I am very pleased to announce the publication of We Are Amphibians on November 14th, 2014.
Here are some reviews:
"This is a remarkably informed and engaging intellectual biography of two famous brothers who together formed the yin and yang of the modern evolutionary worldview. The Huxleys argued over the big, important issues, and R. S. Deese is an excellent guide to what they discovered as scientist and artist." —Donald Worster, author of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
"This magnificent book offers the reader an intellectual feast, exploring the thought of two great minds of the twentieth century as they sought to articulate a more humane vision of progress. From their contrasting—but also remarkably complementary—perspectives, the Huxley brothers grappled with fundamental questions of the modern era: the human place in nature, the role of evolution in shaping Homo sapiens (as well as the project of manipulating that evolutionary process through biotechnology), the ecological threats and cultural dehumanization brought on by industrial economies, the tension between state power and individual agency, the imperatives of political and cultural internationalism, the relation between scientific truth and religious truth, and humankind’s dual nature, suspended between the material and spiritual/symbolic realms. R. S. Deese lays out the thought of the Huxley brothers on these issues with a combination of deep scholarship, wide-ranging expertise, insightful analysis, and wonderful literary flair. This is a powerful and original book about vitally important topics—and what’s more, it is an absolute pleasure to read." —Michael Bess, Chancellor's Professor of History and Professor of European Studies at Vanderbilt University
“The importance and excitement of We Are Amphibians lies in its positive engagement with utopian visions. As R. S. Deese notes, these have been rendered impossible or completely suspect by much of both contemporary political theory and postmodern philosophy. The author also links this positive vision to a particularly acute contemporary problem: ecological crisis. This makes the work not only refreshing but also eminently relevant and timely.” —Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University
“We Are Amphibians contains fresh and brilliant insights into the role the Huxley brothers played in the development of our thinking about environmentalism, social planning, and religion in the twentieth century. As someone who just finished writing a book about Aldous Huxley, I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the material I found to be new and little known. For example, I had never come across the wonderful vignette at the opening of chapter 1 in which Aldous vomits in Julian's top hat in the presence of the Prince of Wales.”
—Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club and Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk
And here's a brief excerpt from the introduction:
Introduction
“The question of questions for mankind . . .”
Yogi Berra was
right when he quipped, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” 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. 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 the winter of 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 22nd, 1963.
Throughout their
long careers, both brothers shared a passionate concern for the same
fundamental question: What is the outlook for Homo 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 . . .
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. 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 own essays and fiction on the potential of
applied biology had 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 mid 1920s, 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.”
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, over a decade before he
would publish 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.” 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 magazine Amazing Stories, Julian’s story
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.
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 much 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
of 1963, and then published the collected recollections of Aldous’s illustrious
friends and colleagues. 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 Henry Huxley, 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 longstanding 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 which its culture could
bring to the everyday tasks of living and self-cultivation. For all of 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 the species of Homo
sapiens as a work in progress, conceiving of human nature and protean and
wonderfully complex.
To express this
idea, both Julian and Aldous both echoed the seventeenth century 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 . . .” 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 over 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
sixties and seventies. Julian Huxley’s call for human beings to grab
the reigns 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.
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 helping to found such institutions as the International
Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
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 a means to enhance our power over nature, Julian and Aldous
Huxley ultimately came to agree that our prospects for survival are
inextricably tied to our respect for both the mystery and the fragility of the
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.” Before either of them had begun their
careers, the term “Huxleyan” had already become part of the English language as
term denoting the relentless skepticism and intellectual bombast epitomized by
their grandfather. 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 re-imagine the paradigm of our place in
nature that T.H. Huxley had advanced in the last decade of the nineteenth
century.
