Darwinism and Lincolnism

Behold, public discourse has its elevated moments. The elevation doesn't go very far, but it is a precious inch when it happens. Newsweek Magazine has this cover story by Malcolm Jones: "Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?"

It is a good question to ask as we approach the 200th anniversary of their shared birthday. Both men were born on February 12, 1909. It is one of this cosmic synchronisities, like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both dying on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But while Adams and Jefferson were the greatest coming-together of ideas ― federalism and republicanism meeting at the same point of political deliberation ― the birth of Lincoln and Darwin mark the greatest divergence. The man who would be President represented the self-evident truths of human equality, enshrined in the core of the American regime; the man who would be a Naturalist represented precisely the opposite idea, that nothing was self-evident, because everything was in a state of perpetual biological change.

Jones seems to miss this entirely. Darwin was the sober teacher of truth, by his account, while Lincoln was an ultra-practical moral crusader. In those respects, they were in fact complimentary, according to him. This in turn seems to confuse a great deal of Jones' account, which could have been so much better. He gives this snapshot of how things were in 1809:

On their birth date, Thomas Jefferson had three weeks left in his second term as president. George III still sat on the throne of England. The Enlightenment was giving way to Romanticism. At the center of what people then believed, the tent poles of their reality were that God created the world and that man was the crown of creation.

Man was not quite the "crown," if one studies the time carefully. He had indeed reached his pinnacle, but it was becoming quite clear that God was no longer a necessary idea. Believe in Him or don't, the philosophers taught (though it was more fashionable to not believe); God still doesn't matter compared to the new possibilities of human power. We were the crown of creation in the 19th century only because we had discovered our own power and found the ability to create our own highest goals.

Still, Jones asserts that for all its optimism,

the institution of slavery was still acceptable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line ― it would not be abolished in New York state, for example, until 1827, and while it had been illegal in England since 1772, it would not be abolished in English colonies until 1833.

All true, as far as the facts go. But the facts leave out the most important truths: none of the nations then profiting from slave labor had within them the very principles that would bring slavery's "ultimate extinction," as Lincoln (not Darwin!) put it. For all of his research and even careful treatment of Lincoln's own speeches, there isn't the slightest acknoweldgement of Lincoln's own understanding of the American regime. The Founders, according to Lincoln, meant what they said in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln explained it this way:

This they said, and this meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

Nor was that simply the wish of the Founders. It was actually true according to Lincoln. Elsewhere he wrote:

One would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.

Deny the axioms of geometry, and there is no geometry. Similarly, deny the axioms of liberty ૽ axioms of human equality ― and there is no liberty, at least not any kind that we can justly claim we deserve. It was not a conclusion, but a premise. To demand the end was to grant the condition ― which for Lincoln and the Founders meant the the deepest necessity to end slavery.

It was clear, though, that the whole reason for slavery enduring in the South came precisely from a deliberate rejection of the Founders principles. With the intellectuals of the Confederacy in mind, Lincoln wrote:

[The axioms] are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities"; another bluntly calls them "self evident lies"; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to "superior races."

These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect ― the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the vanguard ― the miners, and sappers ― of returning despotism.

The fuel for such a radical movement away from the Founding and its princples came, of course, from Darwinian ideas. Biblical literalism was hardly the most vulnerable consequence of Darwin's teaching. Nor was Darwin himself the central exponent of his own theory. Had he waited, other naturalists like Alfred Russel Wallace might have beat him to it (though "Wallacism" just doesn't have the same ring to it as "Darwinism"). Darwin simply codified so much of the historicist thought that was developing at the time, and which had seized the political-philosophic outlook of the American South.

With Darwin there is no Eureka moment when he suddenly discovers evolution. But by the time he left the Beagle in 1836, he was plainly becoming convinced that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, life is not static ― species change and evolve.

The idea of a "species" was, of course, was a very old and critically important part of the West: it was Plato's doctrine of "ideas" and Aristotle's process of generation ― princples that greatly informed the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence. They thought, like all of Western civilization before them, that some things simply had to be perminent for the world to make any sense, and that certain things like human equality had to be especially clear if political life was to be in any sense happy. Darwin's claim that "species evolve" was little more than saying that there were no species ― that there were no ideas or perminent things, but only trends that come and go. That in turn posed serious questions for human flourishing. It pointed to the conclusion that we must participate in our evolution in order to make our happiness.

We forget, though, that participatory evolution, which informed so much of the South's self-understanding, as well as the eugenics movement that came later ― not to mention today's biotech frenzy ― was a very human thing from the start. Evolution might have gone from amoebas to men; but in truth, Darwin reasoned from men to amoebas, drawing his principles from the modern social science of economics. Jones wrotes:

It was not until two years later that he conceived the idea of natural selection, after reading economist Thomas Malthus on the competition for resources among humans brought on by the inexorable demands of overpopulation. There he had it: a theory of everything that actually worked. Species evolve and the ones best adapted to their environment thrive and leave more offspring, crowding out the rest.

As delighted as he was with his discovery, Darwin was equally horrified, because he understood the consequences of his theory. Mankind was no longer the culmination of life but merely part of it; creation was mechanistic and purposeless.

Hence, the manly and almost macho desire to create purpose for ourselves. This was, again, the idea that swept up so many Southern intellectuals in its furvor ― not the supposed purposelessness of human life, but the possibilities before mankind when we accpeted that the self-evident truths of our existence are simply not there. The assumption was, of course, that we would go about this process of self-creation like gentleman, kind at heart, noble in intention, and always looking out for the best of those we have declared subordinate to ourselves.

The signifigance of Lincoln was in the way he forced all Americans to face the reality of that situation. When he said, "As I would not be slave, so I would not be a master," he was not lecturing slave owners as people who were wrong and bad. He was simply showing what the logic of slavery meant for an otherwise free society: any principle you lay down to enslave someone else ― race, intellect, interest ― is equally applicable to you.

This signifiagnce of Darwinism, in contrast, is how it accepts the power principle ― that fitness and might are what makes us free. The curious signifigance of Darwinists, however, is how often they borrow from the Declaration's conclusion of equality and "human rights" without accepting its premises.

More tomorrow.