5 Questions for Adam Gopnik on Lincoln, Darwin, and Their Age

Adam Gopnik (right), who wrote the American culture section of Britannica’s extensive entry on the United States, has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction and humor pieces, book reviews, Profiles, reporting pieces, and more than a hundred stories for “The Talk of the Town” and “Comment.” He became The New Yorker’s art critic in 1987 and, in 1990, moved to Paris and began writing the “Paris Journal” column for the magazine. An expanded collection of his essays from Paris,Paris to the Moon, appeared in 2000, The King in the Window was published in 2005, and Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New Yorkcame out in 2006. He has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism three times, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting.

His latest book isAngels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. He’s kindly agreed, on the occasion of the 200th birthday of both seminal men, to answer the following questions posed by Britannica senior editor Jeff Wallenfeldt.

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Britannica: Much of Angels and Ages, your latest book,focuses on the literary styles of Abraham Lincoln, whose oratory was grounded in legal argument, and Charles Darwin, a meticulous observer whom you characterize as writing about science like a novelist. What were the biggest similarities and biggest differences between Lincoln’s and Darwin’s rhetoric?

Gopnik: The similarity lies in their precision, and in their replacement of the old rhetoric of honor and exhortation by a new rhetoric of argument and observation, and by their insistence on making that new rhetoric popular. Lincoln’s greatest speeches – the Cooper Union speech of 1859, for instance, which “made him President” by one account – are closely reasoned and even legalistic arguments: he goes painstakingly through the history of the early American Congress to see if the Founders intended Congress to rule on slavery as a national question. Only then is the moral issue introduced. Darwin, writing the most ambitious work on biology in its history, first of all publishes it for a popular audience, as a “trade” book, and then introduces it as a homely tale of dogs and pigeons. Darwin began with the narrow language of the naturalist, Lincoln with the close reasoning of the lawyer, and both aimed to persuade, not to intimidate.

The biggest difference is that, Darwin was a persuader speaking softly to an audience of intimates, as all reading audiences are; Lincoln was a politician, speaking clearly, and loudly, to a public gathering. Lincoln had to be terse where Darwin was voluble, and grand where Darwin was modest.

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Britannica: Both Lincoln and Darwin were deeply affected by the early death of a favorite child. How was the worldview of each changed by that loss?

Gopnik: One of the myths still strangely prevalent among cheaply knowing historians is that because 19th-century people experienced more childhood deaths, they cared about them less, or experienced them differently than we would.

Nothing could be farther from the truth; their manners of grieving might be different, but the grief was just the same.

Darwin’s loss of his favorite daughter, Annie, when she was only ten, racked his heart and was the cause of his final abandonment of even the vestiges of the Christian faith that he had been raised in. It also, I think, cast a long shadow over his great work: he saw the “struggle for existence” not as a happily progressive force but as a mysteriously cruel one: he became a Stoic, not a “Social Darwinist.” Lincoln’s parallel loss, in the White House, of his dear son Willie when the boy was just eleven, brought home to him the piercing horror of the death of the young, which, of course, as commander in chief, he was helping to bring about on an immense scale. Lincoln’s grief for the dead, even as he pursued what he saw as a necessary war, is one of the things that give him moral grandeur, and gives the Gettysburg Address its nobility.

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Britannica: You write that Lincoln’s identity and self-satisfaction were more rooted in his transformation from cabin-born bumpkin to Springfield lawyer than from Springfield lawyer to president. Why so?

Gopnik: As good recent studies of Lincoln have reminded us, by far the greatest number of “professional” days in Lincoln’s life were spent lawyering, not politicking. For a poor boy with an essentially illiterate father – whom Lincoln, by the way, despised; there really is no other word for a man who won’t go to his own father’s funeral – and who hated the world of manual labor in which he seemed likely to spend his life, the ascent to a big house and a bourgeois existence clearly seemed like a kind of miracle, albeit one won by his own industry and intelligence. Lincoln was never an ascetic; the accounts of the furnishings of his Springfield home make that plain. Once he was a lawyer, becoming a politician was easy – but he obviously looked back in wonder that a backwoods boy like him had ever become a lawyer.

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Britannica: Is the enduring, loving marriage of Darwin the doubter and his pious wife, Emma ─ with its implications for the peaceful coexistence of spiritual faith and scientific inquiry, hope and history ─ the most important metaphor in Angels and Ages?

Gopnik: Yes and no. No, in the sense that I don’t want to seem to split a difference that can’t be split. Any form of biblical fundamentalism, or religious literalism just isn’t compatible with truths we know for certain about life’s history, and that Darwin showed us. The biblical account of creation and man’s earthly history is false, and no amount of soothing metaphoric fudge will make it true.

But few modern spiritually minded people demand a belief in an invisible man in the sky who makes rules, created the earth in seven days, etc. Auden or Kafka, or Emma Darwin, struggled with the paradoxes of existence – with the double charge that we know loss to be inevitable but cannot feel it as anything but unendurable — which are different from the problems of life. When the wisest modern believers turn to God they are turning to something defined in advance as unknowable – a source exactly of faith rather than of rational truth.

Whether we should respect these intuitions of higher order, the plain fact is that most of us do. Religion fills a need unlikely to be filled by rationalism. Liberalism, to be truly tolerant, needs to tolerate this fact. A wise evolutionary biologist has said that saying that one mind can include both is like saying that one mind can include both adultery and marriage – but the reality is that many, maybe most, wives and husbands do exactly that. Learning to live with contradiction is learning to live. Most poets have struggled to put this truth plainly; it is what Keats meant by “negative capacity”; life is so full of incompatibles, rooted in our knowledge of mortality, that we can only live within them. Charles and Emma did.

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Britannica: Last summer a Newsweek article asked “Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?“ It concluded that Lincoln was. Is it even possible to answer that question?

Gopnik: Of course the question is in a way misconceived; it isn’t a contest. But, though we live in a nation made by Lincoln, we live in a world shaped by Darwin – by his insights and explanations of the history of life. We live on a Darwinian planet – or to be precise, on a planet whose biological history Darwin was the first to explain. It isn’t true to say that someone else, even Alfred Wallace, would have arrived at the same insight. As I show in Angels & Ages the insight was nothing without the cumulative argument. Lincoln showed that democratic liberalism could be a fighting creed, and this changed the world. But Darwin showed that life was one long self-making story. If a laurel must be awarded, I think it goes to him. It’s a bit insular to answer otherwise.