The lives of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin loom in our public imagination. We know their records of achievement and we understand the fundamentals of their respective projects: Emancipation and Evolution. For the most part, however, we have missed something big and important by looking at them separately, and this is what The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik hopes to address with his new book Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life.
Sharing more than a common birthdate of February 12, 1809, Gopnik sees Lincoln and Darwin as midwifes to the modern world. Previously, life had been organized on a conceptual hierarchy: undemocratic systems were favored, while a vertical system of species, with man at the top and the tiniest critters at the bottom, was considered natural and self-evident. Lincoln’s defense of armed republicanism – the conviction that democracy is functional and must be fought for, if under threat – and Darwin’s elaboration of evolution by natural selection did a great deal to topple this old intellectual edifice.
And to such disparate ends, their approaches were strikingly similar. Gopnik spends a considerable amount of time detailing – celebrating, really – the way in which the two men wrote. Both Lincoln and Darwin lent their voices to the public sphere. Lincoln made speeches the nation would come to know, while Darwin wrote books that were meant to be read and digested by the general population. They wrote simply and effectively. They also wrote their finest, most moving lines, only after having laid the groundwork of substantial argument and example. Lincoln’s background as a lawyer infused his speeches with the kind of legal reasoning that could come off as esoteric and needlessly complicated, while Darwin’s work as a naturalist filled his books with endless examples of various species and their behaviour (one of his books, to illustrate, is titled The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms). Yet, this depth of thought and this understanding of the importance of a good set-up before the punch line, is what made their writing so good. They were able to effectively persuade the public because of their tendency towards the tedious and dull build-up of complex argumentation. As Gopnik puts it: “Good writing is mostly good seeing and good thinking, too. It involves a whole view of life, and making that view sound so plausible that the reader adheres to it as obvious before he knows that it’s radical.”
Gopnik’s book does an equally admirable job of studying the two men’s characters, especially Lincoln’s. Lincoln, the man Americans regard as something of a secular saint, was also a war-commander who had countless young men sent to battles they would surely die fighting and “boy-deserters hanged after sitting on their coffins in the sun”. He was sage-like but he was also uncompromising. He was a depressive that was “shrewder than he looks and more eloquent than he pretends”. Such contradictions made him inexplicably charismatic and his success at somehow harmonizing them made him great.
After reading this fine book, my admiration for all three men - Lincoln, Darwin, and Gopnik - expanded immeasurably.
