Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice

12. A Darwinian Revolution in the Humanities

271 Darwin’s Descent of Man fed into a larger stream of “naturalistic” thinking in the philosophy and literature of his time. In contrast to the naturalistic visions of philosophers such as Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Darwin’s vision was grounded in careful reasoning about scientific evidence. He linked us with the other animals as no one had ever done before—logically, scientifically, in a cool and methodical spirit of disinterested inquiry. Though he included passages of grand rhetoric, his vision was not at heart rhetorical. Nor was it deeply inflected with any ideological animus. Over the period of a century and a half, these differences of intellectual quality have made a decisive difference in the magnitude and character of Darwin’s influence. Nietzsche, violent, ferocious, and never quite sane, has had his day. Spencer grows dusty on the shelves of antiquarian intellectual history. In our thinking on man’s place in nature, Darwin is closer to us now than he has ever been before. On the Origin of Species had an almost immediate impact on biological science—on the recognition that species had evolved and had not just been “created” by divine fiat. Darwin’s theory about how species had evolved—by means of natural selection, through a process of adaptation—was suspended in controversy for another half century. The Modern Synthesis, integrating genetics with the theory of natural selection, settled that controversy. Though scientific judgment on Darwin’s explanation for the mechanism of evolution remained in suspense for decades, the idea of evolution itself—the chapter 12 , A Darwinian Revolution in the Humanities 272 Reading Human Nature idea of “descent with modification”—has shed a continuous light on our understanding of other species. The social sciences followed a very different trajectory. For them, the Darwinian dawn was like the light of a day in the far North, when the dawn and dusk have scarcely any time between them. Around the turn of the century, three great minds, those of John Dewey, William James, and Thorstein Veblen, caught something of Darwin’s illumination. In the second decade of the twentieth century, though, founding figures in the social sciences turned resolutely away from Darwin’s naturalistic vision of man’s place in nature. This is a story that has now often been told—how Durkheim, Kroeber, Lowie, and others built the cultural box outside of which no one could think. Humanity produces culture, they declared, and culture produces humanity. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, this vicious conceptual circle formed the boundary for most thinking in the social sciences.1 In the magnificent conclusion to The Descent of Man, Darwin evoked and affirmed the nobility of the human mind—the “god-like intellect” that has “penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system.” Darwin would perhaps have been surprised at the extent to which this god-like mind bears within itself the power to be vastly clever in supporting the flimsiest possible ideas. Why did humans—so far along the way in their descent from their “lowly origins”—descend to folly like that of the culturalist circle? How could intelligent people ever have convinced themselves that humans hold themselves up in mid-air, creating cultures out of nothing? Pride, for one thing. If we create culture, and culture creates us, then we create ourselves. Milton’s Satan would have understood something of the psychological impulse behind the culturalist theory, and all the more once he discovered, as Nietzsche would have explained to him, that God was dead. With God out of the picture, humans had no choice but to take responsibility for making their own world. Pride and a sense of ethical responsibility are both real motives, but to make a theory plausible, one needs more than motive. A theory is plausible, on some level, because it appeals to our sense of reality, however fanciful that sense might be. One reality supporting the notion that culture makes human nature is that we do, in fact, live in the imagination. “A fictive covering / Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.”2 That’s a poet talking, Wallace Stevens, and of course poets have a vested interest in the imagina- A Darwinian Revolution in the Humanities 273 tion, but then, in that respect, they are only human. Humans are very strange and unusual animals. Like other animals, they are driven by their passions, prompted...