Angels and Ages Read online

  Darwin we would likely find far more frumpy and tedious than we like our heroes to be—one of those naturalists who run on and on narrowly about their pet subjects. He would frown and furrow his brow and make helpless embarrassed harrumphs if any of his fervent admirers arrived today and asked him what he thought of man's innate tendencies to relish Tchaikovsky. One can easily imagine him brought back to earth and forced onto a television- studio platform with eager admirers (like this one) pressing him for his views on sexual equality or the origins of the love of melody in the ancient savanna and becoming more and more unhappy and inarticulate—in his day it was German naturalists; now it would be American journalists, though he had those, too—until at last swallowed up in a vast, sad, melancholy, embarrassed English moan.

  Not that Lincoln didn't care about morality, but he cared more about winning, wars and arguments, than about appearing to be a paragon. Not that Darwin wasn't interested in speculative consequences of his theory—he was—but the habit of pontification was completely alien to him, unless it was reassuringly tied with a bow of inductive observation. We are here to treat them philosophically, with the strong understanding that neither man was a philosopher, or tried to be.

  The framing image, and the title, of this book comes from a dispute over the famous epitaph offered at Lincoln's deathbed by his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton: did Stanton say, “Now he belongs to the ages,” or “Now he belongs to the angels”? This small historical mystery is one that I set out to solve, but its meaning—its echo—lies in what the ongoing dispute says about the two or more sides of Lincoln's placement in the history of faith. Was it natural, inevitable, for someone at Lincoln's deathbed, surrounded by his circle, to refer overtly to the mechanism of heaven, as generations had done in respect to the not particularly devout Washington's death, showing his bed lifted to paradise by cherubs? Or would that overt religiosity have been inflected by a reference to time, to fate, to destiny, to history—to the ages?

  This dispute dovetailed neatly with the other great dispute of the time, which enmeshed Darwin and reached its most memorable form in T. H. Huxley's debate with Bishop Wilberforce, which was distilled by the great Disraeli into a neat epigraph: “Is man an ape or an angel?” (“I am on the side of the angels,” Disraeli then added with more mischief and irony—coming as the statement did from a famously “diabolical” figure—than we always remember.) Apes or angels: which were human beings to be imagined as descended from? The three terms together make up a small constellation of our symbols. Where did we, human beings, fit among them all? Angels, apes, and ages: old divine agents, the animal past, the force of time—it is the neat trinity that still helps organize our emotions. If we accept the rule of angels, can we deal with the fact of ages? Can we be apes and still be angels? Can we live in ages and not be only apes?

  The three terms have oddly never seemed more a part of the general buzz and hum of life than they do right now. We are arguing about these things again. Fifty years ago no one would have chosen Darwin and Lincoln as central figures of the modern imagination. Freud and Marx would perhaps have been the minds that we saw as the princes of our disorder. But with the moral (and lesser intellectual) failure of Marxism, and the intellectual (and lesser moral) failure of Freud, Marx and Freud's ideas have retreated into the history of modernity, among the vast systematic ideas that proposed to explain it all to you.

  Lincoln and Darwin, by contrast, have never been more pres ent: Lincoln is the subject of what seems to be the largest biographical literature outside that of Jesus and Napoleon, while Darwin continues not only to cause daily fights but to inspire whole new sciences—or are they pseudo sciences? The irony is that the most radical thing around, at the birth of the new millennium, turned out to be liberal civilization—both the parliamentary, “procedural” liberalism of which Lincoln, for all his inspirational gifts, was an adherent, and the scientific liberalism, the tradition of cautious pragmatic free thought that engaged Darwin, skeptical of grand systems even as science creates them. Science and democracy still look like the hope of the world (even as we recognize that their intersection gave us the means to burn alive every living thing on the planet at will). The marriage of science and democratic politics represents for us liberal civilization, the twinned hopeful note of our time—along with their depressing extension, mass- conscription wars and a stoic acceptance of deep time and pointless mass dying.

  The proliferation of writing about both men, in the past decade especially, means that it may be hard for the amateur reader to pick through it all, and I hope to make the job easier. Was Lincoln a Christian? a racist? Was he a capitalist tool, a corporate lawyer first and a man of principle second? How cynically did he practice politics? Why did he delay emancipation (if he did)? With Darwin similar questions arise: Was he a racist? a believer? Why did he delay publishing his theory (if he did)? Were his personal ethics actually in keeping with his professed ones? How did he feel about his children? his wife? Without pretending to solve these questions, at least I can offer a sense of the topography what the lay of the literary land is like right now and who stands in ambush behind the trees. (I ask the forbearance of Lincoln and Darwin scholars in doing this, but scholarship only matters when it makes students of us all.)

  Above all, I want to help with the hard, embarrassing, but necessary question, which scholarship, strangely, can pose but can't in its nature help much to resolve: what were they like? (I met someone once who had known Einstein. What he was like was all I wanted to know, and the hardest thing for him to tell me.) And deeper questions, too: How do we reconcile the Lincoln who we know was a powerfully good man with the hard commander who knowingly sent thousands of young men to their certain deaths, and kept sending them off after he knew how horribly many of them would die? How was he able to see them as mere arithmetic? And what consolation for life did Darwin find in his own long view of a blind and slow-footed Nature?

  In this sense, what makes the two men worth looking at together is that they aren't particularly remarkable. The things that intrigued and worried them and made them stay up nights were the same things that most other intelligent people in their day worried about, the same kinds of things that keep us up nights, too. An entire mountain range of minds rises between them and around them, most of the rest submerged by history. But they are high peaks within it, and they look out toward each other. And from on top of one you can see the other. They are still above water because what they made of those worries was something big, a permanent mountain of meaningful anxiety.

  • • •

  Lives lived in one time have similar shapes, and the common shape is itself a subject. I wanted to write about both men because I loved their characters and revered their accomplishments, but also for the most honest of writer's reasons: contemplating them gave me a chance to think at length about other things that matter a lot to me. Yet anyone writing an extended study of two very different men must always be haunted by Fluellen's persuasive comparison, in Shakespeare's Henry V of Henry V and Alexander the Great: “There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth—it is called Wye at Monmouth, but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.”

  There is salmons in both—unearned or, anyway, unpersuasive parallels exist between all lives lived in a time. The positive connections between Darwin and Lincoln are in a way the least interesting thing about pairing them. Which isn't to say that there are no neat ties to join them. Though neither had come from slave-owning families, they both, as they grew up, saw enough of slavery to become absolutely opposed to it, a level of revulsion that was unusual even among those who despised the institution. They shared a mutual appreciation of one hugely important, flawed, and mostly forgotten nineteenth- century book, the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which first appeared in 1844 and gave a theory of evolution, though on
e without a mechanism or even much biology. (It turned out to have been written by a Scottish writer and publisher named Robert Chambers.) William Herndon, Lincoln's closest friend and one of his first biographers, tells us that the then- freethinking (that is, more or less openly atheist) Lincoln liked this evolutionary idea because of its causality, its insistence that everything happened for a discernible reason, from natural, not miraculous, causes. Around the same time, Darwin wrote to Thomas Huxley to compliment his bulldog on his review of The Vestiges: “I have just been reading your Review of the Vestiges, & the way you handle a great Professor is really exquisite & inimitable … but I cannot think but that you are rather hard on the poor author. I must think that such a book, if it does no other good, spreads the taste for natural science.—But I am perhaps no fair judge for I am almost as unorthodox about species as the Vestiges itself, though I hope not quite so unphilosophical.”

  The real common stuff, and the really significant subject, though, lies at a deeper level—in the kinds of words both men used, and in a new kind of liberal language that they helped to invent. They matter most because they wrote so well. Lincoln's eloquence was public and central: he got to be president mostly because he made a couple of terrific speeches in famous halls, and we revere him above all because he gave a few more as president. Darwin was a writer among scientists and a scientist among writers; though he didn't think he was a natural writer, he published his big ideas in popular books. A commercial publishing house published On the Origin of Species along with novels and memoirs, and The Origin remains probably the only book that changed science that an amateur reader can still sit down and read right through for pleasure while being told mostly true things. (Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is still fun to read, but his polemic is more dated; he is arguing with Aristotle, not an archbishop.) Above all, The Origin is a long argument meant for amateur readers, an effort at popular persuasion. It's so well written that we don't think of it as well written, just as Lincoln's speeches are so well made that they seem to us as natural as pebbles on the beach. (We don't think, “Well said!” We just think, “That's right!”)

  Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason. Good writing is mostly good seeing and good thinking, too. It involves a whole view of life, and making that view sound so plausible that the reader adheres to it as obvious before he knows that it's radical. (Their great contemporary Karl Marx had none of it; his views strike us as radical before we accept them as obvious. It is no accident—as a Marxist would say—that he criticized both Darwin and Lincoln for being too mundane and banal as stylists.)

  The language they helped invent is still a rhetoric that we respond to—a new style, of persuasion and argument, that belongs to liberalism. (I mean liberalism here, and throughout this book, not in the American sense of well- meaning and wishy-washy, or the French sense of savagely devoted to the free market, but in the British sense, John Stuart Mill's sense, in which an individual is committed, at the same time, to constitutional rule and individual freedom, to the power of the many and the free play of the mind—the sense that takes in a “conservative” in our politics just as well as a “liberal,” if not in a way more.)

  One of the great tides of the time they lived in was the one that made the Western world, willy- nilly, more and more democratic, in the simple sense that more and more people knew how to read and reason, and expected to be persuaded to new convictions rather than just policed into them. Lincoln grew up in a society that, though by European standards was in some ways primitive, was richly rhetorical. In backwoods Ohio, in the 1840s, William Dean Howells, Lincoln's campaign biographer, recalled, “The village wits … liked to stand with their backs to our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare.” Later, the inventions of the telegraph and modern mass journalism would give political words an immediacy that they had never had before. People knew about Lincoln because they knew he had debated Stephen Douglas, and they knew the kinds of arguments he had made and the tone and style he had used to make them.

  Darwin, in turn, might have made his ideas public through the narrow channels of professional publication and specialist lectures. But he didn't. He chose to write books that anyone could read, and that almost everyone did read. And though he wasn't a platform man himself, he saw to it that he had good friends who were, and that his big idea got known through popular public debates. He wanted to be right, but he also wanted to be heard. (One of the most important acts in the acceptance of Darwinism was a review that appeared not in a scientific journal but in the London Times just after The Origin's publication.)

  The style they found to get heard was a new one, and one they shared. They were nearsighted visionaries. They knew how to inspire, but they knew how to argue first. They particularized in everything, and their general vision rises from the details, their big ideas from small sightings. Lincoln's provisos, his second thoughts, his lawyerliness, are as impressive as his prophecies, while Darwin's observational obsessions are what made his big idea live. Good writers have always argued from facts, but few before had taken such narrow paths of reason toward the broad road of truth. They shared logic as a form of eloquence, argument as a style of virtue, close reasoning as a form of uplift. Each, using a form of technical language—the fine, detailed language of natural science for Darwin, the tedious language of legal reasoning for Lincoln—arrived at a new ideal of liberal eloquence. This was a revolution in rhetoric that we still live with, and within, rhetoric remade by a suspicion of rhetoric.

  In the past decades, through the work of historians like Garry Wills in America and Gillian Beer in England, we've come to have a better idea of how both men turned their ideas into words. But thinking of them in counterpoint helps us see something more than we can see by looking at either of them alone, and that is the way a particular rhetoric, a particular power and style of speech, goes hand in hand with the ascendancy of a certain kind of secular liberalism. Theirs was the kind of liberal talk that values eloquence as a form of reticence, and regards argument itself as the point—as transcendence rather than as instrument. The way that Darwin uses madly detailed technical arguments about the stamen of an orchid to make, many, many pages later, a vast cosmic point about the nature of survival and change on the planetary time scale, and the way that Lincoln uses lawyerly arguments about who signed what when among the Founders to make the case for war, if necessary, to end slavery—these styles have in common the writer's faith in plain English, his hope that people's minds and hearts can be altered by the slow crawl of fact as much as by the long reach of revelation.

  Snails with sublime purposes are what they both were, and they saw the rabbits and hummingbirds of oratory by repetition and argument by insistence, like that of the author of the Vestiges— who rushed to the end without going slowly over the ground— as leftovers, unserious contenders for ideas that could be won only painful inch by painful inch. (In Lincoln's case, these painful inches became all too real, as the battlegrounds of war.) Our idea of eloquence—which includes a suspicion of too much of it— begins here. There's a lovely story told by Herndon about Lincoln's laughing at the kind of alliterative, orotund eloquence that was dying in his time. Darwin's impatience with Chambers was not an impatience with the radical thought—he thought Chambers was not radical enough—but with his trying to make hard points in easy ways. When Darwin said he wanted to be more philosophical than Chambers, he meant nearly the opposite of what we would mean now: not more abstract and general and elevated, but more specific and exact and argumentative. The often mysterious poetry of their words—“disenthrall ourselves,” “the better angels of our nature,” �
�the mystic chords,” “this view of life”—haunts us because it is set against a background of willfully unpoetic and even anti- poetic speech. They built their inspiration from induction; their phrases still ring because they were struck on bells cast of solid bronze, not on chimes blowing in the breeze. The replacement of the romantic love of imagination and honor with the romance of observation and argument—that was the heart of who they were, and what they gave to us.

  In the long run, it is not what they have in common with each other that matters; it is what they have in common with us. We live in a society based on two foundations, scientific reasoning and democratic politics, and their offspring, technology and prosperity. (We know technology to be the offspring of science, and we believe, at least, that widespread abundance is the result of liberty doing its work in markets and minds alike.) Lincoln showed, to a degree that we no longer understand, that democratic politics were compatible with long- term survival—or, to put it bluntly, with military victory, winning armies. (The French army had begun to win big only after it lost its republican character.) Darwin showed that scientific reasoning could explain not only the life of matter but the matter of life; it could come up with a plausible theory of the history of life on this planet, which until then had seemed as mysterious as the birth of time seems to us now. The immediate gain of science is machines; the immediate gain of democracy is money. Ours is a society whose two pillars—science and democracy, an idea of objective knowledge arrived at by skepticism and of liberty available to all—have given us the A- bomb, the H- bomb, mass alienation: the most peaceful and prosperous and tolerant societies that the world has ever seen, which balance on the brink of total global annihilation every day.