by Adam Gopnik
And then the great Darwinian themes are struck one last time, in a poignant, comic key: time itself, and slow modification, earthworms burrowing and the earth altering. Darwin was not especially preoccupied by the problems that move some Darwinians today: he readily saw through the puzzle of ostensibly intelligent design. (An eye that works well evolved from eyes that worked less well.) And, because he didn't know about genes, the great hole at the center of his argument—how did inheritance happen?—was one he never solved. But he was obsessed with the problem of time: How old is the earth? Has there been enough time for evolution to happen? As men dig up the bones that show just how ancient life really is, what lessons can you learn? How can you imagine time in a way that seems to make sense of our own lives and emotions?
For that, far more than God and man, is what Darwin is really always returning to: life and time, life and time, and their complements, death and sex, and how they make the history of life. In Darwin's work, from The “Beagle” to the earthworm, time moves at two speeds: there is the vast abyss of time in which generations change and animals mutate and evolve, and then there is the gnat's- breath, hummingbird- heart time of creaturely existence, where our children are born and grow and, sometimes, die before us. The space between the tiny but heartfelt time of human life and the limitless time of Nature became Darwin's implicit subject, running from The “Beagle” to The Origin. Religion had always reconciled quick time and deep time by pretending that the one was in some way a prelude to the other—a prelude or a prologue or a trial or a treatment. Artists of the Romantic period, in an increasingly secularized age, thought that through some vague kind of transcendence they could bridge the gap. They couldn't. Nothing could. The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows. The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly—not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either.
Writers of varying degrees of skill have recently tried to vindicate Darwin for students of literature by emphasizing his modest “sense of wonder,” the almost mystical awe at the sheer existence of life in the universe. Darwin disenchanted believers in heaven, but he reenchanted lovers of earth. The philosophical George Levine, for instance, proposes an “enchanted secularity” to be deduced from Darwin: because Darwin robbed mankind of place and purpose, he gave us a chance to love and revere nature “precisely in its refusal to be like us.”
These philosophical Darwinites are always on the side of the angels. But sometimes they are on the side of the angels when they ought to be on the side of the apes. If Darwin offers us a disenchanted universe—a universe drained of magic and of meaning—what would it be like to live in an enchanted one? Religious faith, after all, often sees itself as bedeviled and beleaguered even when it reigns more or less unchallenged. Conversely, the soulless materialism of the Darwinian universe can be a comfort: one wishes that a Darwinian could have been by Dr. Johnson's deathbed as he sank into a desperate fear of eternal damnation for having lusted after actresses in his youth. He would have found solace in the idea that there was nothing out there save oblivion, and that the world would remember the things that he had said on earth.
Although we can deduce from Darwin a new doctrine of “enchanted secularism”—or, indeed, Edward O. Wilson's proposal of a “scientific humanism”—we don't need to add to him to love what he says about life. For Darwinism has never been a threat to humanism; it is humanism, in flight. By humanism, we can mean two things. One is that man is the measure of all things; the other, that all things can be measured by man. The first view, essentially religious in origin, inspired Renaissance painting and the Sistine ceiling and Vitruvian proportions. The second view— that what makes people uniquely interesting is their capacity for gauging their environment and changing it, that the more we measure, the more accurately we see what things are actually like—has been what we have meant by humanism since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and Darwin is one of its greatest exponents and examples.
Reading Darwin as a natural novelist shows us a Darwin as complex as good writers should be. He ended as a skeptical materialist who had proved that the forms of life were shaped by history, not by a supervising mind. But reading him also shows us that no emotion we would fear losing is lost in the transformation. The hardest Darwinian view of all is still roomy enough for ordinary love to breathe in.
Darwin was a Darwinian fundamentalist. But he was not a Darwinian absolutist. He knew that what feels to us like soul or spirit—the flash of understanding at an infant's smile or grief at a child's death—can never be argued away. He thought that he had found the secret of life. But he knew that nothing could solve the problems of living. That takes all the time we have.
AGES & ANGELS
Subsequent editions of the first Epistle [of the Essay on Man] exhibited two memorable corrections. At first, the poet and his friend “Expatiate freely o'er this scene of man, A mighty maze of walks without a plan.” For which he wrote afterwards “A mighty maze, but not without a plan”: for, if there were no plan, it was in vain to describe or to trace the maze.
—Samuel Johnson, “Life of Pope”
“Yes!” said the fairy, solemnly, half to herself, as she closed the wonderful book. “Folks say now that I can make beasts into men, by circumstance, and selection, and competition, and so forth. Well, perhaps they are right; and perhaps, again, they are wrong. That is one of the seven things which I am forbidden to tell, till the coming of the Cocq -cigrues; and, at all events, it is no concern of theirs. Whatever their ancestors were, men they are; and I advise them to behave as such, and act accordingly.”
—Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies
Science—scientific reasoning—seems to me an instrument that will lag far, far behind. For look here, the earth has been thought to be flat. It was true, so it still is today, for instance, between Paris and Asnières. Which however does not prevent science from proving that the earth is principally round. Which no one contradicts nowadays.
But notwithstanding this they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round, and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present.
—Vincent van Gogh, June 1888
Tides and splashes, angels and ages—heretical thoughts fill one's head at the end of a long walk through the past. Would the tides of history and ideas really have changed had neither man ever made a splash? Can we imagine modern life, and liberal civilization, just as well without either man?
Darwinism, after all, might have been achieved without Darwin, just as the North would most probably have won the Civil War, and slavery would have ended around the same time, without Lincoln. Alfred Wallace had the idea of natural selection—but, as he knew perfectly well, he was not competent to write a book of the scale or persuasiveness of The Origin. He had none of the larger arguments, none of the crushing waves of evidence, none of the deeply meditated grasp of the difficulties. But weren't there other naturalists in touch with the larger evidence, and wasn't Huxley always there to shape the evidence into argument? Yes. Had it emerged that way, though, evolution by natural selection would have appeared only as a footnote, slowly infiltrating the general consciousness, exactly as Mendel's genetics did later. Without Darwin's craftily humble eloquence and exhaustive, encyclopedic evidence, evolutionary biology would never have carried the day so quickly. (And it did. Although the details of Darwin's views on adaptation and natural selection were not universally accepted until the neo- Darwinian synthesis of the 1940s, by the end of the nineteenth century his core point was already in place: in 1858, few people publicly believed that species were mutable; by 1900, essentially everyone did. The arguments, loud ones, were al
l about what it meant, and exactly how it happened, not whether it had.)
Character counts; eloquence illuminates. A useful comparison is to Charles's good friend Charles Babbage, who came as close to solving the problem of mechanical computation as Darwin did to solving the problem of the origin of species. Babbage's “difference engines,” the first programmable computers, could have ushered in a fin de siècle cybernetic revolution. But Babbage was, as Darwin tells us, “a disappointed and discontented man; and his expression was often or generally morose…. One day he told me that he had invented a plan by which all fires could be effectively stopped, but added,—‘I shan't publish it—damn them all, let all their houses be burnt.’ ” (Babbage also once remarked, “There is only one thing which I hate more than piety, and that is patriotism.”) Darwin observed, correctly, that Babbage's “bark was much worse than his bite,” but his bark caused him to be seen, as the English say, as barking—nuts. And so the first computers would be left unfinished and largely unknown. Had Babbage been a writer and advocate as gifted as Darwin, and Darwin as much a maverick and a pill as Babbage, we might have had steam-driven art nouveau–styled personal computers in the early twentieth century, while evolutionary biology would have been left a murky mess until after the Second World War.
Without Darwin, no Darwinism—but might it perhaps, just perhaps, have been just as well? Had Darwinism not been Darwinism, it might have kicked up less ideological dust, some of which is surely noxious. Exasperated by the way specious arguments over evolution are sustained in the guise of personal arguments over Darwin, a few professional biologists, like Olivia Judson, have even undertaken to have the very word Darwinism replaced in discussion of his legacy. Darwinism is just what Darwin happened to say, they point out, while evolutionary biology is the science that grew out of it. As things stand, the argument goes, anti- evolutionists can obsess about Darwin's agnosticism, or his relationship to eugenics, as though these things had any meaning or impact on what goes on in biology today. The name, they argue, implies an undue cult relation between the maker and his theory. There is no more point in calling evolutionary biology “Darwinism” than in calling the theory of gravity “Newtonism” or that of relativity “Einsteinism.” Evolutionary biologists are rightly amused, or offended, when this or that pundit claims to “have issues” with Darwinian thinking, or to have found a hole in Darwinian logic. After all, would one publish the news that a pundit isn't satisfied with the theory of gravity, or doubts that the earth goes round the sun? Evolution is by now as well established by argument and evidence and reproducible experiment as any truth of physics or cosmology as well established a theory as any in the history of science. (Which means, of course, that it continues to be altered and amended. That's why they call it science, and a theory.)
Understandable professional exasperation aside, a change of name would be a mistake. Though evolutionary biology does exist today independent of, even far removed from, Darwin's personal example, Darwinism is more than a set of claims; it is an entire epoch in human thought and feeling. His habits of mind— fairness, popular address, and the annealing of courage with tact— are worth revering even if scientists abandon or revise half of his tenets. The power of his example—an appetite for seeing joined to a capacity for seeing past, a love of observation enabling a gift for rigorous inference—would be right even if his ideas were wrong. It was Darwin's inductive eloquence that made evolutionary biology happen in the admirable way that it did—the patient, exhaustive piling up of instances from botany, evidence from geology, facts of embryology, all hard- won things that he had seen for himself—-along with the ability to give the pile a significant shape. Someone else might have done all that. But no one else did.
Great books of science, like all great books, are worth reading not just for what they add to objective knowledge; they are worth reading because they advance our liberal education. Just as we don't read Dante for a sneak peek at the afterlife or because we expect someday to be confronted with a diabolical architecture of circles within circles and punishments suited to our sins, we don't read Darwin because what he says is what scientists now believe—much of it isn't. We read him because a book of eloquent argument and well- ordered evidence, assembled with such modest yet personal passion, reminds us of the powers of the human mind to bring light to darkness, make a clearing in the wood of confusion. As Dr. Johnson said about the man who could ride on three horses at once, it matters because it shows what people are capable of doing if they try.
Even Darwin's way of being wrong was the right way of being wrong. As Huxley wrote immediately after the publication of The Origin: “Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they will owe the author of On the Origin of Species an immense debt of gratitude. We should leave a very wrong impression on the reader's mind if we permitted him to suppose that the value of that work depends wholly on the ultimate justification of the theoretical views which it contains. On the contrary, if they were disproved to- morrow, the book would still be the best of its kind.” The best of its kind because it asks the right questions in the right spirit, and enlarges the human mind by its very existence. It is not blind belief in Darwin's view of nature but our love for what he did to the blind nature of belief that makes biology, and us, Darwinist. By honoring Darwin, we aren't idolizing him. Just the opposite, really. If Darwinism were like a religion, then the Darwinism practiced now would be a sect, unlike the original and at war with the first faith, Sufis to the old sect's Sunnis. We can say that bits of it are right, and bits of it look wrong, and lots of bits aren't pinned down yet. Anomalies at the edges are not the same as heresies on the horizon.
It is, in a way, a tribute to Lincoln's greatness that we can even mention the two men together: Lincoln is, after all, a provincial figure, one man in one country, an actor largely ex officio, while Darwin is an epoch maker. We lived in an American century, but we live in a Darwinian world. Certainly it's possible that, had Lincoln been assassinated in Maryland on his way to the presidency—rather than saved by Pinkerton—a Secretary Seward working through a feeble President Hamlin might have done as well, or even better. He might have been less impressed by a dress- up general like McClellan and, though he wouldn't have gone to Grant, might well have turned to someone good, and been less patient with the obvious screwups. For that matter, had common cause been made with the rest of North America, as Darwin suggested, cooler and wiser heads might have prevailed sooner, slavery might have ended, and a Greater North America today might be a flourishing nation, albeit more like Australia (big, less populated, a little bit inclined to cringe across the ocean).
Nor are Lincoln's claims of “national unity,” of “Union,” so obviously irresistible—although it helps to have lived outside America to see this. In Canada, for instance, the issue of the secession of Quebec has risen, again and again, with the general conclusion that if the people, even a small majority of the people, of Quebec decide that they want to have their own country, Canada will be obliged to let them go. It is a fraught issue, and a demand for “clarity” has been added to it, in recognition of the reality that the verdict of a single “snapshot” moment hardly seems enough to doom a country. But the principle of potential separation is held to because of the understanding that the alternative is armed violence. For that matter, we endure, and even encourage, the breakup of other countries—the old Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia—into smaller parts, again guided by the perceived good of self- determination and also the prudential judgment that the alternative would be civil war.
Well, civil war was the alternative in America, too, and Lincoln chose it. We see the choice as both morally right and historically successful, but we see it as morally right in part because it was historically successful. Harry Truman said, with artless honesty, that he liked Lincoln best of all the presidents because he allowed Truman to be important, but it isn't always clear to the majority of the earth's pop
ulation that the American rise to global dominance resulting from the preservation of the Union has necessarily been a good thing. More profoundly, there is something dangerous about the equation of military success and moral right; the argument favoring violence for the sake of an ideal can make us idealize violence, and gets even liberal-minded people, who ought to know better, to forget what the actual costs of war are.
Or we might ask what would have happened if Lincoln had not been assassinated right after the war's end. Samuel Eliot Morison began a chapter in his synoptic history of America by calling down a thousand curses on the head of John Wilkes Booth, on the grounds that a living Lincoln would have eased the pains of Reconstruction. The trouble with this is that the pains of Reconstruction were not those of white people who needed a more sympathetic overseer but those of blacks who were promised freedom and then denied it by force. It is hard even for a Lincoln idolater to believe that Lincoln would not have put the demands of the old ruling class for more power over those of a helpless dark- skinned people for mere land and liberty. His taste for the “grease,” his genuine appetite for conciliation, might very well have pressed Lincoln to make more concessions sooner to the returning rulers. It's possible, and nice to imagine, that Lincoln's stature and intelligence would have led him to find a way to enfranchise blacks without infuriating whites, but, given how hard it was to do in our own time, it doesn't seem too likely. The end of slavery had been at the center of his imagination for all his adult life; the integration of blacks had not. The only fair postwar peace would have been a hard peace, sustained by the army; a comparable peace has been possible in South Africa, for instance, only by the irresistible force of numbers. It's just as possible to imagine Lincoln floundering in peace as he had sailed straight in war, and ending up with another version of the same ugly mess that his successors got, eventually fleeing to Europe and the Holy Land and his memoirs, growing old with a potent but mixed reputation—not unlike that of his hero Jefferson, in a way. (When John F. Kennedy met Pandit Nehru, now no longer the philosopher- prophet of Indian independence but a tired and fretful old man, he remarked, with great savvy to John Kenneth Galbraith that Nehru sadly put him in mind of what Lincoln might have been like had our nation-maker lived a quarter century past his triumph.) His death has dramatic point (if we can, as we shouldn't, overlook the mind- crushing grief it caused his wife) and inevitability—but it also locked his reputation in place as a prophet and poet, whereas his continued life might have left him remembered merely as a president.