The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

DARWINISM

AMERICAN CULTURE has entered a period in which atavism looks to us for all the world like progress. The stripping away of humane constraints to liberate great “natural” forces, such as capital flow or the (soi-disant) free market, has acquired such heady momentum that no one even pauses to wonder whether such forces are indeed particularly “natural.” The use of the word implies a tendentious distinction. Billions of dollars can vanish into the ether under the fingers of a bad young man with a dark stare, yet economics is to be regarded as if it were lawful and ineluctable as gravity. If the arcane, rootless, disruptive phenomenon we call global economics is natural, then surely anything else is, too.

Rivers flow to the sea — this fact implies no obligation on our part to abet them in it, to eliminate meanders and flood plains. If economics were natural in this sense, presumably moderating, stabilizing mechanisms would be intrinsic to its systems. But economics is simply human traffic in what people make and do and value and need, or think they need, a kind of epitome of civilization. It is the wealth of nations, and also their fraudulence and malice and vainglory. It is no more reliably benign or rational than any other human undertaking. That is to say, it requires conscious choice and control, the making of moral and ethical judgments.

Primitive, sometimes called classical, economics has long lived symbiotically with Darwinism, which sprang from it. Darwinists have always claimed that they were simple scientists, pursuing truth even in the face of outrage and rejection, even at the cost of dispelling myths upon which weaker souls preferred to remain dependent. It seems fair to allow that Darwinism might have evolved long enough on its own to have become another species of thought than the one in which it had its origins, though nature provides no analogy for change of that kind. Yet we find the recrudescence of primitive economics occurring alongside a new prominence of Darwinism. We find them separately and together encouraging faith in the value of self-interest and raw competition. Furthermore, we find in them certain peculiar assumptions which are incompatible with their claims to being objective, freestanding systems. One is progressivism, which is implied everywhere in primitive economics, and denied everywhere in contemporary Darwinism.

The idea of progress implies a judgment of value. We are to believe the world will be better if people are forced into severe and continuous competition. If they work themselves weary making a part for a gadget assembled on the other side of the earth, in fear of the loss of their livelihoods, the world will be better for it. If economic forces recombine and shed these workers for cheaper ones, the world will be still better. In what sense, better? To ask is to refuse to accept the supposedly inevitable, to deny the all-overriding reality of self-interest and raw competition, which will certainly overwhelm us if we allow ourselves some sentimental dream of a humane collective life. This economics implies progress and has no progress to show.

Contemporary Darwinism shuns the suggestion that the workings of natural selection are progressive, perhaps in resistance to the old error of assuming that humankind is the masterpiece of evolution. To do so would be to discover special value in peculiarly human attributes, to suggest, for example, that mind is something toward which evolution might have tended. That would be to legitimize the works of the mind, its most characteristic intuitions, concerning, for example, ethics and religion. Yet we are told by Darwinists to celebrate the wondrous works of natural selection, the tangled bank. Its authority must be received, its truth made the measure of all truth, because heaven and earth are full of its glory. To claim creation as the signature act of whatever power one prefers is clearly to overstep the bounds of scientific discourse. The intention is to demonstrate that there are emotional satisfactions in this worldview, which is at least to acknowledge the claims of one distinctively human longing. Characteristically, however, Darwinists, like primitive economists, assume that what is humane — I use the word here, unexceptionably, as I believe, to mean whatever arises from the desire to mitigate competition and to put aside self-interest — is unnatural, and therefore wrong.

The debate between Darwinism and religion is and has always been very strange. I wish to make a distinction here between evolution, the change that occurs in organisms over time, and Darwinism, the interpretation of this phenomenon which claims to refute religion and to imply a personal and social ethic which is, not coincidentally, antithetical to the assumptions imposed and authorized by Judaeo-Christianity. Darwin’s theory was published in 1859, two years before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. His achievement would be impressive if even a tiny core of scientific insight survived such an explosion of new understanding of the nature of things as has occurred in the last century and a half. It is important to remember, however, that evolution as I have defined it was observed and noted even in antiquity. In 1850 Alfred Tennyson had published In Memoriam, the long poem in which he ponders the dark implications of an evolutionary origin of man and creation, and arrives at a reconciliation of this theory with a new understanding of divine providence. In 1852 Matthew Arnold published “Empedocles on Etna,” in which evolution is represented as exposing religion as mere human illusion. The tendency to confuse Darwin with Prometheus obscures the fact that his ideas, too, have an ancestry, and an evolution, and, most certainly, a genus.

What, precisely, this theory called Darwinism really is, is itself an interesting question. The popular shorthand version of it is “the survival of the fittest.” This is a phrase coined by the so-called Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer, in work published before the appearance of the Origin of Species and adopted — with acknowledgment of Spencer as the source — in later editions of Darwin’s book. There is an apparent tautology in the phrase. Since Darwinian (and, of course, Spencerian) fitness is proved by survival, one could as well call the principle at work “the survival of survivors.” This is not, strictly speaking, tautological, if the point is to bless things as they are, insofar as they are a matter of life and death. (The words “competition” and “struggle” are grossly euphemistic, since what is being described in Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population [1798], the winnowing that inspired Darwin, was the withholding of very meager sustenance from those who would die without it. Nothing more heroic was called for than closing one’s hand, or turning one’s back, both of them familiar and congenial exercises in Darwin’s time, and both of them what Spencer was commending when he coined this phrase.)

If we are to take this notion of natural selection as a chaste, objectively functioning scientific principle, however, the issue of tautology is not so easily resolved. Since those who are alive tend to make up the majority of any population, one cannot really be surprised to find their traits predominant, and their offspring relatively numerous. At the same time, one cannot be sure that they have not found the broad path to extinction, like so many creatures before them, doomed by traits that cannot at this moment be called incompatible with their survival, given the fact of their survival. In other words, the theory understood in these terms is notably weak in its ability to generalize, describe or predict. Life forms do change, and there is an orderliness in their existence over time, notably in the phenomenon of species, whose origins Darwin did not, in fact, explain, or even claim to have explained. That the drifting of the forms of life corresponds in significant ways to the drift of the content or configuration of their genetic endowment is not a fact whose meaning is self-evident. The change to be observed is change, not necessarily refinement or complication, and not even adaptation, because it is often maladaptive. In The Descent of Man, Darwin notes, “Natural Selection acts only tentatively.” Behold the great Law that governs nature.

It appears to me that the conjunction which allowed evolution to flourish as Darwinism was the appropriation of certain canards about animal breeding for the purpose of social criticism, together with a weariness in European civilization with Christianity, which did cavil, if anything did, at the extraordinary cruelty of industrial and colonial civilization. Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population to demonstrate the harmful consequences of intervening between the poor and their death by starvation. In his Autobiography, Darwin says:

[In 1838] I happened to read for amusement [!] Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work …

It would appear he made Malthus’s grim thesis, that alleviation of misery only results in greater misery, darker still by concluding that those who die deserve to, as the embodiments of unfavorable “variations.” In The Descent of Man he treats human fecklessness as atavism, and perhaps that is part of what he means here. But as a consequence of the progressive character of change brought about by the process of destruction he describes as occurring within and between populations, survival is always a function of relative fitness. There is no such thing as intrinsic worth. No value inheres in whatever is destroyed, or destructible. In Origin of Species he says:

In each well-stocked country natural selection acts through the competition of the inhabitants, and consequently leads to success in the battle for life, only in accordance with the standard of that particular country. Hence the inhabitants of one country, generally the smaller one, often yield to the inhabitants of another and generally the larger country. For in the larger country there will have existed more individuals and more diversified forms, and the competition will have been severer, and thus the standard of perfection will have been rendered higher.

Those who have wondered how it can be that larger countries so consistently dominate smaller ones will find their answer here — bigger countries have better people in them. Insights like this one must have sweetened the pill of Darwinism considerably for those among the British who felt any doubts about the glory of Empire. Especially to be noted is the progressivist spin Darwin puts on Malthus. A more populous country implies for him one in which there is more severe attrition, therefore a more highly evolved people. That is to say, success depends not on numbers but on the severity of competition that is the presumed consequence of large population. Brutal conditions at home legitimize domination abroad. Surely this is the worst of all possible worlds. But my point here is that the idea of progressive evolution through natural selection occurred to Darwin as a consequence of reading about endemic starvation in the populations of wealthy countries. He elaborated it into a theory of national aggression.

If Darwin retreated, in one context or another, from the assertion that there is in fact such a thing as progress in evolution among the plants and animals, he nevertheless consistently assumed that human beings were “perfected” by the struggle for survival. In The Descent of Man he makes quite clear what form this progress takes. He says:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Darwin speaks frequently about higher and lower races of man, and he also says that there is little difference in mind or temperament among the races of men. Mind is not a consideration for him, so this causes him no embarrassment. It is true of Darwinism in general that the human mind, and those of its creatures which are not compatible with the Darwinist worldview, are discounted as anomaly or delusion. Elsewhere Darwin remarks, with striking obduracy, “If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.” The fact that we alone are capable of describing order in nature is not a significant distinction in his view, but instead a source of error, even though the human brain is taxonomically singular, and should therefore set us apart if our sciences and civilizations did not. Darwin freely concedes to the savages (as to the ants) courage and loyalty and affection. He describes an anthropologist’s overhearing African mothers teaching their children to love the truth. These things do not affect the confidence with which he assigns them to the condition of inferiority, which for him is proved by their liability to extermination by the civilized races.

In his useful book, Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution (1980), D. R. Oldroyd, defending the phrase “survival of the fittest” from the charge that it is tautological, proposes that the reader “consider a simple case of natural selection arising from the struggle for existence.” It is the “struggle” that led to the extermination of the native people of Tasmania by European settlers in the nineteenth century. “One group (to their lasting moral, but not biological shame) survived; another group failed to survive. Surely it is perfectly clear that this may be explained in terms of some criterion of fitness (say the possession of fire-arms) that is quite separate from the contingent fact that the Europeans did survive. Thus we can readily see this example as an empirical exemplification of the principle of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.” He goes on to discuss the change in coloration of the English peppered moth, omitting to provide the list of contributions made by Anglo-Tasmanians to global well-being which might assuage our doubts about the persuasive force of this simple case, this systematic destruction of unarmed people. Darwinism is, intrinsically, a chilling doctrine.

Rejection of religion was abroad in Europe in the nineteenth century, just as evolution was. Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche are two noted debunkers who flourished in Darwin’s lifetime, and Karl Marx is another. Marx, the gentlest of them, said, “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Whether the protest against suffering makes suffering harder to relieve, as he argues, or simply makes it harder to ignore, weariness with the sigh of the oppressed creature is easy to document in the thought of the time, and the mode or avenue of such sentiment was religion.

Whether Darwin himself intended to debunk religion is not a matter of importance, since he was perceived to have done so by those who embraced his views. His theory, as science, is irrelevant to the question of the truth of religion. It is only as an inversion of Christian ethicalism that it truly engages religion. And in those terms it is appropriately the subject of challenge from any humane perspective, religious or other. Insofar as ethical implications are claimed for it, it is not science, yet historically it has sheltered under the immunities granted to science. The churches generally have accepted the idea of evolution with great and understandable calm. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or of Luther, Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola, or of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Martin Luther King, is no Watchmaker. To find him at the end of even the longest chain of being or causality would be to discover that he was a thing (however majestic) among things. Not God, in other words. Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) declares from its irksomely alliterative title onward that the complex of assertions I have described as Darwinism is vigorously alive. Dennett asks, “If God created and designed all these wonderful things, who created God? Supergod? And who created Supergod? Superdupergod? Or did God create himself? Was it hard work? Did it take time?” This is my point precisely. It is manifestly not consistent with the nature of God to be accessible to description in such terms. Even Dennett, who appears to have no meaningful acquaintance with religious thought, is clearly aware that to speak of God in this way is absurd.

If one looks at the creation narrative in Genesis one finds no Watchmaker, as the Darwinists would have us believe, but a God who stands outside his creation, and calls it into being by, in effect, willing its existence. This terse account does as little to invoke the model of a human artisan as it could do. The creation and blessing of everything, from light to the great sea creatures to whatever creeps on the earth, is done in the same formulaic terms. It all has the same origin, and it is all good. There is no suggestion of hierarchy in the order in which things come into being any more than in the language that names them, with the exception of man/woman, who are made in God’s image and given dominion over the rest of creation.

The narrative stabilizes essential theological assertions, first of all, that God is not embodied in any part of creation. He is not light, nor is he the sun, as the gods of other ancient peoples were thought to be. He is in no sense limited or local. He is not the force of good or order struggling against forces of evil or chaos, but the sole creator of a creation that is in whole and in part “very good.” There are no loci of special holiness, humanity aside, and nothing evil or alarming or unclean. The sun and moon are simply “lights” and the markers of days and seasons. The alternation of day and night are not the endless recurrence of a terrifying primal struggle but the frame of a great order, identified by the repeated reference to evening and morning with the ordering of creation itself. All these things articulate a vision of being which is sharply distinct from those expressed in competing ancient cosmogonies. The narrative, with its refrain, tells off the days in a week, and culminates in the Sabbath, which is, therefore, as fundamental a reality as creation itself. It is as if God’s rest were the crown of his work. This is a very powerful statement of the value of the Sabbath, so essential to the life of the Jews, and it seems to me it probably accounts for the fact of the narrative’s describing creation as the business of a week.

Certainly this cosmogony describes a natural order which is freestanding and complete, with rainfall and seasons established, as well as the fecundity of all living things. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche says:

In the imagination of religious people all nature is a summary of the actions of conscious and voluntary creatures, an enormous complex or arbitrariness. No conclusion may be drawn with regard to everything that is outside of us, that anything will be so and so, must be so and so; the approximately sure, reliable are we, — man is the rule, nature is irregularity —

This statement is wrong, point for point, as a characterization of the world of the Genesis cosmogony, which is not in the least degree animistic or demon-haunted or dependent for its functioning on divine intervention. If ancient people had consciously set out to articulate a worldview congenial to science, it is hard to imagine how, in the terms available to them, they could have done better. And in fact, Judeo-Christian culture has been uniquely hospitable to science.

But the point to be stressed is that religious people — by definition, I would say — do not look for proof of the existence of God, or understand God in a way that makes his existence liable to proof or disproof. It is naive to talk about proof in that way, which is why Darwinists need not apologize for their failure to prove the existence of the process of natural selection, which they freely concede they have not done. That attempts at proofs of God’s existence have been made from time to time, under the influence of the prestige of Aristotle, or of early science, does not mean that religious belief has sought or depended on that kind of affirmation, as any reader of theology is well aware. Faith is called faith for a reason. Darwinism is another faith — a loyalty to a vision of the nature of things despite its inaccessibility to demonstration.

The Creationist position has long been owned by the Religious Right, and the Darwinist position by the Irreligious Right. The differences between these camps are intractable because they are meaningless. People who insist that the sacredness of Scripture depends on belief in creation in a literal six days seem never to insist on a literal reading of “to him who asks, give,” or “sell what you have and give the money to the poor.” In fact, their politics and economics align themselves quite precisely with those of their adversaries, who yearn to disburden themselves of the weak, and to unshackle the great creative forces of competition. The defenders of “religion” have made religion seem foolish while rendering it mute in the face of a prolonged and highly effective assault on the poor. The defenders of “science” have imputed objectivity and rigor to an account of reality whose origins and consequences are indisputably economic, social, and political.

Creationism is the best thing that could have happened to Darwinism, the caricature of religion that has seemed to justify Darwinist contempt for the whole of religion. Creationism has tended to obscure the fact that religion — precisely as the hope of the powerless and the mitigator of the abuse of the weak — has indeed come under determined attack by people who have claimed the authority of science, and that Darwin’s work was quite rightly seized upon by antireligionists who had other fish to fry than the mere demystification of cosmogony. I am speaking, as I know it is rude to do, of the Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, the Scientific Socialists who showed such firmness in reshaping civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and, yes, of the Nazis. Darwin influenced the nationalist writer Heinrich von Treitschke and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who influenced Hitler and also the milieu in which he flourished.

If there is felt to be a missing link between Darwinism and these distinctive phenomena of modern history, it is because we pretend that only Darwin’s most presentable book would have had circulation and impact. Reading The Descent of Man, one finds Darwin the obsessive taxonomist marveling that Hindus, who are apparently so unlike Europeans, are in fact also Aryans, while Jews, who look just like Europeans, are in fact Asiatics. This sort of language is a reminder of the kind of thinking that was going on in Europe at that time, which Darwin’s cheerful interest in the extermination of races, and his insistence on ranking races in terms of their nearness to the apes, could only have abetted.

Daniel Dennett alludes delicately to the sources and history of Darwin’s thesis. He says, “The grim Malthusian vision of his social and political forces that could act to check human overpopulation may have strongly flavored Darwin’s thinking (and undoubtedly has flavored the shallow political attacks of many an anti-Darwinian) [Shallow? Gentle reader, is this sufficient? Is this fair?], but the idea Darwin needed from Malthus is purely logical. It has nothing at all to do with political ideology, and can be expressed in very abstract and general terms.” The idea Darwin took from Malthus was of a continuous cull. Darwin’s understanding of the phenomenon was neither abstract nor general. The economic and social programs which claim the authority of Darwin have tended to apply this idea, in one way or another, to human society, in a manner he himself might well have approved, considering that he discovered it in its application to human society. The notion that this idea could have “nothing at all to do with political ideology,” presumably because it is “purely logical,” is the thinking of a true fundamentalist. Dennett seems unaware that zealots of every sort find every one of their tenets purely logical. Discussing the ongoing Malthusian “crunch,” which means that only some organisms in a population will leave progeny, Dennett says:

Will it be a fair lottery, in which every organism has an equal chance of being among the few that reproduce? In a political context, this is where invidious themes enter, about power, privilege, injustice, treachery, class warfare, and the like, but we can elevate the observation from its political birthplace and consider in the abstract, as Darwin did, what would — must — happen in nature.

This language is evasive, and also misleading. As we have seen, if by nature we are to understand the nonhuman world, that is by no means the only setting in which Darwin saw his principle at work. If, as Darwin argues, the human and nonhuman worlds are continuous and of a kind, then Dennett implies a distinction that is in fact meaningless. Since Dennett insists that an ethic is to be derived from Darwinism, our concern is not properly with what happens in nature — since, in any case, it must happen — but with the interactions among people in society, concerning which choice is possible. I think we all know that we cannot look to nature for a model, unless we are able to find equity in predation, as, in this century particularly, certain people have in fact claimed to do.

The notion of “fitness” is not now and never has been value neutral. The model is basically physical viability, or as the political economists used to say, physical efficiency. In The Descent of Man, Darwin says:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; 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 everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

This is pure Malthus. So is the demurral: “[We could not] check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature … We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind…” None of this is abstract or general or innocent of political history or implication. The Descent of Man (1871) is a late work which seems to be largely ignored by Darwinists now. The persistence of Malthusian influence in such explicit form indicates not only the power but also the meaning of its influence in Darwin’s thinking. And of course its relevance is clearer when Darwin has turned his gaze, as Malthus did, to human society.

It does bear mentioning in this context that the full title of his first book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. However generously this title is interpreted, clearly it does not assume that biological systems evolve by chance and not design, as Darwin is always said to have done. It clearly implies that whatever is is right, and — even less tenably — that whatever is is the product of raw struggle, and — still less tenably — that there is a teleology behind it all, one which favors and preserves. Darwinists seem unable to refrain from theology, as the supplanters of it. The old God may have let the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike, but this new god is more implacable in his judgments, and very straightforward, killing off those who die, to state the matter baldly. What need of this theology except to imply that there is wisdom and blessing and meaning in “selection,” which the phenomenon itself does not by any means imply? If the temperature on earth rose or fell by five degrees, this same god would curse where he had cherished and love what he had despised, which is only to say that natural selection must indeed be thought of as blind, from the preserving and favoring point of view, if consistency is to be respected at all.

Surely we must assume that a biosphere generated out of any circumstances able to sustain life is as good as any other, that if we make a desert of this planet, for example, and the god of survival turns his countenance upon the lurkers and scuttlers who emerge as fittest, under the new regime, we can have no grounds for saying that things have changed for the worse or for the better, in Darwinist terms. In other words, absent teleology, there are no grounds for saying that survival means anything more or other than survival. Darwinists praise complexity and variety as consequences of evolution, though the success of single-celled animals would seem to raise questions. I am sure we all admire ostriches, but to call a Darwinist creation good because it is credited with providing them is simply another version of the old argument from design, proving in this use of it not the existence of God but the appropriateness of making a judgment of value: that natural selection, whose existence is to be assumed, is splendid and beneficent, and therefore to be embraced.

I am aware that many Darwinists do not argue that the complexity of organisms is a mark of progress in evolution, yet the idea is implicit in their model of adaptation. It is difficult to read about an amoeba, or for that matter a hydrogen atom, without beginning to doubt the usefulness of the word “simplicity.” Rather, the universe itself seems to have evolved so far beyond simplicity, before there was any planet Earth or any sun to rise on it, that the only question is, how will complexity be manifest? Shut up in a cell or a spore, it is clearly still complexity. In other words, there is something archaic in the Darwinist assumption that there was anything simple to begin from, and that complexity was knocked together out of accident and circumstance, as a secondary quality of life. And it is consistent with this same archaism that its model for interaction among creatures is simpler than anything to be found anywhere in experimentally accessible nature. In considering how a black hole might lose mass, the simplest account is to be preferred, no doubt. But this is simplicity of a very rarefied kind. We are of one substance with these roaring phenomena our mathematics stumbles in describing.

In any case, the passage from The Descent of Man quoted above, which undertakes to account for the physical superiority of the savages, suggests extraordinary limits to Darwin’s powers of observation and reflection. If it was true, so far into the era of the contact of savages and Europeans, that the health of the former was still comparatively good, it was true despite the disasters of invasion and colonization and slavery and the near and actual extinctions on this continent and elsewhere brought about by the introduction of European diseases. Darwin notes these effects of the contact of civilized and savage at length in other contexts. He is remarkably inconsistent. He assumes elsewhere, as I have noted, that it is the high rate of attrition within nations that makes them successful in their “struggles” with the less-favored races.

And if it was true that savages throve relatively well it was because they did not live in their own filth in vast conurbations, did not breathe air heavy with brown coal smoke, did not expose themselves to lead or mercury or phosphorus poisoning, did not hold torches to the feet of children to force them to crawl up narrow chimneys or set five-year-olds to work in factories or brickyards, did not sell one another opium tonic to hush the crying of babies. Malthus pondered at length the fact that the mass of the population of Europe, and especially Britain, lived continuously in a state of near starvation. There were two instances of outright famine in Ireland, an agricultural country, in the first half of Darwin’s century. In neither case did any crop fail but potatoes, the staple food of the poor, who were virtually the whole of the population. Vastly more than adequate food to end the famine was exported for sale by nonresident landowners while death by starvation swept over the country. Relief was given only to those who had eaten the potatoes they would have put aside to plant a new crop, so the famine went on and on. No doubt the fittest survived, scrawnier for the experience, and not terribly presentable by comparison with the savages. Darwin is simply repeating a commonplace in finding benevolence the villain in the matter of European “degeneracy.” History does not at all support the idea that benevolence was ever an important enough phenomenon to have done measurable harm, if, for the sake of argument, we concede it that power.

That human beings should be thought of as better or worse animals, and human well-being as a product of culling, is a willful exclusion of context, which seems to me to have remained as a stable feature of Darwinist thought. There is a worldview implicit in the theory which is too small and rigid to accommodate anything remotely like the world. This is no doubt true in part because acknowledging the complexity of the subject would amount to acknowledging the difficulty of demonstrating the usefulness of the theory. Those best suited to survive do no doubt survive in their descendants, all things being equal, as they rarely are. The point is that, in the matter of interpretation, judicious and dispassionate consideration of all factors would be required to establish with certainty why an organism seems to be successful in evolutionary terms in any specific case. While Darwin argues, in one context, that traits such as generosity and self-sacrifice enhance group survival, though not the survival of the individual organism, in others he clearly sees these same traits as defeating the process of selection at the level of the social group. In the first instance he wishes to prove that such motives and emotions are biologically based and analogous with those of animals because they promote survival, and in the second to argue that their effect is contrary to the workings of nature because it prevents the elimination of the weak or defective. His conclusions seem merely opportunistic. Contemporary Darwinism appears generally to discount group survival as a factor in the operations of natural selection.

Darwinism is harsh and crude in its practical consequences, in a degree that sets it apart from all other respectable scientific hypotheses; not coincidentally, it had its origins in polemics against the poor, and against the irksome burden of extending charity to them — a burden laid on the back of Europe by Christianity. The Judeo-Christian ethic of charity derives from the assertion that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, that reverence is owed to human beings simply as such, and also that their misery or neglect or destruction is not, for God, a matter of indifference, or of merely compassionate interest, but is something in the nature of sacrilege. Granting that the standards of conduct implied by this assertion have rarely been acknowledged, let alone met, a standard is not diminished or discredited by the fact that it is seldom or never realized, and, especially, a religious imperative is not less powerful in its claims on any individual even if the whole world excepting him or her is of one mind in ignoring it and always has been. To be free of God the Creator is to be free of the religious ethic implied in the Genesis narrative of Creation. Charity was the shadow of a gesture toward acknowledging the obligations of human beings to one another, thus conceived. It was a burden under which people never stopped chafing — witness this unfathomably rich country now contriving new means daily to impoverish the poor among us.

Darwinism always concerns itself with behavior, as the expression of the biological imperatives of organisms. Though, historically, it is truer to say that this feature of the theory arose from rather than that it ended in a critique of traditional ethical systems, Darwinism is still offered routinely as a source of objective scientific insight on questions like the nature of human motivation and the possibility of altruism. As I have said, the views of contemporary adherents on these matters are darker than Darwin’s own. The theory has been accommodated to Mendelian genetics, yielding the insight that it is not personal but genetic survival for which the organism strives, a refinement which does not escape the tautology implicit in the popular version of the theory, but does add a little complexity to the myth of the battle of each against all, which, however it may thrill sophomores, cannot account for the existence of social behavior in animals. The redefinition of survival enlarges the theater of possible selfish behavior. “Selfish” is a word apologists use without hesitation or embarrassment, because they remain committed to the old project of transforming values, and therefore still insist on using ethically weighted language in inappropriate contexts. It is no more “selfish” for an organism to abide by its nature, whatever that is, than for an atom to appropriate an electron. Certainly finding selfishness in a gene is an act of mind which rather resembles finding wrath in thunder.

In any case, the slightly expanded definition of selfishness is not without problems. This would be a somewhat sweeter world than the one we have if it were true among human beings, at least, that the flourishing of kin and offspring were nearer our hearts than any other interest. As it is, I propose that since this hypothesis cannot survive the evidence to be gathered from reading any newspaper, it ought not to be allowed too great an influence in the formation of social policy. Anecdotal evidence is of the highest order of relevance — evidence gathered inductively would be a better phrase, if the mass of relevant data were not infinitely great, therefore peculiarly vulnerable to misinterpretation as a result of the design of specific inquiries or of bias in the observer, and therefore not really deserving of a more dignified name than anecdote. Studies that proceed by excluding variables are of no use in discovering patterns that signify adaptation to the complexities of the natural order. In zoos we can learn little more than that animals experience boredom and depression.

Observations of human behavior can only be meaningful if they are made in real-world conditions, with an understanding of all factors at play in every instance, and on a scale great enough to allow for every sort of deviation of individuals and groups, and their circumstances, from what might be appropriately described as a norm. To do this would be impossible, of course. But surely science cannot extrapolate with authority from evidence which is only what happens to be available, especially when its appropriateness as evidence is very doubtful. Cats and dogs are quite closely related, but a lifetime of studying dogs would not qualify anyone to speak with authority on the ways of cats. So with the whole earthly bestiary which has been recruited to the purposes of the proper study of mankind.

I fell to pondering Darwinism while reading an essay by Robert Wright in Time, in an issue of the magazine that featured Bill Moyers’s televised discussions of the Book of Genesis. Wright’s essay, titled “Science and Original Sin,” delivers the “verdict of science” on human nature, while generously allowing that the biblical view is not entirely misguided. I would never wish to suggest that Wright speaks for science, a word he uses synonymously with Darwinism. His essay is mired in logical problems virtually sentence by sentence. But its appearance in a major mass publication, offered as an antidote, apparently, lest we be misled by the respectful attention paid to Genesis into forgetting that Science had displaced its fables with Fact and Truth, indicates the persisting importance of the theory, and the form in which it has its life among the general literate public.

The essay is full of Darwinian eccentricities. Wright says, “Such impulses as compassion, empathy, generosity, gratitude and remorse are genetically based. Strange as it may sound, these impulses, with their checks on raw selfishness, helped our ancestors survive and pass their genes to future generations.” To whom on earth would this sound strange except to other Darwinists? Most human beings live collaboratively and have done so for millennia. But Darwinists insist that “selfishness” is uniquely the trait rewarded by genetic survival. So while Wright does concede a biological basis to the traits we call humane and civilized, he puts them in a different category from the more primary traits (in his view) of selfishness and competition. It is not at all clear to me how some biologically based survival mechanisms have priority over others. Wright goes on to say, as Darwinists do, that we are kind to our kin, those custodians of our genetic immortality. “This finickiness gives our ‘moral’ sentiments a naturally seamy underside. Beneath familial love, for example, is malice toward our relatives’ rivals.” So our beguiling attributes can be reduced to the little meanness that governs all. It seems inevitable that, over time, doctrines and worldviews would recruit those to whom they make sense, who would therefore, generation after generation, and given the tendency of creatures to herd with their kind, become less and less capable of assuming a posture of critical distance. I cannot report from my own experience and observation that the malice he describes underlies family love. There is a tendency to consider, as he does in this case, pathological behavior as the laying bare of impulses that are in fact universal, so that any quantity of data can be refuted by a single example of behavior that would seem to illustrate his point. This kind of thinking makes all experience that contradicts its assumptions into the product of illusion or self-deception. A splendid way to win every argument.

The idea of illusion is very important to Darwinian thinking, and I am at a loss to understand how it can function legitimately in a Darwinist context. It is often used to reinterpret behavior to make it consistent with the assumptions of the observer. Wright says that when we send money to help victims of a famine on another continent, our “equipment of reciprocal altruism … is being ‘fooled’ by electronic technology into (unconsciously) thinking that the victims of famine are right next door and might someday reciprocate.” Well, perhaps. This may be truer of Wright’s equipment than of mine. The elaboration of this nonsensical machinery, whose function, I would suggest, is not the behavioral one of converting selfishness into generosity but the rhetorical one of converting generosity into selfishness, looks to me like anything but science. If behavior is genetically based, then the only insight one can have into the content of the genes that govern behavior is in manifest behavior, which, like it or not, includes generosity.

Wright does make one very valuable point. He says, “There remains one basic, unbridgeable divergence between religious doctrine and Darwinism: according to Genesis, nature is in essence benign … Only when man fell to temptation did the natural world receive a coating of evil. But according to Darwinism, the evil in nature lies at its very roots, instilled by its creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection is chronic competition untrammeled by moral rules. Heedless selfishness and wanton predation are traits likely to endure. If these things are sins, then the roots of sin lie at the origin — not just of humankind but of life.” In the degree that we have persuaded ourselves of the truth of this peculiar “science,” we have lost a demiparadise, in which there was a knowledge of good as well as of evil. I do not intend this as a defense of religion. I do not share the common assumption that religion is always in need of defending. What is needed here is a defense of Darwinism.

Why generosity and morality, whose ordinary, commonplace utility need hardly be defended, should be given secondary and probationary status is a question I think is best answered in terms of the history of Darwinism, or of the kind of thinking of which it is one manifestation. Utility, after all, should be a synonym for benefit, from the point of view of promoting survival. And behaviors should be looked at indifferently for their survival value, not screened to assure that they satisfy the narrowest definition of self-seeking before they can be regarded as natural and real. The rejection of religion by Darwinism is in essence a rejection of Christian ethicalism, which is declared to be “false” in terms of a rhetoric that pointedly precludes or disallows it. This is manifestly illogical.

Daniel Dennett quotes Friedrich Nietzsche frequently and with admiration as a writer with a profound understanding of Darwinist thinking and its implications. He deals with the problem of the historical consequences of Nietzsche’s work by remarking that he “indulged in prose so overheated that it no doubt serves him right that his legion of devotees has included a disreputable gaggle of unspeakable and uncomprehending Nazis.” Elsewhere he says, combining optimism with understatement, “fortunately few find [Nietzsche’s idea of a will to power] attractive today.” The following is a passage from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo:

Let us look a century ahead, let us suppose that my attentat on two millennia of anti-nature and the violation of man succeeds. That party of life which takes in hand the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements, will again make possible on earth that superfluity of life out of which the dionysian condition must again proceed. I promise a tragic age: the supreme art in the affirmation of life, tragedy, will be reborn when mankind has behind it the consciousness of the harshest but most necessary wars without suffering from it —

Nietzsche’s many defenders always scold as naive the suggestion that he should be taken to mean what he says, that he is not just being “overheated.” What is most striking to me is the profound similarity between this language and Darwin’s in The Descent of Man. Not that Nietzsche had to know Darwin’s work directly. I do not wish to blame Darwin for Nietzsche, and there is no need to. This passage is entirely conventional except for the detail of heroizing the unpoetic business of breeding and, especially, culling.

One Nazi who was surely comprehending, and who still seems to be highly reputable — I use the term “Nazi” in the strict sense, to mean a member of the Nazi Party in the time of Hitler and an active supporter of his regime — is the Darwinian biologist Konrad Lorenz. In 1943 Lorenz wrote about the decline of humans in civilization: “In a very short time the degenerative types, thanks to their larger reproductive rates and their coarser competitive methods toward the fellow members of the species, pervade the Volk and the state and lead to their downfall, for the same biological reasons that the likewise ‘asocial’ cells of a cancerous growth destroy the structure of the cellular state.” In 1940 he wrote: “From the very beginning the Nordic movement has been emotionally opposed to this ‘domestication’ of humankind, all its ideals are such as would be destroyed by the biological consequences of civilization and domestication I have discussed.” In 1973 he wrote:

It is one of the many dilemmas into which mankind has maneuvered itself that here again, what humane feelings demand for the individual is in opposition to the interests of mankind as a whole. Our sympathy with the asocial defective, whose inferiority might be caused just as well by irreversible injury in early infancy as by hereditary defects, endangers the security of the nondefective. In speaking of human beings, even the words ‘inferior’ or ‘valuable’ cannot be used without arousing the suspicion that one is advocating the gas chamber.

How true. I quote Lorenz only to illustrate that his views can be derived from Darwin or from Nietzsche with equal plausibility. The fact that these ideas are fully within the intellectual range of the average blowhard is very far from exculpating their distinguished proponents.

The “two millennia of anti-nature” of which Nietzsche speaks is the Christian era. They are to be undone through “remorseless destruction,” making up for time lost, presumably, to the practice of mercy while that myth held sway. I hope for the sake of Christianity that it was indeed a constraint on cruelty, on balance. Certainly it was often enough a pretext for it. The thing to note here is that it is not the failure of Christianity but its success, in terms of its own highest values, for which it is despised. And it is despised because it is “anti-nature,” that is, it has fostered degeneracy and parasitism. The antireligious animus is directed at a “falseness” which inhibits the instinct of cruelty. It is another expression of the belief — for which no proof is imaginable — that human goodness is not natural, and therefore is neither beneficial, nor, if the truth were known, even truly good. This is the impetus of the attack on religion, the rejection of the belief, encoded in the terms of myth, that goodness is not only present in creation but is the essence of it. This attack is an impulse of fierce, fastidious aversion directed at humankind, which alone is capable of “degeneracy.”

Let us, as a thought experiment, imagine that all those disreputable Nazis who admired Nietzsche were not uncomprehending after all; that, being culturally and historically closer to Nietzsche than Daniel Dennett, and intimate with his language, they were actually the better interpreters. Let us say that they found in passages like the one quoted above an imperative to act as the agents of nature and to effect the splendid restoration foreseen by Nietzsche. The result was, of course, a hideous crime, which issued in so many kinds of catastrophe that we will never see the end of them. History would then have demonstrated, certainly, the superior naturalness of the very values Nietzsche so passionately derides, if naturalness can be taken to imply consistency with the survival of nature. Perhaps we ought not to be treating these questions of value as if they were purely theoretical, but should instead consider drawing tentative conclusions from experience and observation.

Surely it is useful to note affinity. Dennett remarks of Darwin’s contemporary and supporter Herbert Spencer that he was responsible for “an odious misapplication of Darwinian thinking in defense of political doctrines that range from callous to heinous.” Why do these innocent scientific ideas veer so predictably toward ugliness and evil? I would suggest they do so because they systematically disallow the legitimacy of benign, or for that matter merely neutral, motives and behavior. They are not designed to arrive at any other result. Dennett notes, in his circuitous way, that Darwin did not disavow Spencer, publicly or privately. He interprets this as a regrettable omission. But since Spencer’s odious views were already in print while Darwin was still at work on Origin of Species, it seems appropriate to consider the implications of the very great probability that influence in fact went from Spencer to Darwin.

Then there is Sigmund Freud, a good Darwinist who has had as much to do with shaping the modern soul as any one man. Himself a compulsive mythologizer, he rejected the myths of Judeo-Christianity, and replaced them with his own luridly dismal accounts of primal cannibalism and so on. In keeping with the absurdity of this strain of intellectual history, this great debunker insists the events he sets at the beginning of human civilization actually happened. In Civilization and Its Discontents he says of religion, “Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner — which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.” It is characteristic of Freud to personify abstractions and to attribute to them motive and strategy. I know of no one else but Hesiod who is so inclined to this way of thinking.

In any case Freud restates the commonplace that religion is delusional, that it is external to the “real world” — though clearly very actively employed in it. And how does this un-deluded scientist view the world? Well, “the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only shrunken residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing — feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it.” This is the “oceanic feeling” he associates with religion, his version of Wordsworthian clouds of glory. He is expounding romanticism with the poles reversed, so that maturity as “shrunken residue” is a condition superior to the “intimate bond between the ego and the world.” Clearly in his own terms it is arbitrary to call one sense of things truer than the other, though it might have seemed daring, and therefore true, in a culture weary of romanticism.

As for the sentimental joy associated with feeling a bond with the world, the Freudian psyche has no place for it. “The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled,” though we must try. “Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual’s libido.” I will not pause here over the absolute awfulness of this language, a machinery of imposition and imprecision worthy of a Kafka story. I wish only to point out the utter asociality of the self in the Freudian world. Presumably the existence of others is implied in the concept “libido.” The Freudian psyche operates under the constraints and imperatives now to be found in the Darwinist’s “selfish gene,” with the difference that the psyche has no interest in genetic survival. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud ridicules the idea that one might love one’s neighbor as oneself, a commandment Jesus quotes from Leviticus, on the grounds that it is contrary to human nature. This is the great peculiarity of this school of thought, that it wishes to make an ethic of what it presents as an inevitability, when, if inevitability were a factor, no ethic would be needed.

Freud’s star has dimmed, at last. But his theories were propagated so widely for so long, with so great a degree of certainty of their value, that they survive the demise of his reputation and flourish among us as received truths. They are remarkably meager and charmless. Their lack of scientific foundation, their prima facie implausibility, and their profound impact on modern thought, prove together that we can in fact choose myths which will function for us as myths, that is, that will express visions of reality which form values and behavior. This thought is more frightening than reassuring, though if Freud had not been able to adapt the great influence of Darwin and Nietzsche to his purposes, and if they had not themselves been codifiers of widely held attitudes, Freudian theories would never have achieved the status of myth. Since we do in fact have some power of choice, however, what in the world could have moved us to choose anything so graceless and ugly? Darwinians to this day watch for murder in baboon colonies. Altruism was thought to have been sighted among the penguins, but a study of the question found that they did indeed reliably feed their own offspring and not others, so the shimmering possibility of altruism slipped out of our beaks, as it were, and into the arctic waters of the biological imperatives common to humankind and penguins. Surely there was some wisdom in the old story that we are exceptional among the creatures. George Williams, honored among the Darwinists, wonders briefly in his book Adaptation and Natural Selection what function there could be for human “cerebral hypertrophy.” Obviously it serves to allow us to learn our limitations from the penguins.

Ironically, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud have all benefited from a myth of origins. Even now, the idea that they astonished a world of settled belief with brave new insight, and that they dispelled the gloom of an unvalued present life by turning their piercing gaze resolutely to Truth and Nature, makes giants of them — and, more regrettably, makes history a suitable backdrop for this opera, at whatever loss to verisimilitude. In 1932 Albert Einstein wrote an open letter to Sigmund Freud titled “Why War?” In it he asked:

Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called “Intelligentzia” that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic form — upon the printed page.

Freud replied:

We have been guilty of the heresy of attributing the origin of conscience to this diversion inwards of aggressiveness. You will notice that it is by no means a trivial matter if this process is carried too far: it is positively unhealthy. On the other hand if these forces are turned to destruction in the external world, the organism will be relieved and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation also needs to be found.

Freud took his heresy from Nietzsche. This account of the origins of conscience was at the center of Nietzsche’s theory of the “transvaluation of values,” by which the noble types who ruled mankind were made to accept constraints on their behavior by the craftiness of priests. Nietzsche says “conscience … is the instinct of cruelty turned backwards after it can no longer discharge itself outwards. Cruelty here brought to light for the first time as one of the oldest substrata of culture and one that can least be thought away.” Freud is quoting back to Einstein one of those books which Einstein blames for propagating “disastrous collective suggestions.” He is refusing, also, Einstein’s characterization of the cult of hate and destructiveness as psychotic — the “organism” will benefit from the release of these impulses upon the “external” world. (It is eerie how alien from the self the world is for Freud.) Pathology is the consequence of the restraining of these impulses. They in themselves are natural and biologically justified.

Note that Freud speaks of humankind as an “organism” on which conscience is artificially imposed. This implies that whatever conscience might tell us about obligations to others, or respect for them, is unnatural and also at odds with our own well-being. History had proved, and was about to prove again, that the well-being of human organisms is not served by the unrestrained release of aggression. It is as if Freud truly were not persuaded of the reality of the external world, as if he did not understand the simple fact that aggression is followed by retaliation in the great majority of cases. And when it is not, it still impoverishes the world, on which, oceanic feelings aside, one does indeed depend for what traditionalists would call the good things in life. As realists would point out, one depends on it for life itself.

It is bizarre in the circumstances, with the horrors of World War I a recent memory and the Nazi era under way, that Freud would consider the attempt to resist hatred and destructiveness to be as much in need of explanation as the desire to act on them. To say the least, this strongly implies a refusal to find value in human life. Note that Freud refers the question to study, to explanation, not to common experience or common sense or common decency. He is telling Einstein that the “Intelligentzia” are indeed the appropriate arbiters of these great questions, no doubt because human beings are misled by such artificial phenomena as conscience. Einstein’s query and Freud’s reply make the politics of this “science” very clear. Utter moral passivity, and a presumption in favor of aggressive violence, together with an almost perfect lack of imagination for the reality of other “organisms” — who can doubt that Pericles proceeded from other assumptions?

It is a persistent characteristic of the school of thought called Darwinism to resist finding a biological basis for true social behavior, that is, behavior designed to exploit the benefits and satisfactions of attending to collective well-being, of valuing others irrespective of issues of survival. But then the grievance against civilization from which the theory sprang was precisely that it has prevented survival from being a pressing consideration for many people most of the time. All the forms in which this freedom has been celebrated, all the arts and sciences and philanthropies, are only possible because civilization is intrinsically sociable and collaborative. And human beings everywhere create civilizations. The prophet Zechariah, in his vision of Jerusalem restored, says, “Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.” This fine, plain peace and human loveliness are the things we are learning not to hope for.

For old Adam, that near-angel whose name means Earth, Darwinists have substituted a creature who shares essential attributes with whatever beast has been recently observed behaving shabbily in the state of nature. Genesis tries to describe human exceptionalism, and Darwinism tries to discount it. Since Malthus, to go back no farther, the impulse has been vigorously present to desacralize humankind by making it appropriately the prey of unmitigated struggle. This desacralization — fully as absolute with respect to predator as to prey — has required the disengagement of conscience, among other things. It has required the grand-scale disparagement of the traits that distinguish us from the animals — and the Darwinists take the darkest possible view of the animals. What has been rejected is the complexity of the Genesis account, in favor of a simplicity so extreme it cannot — by design, perhaps — deal with that second term in the Biblical view of humankind, our destiny, that is, the consequences of our actions. It is an impressive insight, in a narrative so very ancient as the Genesis account of the Fall, that the fate of Adam is presented as the fate of the whole living world. I have heard people comfort themselves with the thought of the perdurability of cockroaches, a fact which does not confute the general truth of the view that our species is very apt to put an end to life on this planet.

Surely this makes us exceptional among the animals. Surely this complicates the idea that we are biologically driven by the imperatives of genetic survival. Surely it also complicates the idea that competition and aggression serve the ends of genetic survival in our case, at least. Perhaps our unique moral capacities were designed to compensate for our singular power to do harm — clearly some corrective has been needed. There is a mad cheerfulness in Darwinism, a laissez-faire, enrichissiez-vous kind of optimism that persists with absolutely no reference to history or experience. So we find Freud, in the smoldering ashes of Europe, ready to study the question of why the impulses of hatred and destructiveness should be restrained. We have Robert Wright finding hope for a future Eden of human self-transcendence in the appearance of Buddha (born 563 B.C.E.) and Jesus (born 4 B.C.E.). If the rate of appearance of salvific figures were to have continued without deceleration, there would have been three more by now — which is only to say I find this a frail hope. We have Daniel Dennett and Stephen Jay Gould offering hymns to the new Darwinist vision, as if there were anything the least bit new about it.

Evolution has been debated in America for most of this century in the unfortunate terms of the Scopes trial, in which the State of Tennessee asserted its right to forbid the teaching of Darwinism in the public schools. William Jennings Bryan, lawyer for the prosecution, wrote a concluding statement to the Scopes trial jury, which he did not deliver and which was published after his death. It is an interesting document, a moment worth pondering in the transvaluation of American values. Bryan, a former secretary of state, was a pacifist, an anti-Imperialist and a progressive, and a rapturous Presbyterian. He was a graduate of Illinois College and a product of the near utopian culture of idealism and social reform established in the Middle West in the decades before the Civil War. Religious passion was a great impetus to enlightened reform in that culture, which sprang directly from the Second Great Awakening, and which appealed freely to the Bible to give authority and urgency to its causes. He is described as a populist, which implies some pandering to the mob, but his speeches express a high-mindedness that, especially by present standards, is positively ethereal. To understand the tone of them, it is necessary to remember that his tradition of “fundamentalism” had behind it abolitionism, the higher education of women, and the creation of the public school system. There is a sadness in Bryan’s tone, a kind of casting about, that suggests an awareness of the fact that the ethos of reform was dying out, that after almost a hundred years the old biblical language of justice and mercy was finally losing its power.

Bryan won his case, insisting on the right of a Christian populace not to subsidize the teaching of an inimical doctrine. The problems of this approach are obvious, but he was mortally ill and weary and might have done better under other circumstances. His was a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one, bringing down a torrent of journalistic ridicule that is usually said to have killed him, and appearing to close, from the point of view of intelligent people, an issue that was then and is now very much in need of meaningful consideration. This is not altogether his fault. His argument, putting aside its appeal to religious majoritarianism, anticipates questions Einstein would raise in his letter to Freud a few years later. These are real questions, not to be dismissed by the invocation of science, and not to be ignored because they were posed in terms that seem archaic to us now.

Bryan makes no distinction between evolution and Darwinism, the philosophical or ethical system that has claimed to be implied by evolution. Perhaps the distinction is not important to him because he is a biblical literalist who insists on the truth of the six-day creation. It requires a little effort, that being the case, to remember that his attack on Darwinism came from the left, from the side of pacifism and reform. His argument against Darwinism is essentially political (though he does note that the origin of species was not accounted for, or the theory of natural selection demonstrated). Like Einstein, he associated war with the enthusiasms of the intelligentsia, specifically with the huge influence of Friedrich Nietzsche in the universities. We are all familiar with the anomaly of the success of Fascism in the most cultured countries of Europe, with the anomaly of the high percentage of Ph.D.’s in the SS, and with the startling zeal of learned men in pursuing scientific activities of one sort and another meant to affirm the Nazi worldview. Without wishing to seem to descend to shallow rationalism, I propose that there might in fact be a reason for all this — that Einstein, and also Bryan, may have had a point.

Clarence Darrow, the defense attorney in the Scopes trial, had, the previous year, defended Leopold and Loeb, two young men found guilty of the gratuitous murder of a child. Bryan quotes Darrow’s arguments in extenuation of the crime. They are rather bizarre, but so were the times. Leopold, he said, as a young university student, had misread Nietzsche, while Loeb was the victim of hereditary criminality, passed down to him by an unknown ancestor. Darrow was eager to concede the brilliance of Nietzsche, although he read to the court passages “almost taken at random” which he felt were liable to such misreading as his “impressionable, visionary, dreamy” client had made of them. He said, “There is not any university in the world where the professor is not familiar with Nietzsche, not one … If this boy is to blame for this, where did he get it? Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it?… Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.” Darrow hastened to assure the court that he did not blame the philosopher, the professors, or the university.

This is very murky business. Of course it is the duty of a lawyer to make the best defense he can of his clients, and the problem must have been especially difficult in this notorious case, where the accused were gifted and privileged and the crime was without motive in any ordinary sense. Bryan used Darrow’s defense of Leopold to argue that schools and universities should not have books in them that might corrupt “the souls entrusted to them.” This is clearly the wrong conclusion to draw, though, of course, perfectly consistent with the prosecution of Scopes. But Bryan asks a question that seems, from the perspective of subsequent history, hauntingly prescient “[W]ould the State be blameless if it permitted the universities under its control to be turned into training schools for murderers?” This is a very extreme, almost preposterous question, and yet among the most cultured people in Europe something very like this happened. It was not unforeseen — the “disastrous collective suggestions” of which Einstein spoke flourished among the intelligentsia.

Then what to conclude? What magic is there about the word “modern” that makes us assume what we think has no effect on what we do? Bryan wrote, “Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.” This being true, how could a cult of war recruit many thousands of intelligent people? And how can we now, when the fragility of the planet is every day more obvious, be giving ourselves over to an ethic of competition and self-seeking, a sort of socioeconomic snake handling, where faith in a theory makes us contemptuous of very obvious perils? And where does this theory get its seemingly unlimited power over our moral imaginations, when it can rationalize stealing candy from babies — or, a more contemporary illustration, stealing medical care or schooling from babies — as readily as any bolder act? Why does it have the stature of science and the chic of iconoclasm and the vigor of novelty when it is, pace Nietzsche, only mythified, respectablized resentment, with a long, dark history behind it?

The strain in Western civilization that is expressed in Malthus/Darwin/Nietzsche/Freud has no place in it for the cult of the soul, that old Jacob lamed and blessed in a long night of struggle. There is a passionate encounter with the cruelty of the world at the center of Judeo-Christian experience. So far as we can tell, only we among the creatures can even form the thought that the world is cruel. We are the species most inclined to adapt the environment to ourselves, so perhaps noting the difference between what is and what, from a human point of view, ought to be, is simply a function of our nature, a recognition of the fact that we have choices, that we can improvise. If, as the Darwinists assure us, there is only the natural world, then nothing can be alien to it, and our arrangements, however extravagantly they depart from the ways of other creatures, can never be called unnatural. It is certainly one of the oddest features of a school of thought that denies human exceptionalism as its first premise that it finds so much of human behavior contrary to nature — and objectionable on those grounds. Such an idea can only have survived as part of a self-declared scientific worldview because it allows the making of value judgments, the oldest project of this line of thought. If life had only such meaning as arose from within it, then people could practice philanthropy and give themselves over to mystical visions and harden themselves to their own interests and passions without fear of rebuke. The persistent use of the idea of unnaturalness by people who insist there is only nature suggests that their model of reality is too constricted to permit even its own elaboration. This is true because it is first of all — as premise, not as conclusion — a rejection of things demonstrably present in the world, for example, human fellow-feeling. The idea of the antinatural, of decadence and priestly imposition, gives Darwinism its character as a cause.

This school of thought — ordinarily referred to as modern thought — tells us nothing more urgently than that we are wrong about ourselves. We are to believe we are the dupes of the very reactions that make us judges of circumstance, and that make us free in relation to it. Obviously, if we must act in our own interest, crudely understood, we have few real options. But if we act from a sense of justice, or from tact or compassionate imagination, then we put the impress of our own sense of things on the external world. If this is another version of the will to power, it is in any case the kind of power that religion, and civilization in its highest forms, has always sought to confer. If this is another version of self-interest, it is also a proof of the fact that the definition of that term is very broad indeed, classically friendly to paradox — “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” for example, or “it is in dying we live.” This does not by any means imply the moral equality of every act that can be construed as rewarding to the one who carries it out, without reference to its consequences. Nor does it imply that apparently selfless conduct is in fact merely less honest than straightforward selfishness. It means that there are rewards in experience for generosity, probably because it serves the collective well-being, but probably also because it is appropriate to our singular dignity as creatures who can act freely, outside the tedious limits of our own interests.

I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking it has displaced. Daniel Dennett scolds Judeo-Christianity for Genesis 1:28, in which humankind is given dominion over all the earth, as if it licensed depredation. Notions of this kind go unchallenged now because the Bible is so little known. In the recapitulation of creation that occurs after the waters have receded in the narrative of the Flood (Genesis 9:1–4), people are told, as if for the first time, that they may eat the flesh of animals. It would appear the Edenic regime was meant to be rather mild. And of course the most reassuring images of the lordliness of God in both Testaments describe him as a shepherd. Over against this we have Darwin and Nietzsche with their talk of extermination.

If it is objected — and there would be grounds for alarm if it were not objected — that the passages I have quoted above from Darwin and Nietzsche are misread by those who take issue with them, their defenders must make some little effort to be fair to the context of Genesis. It may be true historically that people have justified brutal misuse of nature on the authority of Genesis 1:28, but it is surely true that they have taken a high hand against the whole of creation on the pretext offered them by “the survival of the fittest” or “the will to power.” The verse in Genesis 9 that permits the eating of animals is followed by a verse that forbids the shedding of human blood, pointedly invoking the protection of the divine image. This is the human exceptionalism which Dennett and the whole tribe of Darwinians reject as if on a moral scruple. But its effect is to limit violence, not to authorize it.

In nothing is the retrograde character of modern thought more apparent. These ancients are never guilty of the parochialism of suggesting that any ambiguity surrounds the word “human,” or that there is any doubt about human consanguinity, though such notions would be forgivable in a people surrounded by tribes and nations with which their relations were often desperately hostile. To say this is to grant what is clearly true, that they often failed to live up to their own most dearly held beliefs. This can be looked at from another side, however. They were loyal over many centuries to standards by which they themselves (though less, no doubt, than humankind in general) were found guilty and wanting. This is a burden they could have put down. It is the burden Western civilization has put down, in the degree that it has rejected the assertion of human uniqueness. Darwin’s response to objections to the idea of kinship with monkeys was, better a monkey than a Fuegian, a naked savage.

History is a nightmare, generally speaking, and the effect of religion, where its authority has been claimed, has been horrific as well as benign. Even in saying this, however, we are judging history in terms religion has supplied. The proof of this is that, in the twentieth century, “scientific” policies of extermination, undertaken in the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror to new extremes. Their scale and relentlessness have been owed to the disarming of moral response by theories authorized by the word “science,” which, quite inappropriately, has been used as if it meant “truth.” Surely it is fair to say that science is to the “science” that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the “Christianity” that inspired Crusades. In both cases the human genius for finding pretexts seized upon the most prestigious institution of the culture and appropriated a great part of its language and resources and legitimacy. In the case of religion, the best and the worst of it have been discredited together. In the case of science, neither has been discredited. The failure in both instances to distinguish best from worst means that both science and religion are effectively lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking.

These are not the worst consequences, however. The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. And this is more or less where we are now.

“Worship” means the assigning or acknowledging of worth. Language, in its wisdom, understands this to be a function of creative, imaginative behavior. The suffix “-ship” is kin to the word “shape.” It is no wonder that the major arts in virtually every civilization have centered around religion. Darwin, always eager to find analogues and therefore inferred origins for human behavior among the animals, said that, to a dog, his master is a god. But this is to speak of religion as if it were mere credulous awe in the face of an apparently greater power and wisdom, as if there were only natural religion, only the Watchmaker. The relationship between creation and discovery — as Greek sculpture, for example, might be said to have discovered the human form, or mathematics might be said to have discovered the universe — is wholly disallowed in this comparison.

Religion is inconceivable because it draws on the human mind in ways for which nature, as understood by Darwinists, offers no way of accounting. Collaboratively, people articulate perceptions of value and meaning and worth, which are perhaps right and wrong, that is, profoundly insightful, or else self-interested or delusional, at about the rate of the best science. We tend to forget the long respect paid to the Piltdown man, a hoax whose plausibility arose from the fact that it seemed to confirm Darwinist evolutionary theory. We forget that it is only fairly recently that the continents have been known to drift. Until very recently the biomass of the sea at middle and great depths has been fantastically underestimated, and the mass and impact of microbial life in the earth has been virtually unreckoned. We know almost nothing about the biology of the air, that great medium of migration for infectious agents, among other things. The wonderful Big Bang is beset with problems. In other words, our best information about the planet has been full of enormous lacunae, and is, and will be. Every grand venture at understanding is hypothesis, not so different from metaphysics. Daniel Dennett attributes the brilliance of J. S. Bach to the fortuitous accumulation of favorable adaptations in his nervous system. Bach, of all people, is not to be imagined without a distinctive, highly elaborated conception of God, and life in a culture that invoked the idea of God by means of music. That is why his work is profound, rather than merely very clever. And it is profound. It is not about illusion, it is not about superstition or denial or human vainglory or the peculiarities of one sensorium.

We try now to establish value in economic terms, lacking better, and this has no doubt contributed to the bluntly mercenary character of contemporary culture. But economic value is extraordinarily slippery. Buying cheap and selling dear is the essence of profit making. The consumer is forever investing in ephemera, cars or watches that are made into symbols of prosperity, and are therefore desirable because they are expensive. So people spend a great deal of money for the advantages of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money. These advantages are diminished continuously by the change of styles either toward or away from the thing they have bought, which make it either commonplace or passé.

Or manufacture is taken from a setting in which adults work for reasonable wages and there are meaningful protections of the environment, and moved into a setting where children work for meager wages and the environment is desolated. This creates poverty among workers in both settings and destroys the wealth that is represented in a wholesome environment — toxins in the air or the water are great destroyers of wealth. So economic value is created at the cost of the economic value of workers who are made unable to figure as consumers, and of resources that are made unsuitable for any use. A few people may get rich, but the transaction altogether is a loss, perhaps a staggering loss. A global economy organized on these principles will be full of poor, sick, dispirited people, and shoddy goods, since they will be cheapened to suit the dwindling prosperity of the workforce, who are also the buying public. An objective accounting of value would find disaster here. Humane limits to the exploitation of people would solve the problem, but they would also interfere with competition, which is the great law of nature, supposedly, and which therefore functions as a value, because “science” has supplanted religion.

How much misery and premature death (most of it out of sight, granted) do we agree to when we accept this new economic order? Is it in any way an advance on colonialism? Do we imagine, as the colonialists sometimes did, that we are bringing benefits of civilization to the far reaches of the world? Are we not in fact decivilizing ourselves as we decivilize them? Why is there no outcry? Is it because we have cast off the delusion of human sanctity? I think we should study our silence for insight into other momentous silences in recent history.

This is not the worst of it. Now that the mystery of motive is solved — there are only self-seeking and aggression, and the illusions that conceal them from us — there is no place left for the soul, or even the self. Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible. We use analysts and therapists to discover the content of our experience. Equivalent trauma is assumed to produce more or less equivalent manifestations in every case, so there is little use for the mind, the orderer and reconciler, the artist of the interior world. Whatever it has made will only be pulled apart. The old mystery of subjectivity is dispelled; individuality is a pointless complication of a very straightforward organic life. Our hypertrophic brain, that prodigal indulgence, that house of many mansions, with its stores, and competences, and all its deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another’s sympathy and courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective life that was addressed to it — religion, art, dignity, graciousness. Philosophy, ethics, politics, properly so called. It is a thing that bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam.