Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

XVIII

SCIENCE

1876: T

HE

J

UDITH

R

IVER

Every night the professor would suffer from nightmares. As dry thunder rumbled over the Montana badlands, Edward Drinker Cope would toss and moan in his sleep. Sometimes, one of his companions would wake him. Understandably, the nerves of everyone on the expedition were drawn tight. The American West was a dangerous place. Cope, prospecting for fossils in regions as yet unmapped by the US Army, was crossing the hunting grounds of a particularly formidable native people: the Sioux. Only a few weeks previously, a seasoned general and veteran of the Unionist victory in the recent civil war, George Armstrong Custer, had been defeated by their warbands on the banks of the Little Bighorn River. At one point, Cope and his expedition had come within a day’s ride of where – as one of them put it – ‘thousands of warriors, drunk with the blood of Custer and the brave men of the 7th US Cavalry’,¹ were camped out. A scout and a cook, both terrified for their scalps, had fled. But it was not thoughts of the Sioux that gave Cope his nightmares. Instead, his dreams were haunted by finds that he and his companions had made in the great labyrinth of canyons and ravines that stretched all around them where they had made base. Beneath the brightness of the stars these appeared impenetrably black. The drop in many places was a thousand feet. One slip on the loose shale and a man might well plunge to his death. Yet there was a time when the now barren landscape had been teeming with life. Buried amid the gorges were the bones of monsters that once, many millions of years before, had roamed what was then a coastal plain. For most of history, no one had realised that such creatures had even existed. It was only in 1841, in distant England, that they had been given a name. Yet now, camped out in the wilds of Montana, in the heights above the Judith River, Cope knew himself to be surrounded by the remains of untold numbers of them: an immense and uncharted graveyard of dinosaurs.

The ambition of fathoming the deep past of the earth was one that had always come naturally to Christians. ‘Of old,’ the psalmist had written in praise of the Creator, ‘You founded the earth, and the heavens – Your handiwork. They will perish and You will yet stand. They will all wear away like a garment.’² Here, in this vision of a world that had both a beginning and a history, linear and irreversible, lay an understanding of time in decisive contrast to that of most peoples in antiquity. To read Genesis was to know that it did not go round in endless cycles. Unsurprisingly, then, scholars of the Bible had repeatedly sought to map out a chronology that might reach back before humans. ‘We must not suppose,’ Luther had declared, ‘that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.’³ Increasingly, though, enthusiasts for what by the late eighteenth century had come to be termed geology were basing their investigations not on Genesis, but directly on their study of God’s creation: rocks and fossils, and the very contours of the earth.

Among the clergy in Britain this had grown to become a particular obsession. In 1650, when James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh and one of the most brilliant scholars of his day, sought to establish a global chronology, his exclusive reliance on written records – and in particular on the Bible – led him to identify the date of the Creation as 4004 BC. In 1822, when William Buckland, another clergyman, published a paper demonstrating that life on earth, let alone the deposition of rocks, was infinitely older than Noah’s flood, it was his dating of the fossils he had found in a Yorkshire cave that enabled him to demonstrate his point. Two years later, he wrote the first full account of a dinosaur. In 1840, he argued that great gouges across the landscape of Scotland bore witness to an ancient – and decidedly unbiblical – Ice Age. Buckland, a noted eccentric with a taste for eating his way through every kind of animal, from bluebottles to porpoises, saw not the slightest contradiction between serving as dean of Westminster and lecturing on geology at Oxford.* Nor did most Christians. Although some, clinging to a literal interpretation of Genesis, refused to accept that the earth’s history might stretch back immeasurable distances before man, the vast majority felt only awe before a Creator capable of working on such a prodigious scale. Geology, bred as it was of the biblical understanding of time, seemed less to shake than to buttress Christian faith.

Yet there were signs, even as Cope embarked on his fossil-harvesting in the wilds of the American West, that this was changing. Cope himself – so unsettled by the dinosaurs he found entombed in rock that they came to visit him in his dreams, ‘tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling upon him’⁴ – was a man suffering from a crisis of faith. The descendant of a Quaker who had settled in Philadelphia after buying land there from William Penn, he had been raised by his father to believe in the literal truth of Noah’s flood. A precocious fascination with ichthyosaurs, prehistoric monsters of the deep, had soon put paid to that; but not to Cope’s faith. Toiling through the badlands, he would hold prayer meetings every evening, and readings from the Bible. His very obsession with animals, alive as well as extinct, marked him out as a distinctive kind of Christian. That God, filling the world with living creatures, had looked on them and seen that they were good, had long suggested to careful readers of Genesis that they bore witness to his design. ‘He is the source of all that exists in nature,’ Augustine had long ago written, ‘whatever its kind, whatsoever its value, and of the seeds of forms, and the forms of seeds, and the motions of seeds and forms.’⁵ William Buckland, whose fascination with all aspects of the animal kingdom was such that he had been the first to identify the faeces of an ichthyosaur, and could distinguish bat urine by taste, had been only one of a great number of clergymen committed to the minutest examination of the natural world. In Britain and America especially, the conviction that God’s workings were manifest in nature – ‘natural theology’ – had become, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a key weapon in the armoury of Christianity’s defenders. An English parson illustrating the goodness of God was as likely to cite the life cycle of a butterfly as the theology of Calvin. The teeming of insects in a hedgerow had come to seem to many Christians in the English-speaking world a more certain witness to their faith than any appeal to revelation. And yet this confidence had been shown up as something grievously misplaced. What appeared an unassailable support of the Christian religion had proved to be nothing of the kind. A position of strength had been transformed into a grievous source of weakness. Natural theology had become, almost overnight, an Achilles’ heel.

Charles Darwin, who as a youth had obsessively collected beetles, and gone on field trips with a geology professor in holy orders, and had himself for a short while been destined for a career in the Church, was a product of the same milieu as William Buckland and all the other prominent defenders of natural theology in England. Yet Darwin, far from joining their ranks, had emerged instead to become their bane. In 1860, writing to Asa Gray, America’s most eminent botanist, he confessed his motivation. ‘I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I sh^d wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.’⁶ Job, of course, had raised much the same complaint; and Darwin, just like Job, had suffered from boils and the death of a child. But God had not spoken to him from a whirlwind; and Darwin, when he contemplated the natural world, found in it too many examples of cruelty to believe that they might ever have been the result of conscious design. One more than any other haunted him: a species of parasitic wasp. ‘I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.’⁷

A year earlier, Darwin had published a book in which the life cycle of the ichneumon wasp had similarly featured. The thesis elaborated in On the Origin of Species was liable to seem, to any supporter of natural theology, a profoundly unsettling one. ‘It may not be a logical deduction,’ Darwin had written, ‘but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, — ants making slaves, — the larvae of ichneumoni-dae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, — not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.’⁸ Here, with this theory of evolution, he was inflicting on natural theology something of the hideous fate visited by an ichneumon on its host. The parsons who in growing numbers had come to roam the fields of England with their butterfly nets and their flower presses took certain propositions as manifest. That the immense plenitude of species bore witness to a single guiding hand; that only in relation to their environment could the full perfection of their design be understood; that the purposes manifest in nature were irreversible. Darwin, in The Origin of Species, was not disputing any of these assumptions. They were, though, to his theory of evolution by natural selection, what the innards of a caterpillar were to the larvae of an ichneumon. ‘The Creator creates by . . . laws.’⁹ So, decades previously, at a time when he was still a believing Christian, Darwin had recorded in a notebook. Abelard had claimed much the same. For centuries, in the Christian world, it had been the great project of natural philosophy to identify the laws that animated God’s creation, and thereby to arrive at a closer understanding of God himself. Now, with The Origin of Species, a law had been formulated that – even as it unified the realm of life with that of time – seemed to have no need of God at all. Not merely a theory, it was itself a startling display of evolution.

But was it right? By 1876, the most impressive evidence for Darwin’s theory had been uncovered in what was fast proving to be the world’s premier site for fossil beds: the American West. Cope was not the only palaeontologist to have made spectacular discoveries there. So too had Othniel Charles Marsh, a Yale professor with the beard, bulk and bombast of a middle-aged Henry VIII. Over the course of six years’ work in the field, he had succeeded in excavating no less than thirty species of prehistoric horse. So complete a chain of evidence did these finds constitute that Darwin could hail them as ‘the best support to the theory of evolution which has appeared in the last 20 years’.¹⁰ Cope, whose envy and detestation of Marsh was cordially reciprocated, did not dispute this. He had long accepted that the evidence for evolution was overwhelming. Nevertheless, unlike his great rival, he refused to accept that it was driven by natural selection. He longed still to find in the natural world a place for a beneficent God. The only deity for which the theory of natural selection had room, he fretted, was one content to botch a species here, to tinker with it there. Certainly, no place was left by it for any sense of a divine design. Yet divine design, so Cope believed, was precisely what the evolution of the horse served to illustrate. Back from the Judith River, he delivered a paper that made this case in forceful terms. The fossils found by Marsh, he told an assembly of American naturalists in 1877, spoke of changes far too regular to be explained by random variation. ‘The ascending development of the bodily structure in higher animals has thus been, in all probability, a concomitant of the evolution of mind.’¹¹ The modern horse, in other words, had willed itself into being. Far from being at the mercy of its environment, the species had always been in charge of its own destiny. The course of its evolution, long foreseen by its Creator, bore witness not to chaos and confusion, but rather to an order that suffused the whole of nature. Borne on the flow of time, every species was bound for a goal preordained by God.

But to accept this was, of course, to accept something more: that humans too were a product of evolution. Darwin, in The Origin of Species, had only coyly hinted at what the implication of his theory might be for humanity’s understanding of itself. This, though, had not prevented others from indulging in their own speculations. Bishops demanded to know of Darwin’s defenders the precise details of their descent from gorillas; satirists delighted in portraying Darwin himself as an ape; Cope declared it his belief that humanity had evolved from a lemur. Yet not all the debating society sallies, not all the cartoons of monkeys in frock coats, not all the theorising about possible lines of human descent could entirely conceal what yawned behind them: an immense abyss of anxiety and doubt. Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilisation, challenged that assumption. Weakness was nothing to be valued. Jesus, by commending the meek and the poor over those better suited to the great struggle for survival that was existence, had set Homo sapiens upon the downward path towards degeneration.

For eighteen long centuries, the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image. The divine was to be found as much in the pauper, the convict or the prostitute as it was in the gentleman with his private income and book-lined study. Darwin’s house, despite its gardens, private wood and greenhouse filled with orchids, stood on the margins of an unprecedented agglomeration of brick and smoke. Beyond the fields where he would lovingly inspect the workings of worms there stretched what Rome had been in Augustus’ day: the capital of the largest empire in the world. Just as Rome had once done, London sheltered disorienting extremes of privilege and squalor. The Britain of Darwin’s day, though, could boast what no one in Augustus’ Rome had ever thought to sponsor: campaigns to redeem the poor, the exploited, the diseased. Darwin himself, the grandson of two prominent abolitionists, knew full well the impulse from which these sprang. The great cause of social reform was Christian through and through. ‘We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.’¹² And yet the verdict delivered by Darwin on these displays of philanthropy was a fretful one. Much as the Spartans had done, when they flung sickly babies down a ravine, he dreaded the consequences for the strong of permitting the weak to propagate themselves. ‘No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.’¹³

Here, for any Quaker, was a peculiarly distressing assertion. Cope knew the traditions to which he was heir. It was Quakers who had first lit the fire which, in the recent civil war, had come to consume the institution of American slavery; it was Quakers who, in America as in Britain, had taken the lead in campaigning for prison reform. Whatever they did for the least of their Saviour’s brothers and sisters, they did for Christ himself. How, then, could this conviction possibly be squared with what Cope, in mingled scorn and dread, termed ‘the Darwinian law of the “survival of the fittest”’?¹⁴ The question was one that had perturbed Darwin himself. He remained sufficiently a Christian to define any proposal to abandon the weak and the poor to their fate as ‘evil’.¹⁵ The instincts that had fostered a concern for the disadvantaged must themselves, he noted, have been the product of natural selection. Presumably, then, they had to be reckoned to serve some evolutionary purpose. Yet Darwin havered. In private conversations he would confess that, because ‘in our modern civilisation natural selection had no play’,¹⁶ he feared for the future. Christian notions of charity – however much he might empathise with them personally – were misplaced. Only continue to give them free rein, and the peoples who clung to them were bound to degenerate.

And this, were it to happen, would be to the detriment of the entire human race. Here, at any rate, Cope was in perfect accord with Darwin. He had taken the railroad across the vast expanses of the Great Plains, and he had sent telegrams from forts planted in the lands of the Sioux, and he had seen their hunting grounds littered for miles around with the bleached bones of bison, felled by the very latest in repeating rifles. He knew that Custer’s defeat had been only a temporary aberration. The native tribes of America were doomed. The advance of the white race was inexorable. It was their manifest destiny. This was evident around the world. In Africa, where a variety of European powers were scheming to carve up the continent; in Australia, and New Zealand, and Hawaii, where there was no resisting the influx of white colonists; in Tasmania, where an entire native people had already been driven to extinction. ‘The grade of their civilisation,’ as Darwin put it, ‘seems to be a most important element in the success of competing nations.’¹⁷

How were these differences, between a white and a native American, between a European and a Tasmanian, most plausibly to be explained? The traditional response of a Christian would have been to assert that between two human beings of separate races there was no fundamental difference: both had equally been created in the image of God. To Darwin, however, his theory of natural selection suggested a rather different answer. As a young man, he had sailed the seas of the world, and he had noted how, ‘wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’.¹⁸ His feelings of compassion for native peoples, and his matching distaste for white settlers, had not prevented him from arriving at a stark conclusion: that there had come to exist over the course of human existence a natural hierarchy of races. The progress of Europeans had enabled them, generation by generation, to outstrip ‘the intellectual and social faculties’¹⁹ of more savage peoples. Cope – despite his refusal to accept Darwin’s explanation for how and why this might have happened – conceded that he had a point. Clearly, in humanity as in any other species, the operations of evolution were perpetually at work. ‘We all admit the existence of higher and lower races,’ Cope acknowledged, ‘the latter being those which we now find to present greater or less approximation to the apes.’ So it was that an attempt by a devout Quaker to reconcile the workings of God with those of nature brought him to an understanding of humanity that would have appalled Benjamin Lay. Cope’s conviction that a species could will itself towards perfection enabled him to believe as well that different forms of the same species could co-exist. Whites, he argued, had elevated themselves to a new degree of consciousness. Other races had not.

In 1877, a year after he had lain amid the fossil beds of Montana, oppressed by terrible dreams, Edward Drinker Cope formally resigned from the Society of Friends.

A New Reformation

Not everyone who read Darwin interpreted his theory as licensing a bleak and carnivorous vision of human society. Among the more pugnacious of his followers, the banishment of God from the realm of nature was viewed as an unalloyed blessing. ‘A veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism’²⁰ – so The Origin of Species was hailed by one of its earliest and most positive reviewers. Thomas Henry Huxley, an anatomist whose genius for savaging bishops led to him being described as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, was a self-professed enthusiast for progress. Impatient with the influence of men like Buckland over the study of geology and natural history, he yearned to see it professionalised. Not only would the rout of ‘Theology & Parsondom’²¹ lead to more opportunities for men like himself – self-educated, middle class, contemptuous of privilege – but it would help to spread the blessings of enlightenment. The more that the fog of superstition was banished, the more apparent would become the contours of truth. Even though the sunlit uplands of reason were beckoning, the road to them still had to be cleared. It was only by stepping over the corpses of extinguished theologians that humanity would be able to leave delusion behind. If this required Darwin’s theory to be employed as a muzzle-loader, then so be it. The age demanded nothing less. Huxley, writing a few months before The Origin of Species was published, had recognised that a great conflict was brewing. ‘Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live thirty years, it is that I may see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies.’²²

But what did Huxley mean by ‘Science’? The answer was not at all obvious. Branches of knowledge ranging from grammar to music had all traditionally ranked as sciences. Theology had long reigned as their queen. At Oxford, ‘science’ still, even in the 1850s, meant ‘attainment in Aristotle’.²³ Huxley, though, was hardly the man to rest content with that. The early decades of the nineteenth century had seen a new and altogether more cutting-edge definition of the word establish itself. When palaeontologists or chemists used ‘science’ to mean the sum of all the natural and physical sciences, they made it appear to their contemporaries a concept simultaneously novel and familiar – much as ‘Hinduism’ was to Indians. Huxley, with the assiduity of a general keen to make sure of a recently annexed province, went to great pains to secure its borders. ‘In matters of the intellect,’ he warned, ‘do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.’²⁴ Such was the principle of ‘agnosticism’, a word that Huxley had come up with himself, and which he cast as the essential requirement for anyone who wished to practise science. It was, he flatly declared, ‘the only method by which truth could be ascertained’.²⁵ Everyone reading him knew his target. Truth that could be neither demonstrated nor proven, truth that was dependent for its claims on a purportedly supernatural revelation, was not truth at all. Science – as a practitioner of the fashionable new art of photography might have put it – was defined by its negative: religion.

Here, then, lay a striking paradox. Although the concept of science, as it emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, was defined by men who assumed it to be the very opposite of novel, something timeless and universal, this was conceit of a very familiar kind. Science, precisely because it was cast as religion’s doppelgänger, inevitably bore the ghostly stamp of Europe’s Christian past. Huxley, however, refused to recognise this. The same man whose genius as an anatomist enabled him to identify what only now has become almost universally accepted, that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs that once, millions of years ago, were scampering through Jurassic forests, had no problem in believing that ‘science’ had always existed. Just as colonial officials and missionaries, travelling to India, had imposed the concept of ‘religion’ on the societies they found there, so did agnostics colonise the past in similar manner. The ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians, and Romans: all were assumed to have had a ‘religion’. Some peoples – most notably the Greeks – were also assumed to have had ‘science’. It was this that had enabled their civilisation to serve as the wellspring of progress. Philosophers had been the prototypes of scientists. The library of Alexandria had been ‘the birthplace of modern science’.²⁶ Only Christians, with their fanatical hatred of reason and their determination to eradicate pagan learning, had prevented the ancient world from being set on a path towards steam engines and cotton mills. Wilfully, monks had set themselves to writing over anything that smacked of philosophy. The triumph of the Church had been an abortion of everything that made for a humane and civilised society. Darkness had descended on Europe. For a millennium and more, popes and inquisitors had laboured to snuff out any spark of curiosity, or enquiry, or reason. The most notable martyr to this fanaticism had been Galileo. Tortured for demonstrating beyond all shadow of a doubt that the earth revolved around the sun, ‘he groaned away his days,’ as Voltaire had put it, ‘in the dungeons of the Inquisition’.²⁷ Bishops who scoffed at Darwin’s theory of evolution by asking sneery questions about gorillas were merely the latest combatants in a war that was as old as Christianity itself.

That nothing in this narrative was true did not prevent it from becoming a wildly popular myth. Nor was its appeal confined solely to agnostics. There was much in it for Protestants to relish as well. The portrayal of medieval Christendom as a hellhole of backwardness and bigotry reached all the way back to Luther. Huxley’s sense of himself as a member of an elect had – as contemporaries were quick to note – a familiarly radical quality. ‘He has the moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute confidence in his own convictions, the desire and determination to impress them upon all mankind, which are the essential marks of the Puritan character.’²⁸ Yet in truth, the growing conviction of many agnostics that science alone possessed the ability to answer questions about life’s larger purpose derived from a much older seedbed. Once upon a time, the natural sciences had been natural philosophy. The awe felt by medieval theologians before the works and the wonders of creation was not absent from The Origin of Species. Darwin, in its concluding lines, described his theory in sonorous terms. ‘There is grandeur in this view of life,’ he proclaimed. The conviction that the universe moved in obedience to laws which might be comprehended by human reason, and that the fruit of these laws was ‘most beautiful and most wonderful’, was one that joined him directly to the distant age of Abelard.²⁹ When, in Germany, Darwinists fantasised that churches might soon feature altars to astronomy, and be decked out with orchids, their hankering after the venerable gravitas of Christianity was rendered explicit. The war between science and religion reflected – at least in part – the claims of both to a common inheritance.

Darwin’s wife, a Christian to the end of her days, voiced the dread of many at what this seemed to portend. Writing to her son shortly after Darwin’s death, she confessed that ‘your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me’.³⁰ Already, it appeared that there was no reach of Christian teaching where a scientist might hesitate to intrude. Even as some trained telescopes on Mars or sought to track the passage of invisible rays, others were turning their attentions to the bedroom. Here, as the Marquis de Sade had insistently complained, a morality that derived ultimately from Paul continued to prescribe the acceptable parameters of behaviour. Darwin and his theory, though, had set the cat among the pigeons. The functioning of natural selection depended on reproduction. The mating habits of humans were no less legitimate a field of study than those of the birds or the bees. This – in countries less embarrassed by sex than Darwin’s own – provided a licence for scientists to investigate the detail and variety of sexual behaviour on a scale that might have impressed even Sade himself. In 1886, when the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing published a survey of what he termed ‘pathological fetishism’, the sheer scope of his researches made his book a focus of interest far beyond the scholarly circles at which it was aimed. Six years later, an English translation of the Psychopathia Sexualis prompted one reviewer to lament its vast and undiscerning readership. The entire book, he complained, should have been rendered into the decent obscurity of Latin.

Nevertheless, classicists could still find much in it to pique their interest. One word in particular, a portmanteau of Greek and Latin, stuck out. Homosexualität had originally been coined in 1869, to provide the writer of a pamphlet on Prussian morality laws with a shorthand for sexual relations between people of the same gender. This, of course, was precisely the category of behaviour that Paul, in his letter to the Romans, had so roundly excoriated, and which Aquinas had defined as sodomy. Nevertheless, in the age of Enlightenment as in that of Bernardino, the word remained a slippery one. In 1772, for instance, when Sade was found guilty of having anal sex with women, it was as a sodomite that he had been legally convicted. Now, with the precision of a skilled anatomist, Krafft-Ebing had succeeded in identifying with a single word the category of sexual behaviour condemned by Paul. Only a medical man, perhaps, could have done it. Krafft-Ebing’s interest in same-sex relations was as a scientist, not a moralist. Why – in seeming defiance of Darwin’s theory – did men or women choose to sleep with people of their own sex? The traditional explanation, that such people were lustful predators whose failure to control their appetites had led them to weary of what God had ordained as natural, was starting to seem inadequate to psychiatrists. Much likelier, Krafft-Ebing believed, ’homosexuals’ were the victims of an underlying morbid condition. Whether this was to be viewed as something hereditary, an ailment passed down the generations, or as the result of an accident suffered in the uterus, it was clear to him that homosexuality should be regarded not as a sin, but as something very different: an immutable condition. Homosexuals, he argued, were the creatures of their proclivities. As such – Christian concern for the unfortunate being what it was – they deserved to be treated with generosity and compassion.

Most Christians were unpersuaded. The challenge that Krafft-Ebing’s researches presented to their understanding of sexual morality was twofold. Even as Psychopathia Sexualis demonstrated that there were people who could not help having a taste for sexual activities condemned by scripture as immoral, so also – just as disturbingly – did it propose that many in the Church’s history might themselves have been in the grip of deviant sexual needs. When Krafft-Ebing invented the word ’sadism’ to describe those who took erotic pleasure in inflicting pain, he was implicitly associating the Marquis with inquisitors such as Conrad of Marburg. Even more shocking to devout sensibilities, however, was his analysis of what he termed – after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian nobleman with a taste for being whipped by aristocratic ladies dressed in furs – ’masochism’. ‘Masochists subject themselves to all kinds of maltreatment and suffering in which there can be no question of reflex excitation of lust.’ In consequence, Krafft-Ebing declared, he had no hesitation in identifying ‘the self-torture of religious enthusiasts’, and even martyrs, as a form of masochism.³¹ Seven hundred years after Elizabeth of Hungary had surrendered herself to the strict ministrations of her confessor, the unsentimental gaze of psychiatry presumed to stare at her as she had never been stared at before. A masochist, Krafft-Ebing ruled, was the perfect counterpart of a sadist. ‘The parallelism is perfect.’³²

Yet even as psychiatry served to challenge Christian assumptions, so also did it fortify them. Krafft-Ebing’s conclusions were not nearly as clinical as either his critics or his admirers cared to think. Raised a Catholic, he took for granted the primacy of the Christian model of marriage. The great labour of the Church in fashioning and upholding monogamy as a lifelong institution was one that he deeply valued. ‘Christianity raised the union of the sexes to a sublime position by making woman socially the equal of man and by elevating the bond of love to a moral and religious institution.’³³ It was not despite believing this, but because of it, that Krafft-Ebing, by the end of his career, had come to believe that sodomy should be decriminalised. Homosexuals, he declared, might be no less familiar with ‘the noblest inspirations of the heart’ than any married couple.³⁴ Huge numbers of them, inspired by his researches, wrote to him, sharing their most intimate yearnings and secrets. It was on the basis of this correspondence that Krafft-Ebing was able to arrive at a paradoxical conclusion. The sexual practice condemned by the Church as sodomy was perfectly compatible with the ideal that he saw as Christianity’s great contribution to civilisation: lifelong monogamy. Homosexuality, as defined by the first scientist ever to attempt a detailed categorisation of it, constituted the seamless union of Christian sin with Christian love.

In cool and dispassionate language, Krafft-Ebing put the seal on a revolution in the dimensions of the erotic that was without parallel in history. Paul, by twinning men who slept with men and women who slept with women, had set in train a recalibration of the sexual order that now, in an age of science, attained its apotheosis. ‘Homosexuality’ was not the only medical-sounding compound of Greek and Latin to which Psychopathia Sexualis introduced the world. There was a second: ‘heterosexuality’. All the other categories of sexual behaviour that Krafft-Ebing had identified – sadism, masochism, fetishistic obsessions – were mere variations of the one great and fundamental divide: that which existed between heterosexual and homosexual desire. Categories that had taken almost two millennia to evolve were now impregnably defined. Soon enough, the peoples of Europe and America would forget that they had ever not been there. Exported by missionaries and embedded within colonial legal systems across the world, a way of conceptualising desire that had originated with an itinerant Jew back in the reign of Nero would come to enjoy a global sway. In the sexual order as in so much else, the roots of modernity reached deep into Christian soil.

Visiting

Diplodocus

Meanwhile, in America, the Wild West was being tamed. Palaeontologists as well as cowboys found themselves obliged to adjust to the closing of the frontier. The old freebooting ways practised by Cope and Marsh with such gusto were proving hard to sustain. Both men ended up ruined. In 1890, scandalous details of what journalists called the ‘Bone Wars’ were published in the press: how America’s two most eminent palaeontologists had been employing rival gangs of workmen to smash up each other’s finds, and writing scholarly papers to destroy each other’s reputations. Fossil-prospecting no longer came as cheaply as it had once done, and both Cope and Marsh found themselves increasingly short of funds. A new age was dawning – one in which the search for dinosaurs was to be dominated by plutocrats. Andrew Carnegie, an industrialist with the largest liquid fortune in the world, could bring resources to bear on the quest for prehistoric remains beyond the wildest dreams of scientists. Cope and Marsh were priced out of the market. Carnegie had no interest in roaming badlands panning for fragments of Mesozoic tooth. He wanted fossils on a scale appropriate to his gargantuan wealth. When his workmen excavated the skeleton of an eighty-foot dinosaur, he made sure to trumpet his ownership of the find by having it named Diplodocus carnegii. It was, his publicists screamed, the ‘most colossal animal ever on earth’.³⁵

To bag trophies was the way of man. Carnegie passionately believed this. An immigrant from Scotland who had gone from labouring in a cotton mill to monopolising the production of American steel, his entire career had been what the ancient Greeks might have called an agon. Rivals were there to be crushed, unions to be broken, the resources of capital to be concentrated in his own grasping and restless hands. Farmers, artisans, shop-keepers: all had to be broken to what his critics termed wage-slavery. Carnegie, who had once been poor himself, had no time for any idea that woe might be due the rich. Impatient with clergymen who offered lectures from the pulpit on their iniquities, he held a sterner view of the miseries suffered by the poor, for he ‘had found the truth of evolution’.³⁶ The only alternative to the survival of the fittest was the survival of the unfittest. Indiscriminate charity served no purpose save to subsidise the lazy and the drunk. Contemptuous of any notion of the supernatural, Carnegie was contemptuous as well of what America’s most distinguished social scientist had termed ‘the old ecclesiastical prejudice in favor of the poor and against the rich’. William Graham Sumner, a professor at Yale, had once felt a calling to the ministry; but the experience of serving as a clergyman had led him to reject the Church’s teachings on poverty. ‘In days when men acted by ecclesiastical rules these prejudices produced waste of capital, and helped mightily to replunge Europe into barbarism.’³⁷ If only Columbanus, rather than skulking profitlessly in woods, had set up a business. If only Boniface, rather than haranguing pagans, had brought them the good news of free trade. Here was teaching of which Carnegie was proud to consider himself a disciple.

And yet he could not help, for all that, but remain the child of his Presbyterian upbringing. When Carnegie’s family had travelled to America from Scotland they had brought with them, just as the Pilgrim Fathers had once done, the knowledge that regeneration did not come easily to fallen humanity. A man had to live in obedience to his calling. Only if he laboured as though everything were dependent on his own exertions would reward then come from God. Carnegie, even if he doubted the existence of a deity, never doubted that his efforts to enrich himself brought with them a stern responsibility. John Winthrop, sailing to the New World, had warned what calamity might follow were he and his fellow settlers ‘to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for our selves and our posterity’.³⁸ Carnegie, two centuries on and more, was shadowed by the same anxiety. A thoughtful man, he declared, would as soon leave his son a curse as a dollar. The article in which he wrote this had a pointed title: ‘The Gospel of Wealth’. Charity was only pointless if it failed to help the poor to help themselves. ‘The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise.’³⁹ It was in obedience to this maxim that Carnegie, having spent his career making fabulous amounts of money, devoted his retirement to spending it. For all that he believed in helping the poor to become rich, rather than – in ‘imitation of the life of Christ’⁴⁰ – living in poverty himself, he was recognisably an heir of Paulinus. Parks, libraries, schools, endowments to promote the cause of world peace: Carnegie funded them all. Self-aggrandising though these gestures might be, they were not primarily self-interested. The concern they showed to improve the lives of others was one of which John Winthrop would surely have approved. It was not enough for Carnegie to put his Diplodocus on display in a lavishly appointed museum in his home town of Pittsburgh. The wonder of it had to be shared far and wide. Casts of it were made, and dispatched to capitals across the world.

On 12 May 1905, Carnegie was in London, where the 292 bones of the first Diplodocus cast ever to be assembled into a single skeleton were ready to be unveiled to an aristocratic array of dignitaries. Naturally, he gave a speech. His dinosaur, vast and stupefying like his own business empire, was the perfect emblem of what might be achieved by giving free rein to the survival of the fittest. It was his unfettered accumulation of capital, after all, that had enabled him to fund his gift, and thereby to help forge between the British and American peoples ‘an alliance for peace’.⁴¹ The setting for this message could hardly have been more appropriate: London’s museum of natural history, an immense pile complete with soaring pillars and gargoyles, had the decided ambience of a cathedral. This was no accident. Its founder, Richard Owen – the naturalist who had coined the word ‘dinosaur’ – had consciously intended it. Science, he had once claimed, existed to ‘return good for evil’.⁴²

Carnegie, then, proudly surveying his Diplodocus, could feel that its bones had been provided with a fitting reliquary. He was not, though, the only foreign visitor to London that May who believed that a proper understanding of science would enable humanity to attain world peace. One day before the unveiling of the Diplodocus, a Russian named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – Lenin, as he called himself – had also visited the city’s museum of natural history. No less than Carnegie, he was a proponent of putting the lessons taught by evolution to practical effect. Unlike Carnegie, however, he did not believe that human happiness was best served by giving free rein to capital. Capitalism, in Lenin’s opinion, was doomed to collapse. The workers of the world – the ‘proletariat’ – were destined to inherit the earth. The abyss that yawned between ‘the handful of arrogant millionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism’⁴³ made the triumph of communism certain. For two weeks, Lenin and thirty-seven others had been in London to debate how this coming revolution in the affairs of the world might best be expedited – but that the laws of evolution made it inevitable none of them doubted. This was why, as though to a shrine, Lenin had led his fellow delegates to the museum. It was only a single stop, however. London had a second, an even holier shrine. The surest guide to the functioning of human society, and to the parabola of its future, had been provided not by Darwin, but by a second bearded thinker who, Job-like, had suffered from bereavement and boils. Every time Lenin came to London he would visit the great man’s grave; 1905 was no exception. The moment the congress was over, Lenin had taken the delegates up to the cemetery in the north of the city where, twenty-two years earlier, their teacher, the man who – more than any other – had inspired them to attempt the transformation of the world, lay buried. Standing before the grave, the thirty-eight disciples paid their respects to Karl Marx.

There had been only a dozen people at his funeral in 1883. None, though, had ever had any doubts as to his epochal significance. One of the mourners, speaking over the open grave, had made sure to spell it out. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution as it applies to organic matter, so Marx discovered the law of evolution as it applies to human history.’⁴⁴ Communists could be certain of their cause, not because it was moral, or just, or written – as Marx himself had mockingly put it – ‘in vaporous clouds in the heavens’,⁴⁵ but because it was scientifically proven. For years he had sat in the Reading Room of the British Museum, crunching the numbers and analysing the data that had enabled him to identify, at last, the inexorable and unconscious forces that shape human history. Once, in the beginning, man and woman had lived in a condition of primitive equality; but then there had been a fall. Different classes had emerged. Exploitation had become the norm. The struggle between the rich and the poor had been relentless: an unforgiving tale of greed and acquisition. Now, under the blood-stained reign of capital, in the era of plutocrats like Carnegie, it had become pitiless as never before. Workers were reduced to machines. Marx, sixty years previously, had foretold it all: what the clamouring, hammering genius of capitalism had revealed. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’⁴⁶ In the great, the climactic convulsion of the class struggle that, since the very dawn of civilisation, had determined history’s course, there could be only one possible outcome. Capitalists like Andrew Carnegie were the grave-diggers of their own class. It was capitalism itself that would give birth to the classless society.

Naturally, now that Marx had succeeded in providing a scientific basis for the processes of history, there was no need for God. To believe in a deity was, for any human being, to exist in a condition of humiliating dependence. Religion, like opium, lulled its addicts into a condition of soporific passivity, numbing them with fantasies of providence and an afterlife. It was, as it had always been, merely a cipher of the exploitative classes. Marx, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a Lutheran convert, dismissed both Judaism and Christianity as ‘stages in the development of the human mind – different snake skins cast off by history, and man as the snake who cast them off’.⁴⁷ An exile from the Rhineland, expelled from a succession of European capitals for mocking the religiosity of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he had arrived in London with personal experience of the uses to which religion might be put by autocrats. Far from amplifying the voices of the suffering, it was a tool of oppression, employed to stifle and muzzle protest. The ambitions of Christianity to change the world, its claims to have done so, were delusions. ‘Epiphenomena’, Marx termed them: mere bubbles thrown up on the heaving surface of things by the immense currents of production and exchange. The ideals, the teachings, the visions of Christianity: none had independence from the material forces that had generated them. To imagine that they might in any way have influenced the processes of history was to slumber indeed in an opium den. Now that Marx had issued his wake-up call, there could be no possible excuse for remaining addicted to such a baneful narcotic. The questions of morality and justice that for so long had obsessed Christians were superseded. Science had rendered them superfluous. Marx had pondered the workings of capitalism as a man unclouded by moral prejudices. Not so much as an incense-hint of the epiphenomenal clung to his writings. All his evaluations, all his predictions, derived from observable laws. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’⁴⁸ Here was a slogan with the clarity of a scientific formula.

Except, of course, that it was no such thing. Its line of descent was evident to anyone familiar with the Acts of the Apostles. ‘Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to everyone as he had need.’ Repeatedly throughout Christian history, the communism practised by the earliest Church had served radicals as their inspiration. Marx, when he dismissed questions of morality and justice as epiphenomena, was concealing the true germ of his revolt against capitalism behind jargon. A beard, he had once joked, was something ‘without which no prophet can succeed’.⁴⁹ Famously hirsute himself, he had spoken more truly, perhaps, than he knew. Dispassion was a tone that – despite his efforts – he found impossible to maintain. The revulsion that he so patently felt at the miseries of artisans evicted by their landlords to starve on the streets, of children aged before their years by toiling night and day in factories, of labourers worked to death in distant colonies so that the bourgeoisie might have sugar in their tea, made a mockery of his claims to have outgrown moral judgements. Marx’s interpretation of the world appeared fuelled by certainties that had no obvious source in his model of economics. They rose instead from profounder depths. Again and again, the magma flow of his indignation would force itself through the crust of his scientific-sounding prose. For a self-professed materialist, he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church Fathers had once done: as a battleground between cosmic forces of good and evil. Communism was a ‘spectre’: a thing of awful and potent spirit. Just as demons had once haunted Origen, so the workings of capitalism haunted Marx. ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’⁵⁰ This was not the language of a man emancipated from epiphenomena. The very words used by Marx to construct his model of class struggle – ‘exploitation’, ‘enslavement’, ‘avarice’ – owed less to the chill formulations of economists than to something far older: the claims to divine inspiration of the biblical prophets. If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily like a recalibration of it.

Lenin and his fellow delegates, meeting in London that spring of 1905, would have been contemptuous of any such notion, of course. Religion – opium of the people that it was – would need, if the victory of the proletariat were properly to be secured, to be eradicated utterly. Oppression in all its forms had to be eliminated. The ends justified the means. Lenin’s commitment to this principle was absolute. Already, the single-mindedness with which he insisted on it had precipitated schism in the ranks of Marx’s followers. The congress held in London had been exclusively for those of them who defined themselves as Bolsheviks: the ‘Majority’. Communists who insisted, in opposition to Lenin, on working alongside liberals, on confessing qualms about violence, on worrying that Lenin’s ambitions for a tightly organised, strictly disciplined party threatened dictatorship, were not truly communists at all – just a sect. Sternly, like the Donatists, the Bolsheviks dismissed any suggestion of compromising with the world as it was. Eagerly, like the Taborites, they yearned to see the apocalypse arrive, to see paradise established on earth. Fiercely, like the Diggers, they dreamed of an order in which land once held by aristocrats and kings would become the property of the people, a common treasury. Lenin, who was reputed to admire both the Anabaptists of Münster and Oliver Cromwell, was not entirely contemptuous of the past. Proofs of what was to come were plentiful there. History, like an arrow, was proceeding on its implacable course. Capitalism was destined to collapse, and the paradise lost by humanity at the beginning of time to be restored. Those who doubted it had only to read the teachings and prophecies of their great teacher to be reassured.

The hour of salvation lay at hand.