io9 | Huxley's
genteel progressivism seems at odds with the popular image of eugenics.
While many eugenics enthusiasts were racists on the the far right of the
political spectrum, Huxley was part of a "reform eugenics" movement
which was popular among British socialists like H.G. Wells and George
Bernard Shaw.
For
these reform eugenicists, social equality was a necessary prerequisite
for identifying genetic inequality. And that's where Huxley's notion of
evolutionary humanism came in. He wrote that evolutionary humanism
elevated this mission to a religious quest:
The lineaments of the new religion ... will arise to serve the needs of the coming era... Instead of worshipping supernatural rulers, it will sanctify the higher manifestations of human nature, in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realization of life's possibilities as a sacred trust.
The
key to achieving these aims was to educate the public, enabling them to
think in evolutionary terms. In Huxley's mind, a widespread acceptance
of an evolutionary worldview represented the process of evolution
"reaching self-consciousness [and] becoming aware of itself."
In order to
make sense of evolutionary humanism as a religion, however, you also
have to understand Huxley's somewhat idiosyncratic approach to evolution
itself. Biologists generally define evolution in terms of allele
frequencies, mutations, selection, and drift. For Huxley, this was just a
small part of a much broader picture. He radically expanded the concept
so that all directional change was evolution. In Huxley's view, "the
whole sum of reality is, in a perfectly legitimate sense, evolution." It
was also, for Huxley, inherently progressive. Evolution necessarily
moved towards "higher," or more complex, states of being.
Huxley
broke this universal process of evolution down into three stages:
cosmic, biological, and psychosocial. Cosmic evolution was the slow
development of complex structures through physical and chemical
processes; the formation of stars and production of heavier elements,
the gradual formation of planets, and the emergence of simple organic
chemistry. Biological evolution was more or less what we think of by the
word "evolution" today, although Huxley believed that most biological
progress ended roughly five million years ago, and that only minor
improvements, especially among early hominids, had occurred since.
Progress was the whole point of evolution, but had only just gotten
started in the last, psychosocial stage.
