The Idea of Evolutionism
An obscure English naturalist startled the world in the 19th century with an idea that is still contagious today. Many an attractive generalization that has never been sufficiently ascertained as true, if broadcast long enough by men of credible standards, is assumed to be true. And so, it is with the 19th century alternating mood of utopia and pessimism conveyed by the idea of evolution.
Although Charles Darwin came from a scientifically prominent family, he showed little interest in his medical and theological studies. Almost by accident, a Cambridge naturalist stimulated his curiosity, and he took advantage of a sailing opportunity to the south seas for five enriching years. He boarded ship as a bug collector and returned a devoted scientist for the rest of his life. The cruise of 1841 marked his life’s vocation. His passion for exploring nature, the constantly enlarging notebooks and acquired specimens, replaced all his former pursuits from religion to the fine arts. He even remarked about himself saying he was “a machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” Esteemed by society’s leaders, his country honored him in death by burying him among its heroes at Westminster Abbey in 1882.
Biological Man
The 1859 publication of the Origin of Species electrified every realm of culture. The ferment produced by a biological theory that advocated progress through conflict was forcibly extended to explain the origins of the entire universe as well as the progress and destiny of every aspect of human culture. It was an idea whose time had come. People in every profession were arguing sides for its plausibility. It seemed to confirm the universe of Newtonian mechanics and the everyday life and death experience of nature. Even the polarities with the competitive human scene fitted with Darwin’s idea. In a way, it gave a universal insight into the creative and destructive side of matter and life.
Actually, Darwin did not invent the idea of evolution. Before him, philosophers and scientists had written about evolution in their speculations and theoretical hypotheses. Scientists like Lamarck, Buffon, Wells, and especially John Wallace, his contemporary, who had already written on natural selection, had proposed the notion without much reaction from their peers. For almost twenty years, Darwin carefully studied his specimens, reinforcing his accumulating knowledge with his observations about animal husbandry. Just as farmers breed their herd for superior characteristics, so nature selects the best animas for survival. His reading of Malthus’ concern when the increase of world population exceeded the available food supply convinced him that in the realm of nature the struggle for existence would only allow the fit to survive, and their traits would then be transferred to their progeny. In an age of intense commercial expansion and competition, Darwin’s proposal that the process of evolution is a struggle for survival made sense in every field of human endeavor.
Evolutionism
With the release of his new book, Descent of Man (1871) Darwin attempted to incorporate his basic insight into the origins of life itself as well as be the total summation of history. A master idea that brought man into the continuity of animal descent and origin, it claimed that human nature only differed by degree, not kind, within the animal kingdom. Human values were determined by survival of the fittest. Thus, evolution became the sufficient and pragmatic explanation for every natural thing and its activity from astronomy and economics to religion and psychology. The inherent dynamics of survival through struggle was the ultimate and thus metaphysical answer to the riddle of existence. Evolution became Evolutionism.
Darwin saw the world with linear eyes, which meant common descent with modification by natural selection. The apparent likenesses, for example, noted among children of the same family typically illustrate the broader continuities among all living entities revealing a common ancestry. Man’s nature being most adaptable to changing circumstances, demonstrated by his superior shrewdness in language and art, crowns the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, his resultant powers and cognitive dignity are derived from lower forms.
In 1889, Alfred Wallace, considered the co-discoverer of evolution, wrote a critique entitled
“Darwinism.” He challenged Darwin’s prevailing inclusion of body and spirit among the evolutionary pattern of animal descent. He insisted that biological evolution pertained only to that realm and man’s psycho-social faculties derived from a different origin. He would disagree with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley who defined mankind as “conscious automata” and maintained that “all vital action may…be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it.”
Similarly, the new field of sociology placed the drama of human life within an evolutionary context and William Graham Sumner pronounced that, “We are convinced that this way of looking at things frees our treatment from a current tendency, which we regard as so confusing and unproductive, to refer societal results to conscious, reasoned, and purposeful action on the part of the individual.”
Huxley and Sumner were soon joined by the Austrian sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz who saw the growth of mankind as the history of group struggle, relegating the power of the individual to a fiction. He was so convinced of the blind natural laws controlling mankind’s destiny that he confidently asserted that: “The great error of individualistic psychology is the supposition that man thinks…a chain of errors; for it is not man himself who thinks but his social community; the source of his thoughts is in the social medium in which he lives, the social atmosphere which he breathes, and he cannot think ought else than what the influences of his social environment concentrating upon his brain necessitate.”
The new thought seemed to explain the temper of the age, enthralling and captivating, as Jacques Barzun remarks, “a generation of thinkers whose greatest desire was to get rid of vitalism, will, purpose or design as explanations of life, and to substitute for them an automatic material cause.” The theory of organic evolution reduced man in effect to the mechanical laws of blind nature.
The consequences of declaring life’s origin from the primeval ooze influenced two compelling but varied interpretations of man which have resounded around the world in the 20th century: the Marxist and the Freudian view of human nature.
Economic Man
At Karl Marx’s funeral in 1883, his lifetime spokesman, Friedrich Engels, eulogized that “just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” Marx assumed that Darwin’s theory accorded with the facts of life and history. Yet he allowed more dignity to man than was possible under plain descent with modification. While man’s origin resided in protein molecules, emerging through a self-acting chemical process, still Marx acknowledged the dynamic side of man’s nature in actively forging his life patterns. He admitted that men are endowed with consciousness and act with definite goals in mind. But the ultimate motivation in man, whether he is conscious of it or not, the driving force behind all his aspirations and actions is nothing other than economic determinism. The goal of life for everyone, as depicted in the struggle of people throughout history, is material well-being, social rights and privileges. Man’s aim in life is physical comfort, prosperity, high wages, low prices, consumer goods and economic security. Economics is not an arbitrary invention of culture but the essential force in man’s soul. In using his energies in the creative productivity of matter, man realizes himself; his destiny is not properly understood in terms of a spiritual transcendence but as an evolving economic and social superiority, an earthly paradise.
Neurotic Man
Freud, like Marx and Darwin, attempted to read the signs of his era through his own evolutionary lenses. He replaced the economic focus upon man with his attempt at a “scientific psychology,” a project that would “furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science…to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles and so to make them plain and void of contradictions.” Freud’s early apprenticeship in Ernst Brücke’s laboratory of animal physiology imbued him with the assumption that all organisms are only systems of atoms moved by forces obedient to the law of the conservation of energy, that is, forces reducible to the fascination of attraction and repulsion. The indebtedness to these years is later detected in his choice of a mathematical and mechanical vocabulary—expressions germane to physics—for his explanations of psychoanalysis. The feeling of excitability in people, for example, was akin to an electrical impulse, capable of both” increase and decrease, displacement and discharge.” Yet in the reading of his full theories regarding man and his ills, less reliance is placed upon scientific imagery than upon metaphors resembling a theatrical melodrama.
In his view, man’s nature revealed an ambiguous mixture of classical physics and experimental theater within the processing mold of unconscious evolution. While admitting that human growth undergoes stages of development, the early stirrings of childhood were of primary importance. One’s early years determined one’s destiny. Biological determination not only sufficed for individual fulfillment but was meant to unfold in definite, inexorable stages, which if disturbed or not properly experienced, would handicap the ensuing adult for life. From childhood to adulthood, human nature should evolve according to rather fixed laws into a mature adjustment with society. The ideal was hardly achieved in society. The outbreak of World War I sufficiently documented man’s instinctual aggression and inner chaos. Once again society was in readiness to accept the theoretics of a remarkable thinker, one whose incessant cigar smoking matched the temper of life in his age. In his famous Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud mentions that:
The meaning of the evolution of culture is no longer a riddle to us. It must present to us the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instincts of life and the instincts of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and so the evolution of civilization may be simply described as the struggle of the human species for existence.
A Shared Outlook
Darwin, Marx and Freud join the 19th century reflection upon a world which they shared, a world in which adequate observation lent credence to their theory of man’s struggle for survival. Each goes his own way in structuring that struggle and outlining the remedies. All, however, use the proto concept of evolution as a unitary idea to show the underlying consistency of their interpretations of man.
Even if one were to grant the essential soundness of his biological idea, Darwin misplaces a limited interpretation in a select field of genetic transmission to the entire universe-every species and genera, every planet and galaxy, the entire range of mind, morals, religion, art, society, and history-in a word, the evolution of culture. While it is true that man is subject to the laws of genetic inheritance, biological continuity is simply not rich enough to include the emergence of psycho-social dimensions of human nature. What may be said at best is that biological dispositions for cultural development may be transmitted genetically. But the cultural process, characterized by the human agent as a toolmaking, symbol and language-creating entity, exceeds the history of any instance of genetic mutation. To relegate the unique cultural achievements of human civilization to a biological classification surfaces the flaw of reduction: namely, the complexities of life arose from primeval, inert, lifeless matter. Or, to put it philosophically, the greater arose from the lesser.
Marx, of course, accepted Darwin’s theory as irrefutable-the epitome of scientific method. By extrapolating the jungle images of competitive struggle and applying them to the working man, the toiling, faceless proletarian, Marx was able to “classify” the economic pursuit in society as a class struggle. The social development of mankind took place on the battle ground of economics. Capitalism with its business entrepreneurs versus the propertyless wage-earner. Both are locked with each other in a fierce conflict to avert deprivation and mass starvation. Their see-saw battles between capital and labor evolve through history into the final resolution of a classless society, the very goal of communism. It was not the unjust distribution of wealth that bothered Marx as much as the perversion of human labor into a meaningless toil which transformed the workers into crippled slaves, removed from their own self-creativity. It was this sense of alienation that finally arouses the proletarian class to overthrow capitalism by revolt in order to create the heaven on earth of socialism.
Marx never argues against spiritual values; he simply dismisses them, replacing the terminal energies of man with economic and social values. History, the proving ground for Marx of his theory of mankind as a class struggle, has disproven his predictions. In the last 100 years, minority groups have proliferated instead of vanishing. Even Russia, the home ground for communism, has become one of the most nationalist of countries, a contradiction for the classless society. Marx undervalued the freedom of choice that guides people in their efforts to pursue significance in their lives. Economic motivations are not the sole determinant in their destiny. Marx also overlooked the possibility for economic systems to adjust their imbalances, as shown since the Industrial Revolution rather than collapse through revolt. Marx reflects the conditions of his period but overextends their application to the future. Thus, the Darwin of the social sciences inadvertently evolved his theories into an endangered species.
Just as Darwin and Marx attempted to unify man’s nature with the historical conditions which surrounded him, Freud similarly presented man as an unfinished product of nature. Man was more reasonable for Marx than for Freud. The latter saw human nature not as the rational culmination of a chance but orderly process, but as an incomplete entity, struggling against the inner forces of unreason, impelled by driving impulses and needs which had to be constrained by society. Man walked the earth bearing the seeds of madness and majesty, having never outgrown an infancy which was anything but innocent.
Life’s destiny became a melodrama. Included among the players of the tragedy of human existence was the psychoanalyst who enters the drama of the patient’s psyche, gaining his trust and helping him to understand the drama and all its subplots. The heightening of the patient’s understanding of the workings of his unconscious brought eventual cure to live a mature life of adjustment.
Freud brought modern man’s attention to a subliminal area within himself that had been neglected in western history. The presence within man’s mind of his own unconscious, a psychical cauldron of seething antagonistic impulses and urges that clash for expression. Below the surface of everyday consciousness, man is affected by this level of mental influence containing primitive and irrational potentialities as well as civilized ones. The irresolution of these polarities’ accounts for the neurotic suffering of modern man. In this schema Freud was following the lead of Darwin in that individual development duplicates the evolutionary history of the species still carrying those active instinctual forces. The relentless encroaching of the unconscious with its private torments, secret urges and mysterious energies, pressures the ego, the everyday rational dimension of man’s mind. In this way man’s life portrays a daily tragicomedy-one in which free, personal choices take a back seat to the fated, impersonal, predetermined powers by nature that beset the human case.
One may define maturity in Freud’s terms as successful sickness. Starting as he does from pathological conditions in man, Freud could hardly escape a warped understanding of man’s inner nature. He does not propose his findings as merely an analysis of Victorian inhibitions but as a metaphysical certitude, universalizing the status of mankind. The history of human culture is a dramatic conflict between primal forces, the life-instinct eros and the death-wish Thanatos-a conflict which death must inevitably win.
Our modern culture is indebted to Freud for point out subtleties within the human complex. But his concept of maturity is chillingly bleak and unrealistic. Human maturity far exceeds any censorship of Freud’s harsh super-ego, that eclectic sum of prohibitions and moral rules; it is more than any balancing act by the ego either repressing powerful drives or giving them free rein in society. Maturity is not checking impulses but selecting them in acts of virtue. It is by the dynamic acceptance of his inner forces as instrumentally good and directing them under rational guidance that man tastes and expands the freedom that he already possesses.
Critique
Our partial inquiry into the career of the idea of evolution was not to indict these three thinkers of the modern age. Evolution and the way these three men used the concept is not a diabolical plot to undermine the human race. Each author contributed enormously to the clarification of man and nature. Equally, each of them misunderstood the importance of his contribution by exaggerating its comprehensive influence.
The idea of evolution as a reflection of reality proposed by Darwin and subsequently modified by later scientists remains an unproven thesis. There is still no genealogical evidence that clearly establishes a gradual passage existing between genera or classes. Writing in Scientific America, Loren Eiseley remarked: “How the primeval human creature evolved into homo sapiens, what forces precipitated the enormous expansion of the human brain-these problems ironically still baffle the creature who has learned to weigh stars and to tamper with the very fabric of the universe.”
Life from the primal mists eons ago, human order from revolution, rationality from the Id-each of these key statements represents the same basic flaw in their respective author’s thinking: the fallacy that more comes from less.
Even today, a distinguished scientist, the Nobel prize winner, Jacques Monod, naively writes: “Evolution… the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random…This conception alone is compatible with the facts. The miracle stands ‘explained.’” But one wonders if these authors are not trying to make sense of the data by constantly pouring it into the prevailing mold until an even more satisfying explanation accommodates the evidence. A kind of will-to-believe allegiance to a favorite master idea in spite of the counter-instances. Frequently in the latter, surprise, emergency explanation are offered to continue the viability of the original idea. All this means that one is involved on a never-ending course of question begging.
The crux of evolution is the notion of “natural selection” in which Darwin explains a world of final causes and teleological laws with a principle that is utterly independent of intelligible meaning or purpose. Darwin assumes a world that is absurd, pointless. And this assumption is a necessary condition for the use of his privileged phrase. He prejudices himself from the beginning; his starting point, “chaos,” is presumed the only way to initiate the explanation of nature. From this unexplainable primeval chaos comes order, design, intelligence, love and life itself. The logic of this approach, found above in variation by these authors, is deemed the “scientific explanation.” May I venture that some of the reasons for the inflated notion of evolution getting by without more critical evidence resides in a twofold observation. First, among the possible hypotheses, it broadly approximates best the continuities of matter in time and space. Second, it accords with the prevailing mood of scientists to exclude any other theory of science itself which does not affirm the superiority of matter and explanations by material associations.
Human Nature: More Than the Sum of its Parts
Despite their research and declarations, Darwin, Marx and Freud have not settled the question of man. He remains a mystery to himself. The use of the word “mystery” is not a barrier beyond which intelligence cannot venture. On the contrary, it signifies a plentitude of meaning so enriching in its truth that the rational mind, the vehicle of science, cannot grasp its depth. Man’s nature is more than one level, the physical. Otherwise, he could not reflect even a materialist conception of himself. For if man’s consciousness were only skin deep, then he could not formulate a question, let alone attempt an answer. Man is not a closed system, predetermined and reflexive to his environment. The recurring attempt to reduce man to a machine or a chance set of atoms is almost becoming a cliché. Instead of reaching out for more things to observe just from the physical level, man should question the quality of his observing. Contemporary man has made his hard-won science too narrow. He has listened too long to the seventeenth century impatience to cast away tradition, the philosophia perennis, and start anew. The ancient traditions are not bankrupt; it is man who has drifted into bankruptcy by refusing to accept his heritage of wisdom bequeathed by the past. Man, a multi-dimensional being, expresses a cognitive apprehension of reality in multiple insights. When the primary scriptures speak of him as “made in the image of God” or “purusha is the whole universe,” are these evaluations of life any less accurate and precise than to speak of man as essentially a “machine” or “virtually neurotic?” Is science itself best represented according to the model of mathematical physics? Modern man needs to replace science within the broader spectrum of wisdom.
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