Now a man may be both an evolutionist and a devout Christian. Millions successfully juxtapose these two independent viewpoints, but Thomas Henry Huxley did not. This quote, in its proper context, actually speaks of Huxley’s courageous agnosticism. It also occurs in what I regard as the most beautiful and moving letter ever written by a scientist.
The tragic setting of this long letter explains why Huxley cited, only in analogy as Moon, Mann, and Otto did not understand, “the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God.” Huxley’s young and favorite son had just died. His friend, the Reverend Charles Kingsley (best remembered today as author of The Water-Babies and Westward Ho!) had written a long and kind letter of condolence with a good Anglican bottom line: see here Huxley, if you could only abandon your blasted agnosticism and accept the Christian concept of an immortal soul, you would be comforted.
Huxley responded in tones that recall the chief of police in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance who, when praised by General Stanley’s daughters for expected bravery in a coming battle that would probably lead to his bloody death, remarked:
Still, perhaps it would be wise
Not to carp or criticise,
For it’s very evident
These attentions are well meant.
Huxley thanks Kingsley for his sincerely proffered comfort, but then explains in several pages of passionate prose why he cannot alter a set of principles, established after so much thought and deliberation, merely to assuage his current grief.
He has, he maintains, committed himself to science as the only sure guide to truth about matters of fact. Since matters of God and soul do not lie in this realm, he cannot know the answers to specific claims and must remain agnostic. “I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man,” he writes. “I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.” Thus, he continues, I cannot assert the certainty of immortality to placate my loss. Uncomfortable convictions, if well founded, are those that require the most assiduous affirmation, as he states just before the passage quoted by Moon, Mann, and Otto: “My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”
Later, in the most moving statement of the letter, he speaks of the larger comfort that a commitment to science has provided him—a comfort more profound and lasting than the grief that his uncertainty about immortality now inspires. Among three agencies that shaped his deepest beliefs, he notes, “Science and her methods gave me a resting-place independent of authority and tradition.” (For his two other agencies, Huxley cites “love” that “opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature,” and his recognition that “a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology.”) He then writes:
If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy’s grave my sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is because these agencies have worked upon me, and not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct forever from the All from whence it came and whither it goes.
And thus, my dear Kingsley, you will understand what my position is. I may be quite wrong, and in that case I know I shall have to pay the penalty for being wrong. But I can only say with Luther, “Gott helfe mir, ich kann nichts anders [God help me, I cannot do otherwise].”
Thus we understand what Huxley meant when he spoke of “the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God” in the passage cited by Moon, Mann, and Otto. It is obviously not, as they imply, his profession of Christian faith, but a burning analogy: as the Christian has made his commitment, so have I made mine to science. I cannot do otherwise, despite the immediate comfort that conventional Christianity would supply in my current distress.
Today I sat in the court of Little Rock, listening to the testimony of four splendid men and women who teach science in primary and secondary schools of Arkansas. Their testimony contained moments of humor, as when one teacher described an exercise he uses in the second grade. He stretches a string across the classroom to represent the age of the earth. He then asks students to stand in various positions marking such events as the origin of life, the extinction of dinosaurs, and the evolution of humans. What would you do, asked the assistant attorney general in cross-examination, to provide balanced treatment for the 10,000-year-old earth advocated by creation scientists. “I guess I’d have to get a short string,” replied the teacher. The thought of twenty earnest second graders, all scrunched up along a millimeter of string, created a visual image that set the court rocking with laughter.
But the teachers’ testimony also contained moments of inspiration. As I listened to their reasons for opposing “creation science,” I thought of T. H. Huxley and the courage required by dedicated people who will not, to paraphrase Lillian Hellman, tailor their convictions to fit current fashions. As Huxley would not simplify and debase in order to find immediate comfort, these teachers told the court that mechanical compliance with the “balanced treatment” act, although easy enough to perform, would destroy their integrity as teachers and violate their responsibility to students.
One witness pointed to a passage in his chemistry text that attributed great age to fossil fuels. Since the Arkansas act specifically includes “a relatively recent age of the earth” among the definitions of creation science requiring “balanced treatment,” this passage would have to be changed. The witness claimed that he did not know how to make such an alteration. Why not? retorted the assistant attorney general in his cross-examination. You only need to insert a simple sentence: “Some scientists, however, believe that fossil fuels are relatively young.” Then, in the most impressive statement of the entire trial, the teacher responded. I could, he argued, insert such a sentence in mechanical compliance with the act. But I cannot, as a conscientious teacher, do so. For “balanced treatment” must mean “equal dignity” and I would therefore have to justify the insertion. And this I cannot do, for I have heard no valid arguments that would support such a position.
Another teacher spoke of similar dilemmas in providing balanced treatment in a conscientious rather than a mechanical way. What then, he was asked, would he do if the law were upheld. He looked up and said, in his calm and dignified voice: It would be my tendency not to comply. I am not a revolutionary or a martyr, but I have responsibilities to my students, and I cannot forego them.
God bless the dedicated teachers of this world. We who work in unthreatened private colleges and universities often do not adequately appreciate the plight of our colleagues—or their courage in upholding what should be our common goals. What Moon, Mann, and Otto did to Huxley epitomizes the greatest danger of imposed antirationalism in classrooms—that one must simplify by distortion, and remove both depth and beauty, in order to comply.
In appreciation for the teachers of Arkansas, then, and for all of us, one more statement in conclusion from Huxley’s letter to Kingsley:
Had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me…and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is—Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
Postscript
On January 5, 1982, Federal District Judge William R. Overton declared the Arkansas act unconstitutional because it forces biology teachers to purvey religion in science classrooms.
22 | Science and Jewish Immigration
IN APRIL 1925, C. B. Davenport, one of America’s leading geneticists, wrote to Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, and th
e most notorious American racist of the genteel Yankee tradition: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to.” If America had become too full to provide places of insulated storage for undesirables, then they must be kept out. Davenport had written Grant to discuss a pressing political problem of the day: the establishment of quotas for immigration to America.
Jews presented a potential problem to ardent restrictionists. After 1890, the character of American immigration had changed markedly. The congenial Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians, who predominated before, had been replaced by hordes of poorer, darker, and more unfamiliar people from southern and eastern Europe. The catalog of national stereotypes proclaimed that all these people—primarily Italians, Greeks, Turks, and Slavs—were innately deficient in both intelligence and morality. Arguments for exclusion could be grounded in the eugenic preservation of a threatened American stock. But Jews presented a dilemma. The same racist catalog attributed a number of undesirable traits to them, including avarice and inability to assimilate, but it did not accuse them of stupidity. If innate dullness was to be the “official” scientific rationale for excluding immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, how could the Jews be kept out?
The most attractive possibility lay in claiming that the old catalog had been too generous and that, contrary to its popular stereotype, Jews were stupid after all. Several “scientific” studies conducted between 1910 and 1930, the heyday of the great immigration debate, reached this devoutly desired conclusion. As examples of distorting facts to match expectations or of blindness to obvious alternatives, they are without parallel. This essay is the story of two famous studies, from different nations and with different impact.
H. H. Goddard was the director of research at the Vineland Institute for Feebleminded Girls and Boys in New Jersey. He viewed himself as a taxonomist of mental deficiency. He concentrated upon “defectives of high grade” who posed special problems because their status just below the borderline of normality rendered their identification more difficult. He invented the term “moron” (from a Greek word for “foolish”) to describe people in this category. He believed at the time, although he changed his mind in 1928, that most morons should be confined to institutions for life, kept happy with tasks apportioned to their ability, and above all, prevented from breeding.
Goddard’s general method for identifying morons was simplicity itself. Once you had enough familiarity with the beast, you simply looked at one, asked a few questions, and drew your evident conclusions. If they were dead, you asked questions of the living who knew them. If they were dead, or even fictitious, you just looked. Goddard once attacked the poet Edwin Markham for suggesting that “The Man with the Hoe,” inspired by Millet’s famous painting of a peasant, “came to his condition as the result of social conditions which held him down and made him like the clods that he turned over.” Couldn’t Markham see that Millet’s man was mentally deficient? “The painting is a perfect picture of an imbecile,” Goddard remarked. Goddard thought he had a pretty good eye himself, but the main task of identifying morons must be given to women because nature had endowed the fair sex with superior intuition:
After a person has had considerable experience in this work, he almost gets a sense of what a feeble-minded person is so that he can tell one afar off. The people who are best at this work, and who I believe should do this work, are women. Women seem to have closer observation than men.
In 1912, Goddard was invited by the U.S. Public Health Service to try his skill at identifying morons among arriving immigrants on Ellis Island. Perhaps they could be screened out and sent back, thus reducing the “menace of the feebleminded.” But this time, Goddard brought a new method to supplement his identifications by sight—the Binet tests of intelligence, later to become (at the hands of Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University), the Stanford-Binet scale, or the conventional measure of IQ. Binet had just died in France and would never witness the distortion of his device for identifying children who needed special help in school into an instrument for labeling people with a permanent stamp of inferiority.
Goddard was so encouraged by the success of his preliminary trials that he raised some money and sent two of his women back to Ellis Island in 1913 for a more thorough study. In two and a half months, they tested four major groups: thirty-five Jews, twenty-two Hungarians, fifty Italians, and forty-five Russians. The Binet tests produced an astounding result: 83 percent of the Jews, 87 percent of the Russians, 80 percent of the Hungarians, and 79 percent of the Italians were feebleminded—that is, below mental age twelve (the upper limit of moronity by Goddard’s definition). Goddard himself was a bit embarrassed by his own exaggerated success. Weren’t his results too good to be true? Could people be made to believe that four-fifths of any nation were morons? Goddard played with the numbers a bit, and got his figures down to 40 or 50 percent, but he was still perturbed.
The Jewish sample attracted his greatest interest for two reasons. First, it might resolve the dilemma of the supposedly intelligent Jew and provide a rationale for keeping this undesirable group out. Second, Goddard felt that he could not be accused of bias for the Jewish sample. The other groups had been tested via interpreters, but he had a Yiddish-speaking psychologist for the Jews.
In retrospect, Goddard’s conclusions were far more absurd than even he allowed himself to suspect in anxious moments. It became clear, a few years later, that Goddard had constructed a particularly harsh version of the Binet tests. His scores stood well below the rankings produced by all other editions. Fully half the people who scored in the low, but normal, range of the Stanford-Binet scale tested as morons on Goddard’s scales.
But the greater absurdity arose from Goddard’s extraordinary insensitivity to environmental effects, both long-term and immediate, upon test scores. In his view, the Binet tests measured innate intelligence by definition, since they required no reading or writing and made no explicit reference to particular aspects of specific cultures. Caught in this vicious circle of argument, Goddard became blind to the primary reality that surrounded his women on Ellis Island. The redoubtable Ms. Kite approaches a group of frightened men and women—mostly illiterate, few with any knowledge of English, all just off the boat after a grueling journey in steerage—plucks them from the line and asks them to name as many objects as they can, in their own language, within three minutes. Could their poor performance reflect fear, befuddlement, or physical weakness rather than stupidity? Goddard considered the possibility but rejected it:
What shall we say of the fact that only 45 percent can give sixty words in three minutes, when normal children of 11 years sometimes give 200 words in that time! It is hard to find an explanation except lack of intelligence…. How could a person live even 15 years in any environment without learning hundreds of names of which he could certainly think of 60 in three minutes.
Could their failure to identify the date, or even the year, be attributed to anything other than moronity?
Must we again conclude that the European peasant of the type that immigrates to America pays no attention to the passage of time? That the drudgery of life is so severe that he cares not whether it is January or July, whether it is 1912 or 1906? Is it possible that the person may be of considerable intelligence and yet, because of the peculiarity of his environment, not have acquired this ordinary bit of knowledge, even though the calendar is not in general use on the continent, or is somewhat complicated as in Russia? If so what an environment it must have been!
Goddard wrestled with the issue of this moronic flood. On the one hand, he could see some benefits:
They do a great deal of work that no one else will do…. There is an immense amount of drudgery to be done, an immense amount of work for which we do not wish to pay enough to secure more intelligent workers…. May it be that possibly the moron has his place.
But he feared genetic deterioration even more and eventually rejoiced in the tighte
ning of standards that his program had encouraged. In 1917, he reported with pleasure that deportations for mental deficiency had increased by 350 percent in 1913 and 570 percent in 1914 over the average for five preceding years. Morons could be identified at ports of entry and shipped back, but such an inefficient and expensive procedure could never be instituted as general policy. Would it not be better simply to restrict immigration from nations teeming with morons? Goddard suggested that his conclusions “furnish important considerations for future actions both scientific and social as well as legislative.” Within ten years, restriction based upon national quotas had become a reality.
Meanwhile, in England, Karl Pearson had also decided to study the apparent anomaly of Jewish intelligence. Pearson’s study was as ridiculous as Goddard’s, but we cannot attribute its errors (as we might, being unreasonably charitable, in Goddard’s case) to mathematical naïveté, for Pearson virtually invented the science of statistics. Pearson, the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College, London, founded the Annals of Eugenics in 1925. He chose to initiate the first issue with his study of Jewish immigration, apparently regarding it as a model of sober science and rational social planning. He stated his purpose forthrightly in the opening lines:
The purport of this memoir is to discuss whether it is desirable in an already crowded country like Great Britain to permit indiscriminate immigration, or, if the conclusion be that it is not, on what grounds discrimination should be based.
Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes Page 27