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How Huxley’s X Club Derailed 150 Years of Science

Rising Tide Foundation

Sep 28

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By Matthew Ehret

In 1865, a group of 12 scientists under the leadership of Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Joseph Hooker, and Herbert Spencer (founder of social Darwinism) was created under the name “X Club” with the mandate to reform global British Imperial strategy.

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At the time of this group’s formation, Lincoln’s north was on the cusp of putting down the secessionist rebellion which the British Intelligence establishment had work decades to nurture guided by Anglo-American operatives in America itself as well as operations in British Canada.

Having far over-extended itself during the 2nd Chinese Opium War (1856-1860) to the Crimean War (1853-1856) to putting down Indian uprisings (1857-1858) and sponsoring the Southern Confederacy (1861-1865), the British Empire knew that it was on the verge of collapse. The world was quickly waking up to its evil nature, and a new paradigm of win-win cooperation was being exported from Lincoln’s America to nations across the world.

Lincoln’s system had been known as ‘American System of National Economy’, a name created by the father of Germany’s Zollverein Friedrich List years earlier. Unlike British Free Trade, this ‘American System’ was premised on protectionism, national banking, long term infrastructure and most importantly placed the source of value on the human mind’s capacity to make discoveries and inventions as outlined by Lincoln’s 1858 speech by the same name. In this system, the Constitutional concept of the General Welfare was not mere ink on parchment but rather the governing principle of monetary value and national policy.

Lincoln’s chief economic advisor and coordinator of the export of the American system internationally after the Civil War was named Henry C. Carey. As early as 1851, Carey wrote his Harmony of Interests which stating:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labour of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the labourer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

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In Germany, the American System inspired Zollverein (custom’s union) had not only unified a divided nation, but elevated it to a level of productive power and sovereignty which had outpaced the monopoly power of the British East India Company. In Japan, American engineers helped assemble trains funded by a national banking system, and protective tariff during the Meiji Restoration.

In Russia, American System follower Sergei Witte, Transport Minister and close advisor to Czar Alexander III, revolutionized the Russian economy with the American-made trains that rolled across the Trans-Siberian Railway. Not even the Ottoman Empire remained untouched by the inspiration for progress, as the Berlin to Baghdad Railway was begun with the intention of unleashing a bold program of modernization of southwest Asia.

The construction of continental railroads, and industrial powers of nations internationally was quickly bringing the world land bridge concept first elaborated by Colorado’s Governor William Gilpin quickly into being. For those who are unaware, Gilpin (who was also Lincoln’s body guard and loudest advocate of America’s transcontinental railroad) spent decades championing the international system of win-win cooperation which he outlined in his 1890 Cosmopolitan Railroad stating:

“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events”.

Reorganize or Perish

The British Empire knew that this emerging new paradigm would render both its maritime control of international trade as obsolete as its international program of usury and cash cropping.

It was clear that something had to change dramatically, for if the empire could not adapt in response to this new paradigm, it surely would soon perish. The task of re-shaping imperial policy from a “material force” approach of control to a more “mental force” of control, was assigned to T. H. Huxley and the X Club. This group established the guiding scientific principles of empire that were soon put into practice by two new think tanks known as the Fabian Society and Rhodes Scholar Trust which I outlined in my three-part series ‘Origins of the Deep State in North America’.

Huxley, who is famously known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for relentlessly promoting Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection (a theory in whose scientific merits he didn’t even believe) soon decided that the group should establish a magazine to promote their propaganda.

Founded in 1869, the magazine was called Nature and featured articles by Huxley and several X Club members. The deeper purpose of the X Club and its magazine was geared towards the redefinition of all branches of science around a statistical-empiricist interpretation of the universe which denied the existence of creative reason in mankind or nature. Science was converted from the unbounded study and perfectibility of truth to a mathematically sealed “science of limits”.

Darwin, Malthus and the Political Use of a ‘Science of Limits’

The science of “limits” became the foundation of an oligarchical economic science for the elite and naturally had to be kept hidden from the minds of the general population since it followed Thomas Malthus’ mathematical principle of population growth. Malthus’ “principle” of population supposed that unthinking humans reproduce geometrically while nature’s bounty only grows arithmetically and as such periodic population collapses were an unavoidable law of nature which could at best be managed by an oligarchical scientific priesthood who were obliged to periodically cull the herd.

Malthus and the X Club leaders believed that nature bestowed upon the ruling class certain tools to accomplish this important task (namely war, famine and disease) and Malthus stated so cold-bloodedly in his 1799 Essay on Population:

“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.”

The X Club’s support of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection was less a scientific decision in this respect and more of a political one, as Darwin later admitted in his autobiography that his own theory arose directly from his study of Malthus:

“In October 1838, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species. Here then, I had at last got a theory by which to work”.

By universalizing Malthus onto all living creation, the X Club obscured the qualitative difference between humans and monkeys which was advantageous for an empire that can only control humans when they adopt the law of the jungle as standards of moral practice and identity formation rather than anything actually moral.

It was thus no accident that Henry C. Carey targeted Darwinism, Malthus and the X Club relentlessly in his Unity of Law: An Exhibition on the Relations of Physical, Social, Mental and Moral Science (1872). In this important book, Carey attacked all systems founded upon master-slave relations saying:

“Hence it is that it has given rise to the doctrine of over-population, which is simply that of slavery, anarchy and societary ruin, as the ultimate condition of mankind; that, too, coming as a consequence of laws emanating from an all-wise and all powerful Being who could, if He would, have instituted laws in virtue of which freedom, order, peace and happiness would have been the lot of man. That these latter have been instituted- that the scheme of creation is not a failure; that is marred by no such errors as those assumed by Mr. Malthus; is proved by all the facts presented for consideration by the advancing communities of the world- the habit of peace, among both individuals and nations, growing with growth of numbers, and increase in power for self-direction.”

Anti-Darwinian Approaches to Evolution

Although we are told too often today that no alternative system ever existed outside of Darwin’s theory of evolution, a closer inspection of science history during the 19th century proves that to be far from true.

During this period, an anti-Darwinian scientific revolution was blossoming in the life sciences under the guiding leadership of figures like James Dwight Dana, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Alexander von Humboldt, Georges Cuvier, Karl-Ernst von Baer, and Benjamin Silliman. These scientists not only began questioning the static theory of nature as derived from a literal reading of the Bible, but made huge strides in realizing the higher causal mechanisms defining the flow of evolution.

Unlike many of our modern scientists, these figures never saw a dichotomy separating science from religion, as “science” was understood as nothing less than the investigation and participation in God’s Creation, and as such the biosphere and all “units” within it were implicitly defined as more than the sum of its parts and all fast approaching theories of evolution that were driven by intention, harmony and directionality.

This outlook was showcased brilliantly by the great naturalist and embryologists Karl Ernst von Baer who wrote in his “On the Purpose of Nature” (1876):

“The reciprocal interconnections of organisms with one another and their relationship to the universal materials that offer them the means for sustaining life, is what has been called the harmony of nature, that is a relationship of mutual regulation. Just as tones only give rise to a harmony when they are bound together in accordance with certain rules so can the individual processes in the wholeness of nature only exist and endure if they stand in certain relationships to one another. Chance is unable to create anything enduring, rather it is only capable of destruction.”

Huxley and the Darwinians on the other hand, promoted an opposing “bottom up” interpretation of evolution by starting with the imagined ‘random mutations’ in the immeasurably small which supposedly added up to the collective sum of all species and biosphere. This biosphere was thus defined as little more than the sum of its parts.

The imperial school of Huxley’s X Club denied not only creativity’s existence from this higher metaphysical standpoint, but also denied the fact that humanity can uniquely translate the fruits of those creative discoveries into new forms of scientific and technological progress which had the effect of increasing our species’ ability to transcend our “limits to growth” (or as modern neo-Malthusians have termed our “carrying capacity”).

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