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Charles Darwin, the unsung abolitionist
By Christopher Benfey |
February 8, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
CHARLES Darwin, a 22-year-old dropout from medical school who subsequently considered becoming a priest, boarded the Beagle in late 1831 and spent five years on the ship, traveling the world and collecting natural specimens.
Despite its cuddly name, the Beagle was a naval brig outfitted with 10 guns. Darwin was a "gentleman dining companion" whose official responsibility was to provide civilized banter with the captain.
Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti and Tasmania, along with other exotic locales, but he never set foot in the United States. Around 1850, charmed by popular tales of lush countryside and the exciting adventures on the underground railroad, and still withholding from public view his explosive theory of evolution, he flirted briefly with the idea of moving his large family, with seven children under the age of 11 and another on the way, to Ohio. The middle states, he wrote, are "what I fancy most."
Two arresting new books, timed to coincide with Darwin's 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be understood in relation to events - involving neither tortoises nor finches - on the other side of the Atlantic.
Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of "social Darwinism" (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the "survival of the fittest"), was no racist.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, "Darwin's Sacred Cause," is bluntly stated in its subtitle: "How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution." They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a "tough-minded scientist" who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution.
This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. "Darwin's starting point," they write, "was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a 'common descent'," of all human beings.
"The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather," Darwin wrote, but his human grandfathers are more central to the circumstantial case that Desmond and Moore assemble. The poet-physician Erasmus Darwin and the industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood were close friends among a circle of mechanical-minded dissenters from the Anglican Church.
Darwin and Wedgwood shared a hatred of the slave trade, contributing money and propaganda - in the form of anti-slavery verse and ceramic curios - to the "sacred cause" of abolition. Wedgwood's cameo medallion of a chained slave, with the caption "Am I not a Man and a Brother?" was "a must-have solidarity accessory."
Darwin's power, according to Desmond and Moore, lay in his marshaling an argument for the unitary origin and hence "brotherhood" of all human beings, and this, they argue, is precisely what Darwin achieved in "The Origin of Species" and later in "The Descent of Man." The case they make is rich and intricate, involving Darwin's encounter with race-based phrenology at Edinburgh and a religiously based opposition to slavery at Cambridge.
But what if Darwin's evidence had led to conclusions that did not support his belief in the unitary origins of mankind? Would he have fudged the data? Desmond and Moore don't really address the question. One is left with the impression that Darwin was amazingly lucky that his benevolent preconceptions turned out to fit the facts.
In his lively and wide-ranging "Angels and Ages," Adam Gopnik suggests that when facts and values clash we might live in accordance with our beliefs anyway. "It might be true - there is absolutely no such evidence, but it might be true - that different ethnic groups, or sexes, have on average different innate aptitudes for math or science," he muses. "We might decide to even things out, give some people extra help toward that end, or we might decide just to live with the disparity."
Gopnik's short book takes its impetus from a striking historical coincidence: "On February 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic."
Those babies, one rich and one poor, as in a plot of Mark Twain's, were Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Though he makes some dubious claims about parallels - "lives lived in one time have similar shapes" - Gopnik's real comparison is between two writers.
"They matter most," he claims, "because they wrote so well." More specifically, Darwin and Lincoln, drawing on their seemingly unpoetic backgrounds in legal argument and natural history, invented "a new kind of eloquence" that we still use for "the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public."
Both of Gopnik's interwoven essays involve mysteries to be solved. The first is whether the secretary of war Edwin Stanton said by Lincoln's deathbed, "Now he belongs to the ages" or "Now he belongs to the angels" - whether, in other words, he invoked the consolations of historical memory or religion. Witnesses reported both. For Darwin, the mystery is why he delayed the publication of his theory of natural selection, with all essentials in place in 1838, for 20 years.
Gopnik dutifully offers solutions to both mysteries and is as convinced as Desmond and Moore that Darwin was no kind of racist. "The one thing that you could not read into Darwin's writings was racism," he writes.
Despite its cuddly name, the Beagle was a naval brig outfitted with 10 guns. Darwin was a "gentleman dining companion" whose official responsibility was to provide civilized banter with the captain.
Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti and Tasmania, along with other exotic locales, but he never set foot in the United States. Around 1850, charmed by popular tales of lush countryside and the exciting adventures on the underground railroad, and still withholding from public view his explosive theory of evolution, he flirted briefly with the idea of moving his large family, with seven children under the age of 11 and another on the way, to Ohio. The middle states, he wrote, are "what I fancy most."
Two arresting new books, timed to coincide with Darwin's 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be understood in relation to events - involving neither tortoises nor finches - on the other side of the Atlantic.
Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of "social Darwinism" (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the "survival of the fittest"), was no racist.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, "Darwin's Sacred Cause," is bluntly stated in its subtitle: "How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution." They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a "tough-minded scientist" who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution.
This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. "Darwin's starting point," they write, "was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a 'common descent'," of all human beings.
"The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather," Darwin wrote, but his human grandfathers are more central to the circumstantial case that Desmond and Moore assemble. The poet-physician Erasmus Darwin and the industrial potter Josiah Wedgwood were close friends among a circle of mechanical-minded dissenters from the Anglican Church.
Darwin and Wedgwood shared a hatred of the slave trade, contributing money and propaganda - in the form of anti-slavery verse and ceramic curios - to the "sacred cause" of abolition. Wedgwood's cameo medallion of a chained slave, with the caption "Am I not a Man and a Brother?" was "a must-have solidarity accessory."
Darwin's power, according to Desmond and Moore, lay in his marshaling an argument for the unitary origin and hence "brotherhood" of all human beings, and this, they argue, is precisely what Darwin achieved in "The Origin of Species" and later in "The Descent of Man." The case they make is rich and intricate, involving Darwin's encounter with race-based phrenology at Edinburgh and a religiously based opposition to slavery at Cambridge.
But what if Darwin's evidence had led to conclusions that did not support his belief in the unitary origins of mankind? Would he have fudged the data? Desmond and Moore don't really address the question. One is left with the impression that Darwin was amazingly lucky that his benevolent preconceptions turned out to fit the facts.
In his lively and wide-ranging "Angels and Ages," Adam Gopnik suggests that when facts and values clash we might live in accordance with our beliefs anyway. "It might be true - there is absolutely no such evidence, but it might be true - that different ethnic groups, or sexes, have on average different innate aptitudes for math or science," he muses. "We might decide to even things out, give some people extra help toward that end, or we might decide just to live with the disparity."
Gopnik's short book takes its impetus from a striking historical coincidence: "On February 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic."
Those babies, one rich and one poor, as in a plot of Mark Twain's, were Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Though he makes some dubious claims about parallels - "lives lived in one time have similar shapes" - Gopnik's real comparison is between two writers.
"They matter most," he claims, "because they wrote so well." More specifically, Darwin and Lincoln, drawing on their seemingly unpoetic backgrounds in legal argument and natural history, invented "a new kind of eloquence" that we still use for "the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public."
Both of Gopnik's interwoven essays involve mysteries to be solved. The first is whether the secretary of war Edwin Stanton said by Lincoln's deathbed, "Now he belongs to the ages" or "Now he belongs to the angels" - whether, in other words, he invoked the consolations of historical memory or religion. Witnesses reported both. For Darwin, the mystery is why he delayed the publication of his theory of natural selection, with all essentials in place in 1838, for 20 years.
Gopnik dutifully offers solutions to both mysteries and is as convinced as Desmond and Moore that Darwin was no kind of racist. "The one thing that you could not read into Darwin's writings was racism," he writes.
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