Angels and Ages

by Adam Gopnik

  Why, then, has the hostility shifted across the political spectrum? The philosopher Philip Kitcher provides part of the answer. Although in fact Darwinism was a late-arriving weapon in the Enlightenment's battle with superstition and religious fundamentalism—the work of doubt had already been done by the time The Origin appeared—most people are unaware of the Enlightenment critique in its earlier forms. We don't read or know Hume's criticism of miracles, or the nineteenth- century textual criticism of the Bible. (It is a fair guess that the overwhelming majority of Christians are unaware that the Gospel according to Mark did not originally include an account of the Resurrection.) But everyone takes biology. Everyone has to. And where it once offended leftists to be told that biology has an existence independent of class interests, it now offends conservatives to be told that biology has an existence independent of religious teaching, or the tradition of the West. And a certain callow triumphalism on the part of the community of popularizers—from which one should exempt even old opponents like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Jay Gould, both of whom recognized there's no explaining away emotion by reference to genes—encourages the upset.

  The other, and deeper, reason for this anger is that the spread of pop Darwinism undermines the strength of the humanities—the tradition of the novel, and poetry and history as authority on human affairs—and of the authority of the people who have mastered those parts of culture to speak in an intimidating way on broad subjects. Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, even T. S. Eliot— none of them really understood even the rudiments of evolutionary theory yet no one, a scant two generations ago, questioned their right to speak on human affairs not just with wisdom but with authority, with a claim to have mastered the real fount of human wisdom about human life. More important even than our faith in God is allegiance to our Magi. The common reader is now more likely to go to Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins, to Steven Pinker or Steve Jones, for that kind of authority, translating academic expertise into moral exhortation. (And doing it in the same way: a bit of data, a touch of interpretation, and a lot of moral exhortation, as here.) The authority, for good or ill, has passed from the humanities proper to the sciences improper, from literary studies to popular science, and with that passage has come an inevitable and understandable reaction.

  The truth is that Darwin implies no politics: one can be a passionate Darwinian and be of the far right, the right, the liberal center, the left, or even the far left; great Darwinians have been found all around the room.

  A similar pluralism is possible in thinking about Darwinism's relationship to faith, despite the stormier and much louder arguments Darwinism provokes. Whether we ought to find the two unbridgeable, the truth is that we haven't. Darwinism has been the basis of biology for a century; meanwhile, fundamentalists remain fundamental, poets have gone on writing Christian poetry, and mystics have gone on doing mystical work. It's a good thing, actually, that we can't reconcile each of our beliefs with every other: the possibility of alteration is the healthiest aspect of our beliefs. Charles and Emma, Mr. and Mrs. Darwin, remained married and in love to the end.

  Of course, it is possible to imagine a day when the forces of intolerance could overwhelm the habits of pluralism. But it hasn't happened, not yet, and not nearly, and the friends of pluralism do their cause no favors by trying to proclaim the day or pretend that it is nearer than it is. We live perfectly happily in a world with churches on the street corners and biology textbooks in the study. True liberalism begins with recognition of what is, and what is possible; so far, what is, is science and religion more or less cohabiting, more or less happily.

  Perhaps the reason is this simple: religion has become for most an affirmation not of a certain understanding of history but of a way to live in the present; it is an expression of a social practice, of community ritual, and life seems sad without it. Anyone who has taken part in even the most debased or “secularized” forms of such rituals, the most godless seder or Unitarian kindergarten, knows that they are illuminating beyond all measure, and that life without them seems empty. A life without Christmas would be a life without stars. So if by religion we mean a faith in a supernatural being, an invisible man in the sky who makes absolute rules about human existence, punishing those who break them and then manifesting his existence from time to time in the Middle East for the purpose of issuing amendments, then, no, the truths of Darwinism are not compatible with religion. (That kind of God would have to have a very weird sense of humor, in any case, since life would be nothing but a very long shaggy- dog story, with us as the punch line, and we're not a big enough laugh for such a buildup—sixty million years of rocks and zombies and then an eye's blink of consciousness. You could get the joke told sooner with the same effect.) And of course if religion includes a doctrine of eternal damnation, then, as Darwin said, it is a damnable doctrine.

  None of our serious religious thinkers has held such a view of God for a very long time. Ours has been an age of great theological speculation, sublime religious poetry, and profound personal revelation. Auden's For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, Barth's theology—neither of them has the least quarrel with, or much interest in, evolutionary biology because that is not its subject any more than the history of life on earth is the subject of the Psalms. The subject of such works is evil and good, alienation and belonging. If by religion we mean belief in a force in the universe that nonetheless seems to shine inside us with a power that is inexplicable but real to all who witness it, and gives meaning and serenity to life, then, yes, religion is completely compatible with Darwinism, which is a claim about history, not about everything that is.

  Or even if we mean by religion what most people have actually meant by it since the beginning of time—an encompassing practice of irrational rituals that can't be justified but only experienced, and give order and continuity to life—then, yes, of course, religion is compatible with Darwinism. The faith of George Herbert and Dr. Johnson, of Kierkegaard and W. H. Auden, has nothing to do with obeying the commandments of an invisible man in the sky who occasionally intervenes, and everything to do with confronting the chaotic reality of the cosmos to find serene order within it. In this sense the “epiphenomena” of religion—choral music, stained glass, Communion—are the thing itself.

  It is odd how often people mention music when talking about faith; the existence of Handel's Messiah does not prove the existence of God, but the importance of Christianity is proved by the existence of the Messiah. To enter Chartres is to understand Catholicism. To secularize or “aestheticize” these things, thereby removing them from their dogmatic contexts, is to miss their meaning. The nativity of baby Jesus reminds us of the fragility of childhood, the wonder of renewal in birth, and the long shadow of a probably horrible death that hangs over every one of us, but it is more than a symbol, too. It's alive. Bach knew this, and we know it, too. The imaginative life, in which we make symbols and stories, is not a secondary existence of ours, but a primary one. It's how we're made to live. When we talk of souls and spirits, we are not talking nonsense any more than we are when we talk of love and courage and faith in some cause. Those ideas may not have a fixed material existence. But the most compelling things never do. The “fact- value” distinction that is so much a part of the modern philosophy of science—the rule that our values are not naturally determined but chosen—is not intended to belittle values; it is intended to diminish the tyranny of facts. It is a way of saying not that physical truths imply no morality but that morality is made irrespective of mere physical truths.

  It might be true, for instance, that life is brutal and pointless, but we can choose to live as though it were otherwise. It might be true—there is absolutely no such evidence, but it might be true— that different ethnic groups, or sexes, have on average different innate aptitudes for math or science. We might decide to even things out, give some people extra help toward that end, or we might decide just to live with the disparity. (In any case, human populations are so large thes
e days that the relatively tiny number of outliers who rise above the average is large enough to staff any university faculty you could want.) It certainly is true that the chances of anything we are doing now being remembered are vanishingly small, and the chances of the obliteration of life on the planet depressingly real—but we all choose to live as though what we are doing has meaning and purpose beyond the day and moment.

  We make our values in the face of facts. And so the values are ours. We can't outsource them upward. The judgment that some act is right, rather than demonic, can only be our own. We can turn to faith for meaning, but not for morality. As everyone since Plato has recognized, our idea of good has to be independent of our idea of God, since a God who asks us to do evil is not one we can obey. The sacrifice of Isaac seems acceptable to us only because it didn't happen; it otherwise seems inscrutable, and we could not obey a God who would have let a father slay a son. Like Darwin, we would choose not to worship a God with bad rules and cruel intentions even if he existed. Only very simple people of faith any longer live by an unquestionable divine covenant. Even the most passionate faith is impossible without moral judgment made independent of it.

  We can't look up to know how to act. But we can't look back, either. The notion that we can go back to the savanna, to our evolutionary past, for our moral principles is, at best, incoherent; if Darwin reveals anything, it is that no moment is privileged, no species perfected, nothing wrought but all nascent and nothing entirely achieved—sixty thousand years from now people might be referring to the ultimate moment in which human morality got fixed in the big cities of this era, when we were flourishing (which we certainly are doing, actually rather more successfully than our sparse savanna ancestors did). We can't outsource our lives, or our morality, either backward or upward.

  Or anywhere else, except forward. We can't worship history any more than we can justify present pain for imaginary future pleasure. But we can make a better world. Pessimism is so much part of the mental equipment of modern people that to gainsay it is to seem unserious. But there is a difference between a tragic consciousness and pervasive pessimism. We don't know what Utopia would look like, but we do know the difference between bad and better. The world is better now than it was once, in the simplest and most important of ways. There are no slaves, at least not in America or England. The hold of fear and superstition has lessened. We know how men got here. Science has revealed many things, if not everything. Annie wouldn't die today. Neither would Willie. We might not be able to cure Tad, but we could help him. We have not yet found a way to avoid wars, but most people know that they have horrible consequences even when they are justified, and that we should begin them only when the life of the community we love and its values are obviously and overwhelmingly at risk. (Sometimes, they are. The pacifists are not always right. But the warmongers are almost always wrong.) There are fewer racists; more people are peace loving. Meanwhile, we can go on looking for the point of life—if there is one, other than to make the bad things better. That may have been the point all along. Between 1914 and 1945 the great reactions against the open society produced sixty million deaths in Europe, and it seemed natural, and right, for us to become pessimistic about modernity itself. To discard those doubts for a fatuous complacency is wrong. But what is most striking is how persistent are the beliefs in freedom despite violence, in progress in the face of the wedge of death.

  There is no struggle between science and art or between evolutionary biology and spiritual faith; there is a constant struggle between the spirit of free inquiry and the spirit of fundamentalist dogma. That struggle is the story of human intellectual history. Atheism is no guarantee of humane conduct. Stalin and Hitler borrowed religious ideas, certainly, but they weren't believers. Nothing is any guarantee of humane conduct, except an insistence on it. In this sense, though Darwinism implies no politics, not even a liberal one, it does imply a philosophy. As the biologist Ernst Mayr wrote, it implies an intense awareness that all categorical or essentialist claims about living things are overdrawn— anyone who says that all cases of this thing or that thing are naturally one way or another is saying something that isn't so. It also teaches a great respect for the rule of variation, and the particular case. Mill's theory that eccentricity is necessary in society was intuitively closer to Darwin's theory of nature than the other grander theories. There are no neat lines between organisms. There are, truly, no straight lines in nature. The world is a gently graded blending of individual cases into apparent groups. Repetition is the habit of nature, but variation is the rule of life.

  The liberal belief in the primacy of the single case is not an illusion nurtured by fancy but a hope quietly underscored—at a distance, pianissimo—by science. The general case is the tentative abstract hypothesis; the case right there is the real thing. This individualism is no guarantee of anything good. If we thought it better to treat people as though there were neat absolute lines between races, tribes, classes, and sexes, we could—and for most of human history, we have. If we would like to believe that humans are getting smarter, that evolution is inevitable, that progress is written into our very nature, that participatory democracy is a condition to which our genes for cooperation and altruism tend to lead us—well, there is nothing in a hundred thousand years of history to tell us that it's so. “Outraged nature” ought to rebound against tyranny, or cruelty, but it won't. Evolutionary theory can only say—and it's a lot—that if we want the rule of law, free speech, and individual rights, equality of races and sexes, there is nothing in biology to tell us that we can't.

  Darwinism, and liberal science, is no threat to humane values and never has been. Yet there is a way in which the anxiety that so many people feel in the face of the primacy of science reflects something real and unalterable. There is something else, something deeper, and that is our awareness of the gap between our knowledge and our experience. The negotiation of that gap, more than any other single thing, is what marks the lives of this book's two subjects and the modern world they helped to create and we have inherited.

  All science, all politics, is necessarily and always the aggregate of experience, while all of our actual experience is individual. Psychology studies children, tells us just how children learn, and traces all the patterns of development that children share, but as our children partake of the pattern, we don't think, “What a pattern!” We think, “What a kid!” All science is about graphs and charts and patterns on spectrums, and it tells immense amounts about how alike we are; all literature is about specific experience, and says that what happens only to us counts too.

  We have common experiences and core experience, aggregate knowledge and individual notes. The common experience is that which we share with everyone else. We learn language at two, become sexually aware at twelve, get married at twenty, get bitter at forty, leave our partners at fifty have a heart attack at sixty, and die at seventy. Your mileage may vary—if you're living on the savanna, you're maybe too healthy to have that heart attack, or else, more likely, you're dead already—but these are the norms.

  Our core experience, on the other hand, is irreplaceably our own. Our children grow old, hit their developmental markers, become alert at thirteen months and angry at thirteen years— they hit twenty and want all the mates they can find and hit fifty and want a younger mate. All of it goes like clockwork, and all of it feels like chance. (The moment our core experience fits perfectly into the common experience is the moment we call rapture—when our children are born or the home team wins and the whole city celebrates. The moment when an account of individual experience touches the aggregated experience is the moment we call art.)

  Lincoln and Darwin both knew this. They both had profound knowledge of the common experience of death—Lincoln, of death in war; Darwin, of death as the great sorter of existence— yet when death touched their core experience, that knowledge was of absolutely no help or consolation. Charles wouldn't have grieved less for Annie, or Mary for Willie, if they ha
d known more about the vulnerability of small children to tuberculosis and typhoid. Annie was not one monkey among many, who could be replaced by some other young female of the same age and genetic constitution. Individual experience is not reducible to general laws, not because of some mysterious essence that defies scientific explanation but because the explanation, as Darwin saw, begins with the existence of the irreducible individual case.

  That, again, is one central point of Darwinism. The habit of nature is regularity, but the rule of life is variation. No one had looked more grimly into the face of mass death than Abraham Lincoln, who grasped the awful arithmetic of modern war. But he could never detach himself from all that death, or find help in apprehension of the aggregate when death touched his own core. Darwin knew better than anyone that the wedge of death was inexorable, cleaving the quick from the lifeless without purpose or plan. But his knowledge didn't ease his grief when Annie died. Masterly knowledge of the common experience brought no understanding or consolation. All the attentions of his adult life had been devoted to this subject: the propagation and blind culling, the winnowing of each species’ young on the threshing floor of death. No one understood this better than Charles Darwin; no one else understood it at that time except Charles Darwin. And it made no difference at all.