Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

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?