The Darwin-Lincoln Double Bicentennial

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, two of the 19th century’s most enduring thinkers and figures, share more than a place in history. They also share a birthday: Feb. 12, 1809. To mark the bicentennial of their births, Adam Gopnik, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a New York Times best-selling author, published Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. He summarized his book in a special essay for Britannica that appeared in the 2009 Britannica Book of the Year. His essay is reproduced below.

The year 2009 marks the double bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States and the author of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery in the rebellious Confederacy, and Charles Darwin, British naturalist and author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Born on the very same day—Feb. 12, 1809—these two icons, one of emancipation and the other of evolution, continue to stir us in the 21st century and remain contemporary in startling ways. If anything, they are more alive for us now than they were at the moment of their centenary. A hundred years ago, with civil rights unaccomplished and genetics not yet in place to explain the mechanisms of inheritance, Lincoln was perceived by many as a pious but in some ways impotent figure, and Darwinism was a speculative road, largely not taken.

Now their triumph is evident: during the bicentennial, U.S. Pres. Barack Obama cited and echoed Lincoln in most of his speeches and many of his actions, and arguments over Lincoln’s faith, acts, and attitudes continue to raise temperatures and feelings. There is even more dispute about Darwin and his legacy—attempts to use Darwinism to understand not only biology but also art and literature pour out, while counterattacks from the religious-minded arraign Darwin for killing God and favouring eugenics. Alone among the great scientists, he still lends his name to the tradition that he engendered. (We still refer to Darwin and Darwinism in a way that we do not refer to Newton and Newtonianism.)

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Although both Lincoln and Darwin have become the centre of polemics—surely a sign of their continuing relevance—the kinds of arguments that they inspired (and still inspire) are very different. Different controversies surrounded both men throughout the bicentennial year. With Lincoln, the most vivid arguments turned on that “piety” and the politics that it produced. Was Lincoln—in a view first formulated by critic Edmund Wilson and later popularized by writer Gore Vidal—an American Bismarck, whose choice of abolition was a merely tactical maneuver in the midst of a drive toward power? Or was he a man of fixed morality who adapted to changing realities? Was he a truly eloquent writer or merely a conventional speechmaker sanctified by memory? Fred Kaplan’s recent book Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (2008) helps to make the case for Lincoln’s essential “literary” qualities. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote a searching book, Lincoln on Race and Slavery (2009), and hosted an equally searching public television documentary, Looking for Lincoln. Beginning with his own skepticism about Lincoln’s sincerity on the race question, Gates worked his way around to the view—widely shared—that Lincoln’s antislavery views, though they may have begun without a clear vision of equality, ended with such a vision and were consistently courageous for their time. John Stauffer’s Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008) emphasizes Lincoln’s moral education at the hands of the great African American abolitionist. Others tried to argue, on the whole rather feebly, that Lincoln was really just a politician—as though eloquence and politics are alien to each other. Indeed, Lincoln did not simply become a politician as a young man in Illinois; he became an antislavery politician, and the Republican Party that he came to head was not just a gathering of different-minded individuals but rather a group created with the sole purpose of coalescing antislavery opinion into a single unit—from radical abolitionists to those who regretted the existence of slavery but could see no immediate way to end it everywhere in the country. In any case, to segregate Lincoln’s work as a word maker from his work as a politician is historically absurd. Lincoln became a plausible candidate for president because—and only because—of his reputation as an orator; his political life and his writing life were one.

Darwin has been the subject of another kind of assault. Where once left-wing critics attacked his attitudes for being too easily taken hostage by right-wing ideas of social order and hierarchy, now religious fundamentalists attempt, in well-funded and heavily hyped films and books, to insist that Darwin was a racist and that his ideas even influenced Nazism (which was, in point of historical fact, utterly hostile to his notion of a single family of man). In this regard, the most important study of Darwin to appear in the bicentennial year was that of his British biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore in their book Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (2009). In it, they establish what had long been known to Darwin scholars, though not in such detail: that Darwin’s commitment to abolition and the antislavery cause—derived in part from his Wedgwood ancestors—was an essential piece of the background to his evolutionary theory. He believed that the family of man was unified, not separately created (or divided into good white “Adamic” and lesser brown “pre-Adamic” types, as many theologians insisted). The central insight of evolutionary theory—that the story of life, from first microbe to finished man, is one—was part of his abolitionist heritage. Darwin, courteous by nature, gave a respectful hearing to his cousin Francis Dalton’s eugenicist ideas (as he did, for that matter, to the ideas of Karl Marx), but in his own work he explicitly and unequivocally rejected those first stirrings of social Darwinism, emphasizing instead the role of culture in fostering humane progress and that of the instinct of sympathy in making certain that human groups continued to care for the helpless. Darwin was certainly a “Europeanist,” who believed that the liberal culture of his time was better than tribal culture, but he thought that those differences were the result of an increase in the spread of social sympathy rather than something inborn or natural only to one race. Both Darwin and Lincoln emerged from their bicentennial trials as men of their time with the marks of their time—but as men who, on the whole, grew in moral understanding as they aged and came to embrace the kindest and wisest ideas about human equality that their time offered.

Yet, although the polemics about them are importantly different, the two men are still worth taking together. It is (as I meditated at length in my own long essay Angels and Ages) not a simple parallel in life but a common liberal temperament—a modern turn of mind—that melds them together. There was not some kind of secret magic connecting these two very disparate figures but rather a field of new feelings and voices that connected many of the liberal voices of the day, including John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Eliot, and William James.

One might propose three common elements that gave this temperament a shape. First, they shared a taste for argument from below, rather than insistence from above. Darwin and Lincoln both began their great works not with grand principle and moral exhortation but with simple evocations of homely evidence. Lincoln’s great antislavery speech, his Cooper Union address of 1860—the speech that “made him president”—begins with a modest and even tedious invocation of the acts of the 39 signers of the Constitution: had they voted on national questions regarding the extensions of slavery? By the time the long answer has been reached—yes, they did—Lincoln has demonstrated that slavery is a national, not a regional question, and then the question becomes: is it right or wrong? Darwin had begun his epoch-making Origin of Species not with the “cosmic question” that he would solve but with an almost absurdly homely description of the breeding of dogs and pigeons. Darwin’s argument is more than an analogy—his point is similar to (and as cosmic as) Newton’s contention that a boy throwing a ball and the motions of the planets follow the same rules, even if one is volitional and one is not.

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Second, both Lincoln and Darwin practiced the habit, at times exasperating to their admirers, of sympathetic summary. The ability to enter into an opponent’s argument without contempt or sarcastic bitterness was common to them both. Darwin did not merely articulate his opponents’ arguments against evolution; in every case he anticipated them and refuted them in advance. This is not merely instrumental, or a sign of softness—Lincoln went to war; Darwin annihilated a thousand years of biblical literalism—but it is a sign of sureness and part of the liberal inheritance.

Finally, they shared a tragic sense of life that did not paralyze their capacity for moral action. Both men rejected organized religion and searched for some other way to understand the presence of pain and suffering in the world; they sought some other model—for Lincoln, a kind of private providentialism; for Darwin, a stoical resignation and contemplation of the power of time—to make sense of mortality. They were stoics but not cynics.

These three elements—argument from below, from evidence; sympathetic summary; and an ability to recognize the man-made nature of morality without succumbing to meaninglessness or searching for false comfort—are the touchstones, the key notes of the liberal temperament, and the real event of the bicentennial was to see how Darwin and Lincoln helped to set them.

Darwin and Lincoln persist as central figures of liberal civilization—the civilization in which scientific progress and democratic politics are, as British natural philosopher Sir Karl Popper showed half a century ago, deeply and permanently intertwined.