Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World available in Paperback
Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
- ISBN-10:
- 0691136394
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691136394
- Pub. Date:
- 03/30/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691136394
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691136394
- Pub. Date:
- 03/30/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
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Overview
Although Darwin could find sublimity even in ants or worms, the word "Darwinian" has largely been taken to signify a disenchanted world driven by chance and heartless competition. Countering the pervasive view that the facts of Darwin's world must lead to a disenchanting vision of it, Levine shows that Darwin's ideas and the language of his books offer an alternative form of enchantment, a world rich with meaning and value, and more wonderful and beautiful than ever before. Without minimizing or sentimentalizing the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, Levine makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism—a commitment to the value of the natural world and the human striving to understand it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691136394 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2008 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Darwin Loves You Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World
By George Levine Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13639-4
Chapter One SECULAR RE-ENCHANTMENT
The gentle gentleman Charles Darwin, who was buried in Westminster Abbey, lives in public consciousness within an adjective describing a brutally competitive and mechanistic world, and as the author of a controversial theory that has made him to many the Antichrist. He has survived not only as the icon of a revolutionary shift in the way we think about origins and humanity but as an unpleasant idea. And for those who think about such things, in extending naturalistic explanation even to human behavior, he is seen as perhaps the most striking embodiment of that scientific rationalism that, in Max Weber's terminology, "disenchanted" the modern world. Evolution by natural selection seems to have removed both meaning and consolation from the world; those who discovered it and who now argue for it often engage in a kind of triumphal rationalism that treads all affective and extramaterial explanation underfoot. It is one thing to believe that science can explain the movement of the stars or even the composition of matter; it is quite another to believe that science can explain human nature itself, and all the disorderly intricacies of human life.
Certainly, Weber's reading of the disenchantment of the world was consistent with the responses of manyVictorians to the progress of science. As against the scientific naturalists, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and W. K. Clifford, who exuberantly advertised the power of science to transform the world, W. H. Mallock, among their most brilliant and witty antagonists, noted of the world in a book significantly called Is Life Worth Living? that "in a number of ways, whilst we have not been perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling." Instead of finding that the new knowledge enspirits and enlivens, Mallock claims that "in the last few generations man has been curiously changing."
And the change is the result of too much knowledge, too much reflection. Man "has become a creature looking before and after; and his native hue of resolution has been sicklied over by thought" (19). Mallock's formulation of the Victorian experience can serve as a strong example of Weber's point that the authority of scientific explanation drives meaning and value from the world.
And the Victorian struggle over this problem takes an even starker shape today. One of the more popular scientific books of recent years is called, not immodestly, How the Mind Works, and its author, Stephen Pinker, recognizing its immodesty, begins on an uncharacteristic "note of humility" by confessing that "we don't know how the mind works." But, Pinker says, we are on our way, arguing that our understanding of how the mind works has been "upgraded" from a "mystery" to a "problem." And it is precisely the fact that Pinker's project is recognized as a legitimate enterprise of science-the upgrade from mystery to problem anticipates another upgrade to resolution-that, according to Weber, marks modern culture's understanding that science can indeed explain everything. Weber contends that meaning drains out of the world precisely as we come to believe that "if one wished one could learn" virtually anything; "there are no mysterious incalculable forces."
There is widespread agreement that this is the case. Pinker's project has deep roots, but in the nineteenth century, particularly in the work of the positivists and scientific naturalists, the enterprise of producing a full scientific description of all phenomena had gained enormous energy. When William James contemplated the project in 1902, he registered a response that confirms Weber's later thesis. "When we read ... proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything," he asserts with something like contempt, "we feel- quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program ... menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life." He talks of "cold-blooded assimilations" that "threaten ... to undo our soul's vital secrets," and of the "assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted" (12-13). James's project is to open the way to a recognition of the importance and validity of the religious experience, but to do that he also makes plain the inadequacy for personal and spiritual satisfactions of this scientific "program." He describes, in effect, the condition of disenchantment, about which Weber was to write, and he feels obliged to engage immediately with what is certainly a fundamentally Darwinian project, the explanation of origins in "lowly" terms.
James mocks the pretensions of those who claim to be on their way to describing "the existential conditions of absolutely everything," but that program is not dead. Nor is it self-evident that it's not worth attempting. In effect, it is the program of evolutionary psychology for which Pinker argues, and the outlines of the debate have remained roughly the same over the course of a century, though the technical understanding has changed.
Pinker explains that the mind "is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life" (x). There is Darwin again, his theory being used here not to explain how species emerge from other species but to explain what is thought to be most distinctive about the human species: mind. It is not a romantic or religious conception that Pinker offers. The mind is a "system," not the seat of the soul; there are problems in its working, but no mysteries. Not only, then, does the use of Darwin imply a disenchanted world, but also (and here is where much modern controversy develops) a world in which morality itself ceases to be a mystery and becomes- again I invoke Pinker-only a problem. As James put it about his contemporary version of evolutionary psychology, the project threatens to undo the soul's vital secrets. The primary problem is that, since Darwin's theory seems to imply that natural selection "acts solely by and for the good of each," that is, it works only on individuals, not on groups or species, it seems impossible to account for "altruism"-the hot issue for sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. This is not the place to join the altruism wars of recent theory, but what is clear is that modern uses of Darwin further propagate that sense of him and his work as offering us a world debased because it is explained in terms of lowly origins-as though it were certain that such explanation is somehow degrading. Evolutionary psychology gives us once again a godless nature red in tooth and claw, ruthless competition, survival of the fittest-and now algorithmic social theory and the biologizing of everything human.
When James confronts these arguments, he dismisses the question of "origins" entirely. That is, the quality of an idea, or a work of art, or a person, depends not on its origins but on its effects. It is Jamesian pragmatism carried over into consideration of religion. As for Darwin humankind is not demeaned because we can trace its origins to apelike ancestors, for James religion is not disqualified because we can trace the origins of belief back to some physiological basis. Athough I do not want to dispute that Weber was describing a real phenomenon in registering the dispirited reaction of a culture to the power of rational, naturalistic, scientific explanation, my argument here is Jamesian in that I do not believe that disenchantment follows from naturalistic explanation. James insists on the legitimacy of belief, on willingness to make the bet on the validity of religious experience. My reading of Darwin, in the chapters that follow, points to an entirely secular but similarly satisfactory response. Disenchantment does not follow from a full description of the existential conditions of absolutely everything; and-putting aside the absurdity of the idea that such a description will ever be produced- one does not need to turn to religion to avoid it. Enchantment, of a sort, follows positively, quite naturally, from intense engagement with the entirely secular, and produces-or can produce- a strong equivalent to the condition that James so sensitively describes.
From the outset, Darwin's theories have spurred ideas about the way life is or should be lived. A world of organisms developed from unexplained, apparently random variations, some of which are preserved because of further random alterations in environment-weather, geological transformations, invading species, and so on-seems to yield us a merely chance-driven world, from which the traditional notion of "meaning" has been banished. It was this world against which such clever late Victorians as Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw rebelled, and which, I venture to argue, has never been comfortably assimilated by a culture that would yet confess that Darwin was probably right about evolution. The very absence of meaning has seemed to provoke an almost infinite variety of interpretations, and despite Pinker's particular take on natural selection, Darwin has been absorbed into theological as well as atheistical views of nature and life; he has been enlisted for socialism, rampant capitalism, individualism, communal living, natural theology, you name it.
Despite the current upsurge of religious fundamentalisms (itself perhaps a reflex of the "disenchantment" Weber described), continuing and innumerable invocations of Darwin further emphasize the way that "science" has become the most powerfully authoritative language of modernity. Show that an idea is scientific, dress up an actor like a doctor in a television ad, and your claims carry weight. Darwin (along with his popularizers, particularly T. H. Huxley) was a critical figure in the rise of the authority of scientific language. And yet, far from presenting to the culture an unambiguous set of facts about the the origin of species, from the start his arguments provoked alternative interpretations. The problem is not the language's authority but establishing exactly what it is being authoritative about. "Signs," wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, "are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable." Darwin's theory is a sign, perhaps not small, but largely measurable. The interpretations to which the theory has been subject are truly illimitable, for it has been invoked for virtually any social or political project.
Scientists have wrangled, and continue to wrangle, over what exactly Darwin meant and what his theory implies, but in the long history of the "development" theory-of descent by modification through natural selection, as Darwin originally termed it-it has been impossible for scholars and social and literary critics to avoid reading his science as ideological. "There is," argues John Durant, "a characteristic tone of moral concern detectable in the writings of almost everyone who is interested in Darwinism at anything beyond the level of the narrowest technicalities." The tendency is uncharacteristic of most other scientific theses, but Darwin and evolution remain hot topics at virtually every level of scientific and cultural discourse, and even at the very technical level they seem to entail that "tone of moral concern."
I
How could they not? As Mary Midgley asserts at the very outset of her essay in Durant's Darwinism and Divinity, "Evolution is the creation-myth of our age." It is a myth, not in the sense of being untrue, but in the sense that "it has great symbolic power, independent of its truth" (154). And as such it significantly affects how we think about the world in nonscientific contexts, and how we think about ourselves. The power of Darwin's theory to affect directly all of our lives, manifest in that long series of interpretations and reinterpretations of it and its cultural significance, by scientists, of course, but also by philosophers, by social critics, and by theologians, entails yet further attention. It matters too much to be relegated entirely to science! It is hard to be neutral about Darwinism and hard not to regard every interpretation as rife with ideological and moral significance. A lot is at stake.
Darwin knew it and ducked it as long as he could, but from the very start he understood that he would have to find ways to ease the pain his arguments might inflict on his audience; it is clear that he felt the pain himself and with his various apologetic gestures was not merely defending himself. It is notorious that when he was driven at last to publish his theory, he tried in the first instances to avoid talking about cultural and social implications. And when he began talking about them overtly, in The Descent of Man, he was not entirely consistent about their human application and usually sought to soften the most disenchanting implications of his ideas. Even in the Origin there is a bathetic and feeble anticipation of the spiritual pain he assumed most people would feel in confronting a world operating in such ruthless and mindless ways. The conclusion to the chapter entitled "Struggle for Existence" confronts the horror, recognizing the need for consolation: "we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply."
That this won't do is obvious. Others who engaged with his theory had either to find alternative consolations or reread it in such a way as to reinsert value and meaning, after all, and because of Darwin's ambiguity, particularly on the question of cultural implications, the possibility of variations in interpretation were multiplied. As Diane B. Paul has put it, "Darwin's followers found in his ambiguities legitimation for whatever they favoured: laissez-faire capitalism, certainly, but also liberal reform, anarchism and socialism; colonial conquest, war and patriarchy, but also anti-imperialism, peace and feminism." Nevertheless, the dominant reading, the one that seems to be implied by almost every colloquial or journalistic use of "Darwinian," takes Darwin's argument as a justification for an unrestrained capitalist individualism, a mechanically utilitarian ethics, and a hierarchical structure of races and classes. En route to dispelling the notion that "disenchantment" is the only possible consequence of Darwin's thought, this book will attempt to modify this dominant reading.
Entering into these endless (rarely for me tedious, though often deeply annoying) debates, I have my own distinctly non-neutral moral agenda. Darwin's thinking about nature and the world remains important; its misuse and abuse have consequences. I hope I will not be misusing Darwin; and I certainly will not be abusing him. Appropriation of Darwin is, after all, part of the great tradition of Darwin studies, in which contending philosophers and theorists claim to tell us exactly what it is that Darwin meant and proceed to use "Darwin" to support their own theories and moral programs. Although I understand that every appropriation has its rationale and that it is dangerous to claim that some are "merely ideological" (though in fact I think many are) while others are scientifically objective and value-free, I do believe, and will occasionally argue, that some interpretations are better than others, that some theorists have simply missed Darwin's point or have focused too exclusively on one aspect of a complex argument. Without aiming at an overall synthetic exegesis of what Darwin said or meant to say, I try in this and the chapters that follow to get close to it by attending carefully to one part of what he meant and means that is little attended to and that runs counter to interpretations of his work that focus on its heartless and mechanistic implications.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Darwin Loves You by George Levine
Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface ixAcknowledgments xxv
Secular Re-enchantment 1
The Disenchanting Darwin 45
Using Darwin 73
A Modern Use: Socibiology 93
Darwin and Pain: Why Science Made Shakespeare Nauseating 129
"And if it be a pretty woman all the better": Darwin and Sexual Selection 169
A Kinder, Gentler, Darwin 202
Epilogue: What Does It Mean? 252
Notes 275
Index 297
What People are Saying About This
George Levine has thought deeply about Darwinism, its cultural history, and its implications for moral and spiritual values. Darwin Loves You should be read by everyone who thinks that their values are threatened by evolutionary theory.
— David Sloan Wilson, author of "Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society" and "How to be a Good Evolutionist"
Darwin Loves You is the most interesting book I have read this year. It is wise, brave, and beautifully written. Levine's reflections on the important issue of Darwinism as an ideology are bound to engage readers. He shows that Darwin's science is not dehumanising or amoral and that it's possible to be a Darwinist and still believe that the world has meaning.
— Janet Browne, author of "Charles Darwin: The Power of Place"
Passionate, erudite, and polemical, Darwin Loves You draws its arguments from a heady array of writers and philosophers. This is a book to think with.
— Rebecca Stott, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, author of "Darwin and the Barnacle"
"Darwin Loves You is the most interesting book I have read this year. It is wise, brave, and beautifully written. Levine's reflections on the important issue of Darwinism as an ideology are bound to engage readers. He shows that Darwin's science is not dehumanising or amoral and that it's possible to be a Darwinist and still believe that the world has meaning."—Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: The Power of Place"George Levine has thought deeply about Darwinism, its cultural history, and its implications for moral and spiritual values. Darwin Loves You should be read by everyone who thinks that their values are threatened by evolutionary theory."—David Sloan Wilson, author of Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society and How to be a Good Evolutionist"Darwin Loves You is a very important work that deserves to be read by many people well outside the narrow circle of Darwin specialists. First, it is a brilliant account of how a science is taken up and used for diverse cultural ends, far beyond the intention of the author and the content of the text. Second, it is crucially relevant to the present day with the horrifying rise of fundamentalist religion in America and abroad. It shows how science gets misused and misunderstood in dangerous ways by fanatics. Third, and most important of all, it introduces us to a man who is deeply in love with his subject, wanting to engage the reader. One learns here truly why scholarship is such a joyful activity."—Michael Ruse, author of The Evolution-Creation Struggle"This is a rich and multilayered argument for a wider appreciation of a 'kinder, gentler' Darwin. It examines many of the ways in which Darwin's writings have been appropriated by later social Darwinist and eugenicist thought. Levine makes a cogent defence of the practice of close reading both Darwin and his many commentators. The result is a subtle but powerful argument about the way in which distinctive strands of Darwin's intellectual and personal identity—as romantic materialist and emotional subject—need to be appreciated as a possible resource of re-enchantment, overturning pessimistic, rationalistic, and technological disenchantment."—David Amigoni, Keele University, coeditor of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species": New Interdisciplinary Essays"Passionate, erudite, and polemical, Darwin Loves You draws its arguments from a heady array of writers and philosophers. This is a book to think with."—Rebecca Stott, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, author of Darwin and the Barnacle
Darwin Loves You is a very important work that deserves to be read by many people well outside the narrow circle of Darwin specialists. First, it is a brilliant account of how a science is taken up and used for diverse cultural ends, far beyond the intention of the author and the content of the text. Second, it is crucially relevant to the present day with the horrifying rise of fundamentalist religion in America and abroad. It shows how science gets misused and misunderstood in dangerous ways by fanatics. Third, and most important of all, it introduces us to a man who is deeply in love with his subject, wanting to engage the reader. One learns here truly why scholarship is such a joyful activity.
— Michael Ruse, author of "The Evolution-Creation Struggle"
This is a rich and multilayered argument for a wider appreciation of a 'kinder, gentler' Darwin. It examines many of the ways in which Darwin's writings have been appropriated by later social Darwinist and eugenicist thought. Levine makes a cogent defence of the practice of close reading both Darwin and his many commentators. The result is a subtle but powerful argument about the way in which distinctive strands of Darwin's intellectual and personal identity—as romantic materialist and emotional subject—need to be appreciated as a possible resource of re-enchantment, overturning pessimistic, rationalistic, and technological disenchantment.
— David Amigoni, Keele University, coeditor of "Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species": New Interdisciplinary Essays"