stand back from what you believe in
I have just read a work of Charles Darwin which has changed my view of myself and my place in the world. It is not one of his books (which I had never seen the point of reading directly) but a letter. It is available online at http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-5500
Please forgive the fact that I am too stupid or lazy to work out why WordPress isn’t letting me insert a proper link and read the letter. I don’t know if it will affect you as it affected me but I’d like to see if you have any conclusions on it before you read mine. I’m going to go straight on now and say how it made me feel, OK?
The first thing is what he says to Haekel about not being over-critical. Most of all, I am thrown for six by the sentence:
“I feel sure that our good friend Huxley, though he has much influence, wd have had far more if he had been more moderate & less frequent in his attacks.”
Huxley, in case you’re not familiar with the story was ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, the angry, honest, young man who stood up the greasily eloquent Bishop of Oxford and, the story goes, the whole prim, reactionary vestigial edifice that was the Victorian establishment – to champion Darwin’s ideas. Darwin himself, meanwhile hid away at his country house, accused by some of hypochondria and, perhaps, cowardice. I now see this in a rather different way.
The second thing that struck me about the letter is what an incredibly nice letter it is. Perhaps this has something to do with the ‘lost art of letter writing’ or somesuch. I should probably have to read a lot more letters from Victorian gentlemen to see if letters exhibiting such consummate skill in niceness were commonplace in the period or whether it was just Darwin.Be that as it may, I would love to get a letter like this – or an email – from another scientist who wasn’t a friend of long standing. He takes every opportunity to be nice and encouraging to and about Haekel, he advises him with a humility and non-overbearing-ness that make me proud to be English. However I look back with some shame on emails I have sent to colleagues myself, frequently squeezing out a terse acknowledgement of excellent work before launching into the agenda of problems that seem to me the real meat of the issue.
Now I’ve been taught all these principles that Darwin both expounds and exemplifies in a Buddhist context – the ideal of loving speech. Specifically also the practice of starting with the positive before seeing if you still need to mention the things which bother you. But, secretly, there has been a counter-argument brewing within me for some years now. And, to try and make the attempt to represent that subconscious squall in a few bulletpoints, it goes something like this:
- some things are true, and some are false.
- people cling to false views because it pleases them, but they have no right to do so.
- such people defy, not only evidence, but logic itself. People like this are not endemic to the southern United States but can also be found among (say) the staff of international conservation organisations and the governments of all countries.
- the flawed logic and the baseless argument should be shown no mercy.
- to show them no mercy is your duty, and your heritage as a scientist. It’s a different ideal from this Buddhist one which has anyway probably been twisted – or, indeed selected – under centuries of Confucian authoritarianism not to upset the status quo, even if the status quo is founded on lies.
Now I haven’t been able to disagree with any of this but, to look at it another way; what kind of person holds to principles like those in the bulletpoints? Adjectives for such a person, anyone? Mine are honest, angry and grim.
I want to focus on grim – in my internal thesaurus it goes naturally with two words, both of which begin with D.
A friend of mine once claimed to be the Angel of Death. It was regarded as a symptom of an episode of schizophrenia and I never knew much about it – including the extent to which my friend ‘really’ believed it. However it did seem safe to say that, for this friend, being the Angel of Death was not an entirely negative thing. In trying to understand this rather later I wondered if there was anything in myself which would appreciate the title. Of course I can definitely see the attraction of invoking yourself as a great spiritual power – in other words I’d love to claim to be an angel – but of death specifically? The thing that leapt to mind as the most ‘Angel-of-Death’ part of me was certain habits of thought which I regarded as part-and-parcel of being a scientist.
It is the part that looks at the universe and sees – not really a malevolent place, not even a bleak place, but an utterly uncompromising place. Don’t tell this angel that if you take a step towards God, He will take a thousand steps towards you. It’s only you who cares in what direction you’re walking, and it’s only you who’s going to suffer for it. The undemocratic, inhuman nature of reality is awesome, and that is the wind in this angel’s wings. He isn’t actually a bringer of death, only a messenger – but a messenger empowered by his mission. And his message is “this is how it is, don’t bother trying to hide.”
One powerful story which this angel likes to tell is the ‘nevertheless they move’ story. For those who don’t know, this is a story of Gallileo. The pope supposedly threatened Gallileo with torture if he would not retract his theories that heavenly bodies move. And Gallileo did retract but reportedly muttered afterwards, under his breath: “nevertheless, they move.” In this case, the fact that the story is almost certainly not true doesn’t matter – it even makes it more powerful. Humans beings are weak and can be destroyed by torture. But killing the messenger will not change anything: they do move. Deal with it.
And we have had to deal with it. And actually we’ve done so fairly well, despite the fact that a literal reading of Genesis does indeed leave the distinct impression that the earth is flat, and that it rests under a tent of sky above which is water. In fact, as far as I understand the subject, it wasn’t Genesis itself that the religious establishment quoted against Gallileo, it was more the spiritual understanding of the time that the universe was a series of concentric spheres with the heavenly bodies at an outer – and therefore purer – level than the Earth (Hell, in turn, being inside the sphere of Earth). And as with Gallileo, so with Darwin. Victorian gentlefolk did not, by and large, believe in the literal truth of Genesis. It was a question of two spiritual beliefs: one about the nobility of man and another, rather more complex and less well known one about the nature of species. This second belief owes more to Plato than the bible. Agassiz, who Stephen Jay Gould considered to be the last respectably creationist biologist, claimed that a species was ‘an idea in the mind of God.’ And God presumably does not change His mind.
Yet Asa Gray, a supporter and friend of Darwin and a faithful Christian asked why people thought natural selection was a challenge to religion when they could accept Gallileo and Copernicus. In fact now, even that description of Asa Gray seems to make him somehow false. A faithful Christian seems to mean someone who isn’t prepared to give up on the comforts of faith and so splits his mind in two. When in fact that is the opposite of the truth. Of course, you can read his letters as well on the same site. They’re just as interesting reading.
So the question that this leaves me with, in the end, is – did evolutionists create creationism? It sounds a bit ‘the Dark Knight Returns’ (sorry if you haven’t read it – it’s a batman comic). There are places where I wouldn’t dare suggest such a thing for the fury I’d get back in return. Really I’m asking a question about the usefulness of any kind of violence.
If these intimations are true, what would be the way forward? And how does it apply to ideas which are directly affecting the material well-being of third parties such as (say) the idea that swidden agriculture is always destructive and backward and should be stamped out. With ideas like that surely you have to speak out and get angry – right? However they had been played, I am sure that Darwin’s ideas would have taken more than a century to be truly accepted. One doesn’t want to wait.
Evolution by natural selection is not a pretty truth. Darwin knew that. Modern publicisers of his work often seem to gloss over it as part of a political strategy. Yet it remains the fact that we are the way we are because of death and loneliness – death after death after death over all the continents and seas of Earth through an expanse of time so vast as to exceed our imagination by seven orders of magnitude. Expressions of this kind were actually what I was seeking in Darwin’s correspondence. I was looking for the reaction of a man who had been given to see the grim face of reality, no matter how little it pleased him. That wasn’t what I found, however.
Or perhaps that was what I found. But, if so, Darwin faced those facts in a quite different way from what I had been led to believe. He did not gloss over the disturbing nature of his theory but nor did he dwell on it and become melodramatic as I tend to. I thought that pointing out the grim nature of reality was what being a scientist was about and Darwin was a kind of hero – a suffering hero – of this myth. I was completely wrong about him. He wasn’t a saint – he got angry when people attacked his theory and attacked him directly, particularly when they were people he had considered friends. But what I find in his letters is a quality of very ordinary goodness which, like skill in writing, is almost imperceptible unless something calls it to your attention. It’s a skill I’ve felt that nothing in society, or in the ideas that obsess society, is encouraging me to cultivate. It’s a value that has come to seem naive.
Now who is to blame for that?
