Thursday, February 12, 2009

Demythologizing Lincoln and Darwin: A Very Short Historiography

Today marks the 200th birthdays of two of the 19th century's, and probably any century's, greatest figures - Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Rather than going into some detailed rambling of the historical importance of these two men as is usually my wont, I'd like to discuss the mythologizing of historical figures and the damage that can often occur when we replace the complexity of a person's character with the stagnant archetypes of our own era's perceptions. To foist upon any historical person traits that are not theirs but ours is, to paraphrase Orson Scott Card, "to kill them all over again." It is not uncommon, of course, for someone's persona to take on a life of its own following his death, especially when the life was so full and the deeds so grand. This disservice begins, I believe, when a person's life can be boiled down to one moment or one act or one thought, and Lincoln's and Darwin's are often described this way: Lincoln freed the slaves; Darwin discovered evolution. End of story. This distillation obscures the complexities of these men's lives and allows, in mythological fashion, for the blanks to be filled in as we will, and depending on our perspectives, allows us to deify or demonize at will. Lincoln was the "Great Emancipator"; Lincoln was a "war-criminal." Darwin was a brilliant naturalist; Darwin was an anti-Christian demagogue. These definitive labels do an injustice not only to the men themselves but to the historical record of which they are a part.

Lincoln scholarship has gone through numerous phases, but the best interpretations have been the ones that ignore the current trends and attempt to get to the heart of the man himself, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses, the flaws and the personal growth that arises from confronting them. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Center for African and African-American Research, has described the writings and historical scholarship related to Lincoln as similar to that of Christ, in the sense that he has been "all things to all people," and Gates is quick to point out that next to Christ, more books have been written about Lincoln than any other figure in history (his count is over 15,000). How can we siphon through all of these to dig out the "true Lincoln" or is such a feat even possible? The short answer, I think, is that it is not. History is a selective narrative of past events and every historian will inevitably emphasize that which they believe is most important for understanding the person and the times. The problem is when we leave out important aspects of a person's character because they don't "fit" with our preconceived notions of who they were. Christopher Columbus is an extraordinary example of selective scholarship that has obscured basic facts about a man. Sure, he was a master sailor, a cunning businessman, and a daring adventurer, and he has been mythologized to the point that we have named cities, built statues, and granted a holiday after the man; but he was also so intent on the acquisition of gold and the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity, that his actions in the New World can be described as nothing short of genocidal. Lincoln's actions, similarly, cannot be boiled down to "he freed the slaves" because this ignores realities that were characteristic not just of Lincoln but of most white men and women of mid-19th century America. Lincoln, while he disagreed with the institution of slavery, did not believe that blacks should be given full citizenship in the U.S., which included voting rights, the right to marry whites, the right to sit on juries, and so on. And while the Emancipation Proclamation is undoubtedly one of the most significant documents in American history, we must not overlook the political calculus in its inception. Some modern scholars have admirably demonstrated that the legal rationale behind the document lay in the war powers granted to the president during the Civil War, and that as enemy combatants, southern slave owners' property was considered the property of the United States because of their state of rebellion. Therefore, all slaves in states that had seceded became property of the U.S., and their freedom was granted at the will of the new property owners. This, of course, did not include slaves in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, or Maryland, since the citizens there were not in a state of rebellion and thus the U.S. had no property rights over them.

The misunderstandings of Darwin are equally as multitudinous and this often has more to do with a misunderstanding of evolution than with the man himself. Perhaps the greatest general myth about Darwin is that he "discovered" evolution. Evolutionary theory had been around for centuries, being discussed in primitive fashion in the Classical Age of Greece and Rome as well as in the Middle Ages and Early Modern times. What Darwin did was provide a mechanism by which it occurred - the theory of natural selection. The prevailing notions of life in Darwin's era were dominated by essentialism and uniformitarianism, though the evolutionary theory that did hold sway among some naturalists was the Lamarckian version which said that changes acquired during an organism's lifetime were then passed on to its offspring. Darwin, informed by the thinking of Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, corrected this view by describing change as occurring within a population, rather than an individual, and that only inherited traits that allowed a population to survive would be passed on. One standard example given to explain the difference between Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution is that of a giraffe's neck: it's not the case that a giraffe's neck gets a little longer in a single giraffe's lifetime, whose offspring's neck gets a little longer, and so on until the neck is as long as it is now. The case is that, in a given population of giraffes, the organisms with the longer necks are better suited to survive and thus pass along their traits while those short necked giraffes do not pass on their traits and die out. Darwin himself admittedly did not know what was being passed on, and it was over half a century before the discovery of DNA and the field of genetics would give evolution its modern synthesis. But what about the man Darwin? For one thing, he is associated with atheism, not just by fundamentalist Christians out to vilify him, but among atheists themselves who wish to claim him as some sort of patron saint. Darwin began his life on the track to becoming a country clergyman in the Anglican Church as his father wanted, but his restless spirit tended to set him on the wandering path, and this in part led him to the circumnavigational voyage in the Beagle. While he later called himself an agnostic, he never was quite able to completely relinquish the idea of God, and attended Church with his family well after his formulation of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Perhaps more mythologizing than this, is the oversimplified account of his arrival at the theory of evolution. Most have heard the story of Darwin's examination of the variety of finches on the Galapagos Islands and how he wondered how the wild differences in the size, shape, and function of their beaks arose, epiphanously coming to the conclusion that descent with appropriate modifications must account for these anomalies. However, as science writer David Quamman pointed out in this month's National Geographic, his greater clues came three years before in 1832 in Argentina while viewing the assortment of fossils in Patagonia. The diversity and differentiation based on geographic and geological distribution in the fossil record were his first clues. It is also important to note that Darwin is not even the only contemporary figure to come to conclusions regarding evolution, as Alfred Russel Wallace, halfway around the world in Indonesia and Malaysia, came to very similar conclusions after noting the differences in bio-geography between the "Asian" animals West of the Macassar Straight and the "Australian" animals East of it.

Perhaps the mythologizing of historical figures is not all bad. Lincoln has become such an iconic figure of what it means to be a good president, that he has set a standard by which all other presidents are judged. Lincoln should also be a paragon for personal growth and change, as he softened many of his views on the relationship between blacks and whites by the end of his life. In fact, the last public speech he made in his life detailed his plan to grant full citizenship to black veterans of the Civil War and upstanding black men such as his friend Frederick Douglass. One person in the crowd at this speech, John Wilkes Boothe, found this personal growth to go to far. We should be wary though of anything that shrinks the life of any one man or woman to a monolithic action or thought because this removes from them everything that makes them human: flaws, idiosyncrasies of personality, internal conflicts, and the agony of personal decisions which will have consequences for all.

No comments:

Post a Comment