“Human beings are not equal in respect of various desirable qualities. Some are strong, others weak; some healthy, others chronic invalids; some long-lived, others short-lived; some bright, others dull; some of high, others of low intelligence; some mathematically gifted, others very much the reverse; some kind and good, others cruel and selfish.” The inequality of humankind was the message that Julian Huxley, writing as the director-general of Unesco, chose to propagate two years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights appeared in 1948. “Our new idea-system,” he continued in a pamphlet setting out what he believed should be Unesco’s guiding philosophy, “must jettison the democratic myth of equality. Human beings are not born equal in gift or potentialities, and human progress stems largely from the very fact of their inequality.”
As Alison Bashford notes in her biography of the Huxleys, “It was a family tradition so to argue.” All three of the most publicly influential Huxleys – Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) and his grandsons Aldous (1894-1963) and Julian (1887-1975) – were never in any doubt as to their superiority over the mass of humankind. They had supreme confidence in their intellects, though that did not spare them mental troubles. All were familiar with what the elder Huxley called “the malady of thought” and Aldous (reviving a Chaucerian usage) “accidie” – a melancholy that in Thomas Henry and Julian produced recurrent periods of acute depression.
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