on lincoln and darwin at 200 (and how ideas outlive us)
On February 12, 1809 two individuals entered the world--one in a fabled log cabin in rural Kentucky, the other in a much statelier Georgian home known as "the Mount." And things have been quite different since.
A cursory Google search yields surprisingly few results on two so individually revered/maligned historical figures. I wonder 200 years later what the significance is of the two. The bicentennial of their birth must mean more than stovepipe hat Christmas ornaments and a life-size recreation of the cabin of the HMS Beagle . Perhaps it is not as much that their shared day-of-birth represents some clandestine astrological coincidence, rather that the ideas they cast forth into the placid lake of history are still rippling and crashing on distant ideological shores.
There is the avowed atheist apologist Christopher Hitchens who claims Darwin to be "A Greater Emacipator" than Lincoln would have dared to dream and there is an equally strong effort to rescue Darwin from being caricaturized as the Patron Saint of Non-Believers.
As Christians in the UK attempt to rescue Darwin's implicit Deism, the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has devoted considerable time to getting to the root of Lincoln's own bigotries, with mixed results.
What struck me most in Gates' article is not Lincoln's vacillations, but the way in which W.E.B. DuBois affirmed Lincoln's inconsistencies:
""he was big enough to be inconsistent—cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves. He was a man—a big, inconsistent, brave man."
Gates then rightly notes: "So many hurt and angry readers flooded Du Bois' mailbox that he wrote a second essay in the next issue of the magazine, in which he defended his position this way: "I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed. …."
In 2009 it may seem difficult to define victory, much less whether or not the life of any individual can be christened "a triumph". What I find most compelling, however, is the DuBois could name Lincoln's inconsistency as a source of greatness. Similarly, the report generated by the Theos Think Tank in the UK says something similar of Darwin:
No longer a Christian, he remained a deist for many years, before slipping into agnosticism in his final decade. He was clear, however, that he was never an atheist and he explicitly rejected the idea that evolution necessitated atheism. Moreover, in marked contrast to some of his modern disciples, he engaged with everyone, even those who disagreed with him, in a spirit of respect and courtesy – a spirit that is sorely missing from the modern debate.
The shared legacy of Darwin and Lincoln (at least from my perspective) is not the lone integrity of the ideas and principles they set forth but the steadfast belief that in that place where one position sparked an equal and opposite position those ideas could engage in mutual conversation and civility.
I don't think I'm alone in my antipathy for the degenerative shouting matches brought to us via 24 hour "news" networks. Similarly, the religious (and, to some extent, scientific) communities have suffered a similar fate.
Somewhere in the midst of all of it, there ought to be room for people of faith and of reason to discuss convictions and their respective sources. Certainly Lincoln and Darwin, though contemporaries, fell on massively different ends of the spectrum on all manner of ideas. Still 200 years later, their legacy suggests that they could engage one another over a cup of coffee or a good meal. As naive as it may sound, I can only hope 200 years from now the same can be said for us and our generation.
