Angels and Ages

by Adam Gopnik

  But the differences between nature and the market in time scale and intention are much greater than the resemblances. Adam Smith's invisible hand is really the concerted action of a thousand small acts of calculation; Darwin's great sorter is the cumulative result of a thousand blind acts of copulation. Animals in evolutionary biology don't want to extend their family line, to produce progeny or improve, or even extend, their species; they just want to get laid. The variation that may result—the longer- tongued frog, the greener bug—is, quite literally, a lucky bastard. No male salmon impregnates salmon eggs with the idea of making more salmon. (Not even every human group knows that sex will lead to offspring.) There is a difference between an invisible hand and a blind watchmaker. One is the result of the immediate interacting of human intentions; the other, of the long- term accidents of animal lust. (No animal, even an Icelandic one, ever sleeps with another organism in order to improve the species.) Greed is good because personal prosperity almost always becomes general; sex is not good because it improves the breed. Sex is sex, and the breed gets better by chance and time, by the oddities of random mutation and the winnowing of natural selection.

  In this way, Herbert Spencer and the rest of the right-wing Darwinians misread The Origin, and tried to insert will into a natural system that, in Darwin's view, didn't have it. They wanted Nature to have a purpose, a point, and a plot, not just a history. On the other edge, Karl Marx was just as impressed by Darwin as Spencer was. The story that Marx wanted to dedicate the second volume of Das Kapital to Darwin seems to be false; Darwin wrote to him politely, following the publication of the second German edition of Das Kapital, that “though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.” But Marx went ahead and, imitating Darwin as he understood him, tried to drain all will and purpose from the human system of politics that did have them. By insisting that History will work out its dialectic independent of our acts, just as Nature shapes forms independent of the individual organism's experience—that the most we can do is midwife changes that are anyway bound to happen—his version of Darwinism encouraged a contempt for active political reform in favor of heightening the contradictions and waiting for the revolution to come. Marx, too, has an insistent eschatology a sense of the direction and arrow of history, that is alien to Darwin. Darwin thinks that many terrible things happen in nature but not that history is moving toward a Utopia in which no animal will ever again eat another.

  And so a Darwinian “left” and a Darwinian “right” were both in place before most people had grasped the Darwinian middle, which was where the maker was. The Victorians got so much metaphoric resonance from The Origin because it was unique in having a double charge, a double dose of poetic halo. It is both an explanation of evolution, an old idea, and a theory of natural selection, a new one. If you concentrated on the evolutionary part, which is, as Darwin knew, an old and long- present idea, one of Granddad's tall tales, then you could make it into a kind of pro-gressivism—an explanation of eternal change and social improvement with a vitalist charge. If you concentrated on the natural selection part, the struggle for survival, you could make it into an endorsement of free markets or imperialism or anything else you liked. The real point, which Darwin understood and was clear about, was that the book got its charge where the two ideas combined to make a third, entirely new one: that things that look fine- tuned by engineering can be made by the compounds of accident, ages, lust, and hunger. Natural selection made whales just as artificial selection made Pekingese and greyhounds, and it turned monkeys into men just as breeders turned wolves into lap-dogs. Natural pianos are made by unnatural patience.

  Scientific ideas become a whole climate of opinion when they can provide a set of metaphor s for people who aren't doing science. Darwin, like Einstein, certainly provided the metaphors, though, like Einstein, he hadn't intended to. People thought that natural selection might prove that Britain was powerful because nature intended it to be, as they thought that Einstein's relativity might imply that anything goes at a party. (In fact, the point of natural selection is that Nature doesn't play favorites, just the odds, just as Einstein's relativity is special because there's something in it that isn't relative, the speed of light, which is absolute. It would make more sense for us to become sun worshippers in the light of Einstein than moral free- for- allers.)

  Yet morals and metaphors aside, the most important way in which Darwin altered his era was by getting people who did do science to ask a new kind of question. Some scientific revolutions have surprisingly small ideological aftershocks; Michael Faraday's discovery that electricity and magnetism are the same thing was as large a discovery as any in the history of science, but it had a paltry aftereffect. We don't talk about Faradayism, or about Faradayan economics (though there's no reason why somebody couldn't equate economic waves, in their pulsating pattern, with electromagnetic ones). For a new scientific theory to become a model in its time, vastly influential outside its immediate claims, it has to release thinking people from a bond that they had long recognized as too narrow and help them interrogate the world in a new way. What really matters is not that the answers suggest a new metaphor for amateurs but that it shows a new kind of question to other pros. Other scientists have to say not, “How smart of him to discover that,” but “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that! If only I'd stopped to ask …”

  As a small boy for instance, I was a witness to the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics (in which my mother and, later, my sister both played parts). In retrospect, what Chomsky proposed are in truth fairly specific ideas about language and the way it's learned, which solved some problems and led to others—but the broader metaphoric aura, the poetic charge, was to release a generation from the narrow bribe- and- threat model of learning that behaviorism, in place before in the field, had insisted on, and make space for new inquiry. Now psychologists and linguists and philosophers felt free to ask questions about what was there in the mind, about innate ideas and blossoming modules—entering inquiringly a previously forbidden garden of inbuilt mental structure—rather than ruling those questions out of court from the start.

  The power of the new Darwinian questioning was everywhere apparent at the time. All over Europe, biologists and naturalists began to ask why rather than what questions about life. It was revolutionary science that proposed “normal” science, things to do. It still is potent today, even to us amateurs. Walking in Central Park at twilight, impregnated with the Darwinian ether, you suddenly ask yourself why there are fireflies in Italy and the eastern United States but not in California, on the Pacific coast? I don't know the answer to this, but I know Darwin would have asked it. By always asking questions that ran against the taxonomic grain— asking not, what is it? but, what's it related to? and, how does it make a living?—he immediately altered the world.

  Addendum: A little research reveals that fireflies in fact do exist on the other side of the Rockies—but that the ones that crossed the mountains, while anatomically like our glowing little guys, are for the most part not bioluminescent: they fly, but they don't fire! Which leads one quickly to the Darwinian speculation that flashing fireflies must have made themselves too visible to unknown sharp- eyed predators they hadn't faced on the eastern side of the mountains—only a desk- bound speculation, but one surely worth pursuing if only to disprove. It also turns out that fireflies are bewilderingly hard to classify for precisely Darwinian reasons: they're so compacted that it's very hard to tell varieties from species. Asking pre- Darwinian questions—essentially, to what place in nature does this thing belong?—quickly dissolves into questions of words and names, while asking instead Darwinian questions—how does this thing make a living? what will it leave its children? how does it pay for the house? and what villain is trying to foreclose on its mortgage?—pays off in less fixed, and more interesting, answers.

  In
an odd way, John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty used Darwin's reluctance to publish as an argument for tolerance, may have eaten the social marrow of the theory better than anyone else. His argument for liberty wasn't just, or especially, for the brave Giordano Brunos of the world, who speak scientific truth in the face of the Inquisition and the fire. It was also for the oddballs. It is desirable, he wrote, for people to be “eccentric”: “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained.” The idea that odd sorts and variations were to be valued for the sake of progress, that bizarre variation was the key to the growth of knowledge, may have been a more truly wise extension of the Darwinian idea to human social life than any other in its day.

  You could plausibly read into Darwin pretty much any politics you wanted, left or right, socialist or laissez-f aire, liberal or radical, Christian or freethinking. The one thing that you could not read into Darwin's writings was racism. Or, rather, you could, but only by simple misreading—not by freely interpreting what the book might say but by falsely declaring what it did say. The story of what came much later to be called “social Darwinism,” with its racist and “eugenic” beliefs, is a long and sad one; it has a lot to do with the social life of the late nineteenth century, and little to do with Darwin or his actual ideas. Darwin is insistent that there are no original differences among people, that all human beings belong to a single family, and that all have the same kinds of roots and the same kind of mind. At a time when religious bigots are trying to undermine the teaching of evolutionary biology in America by calling Darwin a racist, this cannot be said loudly enough, or often enough, or clearly enough.

  Darwin argues, in The Descent of Man, against Archbishop Whately a leading theologian whose “On the Origin of Civilization” had embraced the view that the lower races had “fallen away” from God. “It may be doubted,” Darwin writes, “whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant. Savages, even within the limits of the same tribe, are not nearly so uniform in character, as has been often said…. The most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed.” (That is, they descend from the same fathers even if they haven't all slept in the same bed.)

  Again in The Descent, he writes, “Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole organisation be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these points are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races.” People are different, in Darwin's view— he thought there were savages, primitives, at one end and civilized people at another—but what knit them all together was the habit of sympathy, which could be extended wherever, and as far as, we chose to place it. “As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

  We should not judge the past by the standards of the present. Darwin wrote about “savages;” we wouldn't. (But then, we use words that our great- grandchildren will be shocked by, too— though which ones: wife? veal chops?) But we should not judge the past by the standards of the past either—if we did that, we'd smile politely as some of our ancestors burned books, and nod under-standingly as others burned witches (and some of us would be nodding as both our ancestors and their books got burned). We should judge the past by the standards of the best voices that were heard within it. Shakespeare's anti- Semitism in The Merchant of Venice, ugly as it is, occurred in a time when no one had a clear idea of what Jews were, and of what anti- Semitism actually was. Jews were about as real to Elizabethans as Orcs. The modern anti-Semitism of the great but flawed genius G. K. Chesterton, on the other hand, can't be defended by saying that “everyone thought that way then” because not everyone did. (By 1920, the only people who did were anti- Semites like him, and a chorus of the decent was there to tell him, loudly and at length, that it was shameful. It was his choice not to listen.)

  At every crucial turn, Darwin listened to the highest—that is, the kindest and most humane—voices of his time, and was usually publicly numbered among them. In 1865, just after the American Civil War, the British governor of Jamaica massacred several hundred “natives” in order to end what he imagined was an incipient rebellion. In England, indignant citizens formed a “Jamaica Committee,” intending to have the governor tried for murder. John Stuart Mill was the man who chaired the committee and pushed the point, but Darwin and Huxley were both on the committee (as was the geologist Charles Lyell), and their evolutionary views were assumed to be the source of their indignation. (The Pall Mall Gazette sneered: “It would be curious also [to] know how far Sir Charles Lyell's and Mr. Huxley's peculiar views on the development of species have influenced them in bestowing on the negro that sympathetic recognition which they are willing to extend even to the ape as ‘a man and a brother.’ ”)

  And (closer to our own dual preoccupations), in 1873, Darwin wrote to Colonel Higginson, the American writer and friend to Emily Dickinson, who had recorded his experiences leading a black Union regiment in the Civil War:

  My wife has just finished reading aloud your “Life with a Black Regiment,” and you must allow me to thank you heartily for the very great pleasure which it has in many ways given us. I always thought well of the negroes, from the little which I have seen of them; and I have been delighted to have my vague impressions confirmed, and their character and mental powers so ably discussed. When you were here I did not know of the noble position which you had filled. I had formerly read about the black regiments, but failed to connect your name with your admirable undertaking.

  The “admirable undertaking” was the creation and employment of black troops on an equal footing with white ones, a practice which, as we've seen, enraged the racist South to the point of massacre.

  Bad men often think big thoughts. Darwin might have been a racist and still have been right; that residual racism would have to be extracted from his ideas on evolutionary biology. But, as a matter of fact, he wasn't. And the connection that existed in the mind of his time was that his theory, tending toward proving the oneness of creation, naturally tended to prove the equality of men. Racism, in any form that would have been familiar in his time or would be familiar in ours, had no place either in Darwin's life or in Darwin's logic. Modern racism rests on the simple premise that races exist, and then that some are smarter or higher or purer than others. It begins in the belief that kinds of men are as different as species, that the volk is the reality and that the idea of the individual is the mere product of years of weakening acculturation, and bourgeois sentiment. Darwin was not only passionately opposed to all these views, but provided the best weapons to prove them wrong: evolutionary theory is a long explanation of why only individuals have a real existence, while races and species, far from being fixed and authoritative, are just convenient temporary designations of populations whose only real rule is that they vary. (Of course, species and even, at times, races are things we can talk about sensibly for the moment; we can tell a bear from a panda, and Asians from Africans. But they don't have the “real existence in nature” they did before Darwin; they're part of history, not permanent natural order, and there's lots of variation within the groups.) Variation, not conformity, is the Darwinian rule. Darwin's great and repeated theme was not the short- term
success of certain races, but the permanent nonexistence of any.

  Darwin himself was released by the publication of The Origin— the great struggle was over, and he had won at least a serene space for himself in which to work. He rapidly went from garden duffer to grand old man. Yet he didn't entirely enjoy it. Darwin, though filled with bright ideas and keen arguments on almost every subject under the sun, hated to be placed in the position of a wise man or oracle even as he became one. He felt helpless in the face of the kind of universal questions great men get asked: What should we make of the future? Will the United States be the major power? At one moment after he became famous, a group of a hundred and fifty German naturalists sent him, as a weird keepsake, an album of signed photographs of themselves—one imagines them all, bespectacled and scowling and impressive. It was the kind of thing that wore Darwin out; “we have been rather overdone with Germans this week,” his wife sighed on another, similar occasion. (These days, it's Americans.) When he wrote an autobiography, meant as a posthumous gift for his children, it was candid and affectionate but remote and a little formal. He was timid and easily embarrassed, shrinking from confrontation and violent statement while remaining simultaneously stubborn, opinionated, and convinced beyond reason that he was right and his way of life and views about it were the only sane ones that a man of common sense could hold.

  Darwin's strategy was one of the greatest successes in the history of rhetoric, so much so that we are scarcely now aware that it was a strategy, and it immediately inserted him into the Victorian pantheon. His pose of open- mindedness and ostentatiously asserted country virtue made him, in his way, as unassailable as George Washington. Clean- shaven through his youth, he grew a proper set of whiskers as he began to go public, and was photographed by Julia Cameron, every bearded inch the sage.