A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Babies were born in many places around the globe on Feb. 12, 1809. No news there. But two births occurring on that same day proved globally newsworthy. One occurred in a cabin in rural Kentucky, belonging to a poor farmer, the other on an estate in Shropshire, owned by a wealthy doctor. The American was anointed Abraham while the English boy was called Charles. American or English, affluent or impoverished, both children were ushered into a world where the Bible was held to be the literal truth about human ancestry and where authoritarianism, even in the still-new Republic of the United States of America, ruled most hearts and minds.

Just 56 years later, with the emancipator Abraham Lincoln lately cut down by an assassin and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species already secularizing human and planetary history, that world was well on its way to being transformed. "Darwin and Lincoln did not make the modern world," Adam Gopnik acknowledges. "But they helped to make our moral modernity."

How a naturalist and a politician established "moral modernity" is the broad subject of Angels and Ages. The book is a series of linked essays, their own origins in the pages of The New Yorker, where Gopnik is a staff writer. Chapter titles suggest the nature and flow of the argument: Lincoln's Mind followed by Darwin's Eye; Lincoln in History leading to Darwin in Time. For the finale, Ages and Angels, the two finally meet, so to speak, emblematic figures in the spread of what Gopnik calls, with approval and admiration, "bourgeois liberal democracy."

These certainly are sprawling matters for a self-described "short" book. As well, Gopnik has an additional ambition for Angels and Ages concerning the power of speeches by Lincoln and books by Darwin to accelerate that modernity via the aesthetic allure and moral persuasion of, in effect, great writing.

Woe to the essayist who embarks on such an argument without a formidable skill set of his own. Luckily for the reader, Gopnik brings to his narrative not only passionate faith in the importance of the how, as much as the what, of Darwin's theory of evolution and Lincoln's politics of emancipation, but also an intellectual rigour and deftness, along with a kind of discursive bravado. More ambitious still, there may be a proposed, if implicit, link between writing so liberated and the liberators themselves. Angels and Ages certainly walks the walk of the glorious talk and prose it explores.

"All wars over Lincoln become wars over his words," Gopnik writes early in the chapter on the mind of the Civil War president. Drawing from his readings of the voluminous and ever-expanding, canon about Abraham Lincoln, he outlines those wars. How angelic, for instance, were "the better angels of our nature" from the first inaugural address, in 1861? How, for that matter, could one reconcile Lincoln saying that if he could save the Union without freeing any slaves, he would do so, with his later comment that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong"?

By probing the legal rigour and ethical complexity of these speeches, Gopnik argues simultaneously for the ultimate mystery of the "arc" of Lincoln's life, and the clear intent of his stated remarks. For president Lincoln the political leader, the only right way to fix the wrong of slavery was by using dull law against it, rather than glittering moral principle.

"Lincoln didn't think that due process and fair procedures were the ornaments of a just society," Gopnik writes, "but thought they were a just society; if you did things in the right way, then things would be right."

Over in England, meanwhile, Charles Darwin had finally published in 1859 his own proposal for, in a sense, due process and fair procedure in contemplating how planetary life evolved, and for why all humans must be understood to originate from a single family. (The final argument, surely, against slavery.) On the Origin of Species had emerged after a two-decade-long "pause" between its private inception, while Darwin was on a five-year voyage of discovery aboard the Beagle, and its first public utterance.

Gopnik outlines the "quiet riot of thought" that went into the theory of evolution. Much of the riot in Darwin's mind centred around the stories of species development that he was gathering, all of which kept relaying the same basic points about adaptation and selection. The Origin took the groundbreaking, and shockingly simple, form of lucid tales of the very same occurrence happening again and again in nature both as a rhetorical trope and as a precaution against those who would dismiss the broad conclusion as mere blasphemy. For Adam Gopnik, the book's liberating strategy evidenced "how closely bound storytelling and truth seeking can be."

From these twin foundations, not yet obviously belonging to the same structure, Angels and Ages erects a compelling house for its thesis. Space does not allow further demonstration of Gopnik's ultimate contention, that the "need to persuade and convince, argue and substantiate, talk and justify," whether through the Gettysburg Address or The Descent of Man, is central to all "freely inquiring," and therefore free, societies. Lincoln and Darwin weren't only inspired and brave, they were eloquent and persuasive; major writers, in short, clear of thought and accomplished of craft.

Nor does space allow for much demonstration of how inspired, and persuasive, is Gopnik's own craft and thought. Only the book itself, with its memorable tropes and bounding, often giddy prose, along with its own passionate storytelling truth-seeking equation, can make that case.