Angels and Ages: A short book about Darwin & Lincoln

Adam Gopnik “Angels and Ages: A short book about Darwin & Lincoln”   Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, 204 pp. 

This is a good book to read for those with a historical curiosity about how the nineteenth century changed the western world.

On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born.  They each came to represent two aspects of the changing nineteenth century. The emancipation of the slaves would have eventually happened without Lincoln (but democracy as a form of government might not have) as would the discovery of natural selection without Darwin (in fact Alfred Wallace, with lessor writing skills than Darwin, did have the same idea).  When Lincoln and Darwin were born in 1809 it was still a time when almost everyone still accepted the biblical account of creation and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable social order.  By the time these two men died the world had changed: evolution was a fact, reason was at least considered the equal of faith, and democracy proved it could endure a civil war.  The modern world had arrived replacing a culture of faith and fear with one of observation and argument, and from a belief in the judgment of divinity to a belief in the verdicts of history and time. (Pg. 187)

My Notes:

Pg. 10:  It becomes apparent that Lincoln and Darwin are symbols of the two pillars of the society we live in: one representing liberal democracy, the other the human sciences—one a faith in armed republicanism and government of the people, the other a belief that objective knowledge about human history and the human condition, who we are and how we got here, exists.

Pg. 18:  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 convictions rather than just policed into them. 

Pg. 57:  Mark Twain never tired of attacking the Walter Scott-inspired honor cult of the South.  The honor cult was not entirely confined to the South.  John Brown is an example.  Lincoln, on the other hand, though also against slavery, found the natural code of honor a dangerous substitute for the procedural rule of law.  The respect for violence as a test of personal integrity, the extreme value placed on acts of individual physical courage, the love of scaffold eloquence of a theatrical kind—all were mostly, but not entirely, alien to Lincoln.  He was convinced that things get better by following the rules—he didn’t believe due process and fair procedures were the ornaments of a just society but thought that they were a just society.

 Pg. 98:  Darwin emphasized that if a wolf—within a time frame so short that it can almost entirely be recorded, and by means so simple that they can be mastered even by illiterate people—could be transformed through selective breeding into everything from a Great Dane to a toy Pekingese, then surely Nature, working on a time scale so much greater, could produce even more dramatic transformations—say, monkey to man.  Similarly if one kind of pigeon can become all kinds of pigeons—some to deliver mail and others just to pout and look pretty—then one kind of animal could surely become many others as it descended through time and the pressures of specialized niches.

Pg. 106:  There are two main objections that are still made to Darwin’s theory, and he anticipated both: the argument from irreducible structure and the argument from intermediated form.  These were the argument of eyes and the argument from missing links.  However, he answered both charges even though they had not yet been made.

Pg. 116:  The Civil War was anticipated to be a short romp but turned into a bloody war of attrition, in which defensive firepower so overwhelmed the offense that—at Antietam and Fredericksburg and the Wilderness—soldiers mostly just stood there and watched each other die.  At Shiloh in 1862, the battle cost something like twenty-four thousand casualties, Gettysburg, in 1863, claimed twenty-three thousand casualties on the Union side alone; the South lost somewhere between twenty-four thousand and twenty-eight thousand.  By the spring of 1864, Grant’s losses in slightly more than a single month approached fifty thousand.

Pg. 121:  For most of history, ordinary people lived their lives vertically, with reference to a heaven above and a hell below.  Now we live our lives horizontally, with reference to future generations for whom our sacrifices and examples may make a better life. 

Pg. 147:  Darwin wrote for an audience already in many ways becoming nonreligious; according to the religious census of 1851, less than half the population of Britain was attending church.  The damage of disbelief had already largely, and long before, been begun by Hume and Gibbon and the “higher criticism” of the Bible. 

Pg. 173:  By humanism, we can mean two things.  One is that man is the measure of all things; the other, that all things can be measured by man.  The first view, essentially religious in origin, inspired Renaissance painting and the Sistine ceiling.  The second view—that what makes people uniquely interesting is their capacity for gauging their environment and changing it, that the more we measure, the more accurately we see what things are actually like—has been what we have meant by humanism since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and Darwin is one of the greatest exponents and examples.