Charles Darwin: Great Briton

Prologue

Charles Darwin was first and foremost a scientist, a very great scientist, who not only made scientifically plausible the idea of organic evolutionary change but who came up with natural selection, what today's professional scientists generally consider to be the chief motive force of such change. Yet from the first, as Darwin himself recognized, his thinking was always more than just about scientific explanations of the organisms occupying the physical world. His thinking pointed the way to a new or revived philosophical perspective on reality. A harsher, less-comfortable one than that he inherited. The popular-science writer and ardent atheist Richard Dawkins has written:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A. E. Houseman put it:

For Nature, heartless, witless Nature

Will neither know nor care.

DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

As a staid and very respectable Victorian, Charles Darwin would have been horrified at the frenzied polemics that characterize the writings of the so-called New Atheists. Whatever his personal beliefs, he would never have flaunted his thinking in such a crude and public way. It is doubtful also whether Darwin ever reached quite the state of naturalistic nihilism expressed by Dawkins. Even if he took us all of the way, it is certainly not my claim that Darwin unaided took us to this new world. Internal issues in religion like so-called higher criticism (looking at the Bible as a human-written document) played a crucial role, as did social factors like the move from the land to the city demanding new ideologies for new types of existence. But Darwin's work pointed that way, and he knew it and pursued it. If like Moses and the Promised Land he never quite arrived, he beat the path toward it, consciously and intentionally. Darwin changed not just science; he changed philosophy also, and this is the world in which we now live.

Such is my claim in this, my section of this book. Moreover I argue that Darwin did all of this within a tradition on which he drew. A tradition that in many respects was quintessentially English, the land of his birth, but that was more broadly British, not only because Darwin was in part educated north of the border, but because Darwin always drew heavily on thinking that came from the so-called Scottish Enlightenment. In short, I argue that although Darwin was a great revolutionary — and I bow to no one in my belief that he made major advances in our understanding of the empirical world — he was not a rebel. He did not repudiate his past, hating and trying to destroy and eliminate that from whence he came. It was rather that he took what was offered and then rearranged and transformed the elements into an altogether new picture. Darwin's work was like a kaleidoscope. The pieces were there. Darwin shook them up and made something different. But where did the pieces come from that I claim were so important in Darwin's past? I argue — and here I would stress that I am being totally unoriginal and simply drawing on what one finds in any good textbook — that the Britain into which Darwin was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century had two major elements or themes or traditions. It was his good fortune to be able to draw on both elements and his genius to do with them what he did.

The one element is what we might with reason call the conservative element, the Tory side to Britain. This is the world of the king (George III and the Prince Regent, the future George IV) and of his supporters, political, military (including naval), and most of all clerical. It is the world of landowners, but usually not the biggest men. They were more the leaders in the villages that one finds in the novels of Anthony Trollope (although he was writing a little later), men like Wilfred Thorne, the squire of St. Ewold's in Barchester Towers. It is the world of the Church of England parson, the world (again in Barchester Towers) of Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly. And it is very much the world of England's two ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge. The clerical world and the academic world were truly but one, for to graduate from the universities one had to be a paid-up, believing member of the Church of England and most of the teachers, the "dons," at Oxford and Cambridge had taken holy orders. To refer one more time to Trollope's great novel, remember that the man who becomes Dean of Barchester, Francis Arabin, is a fellow of Lazarus College (a thinly veiled portrait of Christchurch) and a sometime professor of poetry at Oxford.

The other element is what we might with equally good reason call the liberal element, the Whig side (after the Reform Bill of 1832 joined by the Radical side) to Britain. Their leaders were the great landowners, men like the Duke of Omnium in Trollope's political novels. Somewhat paradoxically, they were often joined by the bishops of the Church of England. Bishoprics are bestowed by the government of the day, sometime Whig or liberal. The politicians wanted supporters not the thanks of the village priests. The plot of Barchester Towers revolves around the fact that Archdeacon Grantly, firmly Tory, does not get to follow his father into the see of Barchester. The post goes instead to the Whig Bishop Proudie. The leaders of the Whigs were allied with the men of industry. Whereas the Tories inclined toward protectionism, looking to the interests of the rural leaders — the notorious Corn Laws enacted after the Napoleonic Wars were the epitome of such inclinations, designed as they were to keep high the value of homegrown grains — the Whigs inclined toward free trade, something that opened up markets for the products, initially and overwhelmingly cotton but later moving more toward manufactured goods in iron...