Charles Abraham Darwin Lincoln: A Tale of One (two) Birthday(s)
February 12, 1809: Abraham Lincoln is born in Hardin County, Kentucky, Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. The profound significance of what each contributes to the world’s current makeup is matched only by the breadth of the divergence of what each man’s ideological heritage implies.
In short: the difference is ethical.
Abraham Lincoln’s heritage is nowhere better reflected than in what may be the greatest speech in American History, the Gettysburg Address. (It took around two minutes to deliver, by the way, a fact which should not be lost on those of us always crying for another portion of an hour to finish our weekly church-speeches.) Here it is in its entirety, with emphasis on the portion most poignantly opposed to what will come from Darwin below.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Lincoln identifies the purpose of the Civil War with the cause of promoting the equality of men. The question for any society defending the equal worth of all individuals is whether it can survive rather than perish.
Although it is not in the direct purview of the Gettysburg Address, there is a consequence to regarding all humans as of equal worth which does not appear to promote the survival of the society which holds it. That is, it is hard to see how protecting the less intelligent, the weaker, the inferior in this way or that, will not lead to the ultimate decline of the society, not only in the specific areas of weakness being preserved by the moral laws of the land, but also by the economic drain on those who are the strongest producers.
But it takes Darwin’s theory to make that point. Hence the difference. Darwin publishes The Origin of Species in 1859. These few lines from the final paragraph of that work will suffice:
These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Again, I have italicized the most relevant lines. Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism is integrally dependent on the extinction of less-improved forms. And he certainly does not believe evolution is finished, implying that the extinction of less-improved forms goes on. While there is not a directly moral claim here—for instance, that the less-improved forms ought to perish while the stronger ought to prosper—there is an axiological (very closely related to moral) claim about the “beauttiful” and “wonderful” product of the process.
Again, it is not the direct intent of Darwin’s original document which is in question here, but rather its implications and the developments which arise from it. It is Darwin’s theory, after all, which leads to every form of eugenics as “guided evolution”. Noxious as Margaret Sanger’s claims about the mentally deficient and inferior races needing to be removed from the human genetic tree are, they are hardly unique to her. The ideology of everything from Nietzsche’s superman to early Twentieth Century American textbooks to the Nazi’s Arian supremacy is strongly rooted in Darwin’s provision of a mechanism of struggle for survival.
I am well aware that attempts to root evolution at the tribal or social level instead of the individual level claim to have found a basis for ethical development in evolution. But they do not. I have written a bit more on that topic here.
The point for this moment is simply how wildly divergent the ideas of two men born on the same day actually are. But the divergence should not be surprising. Lincoln’s idea of the equal worth of all humans is rooted in religious and philosophical concern for what is eternally the same (for instance, Plato’s world of being), while Darwin’s idea of struggle for survival is rooted in a secular concern for whatever may come (for instance, Plato’s world of becoming).
Well it’s my birthday, too. And I choose to care about what is eternal. So happy birthday to Lincoln and Darwin. But thanks—only to Lincoln.
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The pro-life position is not simply anti-abortion. Being against abortion is not sufficient to encompass what it is to be pro-life; there are, after all, still issues like eugenics and euthanasia. On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, trying to define the pro-life position in terms of enmity with abortion fails for a different reason.
The phenomenological objection is that people do not appear to act freely. This objection is as plain as the nose on any observant and thoughtful face and manifests itself in practically every venue of life. On highways drivers are strangely animalistic, running in packs of cars and adjusting and maintaining speeds based on stimuli from, for example, the drivers around them, usually without any awareness of what they are doing and why they are doing it. In homes, parents and children spiral around each other in relational systems governed by hidden but practically omnipotent stases. Because they have no idea why their daughter is running amok, they seek counsel from someone who can explain the invisible system behind their behaviors and inject some new stimulus into the system to make a change. More poignantly, anyone who cares to see it can watch manipulators (from salespersons to politicians and, unfortunately, sometimes even preachers) use psychological tools to motivate automatic behavior in unsuspecting clients or followers. Indeed, the herd mentality so disdained by philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is a frightening and disappointing reality of humanity.
My great friend and now pastor of FBC Gunter, TX, Jack Newton, spoke about why Christians should abstain from drinking alcohol recently. Following the presentation, an inquiring member wondered how to address the passages in the Bible which speak of wine and strong drink, sometimes without approbation. So Jack compiled the passages, categorized them, then wrote up his observations in a one page conclusion. My own argument, which is completely compatible with Jack’s, is in my post from last year entitled, “
