Adam, Welcome to the Lake.

Scott, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Welcome to the FDL online book salon, with guest author Adam Gopnik, who should be here any moment. In a few minutes, I will pose a couple of questions to him while (with luck) readers begin arriving. But first…Are you there, Adam Gopnik?

Bev: It’s a pleasure to be here. . I often visit this page, particularly back in the Plame period, and have had a happy experience on Laura Flanders show.My only regular on-line home, I should add, is a Montreal Canadiens fan-board site, where I argue, under a pseudonym, for more Swedish and Russian players, against those Canadian nationalists who think we suffer from the absence of our homeboys. So I may be a bit rusty with the mechanics. Scott, thanks for hosting this. Adam

My pleasure. No doubt many FDL readers will have read the book, and have questions for you based on that, but I hope that as things move along others will join in.

That would be fine. Do you want to kick off? A.G.

It seems like the name of the game in these salons is quick, snappy exchanges, but since we have a few minutes I’d like to ask a question that might be a little long, even if the answer isn’t….

Early in the book you note that one hundred years ago there was some thought to the idea that the shared birthday of Darwin and Lincoln ought to serve as “a binational, transatlantic holiday” that would celebrate liberal democratic civilization.

Let’s stop right there and define terms — in particular, “liberal.” This is a word that does many different kinds of duty, sometimes in quite contradictory ways. The European sense of liberal suggests free-market ideology, while I would guess most FireDogLake regulars prefer to see liberalism as involving protection from the market.

So when you write about Darwin and Lincoln as heroes of liberalism, just how do you mean the term?

Adam, can you explain the term used “creation of the liberal voice” by these two figures?

Good afternoon Scott and Adam and welcome to FDL.

I have not had a chance to read your book Adam, but I do have a question based on Scott’s introduction this afternoon.

…as Gopnik characterizes it, “the writer’s faith in plain English, his hope that people’s minds and hearts can be altered by the slow crawl of fact as much as the long reach of revelation.”

Why do you think it is that so many folks find it difficult to speak (and write) in plain, simple English?

Well, Liberalism is obviously one of those words, like all rich words in our culture, that has many meanings , changing over time. In France, to take the extremes, “liberalism” means far right wing faith in the free market, Thatcherism; in America it means, or is supposed to mean, a faith in government, and even something approaching “socialism” (!) Two particular meanings , in that spectrum, are I think most important in “Angels And Ages”.
First, there is the idea that liberalism celebrates and depends on argument rather than authority – that liberalism believes that argument is not a prelude to a settled truth but is constant, ongoing, and endless, and that the job of people within it, citizens within it , is to engage in argument, all the time, including argument with their own authorities. And it’s the job of the authorities, in turn, elected representatives, to argue with, and at , the people. That’s central to John Stuart Mill’s view in “On Liberty”, published in the same year as “On The Origin….” and which is , as I say in “Angels and Ages”, is the bedrock of modern liberalism. Mill insists that liberty involves the liberty to question anything because we don’t know the truth of anything until it’s been argued over , and those arguments can, and should never stop – even arguments over religious revelation, he says, are not resolvable. Particularly those. (Of course, there are arguments in more strictly religious traditions , but they end in fire, not lake. I’ve just finished reading a good new book about Martin Luther, and though Luther argued, and was argued at, at any moment in could have ended, literally, in a public burning. He expected it to. )
This side of liberalism both draws from and feeds into , the practice of science. Science, as I think Karl Popper once said, is just institutionalized argument. Whether or not science proceeds best in liberal societies, it certainly flourishes there.
The second salient aspect of liberalism that I emphasize is the faith in what I call “horizontal” over “vertical” experience – the judgment of history, rather than the judgment of heaven. Once you believe that there is no final authority , you defer your faith to what happens next, rather than to what someone is thinking “ up there”. Liberalism tends to believe in the verdict of history, on a grand scale, and on making a better life for our children, on a small one. These ideas aren’t unique to liberalism, but they are essential to it.

Okay, now for my dopey “literary talk show”-type question:

Which came first: the desire to write about Darwin and Lincoln in particular? or an interest in reflecting on liberalism, modernity, and so on?

Dear Dakine: it’s a good question ( I’ll answer yours while Scott replies, I hope, to my little liberalism essay.)
First, because, I think, plain English isn’t much encouraged by those who have an interest in making ideas look harder than they really are — one of the wonderful things about Darwin is that he didn’t write ” On The Origin…” for expert readers; it’s his true scientific book, but it’s written for anyone who’s interested in it. A true popular book, written in plain (though beautifully structured) prose.
The other thing, of course, is that bad writing helps cover up bad ideas. Euphemism is the torturer’s best friend. As we have learned.

Hi Adam, Hi Scott
I knew they were birthday twins, fascinating idea to use that as the basis for the book. They are both giants.
altho I confess I’ve been over Lincolned lately

Scott: Sorry, I took a moment to answer Dakine; I’m just learning how to juggle all this.
It’s not a dopey question, but it is a hard one to answer since of course you wouldn’t be interested in Darwin if you weren’t interested in modernity, etc. For me, though, the truth is that what got me interested first , truly, was their writing — their mastery of words, and of language. I was knocked out reading ” Origin of Species” twenty or so years ago, by the sheer mischief of the prose and the subtlety of the book’s movement. I hadn’t read anythng on that side of Darwin, so I started accumulating notes. Similarly, I loved Lincoln’s speeches just as speeches, and came only later to the Shakespearean and Biblical background, and then after that to their role in the struggle over slavery. I’m a sentence-first kind of guy, I guess, and worked my way from words to ideas.

Dear Elliott: It’s funny, I’ve just got back from England, and there everyone wants to hear about Lincoln, since they’re sick of hearing about Darwin!A.G.

You and me both, Elliott. The number of new books about Lincoln crossing my desk over the past few months has been overwhelming.

Of course it did seems like there was a wave o’Darwin for a while there, even before the bicentennial.

Yes– and though it’s tempting to think that there’s so much Lincoln out there because of something in the air now, my own feeling is that it owes a lot to the sheer concentration of Lincoln’s life and acts — very much, as I argue in the book, like Jesus’s in their packed activity in an essentially small time frame, in Lincoln’s case really only four years in the true public eye. We can master Lincoln’s essential acts and phrases relatively easily; unpacking them becomes the work of a lifetime. Several lifetimes, actually.

i actually read all of that……i truly wish i would have read the book…lincoln is by far my favorite person of history…hands down, since i was little…don’t know why.

darwin, also discussed in my family.

a child of priveledge. university bred.
darwin kept his ideas hidden until the age of 50, when the pressure of having someone else claim the theorums drove him out into publishing his life’s work ….must have been a scary thing, thrown into the wind all he held dear..
to assist in conversation,
please excuse the wiki’s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

a child of poverty, but not an intellectual abyss, raised without a mother. self-taught and well read. a child of passion and experience.
lincoln was 51 when he got the nomination to be president.
at the age of 28, he first protested slavery. in and out of public service, notice was most taken of him when not in public office.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

what dichotomy of modern life are you equating them with?

Canadiens!!!!

Dear Dmac: You’re certainly right that Alfred Wallace’s late but parallel discovery of the theory of evolution by natural selection helped push Darwin into finally publishing his ideas. But it’s a little more complicated than that –as I try to show in “Angels And Ages”, he delayed as well because he didn’t want to shock his wife, a devout Christian (who remained one after he did publish, by the way) and also because he was aware of the effect his ideas were likely to have, and didn’t want to publish until he had all the ammo possible. And he treated Wallace honorably, as it happens, always insisting on him as co-discoverer of the theory (though beating him to the punch on publication.)

Not sure if you’re a habs-fan or a habs-hater. The first, I hope.

What if he hadn’t? It’s clear that evolutionary notions were in the air, even apart from Wallace’s ideas. Suppose Darwin hadn’t wanted to run the risk of alienating his wife — what difference would it have made if the theory had been worked out in some sixteen-volume German work with hundred-page paragraphs consisting mainly of abstractions, rather than with Darwin’s livelier narrative style?

but how can you synthesize liberalism in darwin with lincoln when darwin chose to keep his ideas secret until he was 50 and lincoln spoke out at an early age against slavery?

sure, the thoughts were gonig on, but the public expression was disparate.
so, is it a valid tenent for it to be unexpressed, but thought?

both ways served us well, with time, but how is that addressed in your book?

i really wish i would have read this book already..

that’s what i mean, darwin was embarrassed and lincoln was out there. same as many of us today.

Dear Scott: Well, as I argue in the book, it’s certainly possible that someone else (though probably not Wallace himself, who didn’t have a broad enough experience of the many disciplines) might have made the argument . Possible, though not certain: evolution was in the air, but evolution by natural selection, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, as Dan Dennett calls it, wasn’t. But eventually, yes, someone would have got there…as Mendel got to genetics, obscurely. But, as I argue in the book as well, Darwinism is more than a set of claims about the history of life(though it is that) it’s an entire episode in human thought and feeling. Without Darwin’s matchless gift for eloquent explanation, and without his gift for making shocking ideas seem obvious and sensible, the reaction against his ideas might have been more narrowly ideological — one of the startling things about the history of ” The Origin” is that it wasn’t particularly controversial, given all that was at stake. It certainly had its enemies, but within a relatively few years, some version (often misunderstood) of Darwinism was accepted on left, right and center. Style really does matter; as I point out, Darwin’s friend Charles Babbage was as near to modern cybernetics as Darwin was to modern biology– but Babbage’s bark was so loud that no one understood that his ideas had bite.

raised on hockey , my man. who can’t love the nucks.

Dear Dmac: Well, Darwin was out there,too — not as loudly as Lincoln, but very much so. As Desmond and Moore have shown at length in their fine recent biography, Darwin was a passionate abolitionist from a very early age, and it was his hatred of slavery — and his belief that mankind was, in plain scientific sense, one family — that moved him towards evolutionary theory. And though he delayed, by the 1860’s — the same period as what I suppose we can call Lincoln’s passion — he was “out there”, and, though much admired, still the target of bigots and what we now call fundamentalists.

Glad to hear it — sometimes being a hockey fan in america can be a lonely passion.

I’m not sure that I see the relevance here. Darwin’s work wasn’t aimed at righting a social wrong. It was just aimed at correcting an erroneous idea of how biology works. It’s a momentous idea, but I’m pretty sure no one suffered because Darwin kept silent for fifteen years.

Dear Cujo: Yes, I think that’s right. And Darwin’s delay (though it certainly had its eccentric psychological side)also meant that his idea wasn’t unleashed on the world until it was so well argued, and evidenced, that it was nearly irrefutable.

This doesn’t answer Dmac’s point by any means, but I think it’s fair to say that AG isn’t equating them. He seems L&D as having resemblances, but also differences.

In flipping through the book I notice a passage that seemed worth marking:

If one word could sum up Lincoln’s character, it would be shrewd; if one word, Darwin’s, it would be sensitive. Lincoln grasped instantly people’s capacities, their intentions, their weak points and their strengths. Darwin was a tentative judge of people….He could break things down, and he could build things up, but he couldn’t do either one simply or neatly….His intelligence worked at length, over time, and in the accumulation of incidents rather than the incisive example.

yeah, but, and a big but, he was not out there with his own theories until he faced that ‘crossroads’ kind of situation……that’s my point…

ok, i want that meat in the middle part….born on the same day, what else tied them? and the tie-in with ‘modern life’….lay it out.

Dear Scott: Yes, that is an important passage, for me. And you’re right, I’m not equating them — and , as I say in the introduction, what they have in common with each other is less important to me than what they have in common with us.

when it’s a passion you don’t care, do you?

i have a ‘dayton gems’ ihl official hockey stick hanging above mirrors in my living room… i am legitimate. gordy lane. islanders, dayton gem. teenage crush.

But if Adam lays it all out for us in comments, then he won’t have anything left to entice us to buy the book…

:})

Dear Dmac: Hmmmn…it’s a little hard to summarize a book in a phrase. But if you’ll allow me to quote myself, what they have in common has to do with a new kind of liberal language — a rhetoric, if you like — that they both helped shape. They loved to particularize in everything and their big ideas rise from small sightings; they start with small empirical example, and work their way upwards to grand statement. ” Each , using a form of technical language — the fine, detailed language of natural science for Darwin, the tedious langauge of legal reasoning for Lincoln — arrived at a new ideal of liberal eloquence.” is how I put it in the introduction.

you have a new theory of what the world is based on. will change the world. you sit on it due to oppression. many types. another is speaking out at a young age at whatever he sees is unjust. i think that should be an element of it’s discussion.

Islanders, huh? Alas, it’s an axiom of Canadiens fandom that our four-cups-in-a-row are somehow more in -a -row than their four-cups-in-a-row. Don’t ask me to explain it; it’s Canadian metaphysics.

There’s sense in that. Creationism, in the form it existed by then, was very quickly supplanted as the working theory of biology. Given how momentous a change it was, and how tenaciously some folks are inclined to cling to it to this day, it strikes me as a remarkable turnaround.

hey dakine, mwah, i’m buyin’ it….and i’m on a budget…it swung to the top of the buy list. in fact, father’s day is comin’…he’ll love it. can’t count the times lincoln and darwin appeared at our dinner table. and hockey. heh.

You note in your comment — as in the book itself — that following its publication Darwin’s Origin “wasn’t particularly controversial, given all that was at stake.”

This is something people tend not to know. You sort of assume that the late 19th century was like a dress rehearsal for Inherit the Wind. It was only after reading a book by a historian of science named Ronald Numbers called Darwinism Comes to America (published about ten years ago) that I understood how wrong that was.

So…what happened? How did we get from quick acceptance to the point where people spend vast sums of money to promote the idea that evolution is a “controversial theory” for which there is little evidence?

Dear Cujo: yes — I think we underestimate sometimes how quickly Darwin’s idea conquered — and, as you say, given the obstacles, and the millenia of thought he was subverting, that’s quite remarkable. And owes something, surely, to Darwin’s gifts as a writer and , well, liberal arguer. One of the interesting things about the response to the “Origin” is that one of the first inscribed copies Darwin sent out was to Charles Kingsley, who was actually Queen Victoria’s chaplain! And Kingsley saw it as an unthreatening book — in fact, he wrote a children’s classic ” Water Babies” , in which Darwin is a benevolent figure. He thought that Darwin was to biology as Newton was to physics — the man who had cracked God’s code. Still, it’s astonishing to think that , when Darwin was born, the consensus of scientists was that species had always been in place, and unchanging…it really was a revolution.

Fascinating, I didn’t realize Babbage was friends with Darwin.
It’s a small world after all.

Dear Scott: Oy — long subject. In brief — although, as I wrote a moment ago in reply to Cujo, the first self-consciously Christian response was often (though far from always!) positive, as decades went by and Darwinism came to be pitted against American fundamentalism, it changed. I think we can’t underestimate the role that race, and racism , played in that transformation. Though modern creationists like to pretend that Darwin was , in some way, friendly to racism, in truth at the time Darwinism was seen , correctly, as hostile to the idea that there are deep, permanent differences between the races that prevent them from living together , and that can justify the oppression of blacks. So a lot of the early hostility to Darwinism in America came from the belief that it undermined segregation (though, to be sure, a lot of the early enthusiasm for a misunderstood form of Darwinism in American came from the belief that it justified the superiority of whites! It’s a complex story.) But , as you say, the religious hostility was late-arriving — though long-lasting.

it’s a gravity thing.
can’t be explained any other way.

my loyalties lie with whomever is playing best. and no expansion teams. i’m an elitist.

growing up, we traveled all over for dayton gem hockey games. i can’t count the holidays spent in michigan..
as a grown woman, visiting friends, maple leafs’ rink was a special thrill for me..the hall with photos left me dumbstruck.got to see it before it was demolished…i predicted the redwings to the old man next to me……they went on to win forever…was when they were losing, but, i saw it. talent. i wanted to be a goalie but was a girl.70’s. not done. swam, dove, played tennis instead.

hey pups, he asked, i just answered. hockey is a fever. like love. worse.

yayah, physics, that’s it.
energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed.

yes — they were friends. Darwin wrote that Babbage was a ” discontented and dissappointed man…one day he told me that he had invented a plan by which all fires could be effectively stopped, but added — I shan’t publish it. Damn them all. Let their houses be burnt!’” You can see why Darwin triumphed while Babbage failed.

I know we’re getting off-topic here, as the kids say, but I will add that the Hockey Hall of Fame in toronto will make you heart beat faster if you love old sweaters.

Dear Scott: let me just add to the above — I wish I could say that there really is no dispute, that Darwinism is fully compatible with faith,etc. In a general way, which I try to particularize in the conclusion of the book, I think that’s so. But it’s certainly true , and no point in pretending otherwise, that the account of the history of life given in Genesis is not compatible with the account of the history of life given in “The Origin…” Fundamentalists are, on their own terms, right to be furious with Darwin for being right.

Lest we switch over to an all-hockey format (nothing wrong with that, but then I would not be up to hosting) maybe this is a good point to ask about, well…Obama.

You write that the thesis of your book “is that literary eloquence is essential to liberal civilization; our heroes should be men and women possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the need to see for themselves and speak for all.”

This actually does sum up a fair bit of what you have to say about L&D, but I had to wonder whether you had anyone else in particular in mind — if only the former president, by contrast.

thanks, i am like that…there is a delay, as i process…there is a difference, which is what i was trying to point out.circumspect vs. snap judgement based on conviction.

In the Tech world, Babbage is often called the “First Program Manager” and Ada Lovelace is called the “First Programmer” for their work together on Babbage’s Analytical Engine

i am not a praise hander-outer. that was absolutely perfectly worded.

its not it’s.

Dear Scott: Sorry, hockey is a passion. Once infected, not easily overcome, like some of the lesser venereal diseases.
I deliberately left all mention of Obama out of the book, but of course the imprint of his ascent is there, as how could it not be in a book on liberal eloquence written in the summer of 2008, revised in the same fall? All comparisons of Obama with Lincoln seem to me off-limits, for obvious reasons. But it does seem to me that Obama, at his frequent best, does offer , in ways that few have recently , the eloquence of explanation. It’s there in his “more perfect union “speech, where he took several knotty and complex ideas about the history of race in America and wove them into a subtle and persuasive argument; it was there– for all that I’m sure I’d agree with most FDLers, and with you , that it might have been stronger –in his speech this week on torture and terrorism. He doesn’t seek to intimidate or overwhelm, at least not at his best. He argues seriously, as one grown up to others. Perhaps that’s a minimal accomplishment — but it doesn’t feel that way, at least not to me.

So, let’s be clear. Genesis is a beautiful, lyrical story with not a kernel of science or data. A myth, with many similarities to myths in the culture. Sorry the TX schoolbook committee cannot make the distinction. (Yes, OT. Sorry)

Perhaps another way to put it is that you feel that you could argue with Obama, and that it would be an argument worth having. With someone like Cheney, you sense that politics is pure power; persuasion has no place in their vision.

It’s not at all minimal…I think it is an element that provokes the opponents rage….made all the worse by the bumbling incoherence of the recent paste. And Obama manages with such ease & class…cf. Rove, Alberto, Dick, lil’W. I think 3 of the 4 barely got through school.

No, very much on topic, RevBev. What you say is so — the essential truth of the Darwinian picture of the history of life, though it’s a dynamic and changing and self-altering one (that’s what makes it science) is by now beyond serious dispute. Telling people that there are several views, or “disputes” is just telling them falsehoods. (Though of course who can fail to be moved by the epic poetry of Genesis– nor should epic poetry ever be condescended to ; it just shouldn’t be mistaken for argument.)

Who needs persuasion when you can hire someone who knows how to apply electrodes?

Yes — but I wouldn’t want to seem a schooling snob. One of the impressive things about Lincoln is that he is almost entirely self-educated. He mastered law and Shakespeare on his own dime, and time.

LOL. Hope I’m using that properly, for once. ( Auditors of my MOTH stories will know what I refer to.)

in our house, darwin was presented as fdr was. as persons of history. of learning. i know, weird house. inherit the wind sadly was all people knew of him. in our house he was brought up with tchiachovsky-i never could spell in russian, people who didn’t fit the mold.and overcame it. and payed for it. same as lincoln.

that’s why i was pressing for the analogy suggested in the title, who today would you say ‘modern life’-wise compares?

Dear Dmac: A lot of people have asked me this — who two hundred years from now will be seen as the makers of our modernity ? — and I must admit I don’t have a good or plausible answer. Einstein,certainly, in the sciences, and perhaps someone like Havel in politics…but they don’t seem quite of the same humanist heft. Any ideas?

but he was already respected as a man born and bred from their ruling class. him dropping this bomb couldn’t have gone without notice. or did because of his lineage.

lincoln on the other hand flew on out there with no backup. and did it anyway.

entirely different environments.

(sorry for being a pain in the ass)

Of course you are right…I think the thing with Obama’s eloquence is that for many he is a reminder that we have been hungry and longing for some style & truth in public discourse. The lies and barbarism and arrogance of the Rove/Cheney/W speech have harmed us all. For many, I’m sure the longing has been unconscious. Thanks for the reminder about Lincoln…was not meant to sound snobbish, just grateful.

Well, if you mean that , given their starting points in life, Lincoln’s was the more astonishing journey, who could argue with you?

Maybe not quite…but I do think JFK gave us new language and new possibilities.

A place in the social register does not translate into authority in the sciences. Not of any durable kind, anyway.

einstein. wow. another one at the dinner table.

i wouldn’t call him a humanist.

the other two i would.

but einstein believed in what i believe—

energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. in all things.

the other two were practicing that, only not knowing that is what they were doing.

Couldn’t agree more; I know that it’s becoming fashionable among the bien-pensants to say that Obama’s eloquence is a kind of trap, if not actually a trick, and certainly, as Glenn Greenwald and others have argued, it shouldn’t keep us from seeing what he’s doing and calling it for what it is…but, my God, to have as President someone whose tone is one of sanity and seriousness and whose arguments, even when wrong, are as complex and nuanced as arguments , in times like ours, must be. Analyze we must; admire we still can, to sound sadly a bit Yoda-like.

you have a fine brain, just wanted to say that.

thanks for coming.

at least two copies sold.

oh, it did. it did.

middle of hockey season–see the ‘falls’ in ice or the museum….uhhhhh. well…

Also, remember that while Darwin was born to comfort and a certain amount of wealth, his family, on both sides, had a radical history — read Jenny Uglow’s wonderful ” Lunar Men” for an account of the Northern radicalism of both the Wedgewoods and the Darwins in the late eighteenth century, what it accomplished and how it was suppressed in the post-Napoleonic reaction, with the great companion scientist Priestly left with a burned out house.

We have about half an hour left in this salon.

I am willing to throw out another passage or two from the book to promote discussion — but first want to invite anyone who is lurking to chime in with questions or comments.

Among other things, that would give me time to eat a burrito, very hurriedly. (I think this counts as “multi-tasking.”)

North of England, I mean.

Dear Scott; By all means throw; I fear the lurkers will lurk no matter how they are invited out.

Though I have no burritto, having resolved to get through this salon on caffeine alone.

Thanks.

but wouldn’t a comparison have to come after years of a committed stance that lincoln and darwin placed? of course, he hasn’t hit his fifty year mark that they did when they both finally put down the gauntlet….

i am still fishin gfor the allegory you stated in the title with them and ‘modern life’…

Ah well, the burrito can wait. It will cool down meanwhile….

One passage I want to quote is about Lincoln’s fascination with Shakespeare — with part of Shakespeare anyway.

But first I want to get you to elaborate on what you mean by “liberal violence.” This comes up in passing — too much in passing, frankly.

Anyway, let me hunt up and transcribe that passage on Sh. while you respond…

Adam, as we go forward, do you think D&L’s liberal voices still be as strong in 100 years?

or coercion. as in darwin’s case.

lincoln wasn’t exposed to the same tenents.

which is part of the intrigue of this novel.

(i am way behind in comments)

Dear Scott: By liberal violence I mean the reality, too easily overlooked by triumphant liberalism , that for all its benefits and brilliances, liberalism has defended itself, or claimed to, with bloody acts and bloody wars. Cold Harbor and Hiroshima are part of our inheritance,too. Part of Lincoln’s historical importance is that he showed, against the grain of long-standing conservative and authoritarian claim which insisted that liberal democracy was inevitably self-defeating, self-annihilating, that liberalism could defend itself , albeit by fighting one of the bloodiest wars in human history to that moment.
In passing? But surely the fact of liberal violence, and Lincoln’s response to the suffering he knew that he had caused , occupies almost the entire chapter called “Lincoln In History”

but was raised in an environment that knowledge is learned.

darwin, that it is taught.

wva moth?

Will their voices be as loud? Some part of the answer depends on what happens next, of course. But it takes a keener pessimist than I am not to think that, for all of its failures and incapacities, many of them especially evident right now, liberal humanism, and the civilization it created, will still seem to be a high achievement in human history, and the people who gave it voice will still be heard.

well, i was hopin gyou could.

I told a story at The Moth, a New York story-telling group, about my misunderstanding what LOL means in instant-messaging slang. (Briefly, I thought it meant , “Lots Of Love”, not “Laughing Out Loud.) You can find it as a what-do-you-call-it, a podcast , on their site. A written version is also in the last chapter of my last book, before this one I mean, “Through The Children’s Gate”.

Here’s the passage I was thinking of:

Lincoln’s spiritual state by the end of the war was very much like that of a Shakespearean tragic hero: resigned to a deadly fate that he did not will but could not avoid….Shakespeare’s people pass from ambition to amorality to evil in one long gradient of gray; only a moral idiot would be sure that his gray days were not part of the same declining curve. Part of Shakespeare’s genius lies in his ability to create characters who intend no harm but end up covered with blood.

So: was there something Shakespearean about GWB? Or was it moral idiocy all the way down?

Hmmn. I think the difference though, between GWB and Lincoln –among others, shall we say–is that Lincoln was acutely aware of the suffering that he had caused, and morally alert to the possibility that it might be, could perhaps be seen as, a waste. He didn’t think it was; quite the contrary. But he spent all summer through the war at a house outside Washington in sight of, and earshot of, a military cemetery. He believed that he was saving the Republic; he knew that he was dealing out death to thousands of eighteen year old boys. What was so depressing about Bush, surely, was his lightness of spirit, his insistence that none of it really bothered him. Shakespeare could have done something with Bush; but Lincoln was able to do something with Shakespeare.

I ask this not to be contrarian (okay that too) but because the Global War on Terror and our Iraq-Afghan-and-coming-to-Pakistan-soon adventure would undoubtedly be examples of “liberal violence” — and were indeed rationalized as such in some quarters.

Scott: put it another way — what makes a Shakespearean figure Shakespearean is his self-consciousness.

oh, sorry, it does.. especially back then, without that standing you had no standing…your papers might have well have been toilet paper…..he had to walk a fine line….offering enough to stay in good graces and at the same time withholding a theorem that would rock the world.

even after /during world war 2 that board review still held enough standing to reject pioneers of science that should have been acknowledged. and never got credit, and rotted in nazi germany./

i do’nt think people fully understand what he was up against.socially and academically.

heh, interesting dmac, imo life/dna has done an end run around that.

Not if you assume the classical position of the “tragic hero”. W has never been a hero, that I’ve heard.

i like your meaning better.

lol.

still back on comment 68. catchin’ up.

he’s certainly created enough tragedy.

Yes, they were , in some quarters. And those who did rationalize it that way, or who felt that our victimization gave us a sudden license to victimize others, were , on my view , betrayers of liberalism — which demands cool reflection when hot action is sought, and a sense of proportion when apocalyptic imagery (and language) is demanded. The lesson of the last eight years, one of them anyway, is that a liberalism which betrays its values in self-defense soon becomes something other than liberalism. ( Yes, of course, we could debate whether, and how badly, Lincoln himself did this in the Civil War.)

As we come to the end of this good discussion about Darwin, Lincoln and liberals,

Adam, Thank you for stopping by the Lake and spending the afternoon discussing your new book with us.

Scott, Thank you very much for Hosting this good Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought Adam’s book yet, here is a link.

Thanks all.

we are finally in my area…..think about it.

trees, space, it applies.

no argument.

Does class influence whether you get to have a scientific career or not? Yes, of course. Trust me, I am quite belligerent on the role of class in shaping people’s opportunities and outlooks.

But to be accepted and gain any influence, scientific work has to meet standards (and survive criticisms) for which the old school tie provide just about nothing in benefits. People could be as snobby as they wanted about Michael Faraday’s lowly origins, but in the end that made less difference than, say, his experiments.

Thank you Adam, thank you Scott
and always, thanks Bev ;)

Jane Hamsher at the Silo, upstairs!
RNC Ad Compares Pelosi to Pussy Galore — Time For Women to Exit the GOP?

Bev, Scott: It was a pleasure. I feel baptized in the digital book salon ether, and enjoyed it almost as much — in some ways more — than the hockey boards. Thanks for letting me be here, and thanks to all who visited. A.G.

Thanks very much to Bev for the chance to host, and to Adam Gopnik for two possibly frantic hours.

I would, however, recommend buying this or any other book from Powell’s, which is unionized, unlike Amazon, which most definitely is not.

hiroshima? liberal?

wasn’t that more of a general knee-jerk reaction of a country?
the camps? liberal?

adam, please explain that one.

Our local editorial page called for Perry to fire the strategist who provided the whorehouse” remark…Yup, they never get any wiser.

Thank you…great discussion and fascinating book to anticipate. Thank you

oh, wait, through the childrens’ gate….now i know who you areee…oh my.i back off. omg.

funny.

go to gettysburg and to the place where lincoln wrotehis speech…and take the tour of the battlefield. just do it someday. i did it because i wnet up there for a funeral. and wondered why everyone hadn’t done it..

but back then, you had to be nominated by a peer. that is the difference.

thanks, adam. ice your puck, dude.

What a fantastic book salon!

Your book is at the top of my ‘list’, Adam.

Your thoughts and ideas are wonderful, matching, as they do, many of my own, but your eloquence is most delightful and thoroughly enjoyable.

We do have a paucity, in our times, of those who might compare to Lincoln or Darwin (I especially appreciate your making clear that Darwin’s abhorrence of slavery was central to his motivation in exploring the world and its manifestation of subtle ‘connection’ and evolutionary impetus descernable to those willing to look and understand).

Thank you, ever so much!!!

DW

It’s actually a bit of a myth that Darwin kept his ideas “secret”. Although he didn’t publish…many people knew his position about natural selection. He’d already told Huxley, Lyell, Hooker, Fox and a half dozen others. Many more knew that Darwin was a “transmutationist”.

Many more knew that he was intensely collecting information of the mechanisms of change in domestic animals. That was part of the reason that “the idea was in the air” and why there was some concern by Lyell and Hooker that Darwin publish “soon” to establish his priority. The fact that Darwin had written others about his ideas is what made Darwins’ receiving Wallaces’ “not for publication” essay so touchy. Both men had written expositions of their ideas in letters [Darwin had also drafted a sixty page essay in 1844 that his will said to publish at private expense in case he died]. Darwin’s colleagues felt that this dilemma could only be resolved by simultaneous publication of both Wallace’s and Darwin’s earlier drafts. Those were presented in 1858 at the Linnaean Society. That event barely got a wisp of notice. There was a general apprehension in those days that “theory without real evidence” was not very good (or at least incomplete) science. Wallace had written about evolution in general in 1855 and was “scolded” for being too philosophical.

That Darwin, who had already completed two-thirds of his massive “Natural Selection” was better equipped to publish a more extensive work on the topic was obvious. Wallace was spending another three years in the Indies collecting. He had no extensive library. In fact it took him another 5 years after his return to even get his journals in order to publish his classic “The Malay Archipelago”. After the “Origin of Species” Wallace himself always recognized that Darwin was the more significant of the two in actually providing the real life examples, the general applications, and forestalling the challenges that would ultimately occur after their essays were published. Wallace in fact wrote a work entitle “Darwinism” using some of Darwin’s’ material collected for that massive volume that never reached print.

But the fact is that neither Darwin or Wallace had first advanced or even popularized evolution. That had already been done by Lamarck, an anonymous author of the popular “Vestiges of Creation” and even Herbert Spencer. The great benefit that Darwin and Wallace supplied was that natural selection was the mechanism that COMPELLED evolution and that adaptations could be explained through natural forces.

Even more interesting is that Darwin and Wallace’s work, dealing as it did with the origin of species as organisms with a shared history and adaptation directly confronted one of the main props of scientific racism…polygenism…that the different human races derived from different creations and had dramatically different adaptations. Evolution would hold that the races are at most, different local forms that use the same basic “human adaptation”. Both Darwin and Wallace (despite their different backgrounds- Wallace was more like Lincoln in social standing in several respects than Darwin was) still, despite their view of general biological equality and potential, were still social chauvinists. Wallace was a big promoter of the ideas of Rajah James Brooke and even the Dutch system despite his advocacy of Irish Home Rule and socialism at home.