 Muir, John, 148, 155 Muller, H. J., 94, 202n40

Mumford, Lewis, 39, 153 Murugan (char. in Island), 163, 207n64 Mussolini, Benito, 45 mysticism, drugs and, 101–102, 128; religion and, 96, 128; science and, 143–146, 160–161 NASA, 175fig., 208n92. See also Apollo program Natural History Museum (London), 22, 25 Needham, Joseph, 141–42 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 151 New Atheism, 11 Newdigate Prize, 57 Next Five Year group, 73 Nicholson, Max, 73, 101, 116, 151, 174 nonviolence, 111, 129–130. See also Pacifism noösphere, 138–39, 174 Nys, Maria. See Huxley, Maria Nys. Ocampo, Victoria, 123, 172 Occidental College, 127 Oneida colony, 84 Oppenheimer, Robert, 121, 129, 202n38, 204n65 Orwell, George, 14, 56, 82–84, 115, 122; on Gandhi, Mohandas, 123; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 14, 84; on pacifism, 115; on socialism, 83; Road to Wigan Pier, The, 82; on utopias, 82; Osborn, Fairfield, Jr., 18, 161 Osmond, Humphrey, 99–100 Oxford, University of, 14, 23, 28, 29, 30, 39, 56–57, 180, Oxford English Dictionary, 149, 188n13, 207n59 Pacifism, 82, 104, 114–115, 122–126, 129, 134. See also nonviolence Paine, Thomas, 88, 93, 107; Age of Reason, 88 Peace Pledge Union (PPU), 7, 111–12, 115, 125, 201n18 Peale, Charles Willson, 93, 198n23 Perennial Philosophy, The (Huxley, A), 96, 102, 128, 147, 158, 205n23, 208n80 peyote. See psychedelic drugs Point Counter Point (Huxley, A), 36, 81, 86–87, 132 Political and Economic Planning (PEP) group, 49, 73, 83, 111, 116, 196n32 Pound, Ezra, 54

Index Prior’s Field School (Godalming, Surrey), 22 Progress, 3–4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15–16, 23, 41–42, 48, 64, 69–72, 81–82, 84, 87, 94, 96, 109, 120, 125, 132, 135, 138, 142–143, 146, 164, 168, 171, 178, Propter, Mr. (char. in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan), 61, 83, 123–25 Providence, 83, 118 psilocybin. See psychedelic drugs psychedelic drugs, 3–4, 49, 64, 95, 98–102, 124, 128, 144, 167, 181, 199n37, 199n38, 199n40 Pynchon, Thomas, 180 Rajagopal, Rosalind, 170 Raymond, Harold, 100 realpolitik, 124 religion: Abrahamic, 96, 103, 105, 106; in Brave New World, 63–65; and evolution, 88–89, 92–94, 160, 189n26; and Haldane, J. B. S., 71; and Huxley, Aldous, 1, 3, 15, 19, 63–65, 71, 79–80, 90–91, 95–96, 101–4, 124, 128, 138, 140–41, 144–45, 157–58, 160, 167, 172–73, 175–76; and Huxley, Julian, 3, 10–11, 19, 44, 78, 90–95, 102–5, 142, 144–45, 172–73, 175–76, 189n32; and Huxley, T. H., 10–11, 38–39, 86, 89, 107; in If I Were Dictator, 78; in Island, 163; and Lawrence, D. H., 87, 124; and nature, 105–7, 157, 160, 173, 175; and Orwell, George, 83; in Religion without Revelation, 92, 94–95, 189n26; and science, 10, 19, 86–89, 92–95, 107, 118, 124, 141–42, 145, 160, 163, 167, 169, 172, 175–76, 189n26; symbolism of, 140; and Paine, Thomas, 88, 107; in The Perennial Philosophy, 128, 158; in “Science and Religion,” 86; in “The Tissue Culture King,” 44; secular, 11, 175, 189n26 Religion without Revelation (Huxley, J), 64, 90, 92, 94–95, 145, 189n26 Rice University, 6–7, 29, 56, 57, 91–92, 110, 154, Romanes Lecture, 52, 78 Romanov, P. S., 62–63 Romanticism, 71, 104, 157 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 191n23 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 66, 74 Roosevelt, Theodore, 148 Royal School of Mines, 39, 81 Russell, Bertrand, 13, 48, 71–73, 111, 114, 116, 182–83, 196n32; Icarus, or the

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Future of Science, 71; Scientific Outlook, The, 48 Saint-Simone, Henri de, 69, 70 San Diego Zoo, 147 Sarton, May, 36, 191n8 Satyagraha, 123 Savage, D. S., 115, 201n18 Savage, the (char. in Brave New World), 31–32, 51 Savage Reservation (in Brave New World), 50–51 Schrödinger, Erwin, 146, 205n23 Science, Liberty and Peace (Huxley, A), 16, 72, 123, 129–30, 132 science fiction, 2, 39, 41, 48; Huxley, Aldous and, 66, 130, 132; Huxley, Julian and, 2, 68, 150, 195n24 Science of Life, The (Huxley, J, Wells H. G., and Wells G. P.) 9, 86 Second World War. See World War II Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 13. See also Beatles, the Shakespeare, William, 66, 163; The Tempest, 163 Shanta (char. in Island), 161 Sheldon, William H., 124, 168 Shelly, Mary. See Frankenstein Sheppard, Reverend Dick, 7, 111, 123 Silent Spring (Carson), 18–19, 155, 183, 206n43. See also Carson, Rachel Smuts, Jan, 198n27 Society of Friends Meeting House (London), 3, 171 Southern California. See Los Angeles Soviet Union, 7, 9, 58, 66, 67, 73, 83, 112, 121, 123, 175, 182; Huxley, Julian in, 61–63 Spencer, Herbert, 6, 40, 107, 178, 193n64 Spender, Stephen, 122, 171 Spinoza, Baruch, 103 Stalin, Joseph, 7, 62–63, 73, 112, 140, 188n20. See also Soviet Union Stevenson, Robert Louis, 41, 179 Stoermer, Eugene F., 2 Strachey, Lytton, 53 Suez Crisis, 158 Sufism, 96 synthetic biology, 209n12. See also biological engineering Szilard, Leo, 121, 202n38 Tansley, Arthur, 198n27 Taoism, 161

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Index

Taylor, Bob Pepperman, 157. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. See Taylorism Taylorism, 194n65 technocracy, 59, 62, 66–67, 69, 73, 79, 118, 144, 194n65, 203n48 Technocracy Review, 67, 73 technosphere, 12, 174 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 8, 74–77, 114, 118–119, 129 Theotocopoulos (aka El Greco), 132 Third Reich, the, 82, 114, 116; racial pseudoscience in, 7, 74; refugees from, 117 Thoreau, Henry David, 16 Three Mile Island, 16 “Tissue Culture King, The” (Huxley, J), 41–48 Toffler, Alvin, 177 Tolstoy, Leo, 16–17, 111, 123, 155 Trabuco College, 128–29 Traherne, Thomas, 97 Transhumanism, 2, 4, 20, 135, 149–50, 176, 179–81, 187n11 Truman, Harry S., 118 Twain, Mark. See Huckleberry Finn United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations, 118, 154 United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1, 9–12, 17–18, 103, 111, 121–22, 135, 150–56, 162, 180, 185, 202n42, 205n27, 206n44 United States of America: culture of, 38, 79–81, 102; geopolitical position of, 9, 41, 80, 116–118; Huxley, Aldous in, 79–80, 113–114, 115, 126, 103–104; Huxley, Julian in, 7–9, 28–30, 35–36, 57, 73–75

Webley, Everard (char. in Point Counter Point), 82 Weismann, August, 178 Wells, H. G., 1, 6, 8, 14, 37, 39, 43, 48, 62–63, 66, 68, 82–83, 86, 116–17, 131–32, 164, 178–79; Island of Dr. Moreau, 43; Men Like Gods, 62; The Shape of Things to Come, 132 West, Rebecca, 63, 116 Wharton, Edith, 48 What Dare I Think? (Huxley, J), 8, 49, 63–64 Whytt, Robert, 136 Wilberforce, Samuel, 11, 23, 143 Wilson, Woodrow, 56 Woolf, Leonard, 111 Woolf, Virginia, 111 Wordsworth, William, 157, 159, 167 World’s Largest Drugstore, the, 98 World State, the (in Brave New World), 14, 20, 32, 48, 50–51, 62–66, 68, 83, 134 World War I, 1, 6, 7, 13–14, 53, 59, 69, 71–72, 82, 84, 90, 99, 104, 110–112, 179, 181; aftermath of, 31; Huxley, Aldous and, 13, 111; Huxley, Julian and, 7, 110–111 World War II, 8, 11, 15–16, 19, 21, 36, 58, 68, 73, 75–76, 79, 83, 101, 109–110, 114–115, 117–119, 120, 121–122, 123, 125–126, 130, 134, 142; aftermath of, 150, 154–156, 157, 161, 164; Churchill, Winston and, 104, 108; Frankfurt School and, 164; Huxley, Aldous and, 8, 15–16, 115, 128; Huxley, Julian and, 8–9, 114, 115–116; Orwell, George and, 115 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 1, 5, 12, 54, 73, 85, 146, 148, 154 X Club, the, 88, 197n9

Veblen, Thorstein, 17, 66–67, 71 Vedanta Society, 97, 101, 102, 167 Verne, Jules, 41 Vogt, William, 161 Watson, Helmholtz (char. in Brave New World), 83

Yen Fu, 23, 193n64 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 84 Zeitlin, Jacob “Jake,” 126–27, 199n38 Zoological Society of London, 7, 116–117, 185, 201n28. See also London Zoo