Krannawitter on Lincoln, Darwin, & Biblical Historicism

This is the fourth part of my comments on Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln.

In the first paragraph of his book, Krannawitter refers to Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species as influencing P. T. Barnum's exhibit at his American Museum on "Connecting Link between Human and Brute Creation." Krannawitter suggests that the evolutionary theories of Chambers and Darwin denied the equal moral dignity of human beings in a way that supported racist arguments for slavery. This is the first of many references in Krannawitter's book to Darwin, with the suggestion that Lincoln's defense of natural right as based on human equality and opposition to slavery was subverted by Darwinian evolution, which supported the historicism that led to the progressivist attack on natural right and limited government.

Krannawitter's writing on this point is strange. First of all, he says nothing about William Herndon's report that Lincoln read Chambers' book and was persuaded by it. Herndon wrote: "The volume was published in Edinburgh, and undertook to demonstrate the doctrine of development or evolution. The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called 'universal law'--evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine." Later, Darwin acknowledged that Chambers' book anticipated many of the main elements of Darwin's own account of evolution. So here, as I have indicated in many previous posts, we see one of the many points of agreement between Lincoln and Darwin.

It is also strange that with all of Krannawitter's references to Darwin, he never cites any specific passage of any writing by Darwin. This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with Harry Jaffa. He criticized Darwin. I responded by quoting some passages from Darwin's Descent of Man. Jaffa then confessed that he had never read Darwin. Similarly, I see no evidence that Krannawitter has read Darwin.

Jason Jividen is a professor at the University of Saint Francis (Fort Wayne, Indiana), who wrote a dissertation under me on the use and abuse of Lincoln in American political rhetoric, which I expect will soon be published as a book. Recently, he sent me an email message about Krannawitter's book, which included this comment:

"Despite the fact that they paint Darwin and Hegel as the twin evils for natural right, the Claremont/Jaffa types almost always delve much more deeply into historicism (Hegel, Wilson, FDR, etc.) than Darwin. . . . What is often lacking in the Claremont stuff here is an actual demonstration, even in brief, of Darwin's thought, using Darwin's own words, i.e. the method they claim most historians, politicians, and political scientists refuse to do when looking at Lincoln. Rather, there is always something linking Darwin to progressivism and the like using Wilson's words, or Dewey's words or something like that. But if that is all it takes to link Darwin to progressivism/modern liberalism, then we could just as easily link Lincoln with the left simply because they so frequently cite him. Even if they are right about Darwin, one would think that they would need to treat Darwin in the same manner they insist great thinkers should be treated."

I agree. If Krannawitter and the Jaffa followers were to read Darwin, the first thing they might notice is that he was a life-long opponent of slavery. Moreover, much of The Descent of Man is an attack on the theory of scientific racism that the human races are actually separate species. Against this, Darwin argued that all human beings were equal as members of the same species and thus endowed with the uniquely human capacities for language and the moral sense. Here then is the ground for Darwinian natural right as based in a universal human nature. I have elaborated these points on this blog and in various publications, especially the chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right.

Krannawitter might respond to this idea of Darwinian natural right by saying that there is no need for a scientific ground for natural right. He says that "human knowledge of human nature is prescientific and prephilosophic," because "our commonsense knowledge of human nature precedes all philosophic or scientific inquiry" (139). This might be so. But isn't it helpful to have modern science supporting our commonsense grasp of human equality? After all, Krannawitter says that "throughout history, few people have found it obvious that all human beings are equally human," which suggests that "common sense" is not enough.

Although Krannawitter refers often to Aristotle, he never mentions Aristotle's account of the natural slave. If he did, he would have to confront the fundamental issue in the whole debate over slavery: Are some human beings by nature adapted for slavery? Darwinian science supports the conclusion that despite the differences between individuals and races, all normal human beings have those minimal capacities for reason and speech that constitute the universal nature of the human species. The proslavery racists had to argue for a racial science that would deny this. Krannawitter never takes up this debate.

If Darwinian science is not the source of the historicism that subverted the idea of natural right, then where do we find the source? Krannawitter points to Hegel. But doesn't Hegel's philosophy of history ultimately derive from the biblical idea of history? In fact, Hegel acknowledged this when he wrote: "We transform the language of religion into that of philosophy."

This is pertinent to Lincoln and the slavery debate. As I have often noted on this blog, the Bible supports slavery, and so the debate over slavery in America created a theological crisis. Krannawitter recognizes this in his writing about pro-slavery Christian theology. He notes James Henley Thornwell's biblical historicism: "God is in history" (238). And he also comments on Fred Ross's biblical defense of slavery based on the claim that right and wrong are based completely on the will of God, and therefore any affirmation that right and wrong can be known naturally by human reason is atheism. Since the Bible clearly sanctions slavery and never condemns it as wrong, we know that slavery is morally right because God commands it (238-41).

Krannawitter says that "Lincoln proceeded to dismantle the pro-slavery theological arguments presented by Ross" (243). But when we look at Lincoln's remarks as quoted by Krannawitter, we see that Lincoln is actually evasive about the Bible on slavery: "The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation--the Bible--gives none--or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning." He then goes on to suggest that "Dr. Ross" is probably moved by selfish motives that detract from "perfect impartiality." Lincoln thus appeals to our knowledge of human nature as a ground for moral discussion rather than the Bible.

Don't biblical religion and the idea that right and wrong depend ultimately on the will of God expressed over history through revelation provide the basis for historicist relativism? Doesn't a scientific grasp of the human nature of morality provide an alternative to biblical historicism?

For a few samples of my blog posts on Lincoln, Darwin, and Jaffa, you can go here, here, and here.

Did Darwin Naturalize Genocide?--Or Does Right Make Might?

The longest chapter in my book Darwinian Natural Right is on slavery, because the history of the debate over slavery illustrates how a Darwinian understanding of evolved human nature supports moral judgment. We can see that slavery is wrong because it violates a natural moral sense rooted in human biology.

Part of my argument in that chapter concerns Darwin's moral condemnation of slavery and how he saw his science of the biological unity of the human races as subverting scientific racism. The evidence for that interpretation of Darwin is now strengthened by a new book--Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (2009). Desmond and Moore show how Darwin's life-long opposition to slavery influenced his science, and in particular, how his evolutionary science of Homo sapiens as one species refuted the scientific racism of those who claimed that the human races were actually separate species, and that the inferior races were naturally adapted for slavery.

And yet there's an ambiguity in the message of the Desmond and Moore book. On the one hand, their dominant theme is how Darwin's opposition to slavery manifested his humanitarian morality. On the other hand, they occasionally suggest that Darwin's theory of evolution could be interpreted as a "biologizing of genocide" (147-55, 318, 326, 337, 344). The problem is indicated in the full title of Darwin's most famous book--The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Does this mean that the extinction of the "lower races" by the more "favoured races" must be accepted as part of nature's evolutionary "struggle for life"? If so, then was Adolf Hitler correct to see this as scientific support for his Nazi ideology as based on the the triumph of the Master Race in the struggle against inferior races? Would this confirm Richard Weikart's "Darwin-to-Hitler" thesis?

During his trip on the Beagle, Darwin saw the brutality of European colonists in enslaving others and extinguishing aboriginal peoples in warfare. Near the end of his Voyage of the Beagle (Doubleday, 1962), Darwin recounts that every time he hears a "distant scream," he is reminded of his painful feelings from hearing slaves being tortured in Brazil. He describes in vivid language some of the "heart-sickening atrocities" he observed, and he concludes:

"Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter;--what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children--those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own--being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendents, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty; but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin" (496-98).

Darwin's reference at the end--to British efforts "to expiate our sin"--is to the acts of the British Parliament in outlawing the slave trade in 1807 and abolishing slavery in the British colonies in 1833. Most importantly, the outlawing of the slave trade was enforced by the Royal Navy sailing the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas capturing slave ships and liberating their human cargo. This anti-slavery policy was induced through an extended campaign by anti-slavery societies that wrote up reports with detailed descriptions of the cruelty of slavery, reports that were widely published to provoke moral emotions of revulsion. Thus, these groups employed the same rhetorical tactics as are used today by human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Darwin's writings contributed to the moral rhetoric of abolitionism in three ways. The first way is by expressing his own moral outrage at the atrocities of slavery, which he did in his Voyage of the Beagle book and elsewhere. Desmond and Moore stress this.

But they don't recognize a second way in which he supported abolitionist morality. From the notebooks that he began after returning from his voyage, we can see that in explaining the evolution of morality, he relied on those theories of morality promoted by David Hume and Adam Smith that emphasized moral emotions or moral sentiments based on sympathy or fellow feeling. By extending ourselves imaginatively into the lives of others, we mirror their emotional experiences, and thus feel disapproval when they are unfairly harmed by others. In the Descent of Man, Darwin elaborated his theory of how this natural moral sense could have evolved. He thus supported the moral rhetoric of abolitionism by showing that the abolitionist appeal to moral emotions of repugnance towards slavery based on our sympathy for the slaves expresses the emotional roots of moral experience. Later, Edward Westermarck elaborated this theory of morality as founded on moral emotions. And, most recently, biological research on the emotional character of morality--including the neural bases of moral emotions--has deepened the science of Darwin's theory. Desmond and Moore don't see the importance of this Darwinian account of morality in sustaining the moral case against slavery.

Desmond and Moore stress the third way in which Darwin's writing supported abolitionism--his argument for the unity of the human races. Through much of the nineteenth century, there was an intense scientific debate between the polygenists who argued that the human races were actually separate species and the monogenists who argued that the races were varieties of the same human species. The polygenists provided scientific support for the proslavery claim that black slaves belonged to an inferior species, while the monogenists sustained a scientific basis for the unity of the human species as one human family. As Desmond and Moore show, the leaders of the Confederacy in the American Civil War understood the moral and political implications of this scientific debate, because they sent paid Confederate agents to England to support the Anthropological Society of London, founded in 1863, which sponsored the pro-slavery arguments for polygenism.

But then Desmond and Moore admit that their story of Darwin as the humanitarian opponent of slavery and racial bigotry is apparently undermined in two ways. First, in the Origin of Species, Darwin devotes a long passage to his study of the "slave-making instinct" in some ants, which was interpreted by some readers as suggesting that slavery could be justified as natural. In fact, as Desmond and Moore indicate, the discovery of ant slavery by Pierre Huber early in the nineteenth century was cited by pro-slavery authors as a clear example of natural slavery. Desmond and Moore worry that Darwin was "naturalizing the slave-making instinct" (302). But they are reassured that Darwin refers to this as "so extraordinary and odious an instinct." They don't acknowledge, however, that in later editions of the Origin, Darwin dropped the words "and odious." Did Darwin decide that it is not appropriate to morally condemn the behavior of animals that have no moral sense? Desmond and Moore suggest this when they argue that only humans are "reasoning moral beings" who can be held morally responsible for their behavior, and therefore there is no moral analogy between ant slavery and human slavery (303-304). They might have reinforced this point if they had referred to a passage in the Descent where Darwin speculates on how bees might have developed a different moral sense from that of humans if the bees had developed intellectual faculties comparable to those of humans, which suggests that without such intellectual capabilities, there is no moral experience.

In DARWINIAN NATURAL RIGHT, I have a long section on ant slavery. I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities suggest that slavery among ants and humans is rooted in a natural inclination to exploitation. The differences suggest that the uniquely human opposition to slavery is rooted in a natural moral sense that resists exploitation.

There's a second, and more pervasive, way in which Darwin's writing seems to weaken the story of his humanitarianism. Although in his early notebooks, he wrote a note resolving never to use the words "higher" and "lower," he did often distinguish the "civilized races" from the "lower races." He also described the military success of the "civilized races" in extinguishing the "lower races," which he presented as crucial for moral evolution, because those groups that were more loyal and courageous in fighting for their group would be favored by natural selection in defeating those groups that were less loyal and courageous. Desmond and Moore attribute this to the influence on Darwin of Thomas Malthus's depiction of how human beings are driven to compete for scarce resources, and they worry that this pushed Darwin towards "rationalizing the darker side of tribal contacts" (147).

In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin writes:

"Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals--the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children" (433-34).

He describes in gruesome detail the war he observed in Argentina as General Juan Manual Rosas tried to exterminate the Indians.

". . . This is a dark picture; but how much more shocking is the unquestionable fact, that all the women who appear above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood! When I exclaimed that this appeared rather inhuman, he answered, 'Why, what can be done? they breed so!'

"Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?" (102-103).

In his Beagle Diary (ed. R. D. Keynes), Darwin wrote:

"If this warfare is successful, that is if all the Indians are butchered, a grand extent of country will be gained for the production of cattle: & the vallies of the R. Negro, Colorado, Sauce will be most productive in corn. The country will be in the hands of white Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians. The former being a little superior in civilization, as they are inferior in every moral virtue" (181).

Should we worry, as Desmond and Moore do, that this shows Darwin "biologizing colonial eradication" (149)? Is it immoral to teach that the natural history of humanity shows "the stronger always extirpating the weaker"?

But notice, first of all, how Darwin's language conveys a sense of moral tragedy and revulsion--"melancholy," "a dark picture," "shocking," "inhuman," "atrocities," "butchered." Because their advanced agrarian society based on farming and herding gives them economic superiority over aboriginal peoples, those "a little superior in civilization" are also superior in military power although "inferior in every moral virtue."

We might read Darwin as pointing to a problem clearly captured in Pascal's Pensees (fr. 192):

"It is just that what is just should be followed; it is necessary that what is stronger should be followed. Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyrannical. . . . We must therefore combine justice and force; and to do this, what is just should be strong, or what is strong should be just."

We might be reminded of Thucydides' famous account of the Melian dialogue, where the Athenian envoys tell the Melian envoys: "you know as well as we do that justice in human arguments is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" (5.89). They go on to declare: "Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessity of their nature, they rule wherever they can" (5.105).

We miss the deep lesson in the Melian dialogue, however, if we see it simply as the triumph of the strong over the weak. The Athenians failed in their attempt to persuade the Melians to surrender without a fight. The Melians fought to the death, forcing the Athenians to suffer casualties during a long siege. So even though the Melians were defeated, their just resistance to unjust aggression inflicted great harm on the Athenians.

Nietzsche presents this lesson in his Darwinian account of morality in Human, All Too Human (92-93). Justice originates as reciprocity between approximately equal powers. But there can also be a "right of the weaker." "If one party, a city under siege, for example, submits under certain conditions to a greater power, its reciprocal condition is that this first party can destroy itself, burn the city, and thus make the power suffer a great loss. Thus there is a kind of equalization, on the basis of which rights can be established. Preservation is to the enemy's advantage."

The natural propensity to take vengeance against injustice through physical violence is a powerful check on injustice. This is conveyed in one of the first moral laws of the Bible: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Genesis 9:6). The natural human propensity to murder is countered by the natural human propensity to kill murderers. The sense of justice is most clearly manifested in the sense of injustice--the desire to right a wrong by taking vengeance on the wrong doer.

It's an uncomfortable truth that moral history is often decided by acts of violence and war. That's particularly true in the modern history of the debate over moral rights. John Locke's teaching about natural rights begins with his assertion of the natural human right to use force and violence to protect one's life and property. A just government is to secure rights. But when justice is perverted, the people have "no appeal but to Heaven," as in the Old Testament case of Jephtha and the Ammonites, and that means war. The ultimate check on an unjust government is the threat of revolutionary violence.

Similarly, we think of the American Declaration of Independence as a noble expression of the moral principles of rights. But, of course, this was a declaration of war in which the moral and legal debate over rights would be settled by force of arms.

Likewise, when the debate over slavery in the United States reached an impasse, the Civil War resolved the issue by military force. Abraham Lincoln concluded his Cooper Union speech in 1860 by declaring: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." Then, in 1863, in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke of the U.S. as "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." But then he immediately warned that "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." Lincoln must hope that the moral superiority of freedom over slavery can be expressed as military superiority--this is his "faith that right makes might."

Some religious believers say that the only conclusive way to resolve great moral disputes is by appealing to God's moral law as revealed in the Bible. But we should note that the Bible itself is a remarkably bloody book: from the Old Testament to the last book of the New Testament (Revelations), God leads His people in war. Moreover, the Bible didn't resolve the debate over slavery because biblical believers couldn't agree as to whether the Bible supported or condemned slavery. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln observed that in the division between North and South: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

In fact, as Mark Noll has observed, the Civil War became a theological crisis for biblical believers who could not find in the Bible clear resolution of the moral question of slavery. Noll writes:

". . . The country and the churches were both in trouble because the remedy that finally solved the question of how to interpret the Bible was recourse to arms. The supreme crisis over the Bible was there existed no apparent biblical resolution to the crisis. . . . it was left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant."

And, in fact, we now know, as a result of the Civil War, that the Bible must condemn slavery as immoral.

This combination of justice and force--so that "right makes might"--continues in the modern history of human rights. The brutal power of Nazism seemed to show the same dark power in human history that Darwin had seen--"the stronger always extirpating the weaker." But ultimately the Nazis were defeated not by force of moral argument but by force of military arms. And then, the moral revulsion against Nazism and the Holocaust led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declared that "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind." Here, then, are the instinctive moral emotions of repugnance against injustice that Darwin and Westermarck saw at the base of all moral experience. Our revulsion against great "wrongs" leads us to assert the "rights" that we want to defend.

The Universal Declaration also states: "it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law." There was a long discussion among the drafters of the Universal Declaration as to whether they should declare a human right to revolution. Some of them were nervous about openly endorsing such a right as encouraging anarchy and subversion of legal government. But they finally agreed that this statement should clearly acknowledge "rebellion against tyranny and opppression" as as "last resort." This statement also implies that we can identify human rights as those conditions for human life that cannot be tyrannically denied without eventually provoking violent rebellion.

We can say, then, that human rights are natural rights in so far as they are enforced by the natural human propensity to take vengeance against, and feel revulsion towards, great injustices.

If this is so, then right does make might.

A few of the many posts that take up related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here, here., here, here, here, here, and here.

Darwin, Lincoln, and Slavery

At this time of the year, we celebrate the remarkable coincidence of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin being born on the same day--February 12, 1809. Last year, I wrote a post on their intellectual similarities, which can be found here.

As I said then, there are at least five points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln. (1) Both believed in a universe governed by natural causes. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) And both abhorred slavery as immoral.

From his voyage on the "Beagle," Darwin was horrified by the brutal treatment of slaves in South America, and this reinforced an abolitionist disposition that ran through his family.

Proslavery fanatics in the American South and elsewhere found support for slavery in the Bible and in science. The argument for scientific racism rested on the claim that the human races were actually separate species, and that the black species was naturally inferior to the white species. In March of 1861, Alexander Stephens, the new vice-president of the Confederate States of America, insisted that Thomas Jefferson's belief in natural equality had been refuted by modern science. "Our new government," he declared, "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not the equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition."

Against this "polygenist" claim of the scientific racists that the human races were separate species, Darwin defended the "monogenist" position that the races are only varieties or sub-species of the same race. This meant that he had to explain the evolution of racial differences. And he tried to do this by developing his idea of "sexual selection": just as human plant and animal breeders can select for desirable traits, animals act as self-breeders in selecting mates. So the observable differences in the human races could be the product of aesthetic differences in human racial populations.

The importance that Darwin gave to sexual selection is indicated by the fact that over half of The Descent of Man is devoted to sexual selection. In the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Descent of Man, James Moore and Adrian Desmond argue that Darwin's primary motivation for writing the whole book was to attack slavery and racist science.

The Rev. John Brodie Innes--Darwin's vicar--saw this when he first read Darwin's book. He wrote to Darwin: "I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ant slaves to the white." To which Darwin replied: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do: I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."

Innes' reference to ant slavery is revealing. In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities suggest that in both cases slavery arises as a natural form of social parasitism in which slavemakers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation. But the differences between ant slavery and human slavery suggest that human beings are naturally inclined to detect and resist exploitation through slavery.

Among human beings, the coercion of slaves by masters cannot be based on a natural complementarity of desires. The master's desire to exploit the slave clashes with the slave's desire to be free from exploitation.

Darwin and Lincoln saw this as showing that slavery is contrary to human nature and thus contrary to natural right.

Debating Darwinian Liberalism (7): Wiker on Ant Slavery and Christian Sympathy

In his contribution to Dilley's book, Benjamin Wiker repeats his argument from previous writings that Darwinian science destroys morality.  I have written some responses to Wiker that can be found here and here.

One section of Wiker's chapter is devoted to Darwinism and slavery (39-42).  The longest chapter of my Darwinian Natural Right is on Darwinism and slavery (161-210).  Wiker is silent about what I argue there.

Wiker asserts that Darwin failed to see that his theory of evolution contradicted his personal hatred of slavery.  Wiker quotes a long passage from Darwin's account in The Origin of Species of the "slave-making instinct" among some species of ants.  Wiker then observes:

"The reader, I hope, can see the difficulty.  Human slavery has been, throughout history, an extraordinary wide-spread phenomenon.  Again, Darwin admits in his Descent, the 'great sin of Slavery has been almost universal, and slaves have often been treated in an infamous manner' (Darwin 1871, I.III, 94).  If ant-slave making can be perfectly described as the result of natural selection, and all human moral and social traits are likewise to be explained a the result of natural selection, it would appear that the human institution of slavery, wherever it exists, is just as natural among human beings as it is among ants.  Every widespread trait must have been beneficial or it would not have been widespread.  In what way can a particular evolved trait that has proven to be so beneficial be a 'great sin'?" (40)

Wiker concludes: "There can be no moral blame attached to slavery in the present precisely because, on Darwinian grounds, it must be the result of a naturally selected trait that contributed to survival in the past" (41).

Since Darwin emphasizes the importance of sympathy in the evolution of human morality, one might think that this moral trait would lead to the condemnation of slavery.  But Wiker will have none of this:

". . . Picking one nice moral trait--such as sympathy, or the present favorite among morally-minded Darwinists, altruism--that we might like to be more widespread receives no more special support from natural selection, than does any other malleable trait.  In fact--and it is a very important fact--the widespread development of what Darwin meant by sympathy, is actually historically due to the spread of Christianity.  Being kind to one's friends and kin is understandable as a natural principle; loving one's enemies and doing good to those one does not even know, who offer no hope for contributing to one's own survival, are explicit contradictions to Darwinism" (42).

In all of Dilley's book, in which most of the authors argue that it is only the "Judeo-Christian worldview" that saves us from the immorality of Darwinism, this is the only extended historical example of how Christianity supported a moral insight that otherwise would have been denied by Darwinian nihilism.

In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I provide an extensive account of ant slavery considered in the context of the whole debate over slavery from Aristotle to Hume to Jefferson to Darwin to Lincoln.   I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery.  The similarities suggest that both for human beings and for ants, slavery is a form of social parasitism in which slave-makers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation.  The differences suggest that human beings resist the exploitation of slavery because it violates their natural moral sense.  That moral sense arises as a joint product of emotional capacities for feeling social passions such as anger and love and rational capacities for judging social principles such as kinship and reciprocity.  Since these emotional and rational capacities are part of human nature for all normal human beings, the moral sense as an expression of those capacities is a human universal, and no race of human beings is naturally adapted for slavery.  We should expect, therefore, that in every human society where slavery exists, slavery will produce moral conflict.  Unlike slave ants, human slaves will resist exploitation and demand social cooperation based on kinship and reciprocity.

Since Wiker has chosen to remain silent about my argument in this chapter, I have no way of knowing whether he has any response.

Wiker has also chosen to remain silent about the fact that the people pointing to ant slavery as justification for human slavery were devout Christians like Thomas Cobb in his Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States (1858).  Wiker is also silent about the fact that Cobb and many other Christian defenders of slavery were able to cite the Bible as supporting slavery, because the Bible (both Old Testament and New Testament) sanctions slavery.  For example, the book Slavery Ordained by God by the prominent minister Fred Ross shows that the Bible never condemns slavery and always supports it.  Those Christians who condemned slavery had to reinterpret the Bible by passing it through their naturally evolved moral sense of the evil of slavery.  And consequently, as Mark Noll has shown, the American Civil War became a theological crisis, because American Christians could not rely on the Bible to resolve their moral debate over slavery.  As Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural, both sides in the Civil War thought they were fighting for God's cause: "Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

What this shows is that while the "Judeo-Christian worldview" is often helpful in illuminating our moral experience, it is often unreliable, and in many cases it must be corrected by our natural moral sense as rooted in our evolved human nature.

I have invited Wiker to write a response to this post.  He has responded with silence.

A few of the many blog posts I have written on Darwinism and slavery can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Darwin's Vicar

As we enter the Easter season, we should notice the continuing debate over the relationship between Darwinian science and Biblical religion. For example, last November, Time magazine published a debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, with Dawkins claiming that Darwinism refutes religious belief and Collins claiming that Darwinism and religion are compatible.

The fundamental difficulty manifest in this debate is one that I have taken up in my books and this blog. It's the problem of ultimate explanation. In the search for ultimate causes, we must appeal to some final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained. Either we look to Nature as the final ground. Or we look to God as the supernatural ground of Nature. I cannot see any way around this problem, which shows the limits of human reason.

As I have argued on this blog, Darwin himself saw no necessary conflict between evolutionary science and Biblical religion. He appealed to the traditional conception of "two books": God speaks both through the Book of Nature as studied by human reason and the Book of Scripture as revealed to the faithful.

In his personal religious views, Darwin moved from being an orthodox Christian in the earlier parts of his life to being a skeptic or agnostic at the end of his life. Unlike Dawkins, Darwin never attacked religion or denied that there were fundamental mysteries that left an opening for religious belief.

Darwin's stance on the relationship between science and religion is illustrated in his personal life by his friendship with the Reverend J. Brodie Innes. When Darwin moved to the village of Downe in 1842, Innes was curate of the adjoining parish of Farnborough, and Innes became the vicar of Downe in 1846. Innes moved to Scotland in 1862. For over 30 years, they were close friends.

The correspondence between Darwin and Innes was published in the Annals of Science (December, 1961), as edited by Robert Stecher. This correspondence shows a remarkable friendship between two men who respected one another despite their disagreeing about almost everything. Innes was a Tory. Darwin was a Whig who supported the Liberal Party. Innes was a devout theologian of the Church of England. Darwin was not a church-goer, although he supported the Church in its parish activities. Innes read Darwin's books with great interest, and he shared Darwin's interest in natural history, but Innes was never persuaded by Darwin's evolutionary theory.

When religious leaders attacked Darwin, Innes defended him by saying, "I never saw a word of his writings which was an attack on religion. He followed his own course as a naturalist, and he leaves Moses to take care of himself." Like Darwin, Innes used the "two books" idea to separate the Book of Revelation from the Book of Nature, so that nature could be studied scientifically without necessarily denying the claims of revelation.

One particularly interesting disagreement between them was on slavery. After Innes had read the Descent of Man, he wrote to Darwin: "I have today finished reading your charming book, . . . full of the most interesting facts of natural history. I am not a convert to the theory you found on them. I hold to the old belief that a man was made a man though developed into niggers who must be made to work and better men able to make them, if those radicals did not interfere with the salutary chastisement needful, neglecting the lesson taught by the black ants slaves to the white." Darwin wrote back: "my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes & slavery as yours do; I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as this goes."

This exchange shows that Innes recognized that attacking slavery and refuting racist science was one of the main purposes of Darwin's writing in the Descent. It also shows the possible conflict between Biblical morality and Darwin's natural moral sense. As I have indicated in some of my posts, the Bible seems to endorse slavery, and that's why many of the proslavery thinkers could defend slavery as biblically grounded. But Darwin regarded slavery as contrary to natural moral principles of justice as reciprocity (see my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right).

While some Biblical believers claim that morality without Biblcial religion is impossible, this dispute over slavery shows that sometimes we must appeal to our natural moral sense to correct the teachings of the Bible.

Slavery, Southern Conservatism, and Darwinian Natural Right

"Slavery is a conservative institution."

"Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon."

The first quotation is from Thomas R. R. Cobb's Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States (1858). The second is from Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind (1953). A Darwinian conception of natural right supports Kirk against Cobb.

Kirk's remark comes in his section on the "Southern conservatism" of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun. Kirk argues that their Southern tradition of conservatism has never recovered from their imprudence in defending slavery. Elsewhere, Kirk praises Abraham Lincoln for his prudent statesmanship in his handling of slavery and the Civil War. But Kirk never explains exactly why the proslavery position was imprudent. I would say that Lincoln was a prudent statesman because he never lost slight of the evil of slavery as violating natural right, while Calhoun defended slavery as a "positive good." This moral blindness on Calhoun's part crippled him in a way that prevented him from being a truly prudent statesman.

Calhoun's "positive good" defense of slavery is elaborated in Cobb's book, which is the only legal treatise on slavery written by a Southerner. Cobb was a prominent lawyer and law professor in Georgia who helped to write the Confederate Constitution. As a summary of the proslavery position, Cobb argues that slavery conforms to both natural law and divine law. Slavery is natural because negroes are natural slaves who are physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to whites, and thus the enslavement of negroes improves them and makes them happy. He finds a counterpart to negro slavery in the slavery of ants. "It is a fact, well known to entomologists, and too well established to admit of contradiction, that the red ant will issue in regular battle array, to conquer and subjugate the black or negro ant, as he is called by entomologists. And, that these negro slaves perform all the labor of the communities into which they are thus brought, with a patience and an aptitude almost incredible." Cobb does recognize the humanity of the negro as "a man, endowed with reason, will, and accountability." And yet he accepts the arguments of the scientific racists who claimed that the black race was naturally inferior in its physical, intellectual, and moral traits.

By contrast, Charles Darwin was a fervent opponent of slavery who rejected the attempts of the scientific racists to justify slavery as natural. Pierre Huber was the first naturalist to observe and write about slavery among ants in 1810. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin reported his own studies of ant slavery and offered a theory of how it could have evolved by natural selection. But he did not see this as a natural counterpart to human slavery.

In my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right, I have suggested that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities indicate that slavery among ants and humans is rooted in a natural inclination to social parasitism in which slavemakers exploit their slaves through coercion and manipulation. The differences indicate that the uniquely human opposition to slavery is rooted in a natural moral sense that resists exploitation, because human beings are naturally inclined to detect and punish exploitation. In The Descent of Man, Darwin gives his account of how that natural moral sense evolved as part of human nature.

Some of the opponents of Darwinian moral naturalism insist that morality requires a transcendent source in religious belief. But in this debate over slavery, we see that such religious belief--at least as coming from Biblical revelation--does not provide us reliable moral guidance. Cobb was able to show that the Bible--both the Old Testament and the New Testament--sanctioned slavery. (Recent books by Mark Noll and Eugene Genovese have surveyed the history of Southern proslavery arguments based on the Bible.) If the Bible cannot resolve such a moral debate, then we have to appeal to our natural moral experience that does not depend on religious belief. Darwinian science indicates how such moral experience might be founded in our evolved human nature.

The prudent statesmanship desired by conservatives requires some standard of natural right as providing the moral compass for political judgment about great questions such as slavery. Darwinian natural right sustains such statesmanship.

The Bicentennial of Darwin and Lincoln

Next year will bring the bicentennial of the birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, who were born on February 12, 1809. There are many programs scheduled to celebrate either the Lincoln bicentennial or the Darwin bicentennial, but there are few programs bringing the two together. The only program that I know of that explores the link between Lincoln and Darwin is a program over the academic year--2008-2009--sponsored by the Center for Critical Inquiry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro on the theme "Identity, Race, and Human Rights: Social Authority and the Legacies of Lincoln and Darwin."

The current issue of Newsweek has a cover article by Malcolm Jones on "Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?. There's a new book comparing Lincoln and Darwin by David Contosta entitled Rebel Giants. In January, Knopf will publish Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Making of the Modern Age.

On this blog, I have often written about the points of intellectual contact between Darwin and Lincoln. Some of these posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. These blog posts along with my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right convey my thoughts about the links between Darwin and Lincoln in their thinking about morality, politics, religion, and the place of human beings in nature.

Here I have one point to add. Lincoln had a remarkably deep understanding of human cultural evolution that follows the pattern of Darwinian universal history set forth by Darwin and by David Christian in the book that was the subject of my last post.

In his "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, his "Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society," and in his meeting with some American Indian chiefs, Lincoln laid out his conception of cultural evolution as moving through three stages of society--from foraging societies to agrarian societies to societies based on commercial exchange and free labor. Like Darwin and Christian, Lincoln believed that what made human beings unique in the animal world was the human capacity for symbolic speech, which allowed for collective learning in the artful domination of nature for the material, moral, and intellectual improvement of human life. Originally, all human beings lived by foraging--gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Some of the native American Indians manifested this way of life. The invention of agriculture--based on the cultivation of domesticated plants and the herding of domesticated animals--supported human civilization as an advance beyond the savage life of foragers. But despite the advance in civilization in agrarian states, such states were founded on slavery and other forms of coerced labor so that rulers lived by exploiting peasant labor. Lincoln saw that the Industrial Revolution based on commercial exchange and free labor was bringing a new revolution in human cultural evolution that promised the physical, moral, and intellectual liberation of labor. He saw the abolition of slavery as the crucial move towards this new state of society that would bring a "new birth of freedom," in which all human beings would have a fair chance in the "race of life."

Darwin saw this same revolution in the cultural evolution of humanity. That's why he followed with great interest the news reports of the American Civil War. We can see this in his correspondence with Asa Gray in the 1860s. Like Lincoln, Darwin was a life-long opponent of slavery who looked forward to its abolition. But like Frederick Douglass, Darwin was frustrated by Lincoln's slowness in attacking slavery, because he did not fully comprehend Lincoln's prudence in working for the "ultimate extinction" of slavery over time. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation illustrates his prudence, because he justifies the emancipation of slaves in the rebellious territories as a military necessity in time of war, while recognizing that the final and complete abolition of slavery would require the 13th Amendment. Here we see the complexity and contingency of moral judgment. It is not enough to appeal to some abstract principle of absolute morality. We must be able to judge what can be done and should be done in the circumstances of action. And since such practical judgment can never be exercised with certainty or precision, we can never be sure that our decisions are correct.

We see here how a Darwinian science of morality and politics would have to account for the complex interaction of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and individual judgment.

Many of these points will surely come up in my seminar on Lincoln this fall at Northern Illinois University.

Strauss, Slavery, and Darwinian Natural Right

        
     Ant slave rebellion?  Enslaved ants destroying a pupa of the slave-making colony


In Natural Right and History, Strauss doesn't give many examples of natural right.  But one example that appears repeatedly is slavery (23, 103-104, 118, 121, 159).  In speaking about conventionalism, Strauss observes: "what is natural comes into being and exists without violence.  All violence applied to a being makes that being do something which goes against its grain, i.e., against its nature. . . . the unnatural character of slavery seems to be obvious: it goes against any man's grain to be made a slave or to be treated as a slave" (103).  The unnatural character of slavery might be an illustration of natural right that can be defended against the relativism of both historicism and positivism.

The historicist relativist would point out that slavery has been practiced for thousands of years in many societies, which shows that our moral judgment of slavery is historically determined by the prevailing opinions of our time and place, and thus there is no natural standard for judging slavery as right or wrong.  After all, even philosophers like Aristotle defended slavery as natural, because that was the common opinion in the ancient Greek world.  And so later defenders of slavery, like the slaveholders of the American South, could cite Aristotle as supporting their position (Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, 1858, 17).

Strauss responds to this by arguing that it is untrue that Aristotle could not have conceived of the injustice of slavery, because in fact he did (23).  Most slavery in the ancient Greek world was based on the convention that people taken prisoner in war and not ransomed can be enslaved.  Such slavery is merely conventional, not natural (104).  By making the distinction between natural and conventional slavery in The Politics, Aristotle conveys an exoteric teaching that slavery is natural, which appears to conform to prevailing opinions; but he also conveys an esoteric teaching to his careful readers who will notice that by Aristotle's standards slavery as actually practiced in ancient Greece is purely conventional and not natural.

When the Spanish conquerors of the New World enslaved the Indians in the sixteenth century, this provoked a debate in Spain over the justice of this enslavement.  Juan Gines de Sepulveda appealed to Aristotle in arguing that the American Indians were natural slaves.  But then Bartolome de Las Casas condemned the enslavement as contrary to natural right.   Las Casas argued that by Aristotle's standard of natural slavery, the only natural slaves would be those few individuals who are born mentally deformed without the normal human nature of rational and political animals; and by this standard, the American Indians were clearly not natural slaves.  Their enslavement was merely conventional, because they had been defeated in war.  To treat them as natural slaves was contrary to their nature as human beings.  This argument by Las Casas can be seen today as one of the first statements of the modern conception of human rights--that all human beings have natural rights by virtue of their universal human nature.

This example of natural right does not depend on a cosmic teleology that has been refuted by modern science.  This example of natural right depends only on the immanent teleology of human nature, which can be supported by modern biological science.  As Strauss says, "however indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions" (94).  If we can "distinguish between those human desires and inclinations which are natural and those which originate in conventions," then we can judge natural right as that which conforms to natural human desires and inclinations.  If Darwin was right that an evolved moral sense is part of our evolved human nature, and that our moral sense condemns slavery, then we might see slavery as contrary to Darwinian natural right.  We can see that slavery frustrates the natural human desires of the slave, especially the desire to be free from exploitation.

But then the positivist relativist (like Max Weber) might object that in trying to draw moral conclusions from our knowledge of human nature, we are violating the distinction between facts and values, or between the is and the ought, because we fail to see the fallacy in deriving moral values from natural facts (NRH, 38-48).  As historians or scientists, we can describe the facts of human slavery: that slavery has been practiced for thousands of  years, that this has satisfied the natural desire of masters for dominating and exploiting their slaves, and that this has frustrated the natural desire of slaves to be free from exploitation.  But judging whether this is right or wrong is not a factual judgment but a moral judgment. 

Slave masters will say that slavery is right because it satisfies their natural desires.  Slaves will say that slavery is wrong because it frustrates their natural desires.  To say that one side is right and the other wrong is not an objective judgment of fact but a subjective judgment of value.  Scientific knowledge must be value-free, because while we can have an empirical and rational knowledge of facts, we cannot have any genuine knowledge of values.  The values of human beings are arbitrary preferences that conflict with one another, and there is no rational way to say that one set of values is better than another.  Reason cannot tell us that anti-slavery values are better than proslavery values.

The idea of Darwinian natural right is mistaken, therefore, because it fallaciously infers moral values from natural facts.  Darwin was vehement in his condemnation of slavery, and much of his book on human evolution--The Descent of Man--was written to refute the proslavery argument that the human races were separate species, that some species were naturally inferior, morally and intellectually, to others, and that these inferior species were naturally adapted for slavery (Desmond and Moore 2009). 

But the positivist relativist will suggest that Darwin was wrong if he thought that his personal value judgment condemning slavery could be grounded in his natural science.  After all, Darwin in The Origin of Species recognized that slavery was a naturally evolved adaptation for some ant species that have a "slave-making instinct," which shows that slavery can arise by natural evolution.  In the first edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that this ant instinct for making slaves was "extraordinary and odious" (1859, 220).  In the second edition of his book, he struck out the word "odious."  Perhaps he did this because he realized that this word was only an expression of his moral emotions--his hatred of slavery--and not a scientific description of the facts.

The proslavery American southerner Thomas Cobb pointed to ant slavery as a natural fact showing that slavery conforms to the law of nature.  "It is a fact, well known to entomologists," Cobb observed, "that the red ant will issue in regular battle array, to conquer and subjugate the black or negro ant, as he is called by entomologists," and "that these negro slaves perform all the labor of the communities into which they are thus brought, with a patience and an aptitude almost incredible" (8-9).

Some religious believers will argue that this shows how a Darwinian science of nature and human nature cannot provide any standard of right and wrong for judging that slavery is wrong, because our knowledge of right and wrong depends on a religiously informed cosmic teleology like that suggested in the Declaration of Independence.  If it is self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we can see that slavery is wrong because it violates God's law in denying the equal dignity of all human beings as created in God's image.  That's the argument of John Hare, Carson Holloway, and Benjamin Wiker.  The positivist relativist would see this as a religious value judgment that cannot be derived from our empirical knowledge of the facts of nature.

Strauss objects to this positivist fact-value distinction by insisting that a value-free social science is impossible, because the social phenomena studied by the social scientist are "constituted by value judgments," and all social scientists must strive to make "objective value judgments" about the social phenomena they study (NRH, 53-57).  So, for example, a military historian studying the actions of statesmen and generals must necessarily make value judgments in which he judges whether these actions were successful or mistaken.  A general who loses a battle because of a blunder in some tactical maneuver must be judged to be a bad general, because he has not correctly chosen the right means for achieving his ends.  All human actions are purposeful--aimed at some end--and so we can judge the success or failure of those actions in achieving their ends. 

We don't need a cosmic teleology for our value judgment here, because we have an immanent teleology of human action.  Strauss explains: "It is impossible to understand phenomena of this kind without being aware of the standard of judgment that is inherent in the situation and accepted as a matter of course by the actors themselves; and it is impossible not to make use of that standard by actually evaluating" (54).

As opposed to nonliving things, all living organisms have standards of value inherent in their nature as the kind of organism that they are.  To live, every animal must act, either consciously or unconsciously, to achieve the goals set by its nature.  An animal either succeeds or fails in this, and its relative success or failure will decide whether it lives or dies, and whether its life is satisfying or not.  This not true for inanimate entities.  We might explain a thunderstorm, for instance, as a physical and chemical system that sustains itself for a period of time and then dissipates, but we could not properly speak of its relative success or failure in achieving its goals.  In all animal behavior, by contrast, there are natural goals, which are standards of achievement that we can identify as values or goods.  If we define value or good in relational terms as whatever satisfies a desire, then all animals have values, because they all have natural desires that they strive to satisfy as they gather information about their world.  This includes human beings, who are unique only in the complexity of their desires and the complexity of the information they gather to satisfy their desires (Binswanger 1990, 1992; Herrick 1956; Polanyi and Prosch 1975).

If Darwin is right about human evolution, human beings have evolved to be social animals, who desire the praise of those around them and fear their blame.  They have evolved to have a natural desire for justice as reciprocity in their social life, so that they are naturally inclined to feel love and gratitude in return for benefits conferred on them, they are inclined to feel anger and hatred in return for injuries inflicted on them, and they are inclined to feel guilt and shame when they violate their reciprocal obligations to others.  If this is so, then we can expect that slave masters will feel the injustice of their exploitation of their slaves, and they will try to hide that injustice by pretending that slavery is good for the slaves.  So, when Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, it's depiction of the brutal exploitation of slaves by masters was denied by many defenders of slavery as a false account.

In fact, Abraham Lincoln argued, anyone with "ordinary perceptions of right and wrong" can see the injustice of slavery, because anyone can see how it frustrates the natural human desire to be free from exploitation.  Even in the American South, Lincoln observed, slave-traders are despised: it is considered improper for a gentleman to shake hands with them, because the buying and selling of human beings as property elicits a feeling of disgust (1953, 2:264-65).  What Lincoln called "ordinary perceptions of right and wrong" might correspond to what Strauss called "those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right" (NRH, 31-32, 105).

But then the critics of Darwinian natural right will say that what we see here is a conflict between evolved natural desires with no standard beyond those desires to resolve the conflict.  The slave masters' desire to exploit their slaves is opposed to their desires for reciprocity and sympathy.  But there is no standard here for determining that one desire is better than the other.  The slave masters are free to suppress their sense of the injustice of slavery by deceiving themselves and others to believe that slavery is actually just.

Some of the critics will argue that the standard we need for recognizing the injustice of slavery is a transcendent standard that goes beyond evolved human nature--a religiously-informed cosmic teleology by which we can see that slavery violates God's moral law.  But if this is an appeal to the Biblical God, then it's not obvious that this gives us a clear and reliable standard for judging slavery, because Christian defenders of slavery have cited the Bible as supporting slavery (Cobb 1857; Ross 1857). 

That's why the American Civil War became a theological crisis: the theological dispute between proslavery Christians and anti-slavery Christians was settled by force of arms (Noll 2006).  Lincoln pointed to this in his Second Inaugural Address:  "Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

Some readers of Strauss would object to the assumption here that Strauss views the injustice of slavery as a good example of natural right.  In Natural Right and History, when Strauss speaks of the injustice of slavery, it's not always clear that he is speaking for himself.  At times, Strauss seems to intimate that if there is natural right, the only clear principle of natural right is the supremacy of the philosophic life of those few who can live it as the only naturally good life (NRH, 36, 74-79, 110, 112-13, 115, 126-27, 143, 151-52, 156).

The Moral Realism of Darwin, Lincoln, and Obama

February 12th will be the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin on February 12, 1809.

Two years ago was the bicentennial celebration of their births. Only a few weeks after his inauguration as President, Barack Obama contributed to this celebration by delivering a speech to the Abraham Lincoln Association in Springfield, Illinois. In the central paragraph of his speech, he recognized the link between Lincoln and Darwin:

Only a union could speed our expansion and connect our coasts with a transcontinental railroad, and so, even in the midst of civil war, he built one. he fueled new enterprises with a national currency, spurred innovation, and ignited America's imagination with a national academy of sciences, believing we must, as he put it, add "the fuel of interest to the fire of genius in the discovery . . . of new and useful things." And on this day, that is also the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, let us renew that commitment to science and innovation once more.

Here Obama quotes from Lincoln's "Lecture on Discovery and Inventions," which is the clearest expression of Lincoln's Darwinian view of human evolution and technology. In a previous post, I have commented on Obama's rhetorical debt to Lincoln and his acceptance of Darwin's science.

Beginning in the 1980s, I have written about the intellectual links between Lincoln and Darwin in various articles and books--for example, in the chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right. But I have learned a lot from some of the recent scholarship related to the Lincoln/Darwin bicentennial. Three books are especially good: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution, and James Lander, Lincoln & Darwin: Shared Visions of Race, Science, and Religion. Some of my previous posts on some of this scholarship can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

I see at least six points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln. (1) Both saw the universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life. (2) Both were accused of denying the Biblical doctrine of Creation. (3) Both spoke of God as First Cause. (4) Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion. (5) Both abhorred slavery as immoral. (6) Both were moral realists.

As I have indicated in previous posts, there is debate about each of these points. But I find that what is most difficult for many people to understand is the last point--their moral realism. Previously, I have taken up this point in my response to Desmond and Moore in my post "Did Darwin Naturalize Genocide?--Or Does Right Make Might?" My reading of Lander's book has stirred me to think more about this.

Here's how I interpret the moral realism of Lincoln and Darwin. Because they see moral and political order as rooted in evolved human nature, they see moral progress as both possible and imperfect. Moral progress is always possible, because human beings can learn how to extend social cooperation and sympathetic concern to ever wider circles of humanity. But moral progress is always imperfect, because human beings will always face tragic conflicts of interest that arise from their complex nature as animals who are both selfish and social, both competitive and cooperative. Consequently, a world of perpetual peace and universal cooperation is impossible. Moral and political history often coincides with military history.

Lincoln showed his moral realism in his handling of the slavery issue. Lincoln always recognized the immorality of slavery, and therefore he disagreed with the proslavery extremists (like John C. Calhoun) who defended slavery as a "positive good." But Lincoln also recognized the imprudence in trying to immediately abolish slavery, and therefore he disagreed with the abolitionist extremists like William Lloyd Garrison who were willing to overturn the Constitutional compromises with slavery.

Lincoln looked for a practical compromise that would allow for the gradual extinction of slavery. He hoped that slaveholders could be compensated for liberating their slaves, while the freed slaves would move to a colony in Africa. He thought this would strike a balance between self-interest and moral concern. To many people today, his colonization plan looks like evidence of racist bigotry. But for Lincoln, this arose from a tough-minded recognition that racial prejudice would make it hard for blacks and whites to live together peacefully. If the freed slaves remained in America, Lincoln predicted, there would be at least 100 years of racial conflict before racial equality could be achieved. For example, Lincoln saw the natural disgust with racial intermarriage as a sign of the natural human disposition to in-group/out-group conflict.

When the proslavery extremists in the American South refused Lincoln's offers of practical compromise and then launched a war of secession, Lincoln was forced to wage war to save the Union as a condition for the ultimate extinction of slavery. Here, again, we see his moral realism. (Let's remember that this year is the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, which will stir new debate about the decisions that led to the war, by far the bloodiest war in American history and one of the bloodiest wars in all of human history.)

We hope to settle moral conflict through persuasion. But when persuasion fails, we must sometimes appeal to force of arms to settle the disagreement. As Pascal observed, we look for the union of force and justice, so that what is just must be strong, or what is strong must be just.

Many American religious believers thought that the Bible should settle such moral disagreements. But as Lincoln noted, the Bible was unclear about the morality of slavery. And so in the Civil War, "both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." This theological dispute was resolved by the military victory of the North.

We see this same moral realism in Darwin's thought. Darwin believed that one crucial element in the evolution of morality was group selection through tribal warfare, because those tribal groups with the moral virtues of courage and patriotism would tend to prevail in war against those groups whose members lacked those virtues. In The Descent of Man (Penguin ed.), he writes:

When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other. Let it be borne in mind how all-important in the never-ceasing wars of savages, fidelity and courage must be. . . . Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities would spread and be victorious over other tribes: but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other tribe still more highly endowed. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world. (155)

This competition in war continues today. "At the present day civilized nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations, excepting where the climate opposes a deadly barrier; and they succeed mainly, though not exclusively, through their arts, which are the products of the intellect" (153). And we can expect this to continue into the future. "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world" (183).

This last passage is often quoted by Darwin's critics--people like Richard Weikart and Gertrude Himmelfarb--to support their claim that Darwin promoted the militaristic Social Darwinism that led to Adolf Hitler.

But the intellectual shallowness of people like Weikart and Himmelfarb make it impossible for them to think through the complexity of Darwinian moral realism. We can recognize the evil of Hitler's Nazism, while still recognizing the historical truth that "civilized races" have prevailed in war with "savage races," because the advantages of "civilized" social organization create military superiority. Desmond and Moore show a similar shallowness when they criticize Darwin for his "rationalizing the darker side of tribal conflicts" or "biologizing of genocide."

In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin described the revulsion he felt towards the atrocities committed by the European races against the native people of South America, Tasmania, and New Zealand. He lamented: "Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal." Describing how "all the Indians are butchered" by the Europeans in Argentina, he observed that those "a little superior in civilization" are also superior in military power, although "inferior in every moral virtue."

And yet while feeling sympathy for the suffering of the "savage races," Darwin also recognized the barbarism in the life of "a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives life slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions" (Descent, 689).

Darwin looked forward to the moral progress that would come with the extension of moral sympathy to all of humanity:

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would teach each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and ages.

(Descent, 147)

But Darwin suggests that this humanitarian sympathy will generally be weaker than the love for one's own--for one's own family, friends, and fellow citizens. Consequently, there will always be tragic conflicts between human groups, and when those conflicts become severe, human beings will go to war.

A similar moral realism was expressed by President Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture in 2009. Obama acknowledged the awkwardness in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize while acting as Commander-in-Chief in two major wars. He stated his admiration for the pacifist morality of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi. But he recognized that their pacifist morality was unrealistic. He explained: "As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism--it is a recognition of history: the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

Obama defended the tradition of "just war," the moral tradition that tries to combine justice and force by specifying the moral criteria for the justice of going to war and the just conduct of war. Even if one disagrees--as I do--with Obama's claim that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are just, one can agree with the moral realism of the just war tradition.

Obama saw the tragic character of war:

"So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another--that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such."

"So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths--that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."

Moral progress is possible in matters of war to the extent that we can enforce standards of just war, but even just war manifests the moral tragedy of the human condition, a tragedy rooted in our evolved human nature.

Of course, Obama's election as President is another example of moral progress. Just as Lincoln predicted, it took America over 100 years of racial conflict before the country could begin moving towards racial equality. The moral progress manifest in Obama's election is especially dramatic because of Obama being the child of a racially mixed couple.

Not long ago, Obama joked that his family dog was a "mongrel" just like him! This seems to be part of a general social change in which racial intermarriage does not provoke as much disgust as it once did. There is no reason to believe that racial conflict will ever be totally abolished. But, at least, we can see this as another example of how moral progress is possible, even if imperfect.

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Science of Liberty, Slavery, and the Bible

On Sunday, Americans will be celebrating their most important national holiday--Super Bowl Sunday.

But that day will also be the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.

On February 12, 1809, Darwin was born in England, and Lincoln was born in Kentucky.  They had more in common than just the coincidence of their birth on the same day.  Almost every February 12th, I have posted an essay on some of the common themes in their lives.  I have identified ten points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.

1. Both saw the Universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life and human beings.

2. Both denied that the Bible was a divine revelation, and they denied the Biblical doctrines of divine special creation in the first chapters of Genesis and the divinity of Jesus in the New Testament.

3. Both were accused of being atheists or infidels.

4. Both spoke of God as First Cause in a deistic sense.

5. Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion that could correct the Bible's moral mistakes (such as the Bible's endorsement of slavery).

6. Both rooted that natural moral sense in the evolved moral sentiments.

7. Both abhorred slavery as an immoral violation of evolved human nature, and they saw the American Civil War as a crucial turning point for the abolition of slavery.

8. Both were moral realists.

9. Both saw human history as moving through a Big History of three evolutionary eras--the foraging era, the agrarian era, and the modern commercial and liberal era.

10. Both were classical liberals.

Although there is no evidence that Lincoln ever read Darwin, we do know from William Herndon that Lincoln was persuaded by his reading of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to embrace an evolutionary science of the history of the Universe very similar to Darwin's theory.

Now, we have a new book by David Kent--Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln's Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America--about how Lincoln's life-long study of modern science and technology shaped his moral and political life.  Although Kent recognizes some of my ten points of similarity between Lincoln and Darwin, he is remarkably silent about the second, third, fifth, and ninth points.

Kent says nothing about the popular charge against Lincoln that he denied the truth of the Bible and therefore was an atheist or infidel.  When Lincoln ran for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1846, his opponent--Peter Cartwright, a Methodist minister--circulated a rumor that Lincoln was an infidel.  The basis for this charge was that as a young man, Lincoln had read some notorious books of skeptical deism--particularly, Volney's Ruins of Empires and Tom Paine's The Age of Reason--and he wrote his own pamphlet arguing that the Bible was not divinely inspired and that Jesus was not truly the Son of God.  His friends warned him that the reputation for being an infidel or atheist would ruin his life, especially if he wanted to have a political career.  So, he burned his pamphlet,  and he became very secretive about his religious beliefs.  Darwin was similar.  As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), Darwin denied that the Bible was a divine revelation and that Jesus was divine; but he wrote about this only in private correspondence.  Kent is silent about this.

Kent has a long section in his book on Lincoln's "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions."  But he does not notice how Lincoln mocks the Bible in that lecture.  As I have indicated, Lincoln suggests that "in the beginning," there is no divine creation of man, and man depends totally on himself "to dig out his destiny" without any guidance from God.

Kent also does not notice Lincoln's suggestion that the Bible's endorsement of slavery needs to be corrected.  While Kent surveys some of the attempts to justify slavery as supported by the Bible, he does not confront the fact that the Bible really does affirm slavery.  Frederick Ross's Slavery Ordained by God (1857) shows that all of the references to slavery in the Bible are proslavery.  Lincoln read this book, and Kent points to Lincoln's note on the book's proslavery theology.  But Kent does not notice Lincoln's failure to refute Ross's reading of the Bible.  Nor does Kent reflect on Lincoln's remarkable observation in his Second Inaugural that in the Civil War between North and South, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

Kent also fails to see how Lincoln's Darwinian evolutionary science of human history moves through three eras--from foraging to farming to commerce.  By embracing the moral progress to the modern commercial society, Lincoln shows the classical liberalism that he shares with Darwin. 

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin: The Evolutionary Science of Liberty, Slavery, and the Bible

On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born in England, and Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky.  They had more in common than just the coincidence of their birth on the same day.  Almost every February 12th, I have posted an essay on some of the common themes in their lives.  I have identified ten points of similarity between Darwin and Lincoln.

1. Both saw the Universe as governed by natural laws, which included the natural laws for the evolution of life and human beings.

2. Both denied that the Bible was a divine revelation, and they denied the Biblical doctrines of divine special creation in the first chapters of Genesis and the divinity of Jesus in the New Testament.

3. Both were accused of being atheists or infidels.

4. Both spoke of God as First Cause in a deistic sense.

5. Both appealed to the Bible as a source of moral teaching, even as they also appealed to a natural moral sense independent of Biblical religion that could correct the Bible's moral mistakes (such as the Bible's endorsement of slavery).

6. Both rooted that natural moral sense in the evolved moral sentiments.

7. Both abhorred slavery as an immoral violation of evolved human nature, and they saw the American Civil War as a crucial turning point for the abolition of slavery.

8. Both were moral realists.

9. Both saw human history as moving through a Big History of three evolutionary eras--the foraging era, the agrarian era, and the modern commercial and liberal era.

10. Both were classical liberals.

Although there is no evidence that Lincoln ever read Darwin, we do know from William Herndon that Lincoln was persuaded by his reading of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to embrace an evolutionary science of the history of the Universe very similar to Darwin's theory.

Now, we have a new book by David Kent--Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln's Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America--about how Lincoln's life-long study of modern science and technology shaped his moral and political life.  Although Kent recognizes some of my ten points of similarity between Lincoln and Darwin, he is remarkably silent about the second, third, fifth, and ninth points.

Kent says nothing about the popular charge against Lincoln that he denied the truth of the Bible and therefore was an atheist or infidel.  When Lincoln ran for a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1846, his opponent--Peter Cartwright, a Methodist minister--circulated a rumor that Lincoln was an infidel.  The basis for this charge was that as a young man, Lincoln had read some notorious books of skeptical deism--particularly, Volney's Ruins of Empires and Tom Paine's The Age of Reason--and he wrote his own pamphlet arguing that the Bible was not divinely inspired and that Jesus was not truly the Son of God.  His friends warned him that the reputation for being an infidel or atheist would ruin his life, especially if he wanted to have a political career.  So, he burned his pamphlet,  and he became very secretive about his religious beliefs.  Darwin was similar.  As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), Darwin denied that the Bible was a divine revelation and that Jesus was divine; but he wrote about this only in private correspondence.  Kent is silent about this.

Kent has a long section in his book on Lincoln's "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions."  But he does not notice how Lincoln mocks the Bible in that lecture.  As I have indicated, Lincoln suggests that "in the beginning," there is no divine creation of man, and man depends totally on himself "to dig out his destiny" without any guidance from God.

Kent also does not notice Lincoln's suggestion that the Bible's endorsement of slavery needs to be corrected.  While Kent surveys some of the attempts to justify slavery as supported by the Bible, he does not confront the fact that the Bible really does affirm slavery.  Frederick Ross's Slavery Ordained by God (1857) shows that all of the references to slavery in the Bible are proslavery.  Lincoln read this book, and Kent points to Lincoln's note on the book's proslavery theology.  But Kent does not notice Lincoln's failure to refute Ross's reading of the Bible.  Nor does Kent reflect on Lincoln's remarkable observation in his Second Inaugural that in the Civil War between North and South, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

Kent also fails to see how Lincoln's Darwinian evolutionary science of human history moves through three eras--from foraging to farming to commerce.  By embracing the moral progress to the modern commercial society, Lincoln shows the classical liberalism that he shares with Darwin.