Angels and Ages

by Adam Gopnik

  Yet in another way it was an even bigger war, with bigger meanings, than Americans can quite see. We may overrate Lincoln's personal genius a little—as we eulogize, over and over, his faith, his speech, his shrewdness, and even his sadness—but we may also in an odd way underrate his accomplishment. We tend to overpraise the originality of his political procedures—every statesman in England and France brought his rivals into his cabinet. Yet we may still overlook the consequences of his cause. In England, John Stuart Mill, who never visited America or much wanted to, still followed the Civil War and Lincoln's acts with the sense that the war was “full of the most important consequences to humanity, stretching into the remotest future,” and even that “the whole futurity of mankind” depended on it. What was at stake in this war for Mill was not only the end of slavery but the survival of liberal democracy itself, and the test of its survival was whether it could enforce its own laws against a morally deranged minority who didn't like them (the law that held that one man rather than another was the elected president or, more locally, that a fort belonged to the government that had built it). Mill, recognizing the tension between his belief in the right of self- determination and his opposition to the South, wrote that “secession may be laudable … but it may also be an enormous crime.” In contemporary terms, Lincoln's success had the worldwide effect that Boris Yeltsin's might have had had he somehow been able to keep the Russian empire united while installing a functioning, law-bound democracy. Our own post- 1989 hopes for liberalism as both a light and a lance, a humane creed capable of self- defense, would have risen immeasurably had Yeltsin only done that. Lincoln's success was of that kind, and of that scale.

  After it was over, a new birth of freedom did take place. Ironically, the renaissance was in some ways less visible in America itself, where what has been fairly called the reenslavement of blacks took place under the rule of terror, and a plutocracy emerged in the North, than it was elsewhere. In England, the victory of the North helped pave the way for the Reform Bill of 1867 and engaged the English working classes in what Gladstone rightly called the “magnificent moral spectacle” of the fight against slavery in defiance of their own economic interest in the cotton trade; in France, the victory helped give confidence and a sense of purpose to the establishment of the Third Republic. The Statue of Liberty, though it has been incorporated into our history of immigration, stands in New York Harbor as a testament from one free country to another that liberty, after two thousand years, really does light the harbor. When we look at it, we should see our grandparents arriving. But we should think of Lincoln, too.

  Lincoln and Darwin are both emblematic figures in the spread of bourgeois liberal democracy, and the central role for science that goes with it. They stand for those free and freely inquiring societies in their gift of eloquence, in their insistent need to persuade and convince, argue and substantiate, talk and justify. They remind us that literary style, eloquence, isn't an ornament or frosting on an achievement created by other means; it is part of that achievement. Lincoln and Darwin were not otherwise great figures who happened to be great writers; we pick them out among their contemporaries because they wrote so well, and they wrote so well because they saw so clearly and they saw so clearly because they cleared their minds of the cant of their day and used the craft of legal and scientific reasoning to let themselves start fresh. Just as Lincoln used the narrow language of the law to arrive at a voice of liberalism still resonant and convincing today Darwin used the still more narrow language of natural observation—of close amateur looking—to change our ideas of life and time and history. Darwin is most fully himself, most alive, in the volumes of narrow observational science that he published regularly in between his speculative books. The end of his life's work, which seems to some a descent, a dying fall—those worms and that vegetable mold—seemed nothing of the kind to him. Nor should it to us. It's the last Darwinian statement: truth comes from close scrutiny of the way things are, with the mind demanding every moment to know how the hell they got that way. The tininess is the point. In the same way, the legalistic side of Lincoln, the devotion to legal technicality so disconcertingly evident in the Emancipation Proclamation, or the buildup of his great Cooper Union speech, is inseparable from the celebrated soaring rhetorical Lincoln who saw the point of the thing: that no nation can be free and enslaved at once.

  Induction and argument are the probity of liberal thought. Facts matter, logic counts, describing the stamen of the orchid exactly is worth six volumes on the metaphysics of being. The truth matters to the progress of a free nation—but it matters just as much that the truth be accepted. In an open society, new truths need to be told, and new truths need to be heard. It was Darwin's inductive eloquence that allowed science to rewrite the history of life; it was Lincoln's rational passion that ended the long horror of slavery, and began the adventure of democracy as a dominant, not a Utopian, way of life. Lincoln showed, to a degree that we no longer appreciate, that democratic politics are compatible with a society's long- term survival—or, to put it bluntly, with military victory, with winning armies; he showed that democracy can survive the use of force to preserve it. Darwin showed that scientific reasoning can explain not only the life of matter but the matter of life—it can come up with a plausible theory of the history of life on this planet, which until then had seemed as mysterious as the nature of time or consciousness seems to us now.

  And this rootedness in reasoning explains why of all explanations of life, evolutionary theory is not remotely like a religion. There is no resemblance between evolutionary biology, even if we call it Darwinism, and a religion. (And it is the devil's work to say it is!) The theory of evolution by natural selection is an argument: all its points are open, its claims clear, many of its possible refutations self- evident. (Find the fossilized body of a Pekingese lapdog in the Pleistocene, and we all start over.) It deserves the respect we give to any wonderful and winning argument, the same respect that we give to the argument of the Declaration of Independence, or the Gettysburg Address. But it isn't a dogma, and the claim that it is is made only by those who want to protect their own faiths from criticism by pretending that all strong ideas can only take the form of faiths.

  Darwin proudly called his idea of evolution by natural selection a “theory,” which was not always the way that scientists talked about their ideas in the nineteenth century. In those 1838 notes on Maculloh's “Proofs of God,” he refers twice on a single page to “my theory” in opposition to Maculloh's natural theology. The invocation of theory has something modest about it, but it is also “massive,” as the kids say now; theology was to be countered by theories, which are tentative, open- ended, and unsure but also explain things that were otherwise mystifying, and are always empirical—open to probing and testing and changing. Theories, as the psychologists Alison Gopnik and Andy Meltzoff have pointed out, are in many ways the ground and basis of our humanity: it is in the child's ability to make theories, test them from experience, and then make new and better ones, that intelligence emerges; and it is, by the same argument, in the perversion of theory into dogma that intelligence becomes enslaved. A child who can't make new theories is a disabled child. Darwin's elevation of the dignity of theory is part of his elevation of the dignity of man, defined in a new way: not as a being who knows from birth, or is told from on high, but as one who asks and learns and asks again.

  Yet Darwin and Lincoln both saw something more, and darker, than the strength of good speech and open-ended ideas. They learned that death was all around and all- powerful. They learned it firsthand through the deaths of those they loved, and they learned it just as cruelly, if at a greater distance, from those who died in war or in the struggle for existence. Lincoln's compassion for the soldiers he knew he had led to an early death was real and immediate; it's one of the things that make us admire him. But Darwin's compassion for even the simple creatures who died horribly in nature was real, too; the caterpillar eaten away from inside b
y the ichneumon wasp's larvae genuinely made him doubt that any good deity could oversee the world. Death was the one fact whose force could not be argued out, only accepted. It couldn't be explained persuasively in terms of due process. It couldn't be brought down to earth by the most painstaking of descriptions. It called them both to seek some form of transcendence, some meaning beyond the human cycle of breathing and eating and dying, even while resisting the supernatural meanings of faith. Their constant sense of the presence of death helps explain why they both came to a new, almost mystical sense of the power of time—time the explanatory force, the justifying force that gives meaning to life by asking us to think in the very long term. Unable to see life “vertically,” in terms of the verdict of heaven, they came to see it “horizontally,” in terms of the judgment of time. Deaths at Cold Harbor or in the struggle for existence made some sort of sense in history, beyond individual imagination but within human imagination.

  Darwin and Lincoln were makers and witnesses of the great change that, for good or ill, marks modern times: the slow emergence from a culture of faith and fear to one of observation and argument, and from a belief in the judgment of divinity to a belief in the verdicts of history and time. First, the change from soul to mind as the engine of existence, and then from angels to ages as the overseers of life. For good or ill, that is what we mostly mean by “modernity,” and by the special conditions of modern times. Just as Lincoln looking at history could seem to make sense of the horror of war, Darwin, considering the deep time of evolution, could give some shape to the senseless wedge of death. This emergence, of course, is still seen by many as a terrible descent: the loss of the certainty of a single set of sure values. Yet their pain and problem is ours. Our beliefs are still likely to be touched by either Lincoln's agonized intuitive spirituality, his private religion, or by Darwin's calm domestic stoicism, his quiet doubt.

  This faith in deep time gave each of them a different, and modern, spiritual turn. The American begins in aggressive freethinking and atheism so severe that it has been largely read out of the record and crosses, through the Civil War, toward some kind of private belief in providential fate and destiny, in many ways Jewish, or at least Old Testament, in tone. The Englishman begins in the inward- turning faith of the English church and clergy, for which his whole early life was designed, passes through quiet doubt, and ends in open atheism, which, with typical tact, he refers to only as uncertainty. He ended as a kind of classical Stoic. Lincoln became an American Job; Darwin, an English Marcus Aurelius. These two tracks cross in the sky above their time (and show, at crucial moments, a similar pang of acute doubt brought on by seeing children die too soon). Lincoln and Darwin take opposing trajectories toward two very near places, and rare is the modern person who hasn't, at some time or other, visited both: private mysticism touched by public secularism, shining inward faith in tension with scientific skepticism.

  There is a curious double consciousness at large in liberal civilizations. On the one hand, they grant enormous importance to the individual and the individual's immediate connections—to family, garden, small group, the Little Women waiting. On the other, they have been shaped by mass death and a readiness for mass killing, by what Papa goes through in the Union army. (This imbalance may explain why we give murder such undue imaginative weight, why our most popular storytelling apparatus, nightly television, is so devoted to the lore and legends and compulsive retelling of individual homicides, even though their investigations are a vanishingly small percentage of what police officers really do.)

  Lincoln and Darwin grasped this double truth—inhabited it, in fact. Modern liberal eloquence is rooted in fact, divided in feeling. It begins with a faith in what the eye sees and what the mind knows—and recognizes that the heart and soul seek more. In the mid- nineteenth century, when modernity was taking shape, most of the liberals and progressives were optimists; they believed that things were getting better, and would go on getting better. The poetic pessimists, Carlyle and Ruskin and Henry Adams, were all among the “reactionary” doubters. Evolution became joined to the idea of constant progress, government of the people to the idea of Manifest Destiny. For a long time in the twentieth century, with the eclipse of liberalism, the pessimists held more intellectual repute even as the optimists worked small wonders in the world. (This made for the awkward but important fact that reactionary politics and visionary art go together in the literary movement we call modernism.)

  But as history changed and liberalism seemed, at the end of the twentieth century with all its flaws and faults, not just admirable but for a moment at least victorious, the old evident banality intruded. We again need a sense of how we can reconcile it with the darker truths we know about the world, and which Darwin and Lincoln understood already. In their lifetimes, they took the fatuous and optimistic liberalism of triumphal democracy and ever- improving nature and improvised toward a fatalistic but far from despairing idea of Providence and the workings of time. All their angels are ages, and the ages held out a distant halo of angels. They found a way to sustain the necessary values of the Enlightenment in the face of pessimistic truths about the universe and political conduct. Persuasion wouldn't be enough in human affairs; war would be necessary. Nature was not benevolent, nor always tending to improve, but blindly cut a wedge of death through the innocent. But it was still possible to measure and speak and believe in the possibility of broader knowledge and a better world. There may be no plan, but we can still describe the maze; describing the maze is, in fact, the first step in getting out of it. Lincoln, as Garry Wills has shown us, revived the crucial Enlightenment document, the Declaration of Independence, and made it part of the war. Darwin gave his grandfathers’ labile universe a mechanism and an explanation; he put the history of life on the same law- bound basis as the history of the universe. Evolution wasn't an impulse in each creature that we could only submit to; it was a cumulative law of the natural world that we could see. Darwin was a sort of Stoic, and Lincoln a “suffering man,” but neither was merely resigned. Both gave liberalism a tragic consciousness without robbing it of a hopeful view.

  • • •

  In our optimism over their rhetoric, might we be missing an appropriate pessimism about their success? After all, slow, carefully argued evidentiary- minded speech sure doesn't seem like a winning ticket in modern life. And it isn't always, or perhaps even often. Alas—and that nineteenth- century rhetorical alas covers a genuine world of grief and pain—it's true that both men, and their ideas, for all they won, were also losers. Within a year of Lincoln's death, the great idea of Reconstruction was gone, and the resubjugation of black Americans, with slaves turned into serfs, was begun through terror, not to end until well into the next century. Lincoln stands out in his time because there is only one of him, one statesman with his moral vision. Darwin, for his part, planted the seeds of a natural universalism in the mind of the world, but nationalism and racism would turn out to be much stronger—so much stronger that Darwinism itself would be abused in the cause. That we remember them well doesn't mean they won. They may be icons, but icons still inspire prayers for lost causes.

  There is, still, a real asymmetry in how they are remembered. Aside from a few loud doubters, Lincoln has been resettled in a cocoon of righteousness even as his real accomplishments have not always been well understood. Darwin, on the other hand, though even his smaller ideas have been vindicated over time, has been under increasing assault in the last few years, at least in America, from the conservative and fundamentalist right wing.

  Traditionally, it was leftists, and Marxists in particular, who, despite the allegiance of Marx to its master, were the most hostile to Darwinism. They were passionately opposed to it, or just ignorant of it, for a simple reason: it seemed to downplay the control of economic life over human minds, saying that biology was strong, and free of social causes; it also seemed to posit a system of competition that, as we've seen, very superficially resembles free market capitalism. Th
is double dubiousness led ultimately to the catastrophe of Lysenkoism, the doctrine that acquired characteristics can be inherited, which became dogma under Stalin, helping to stall Russian genetics and starve Russia. (Even today, many leftist lives of Darwin are written under a sign of extreme suspicion that he was merely serving capitalist masters by saying that creatures struggled in nature to survive, even though the analogy of nature and the market was not his own, nor implied by his work.)