13) The Huxleys and the intellectual aristocracy

From the back: Julian, Trev, Aldous and Margaret Huxley

This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which looks at the overlap between New Age spirituality and eugenics. For a definition of these terms, an intro to the project, and preceding chapters, go here.

As we saw in the last chapter, Thomas Huxley raised his family from obscurity into the British ‘intellectual aristocracy’.

This was a phrase coined by Noel Annan in 1955 to describe the ‘Whig cousinhood which moulds the culture of this country’. Annan traced a network of families, such as the Trevelyans, the Darwins, the Arnolds, the Haldanes, the Keyneses and the Huxleys, who came mainly from dissenter (i.e Unitarian or Quaker) backgrounds, who rose to prominence in the mid-19th century, who tended to inter-marry, and who prided themselves on reliably producing the smartest and most talented humans.

He traces the inter-marriages and intellectual achievements of this ‘intellectual aristocracy’, in a manner reminiscent of Francis Galton in his essay Hereditary Genius. The implication is the same: talent is hereditary. Here is one of Annan’s family trees, showing all the genetic talent in the Huxley family:

As you can see, Julian and Aldous Huxley were the product of the intersplicing of two intellectual pedigrees — the genius of their paternal grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, and the Arnold family, who produced the Reverend Thomas Arnold, the most famous headmaster of the 19th century; Matthew Arnold, the leading British literary critic of the Victorian age; and Mrs Humphrey Ward, one of the best-selling authors of the 19th century.

The ‘intellectual aristocracy’ championed a new creed in the 19th century, which would eventually be christened ‘meritocracy’. Defenders of meritocracy argued that positions of influence and power should not be handed out through heredity or nepotism, as they were in feudalism, but should instead go to the most talented candidate. Meritocracy was a political creed allied to evolutionary theory (which was discovered and promoted by members of the intellectual aristocracy, like Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton). Society should encourage the fittest humans to rise to the top — and, perhaps, to breed more…

How does one discover the fittest humans for promotion? Through exams and psychometric tests. Charles Trevelyan introduced exams into the civil service to select the fittest candidates. Thomas Huxley rose from obscurity to greatness by coming second in a national exam. Francis Galton was so enamoured of exams and IQ tests as proof of natural fitness, he imagined a utopia where only those who excelled were allowed to breed, while those who failed were shipped off to the colonies (this despite Galton himself having had a nervous breakdown before his finals).

Now, there’s a paradox in the meritocratic philosophy. On the one hand, meritocracy challenges feudal aristocracy and says it’s unfair that jobs are handed out simply through hereditary connections. They should be open to all and go to the most talented candidates, argue the meritocrats.

On the other hand, the intellectual aristocracy is a network of inter-breeding families who believe that intelligence and talent is hereditary, and that they constitute a ‘natural aristocracy’. The top positions in society should be open to everyone, but the intellectual aristocracy think their children are likely to prove the most talented, through the power of heredity. So in fact, the top jobs should probably go to the same families. As Michael Young put it, the feudal aristocracy is replaced by an aristocracy of talent. They become a genetic caste of intellectual Alphas, as Aldous Huxley prophesied in his 1931 novel, Brave New World.

In practice, however, nature and heredity are unpredictable. What if you’re born into the intellectual aristocracy, and you fail to rise to the top? What if you don’t get into Oxbridge, or elected to All Souls, or write a great book, or become a minister or QC or editor of The Times? Then you’re a loser, an embarrassment, a drop-out, an evolutionary dead-end. There is no forgiveness or redemption for you, in the brutal evolutionary creed of meritocracy. You simply failed.

Even if you do well in an exam, your position in the intellectual aristocracy is not permanent and secure, as it was for the feudal aristocracy. You have to constantly prove your membership of the intellectual aristocracy with your achievements. This creates a huge pressure to do well. Either you’re a god-like Master of the Universe, or you’re a basket-case.

Huxleys always get firsts

This was the environment in which Julian and Aldous Huxley grew up. Their father, Leonard Huxley, son of Thomas, married Julia Arnold, the niece of Matthew Arnold, on the 16th of April, 1885. The couple met at Oxford, where Julia was one of the first female undergraduates. After getting married they moved to a cottage near Charterhouse, where Leonard got a job teaching. There they begat four children: Julian, born in 1887; Noel Trevenen, born in 1889; Aldous, born in 1894; and Margaret, born in 1899.

The Huxley children were born ‘with great advantages, cultural and genetic’, in Julian’s words. But there were also great expectations. One family motto was ‘remember you’re a Huxley’. Another was ‘Huxleys always get firsts’. Julian Huxley’s wife, Juliette, recalls: ‘There was something really devastating about having a grandfather (grandpater as they called him) who was a god in the family. These children grew up with that atmosphere. You must be worthy of grandpater.’’

Life was a race for prizes, and Julian was fast out of the gate. He said he felt like a ‘demon’ possessed him since the age of four, and it manifested in a restless pursuit of knowledge and glory. He won a scholarship to Eton, where he won the Shakespeare Prize, the Poetry Prize, and the Biology Prize. He worked so hard he developed nervous tics, and only found reprieve from his workaholism by occasional sorties into nature — sometimes he would lie on his back, looking at the stars, and feel mystically at one with nature.

Then onwards, to another scholarship to Oxford, which he won with an essay suggesting the British coast should be preserved as a nature reserve (he would later play a leading role in the establishment of nature reserves around the world). He also won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, and the Naples Prize for Biology, and graduated with a First.

Noel Trevenen — Trev — was next out of the gates. He followed Julian to Eton, but failed to get a scholarship. At school, he worked himself so hard his matron suggested to his parents he should be removed, lest he have a nervous collapse. They kept him there. He followed his brother up to Balliol College. He was well-loved, if not quite as smart as his older brother.

Then came Aldous, nick-named ‘Ogie’, short for Ogre, because his head was so big, he didn’t walk until he was two (this would have gratified his cranium-measuring grandfather). From early on, he showed a capacity to step out of ordinary reality and reflect on its strangeness. One day, the four-year-old Aldous was asked what he was thinking about so deeply. He looked round, said the one word ‘skin’, then turned back to his meditation.

Aldous also won a scholarship to Eton, but then tragedy struck. The children’s beloved mother, Julia, had cancer. The youngest, Aldous and Margaret, were given no forewarning, and were simply brought in to see their mother in her death-bed. Then, more misfortune. Aldous’ retinas became inflamed, in a condition known as keratitis, and he went almost totally blind. He took the tragedy Stoically, and taught himself braille — it had the advantage, he said, that he could read books under the covers in bed. His eyesight recovered somewhat but he was profoundly visually impaired the rest of his life.

Then the Huxley family’s genetic tendency to depression struck twice. First Julian was hit. His mental health had been worsening throughout his time as an undergraduate at Oxford. He felt as if his mental turmoil threatened ‘to tear my mental being in half’. It didn’t help that the Huxley and Arnold families, despite being the most famous unbelievers in England, were deeply Puritan about sex. Julian was engaged to a beautiful woman, Kathleen Fordham, but his sexual hang-ups and growing depression seemed to have got in the way. Where previously he’d managed to find some respite in bird-watching, now he even had ‘a sense of being forsaken by nature’. The engagement was broken off, and Julian had what his father described as ‘a really bad nervous breakdown’. He was sent to a psychiatric facility in Surrey. Slowly, he put himself back together.

A year later, in 1914, Trev was sent to the same psychiatric facility. He had failed to get a first at Oxford. Huxleys always get firsts. Then he failed to win a place in the Indian Civil Service exam. He was also plagued by Huxley sex hang-ups. He’d fallen for a servant girl, who he then attempted to educate to help her fit in to the intellectual aristocracy. It was never going to work, and Trev felt extremely guilty at leading her on. One day, he left the psychiatric facility to go for a walk, headed into the woods, and hanged himself.

These early traumas and breakdowns left deep scars in Julian and Aldous. They spurred them to search for a meaning to the universe, an alternative to Christianity, just as their ancestors Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold had searched for religious substitutes in Science and Culture. Like their ancestors, Julian and Aldous would try to invent a new religion. And spiritual eugenics would play a central part in it.