ANGELS AND AGES: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life
Adam Gopnik
Knopf
Biography
ISBN: 9780307270788
These days the air is thick with talk of Abraham Lincoln. From the fascination with his “team of rivals” to the political roots in Springfield, Illinois, he shares with our new president, it seems everyone wants to grab a seat in Lincoln’s rail car.
Charles Darwin has had his own recent stint in the limelight. In 2005, in my hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a conservative Republican federal judge patiently listened to seven weeks of testimony in a challenge to a small town school board's attempt to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design” --- a fundamentalist antidote to Darwin’s theory of natural selection --- before issuing a blistering opinion rejecting it as a violation of the First Amendment.
Born on the same day --- February 12, 1809 --- one in a cramped Kentucky log cabin and the other in comfortable circumstances in England, the subjects of The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik’s intellectually stimulating appreciation might appear to be an odd couple. But like a contemporary Plutarch, Gopnik has linked these monumental historical figures on the intriguing theory that they form “two pillars of the society we live in: one representing liberal democracy, the other the human sciences….” And while that connection is far from obvious, by the end of a work in which he marries analytical rigor to his customary elegant prose, he has made a persuasive case that the two merit this unique joint recognition.
Originally published as two pieces in The New Yorker, ANGELS AND AGES consists of four chapters alternating between Lincoln and Darwin, bracketed by opening and concluding essays in which Gopnik considers his subjects together. The book takes its title from the debate that has raged over the words uttered by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at the moment of Lincoln’s passing: Did the assassinated president belong to the “angels” or the “ages?” For Gopnik, that mystery triggers a searching inquiry into the influence of his subjects on the birth of modern liberal thought, as Western civilization, spurred by their work, underwent a decisive shift from a vertical worldview, eyes cast heavenward in reliance upon the divine, to one that came to grips with mankind’s place in the vast forward movement of history.
Gopnik is most captivated by Lincoln and Darwin’s skill as writers, their facility with the written word forming the core of his thesis that “literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves and to speak for us all.” To support it, he marshals an impressive body of evidence in a work that in the best sense seems intended, not to end a debate, but to spark one.
In the case of Lincoln, “a great writer whose form was talking,” Gopnik argues that the lawyer-turned-politician’s “rhetorical genius lay in making cold calculation look like passionate idealism, in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religious necessity.” Darwin, who Gopnik describes as a “natural novelist,” brought us a new way of seeing, “to remind us of the role of good old-fashioned observation in science.” He displayed that gift long before the publication of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES in 1859, a work he produced more than 20 years after formulating the theory of natural selection, the delay arising, in part, from his reluctance to expound a construct that would be at odds with his wife’s strong religious convictions.
For although Lincoln and Darwin were public men, both displayed an intense attachment to family life, and both, Gopnik points out, were profoundly affected by the loss of a young child. As to each, he musters a spirited defense against charges of racism --- Lincoln because of the claim of some that his determination to end slavery did not extend to the notion of equality for its victims, and Darwin arising from the way his theories have been distorted in order to hijack them into the service of political agendas that would have been alien to him.
In the moving final pages of his book, Gopnik asks us to consider no less a subject than how the ideas to which Darwin and Lincoln gave such eloquent voice have shaped our notion of what it means to be human. “They found a way to sustain the necessary values of the Enlightenment,” Gopnik concludes, “in the face of pessimistic truths about the universe and political conduct.” Though they operated in the disparate realms of politics and science, both of these extraordinary men made us see the world in new ways, and, through that insight, helped usher in a new world.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
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