Do I read the blogs by my fellow Brainstormers? Well, I do more or less. This summer, David Barash has made me feel so guilty about my lack of enthusiasm for the great outdoors that I have to reach for another beer to dull my senses before I return to the couch and reruns of “I Love Lucy.” But obviously not enough or with sufficient care, because as one sharp commentator pointed out, I quite missed Gina on the Dickens Camp. I don’t think I read her piece and forgot it. I just don’t think I read it. So many apologies Gina. My rather acid response was a matter of embarrassment, because I felt like a bit of a schmuck.
One person I do read with care and enthusiasm is Laurie Fendrich. Obviously this is in part because she speaks to me so strongly politically, but not entirely. Her piece on Norman Rockwell, for instance, struck home. I have always had a bit of a guilty feeling about him. On the one hand, he is so appallingly sentimental and he does appeal to (snob, snob, snob) those who like that sort of thing—the sort of people who like Andrew Lloyd Webber rather than Giuseppe Verdi. On the other hand, he does hit home again and again.
My favorite is the one of the kid sitting next to his dad, with the family dog’s head on his knee, waiting for the bus to take him off to college. Those emotions of excitement and fear in the boy, and tenderness and pride and sense of loss in the dad, are being repeated again and again all over America even as I write. Including, I might add, in the Ruse household as Edward gets ready to fly north to Toronto and his first year at university.
Although I am not quite sure about the emotions of our dogs. They know something is up and they will miss Ed—not as much as the black and white cat that we never quite got around to naming—but they are hardly reasoning out what is happening. But then they are Cairn Terriers, which means that they are very affectionate but somewhat IQ challenged. They are what in the education business we call “late developers,” meaning “thick as two short planks but we’d better not tell the parents outright.”
Laurie’s last piece was on the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. (Incidentally, today most people refer to him as Thomas Malthus, but in his day he was known as “Bob,” so strictly I guess you should call him Robert Malthus. But I doubt things are going to change now. I wonder in the future if Richard Dawkins will be known as Clinton Dawkins.)
The reason why I picked up on the piece was because last night I gave the introductory lecture to a course I am team-teaching with a couple of biologists on Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species. Malthus has a major role in the Darwin story. Darwin became an evolutionist probably shortly after he ended the Beagle voyage—in the spring of 1837 when the ornithologist John Gould told him that the birds he had collected on the Galapagos Archipelago were different species, from island to island—and then he set out on an 18-month quest to find the cause.
Pretty quickly Darwin twigged on to the fact that animal and plant breeders change forms and get what they want by selecting, and he searched for a force bringing on a form of selection in nature. On September 28, 1838, he picked up the sixth edition of Malthus on population and began to read it “for pleasure”—at which point all I can say is “for pleasure”????!!!!
Darwin saw that the struggle for existence, generalized to the whole living world, is the force he was seeking, and the rest as they say is history. Although he did not publish for another 20 years, by November of 1838 Darwin was speculating in his notebooks about how selection makes some people bright and others less so. (After his experiences with the natives of Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of South America, Darwin never had any doubts that humans are animals and pretty close to the apes.)
Now, of course, you can sanitize this reading of Malthus. Darwin was not making a political or social statement by using him, and so forth. And there is truth in this. Actually—indeed, at the beginning of his book—Malthus talks about the struggle through the living world, using Ben Franklin as his reference, and only then restricts the discussion down to humans, so in a way you can sidestep Malthus entirely.
Although I think you should be careful here. The Darwin family was always dead set against slavery, but as a family living on the successes of the Industrial Revolution—Darwin’s maternal grandfather (and paternal grandfather of his wife Emma) was Josiah Wedgwood, the potter—they certainly thought that the struggle was natural and not necessarily a bad thing. You need those workers at low wages. Darwin would have thought you were absolutely nuts if you suggested that there is a place for unions.
But going back to Malthus himself, I think it important to put him in context, and to explain incidentally why Darwin would have taken to him so readily. For Malthus, the issue was less economics and politics—although he was certainly writing against the idealistic progressionism of people like Condorcet (remember the first edition of Malthus’s work was 1798, just after the French Revolution)—but as much if not more natural theology. Just what you would expect, given that the Reverend William Paley was in full flight.
The question is why do we do anything at all? Why don’t we all behave as did one of my junior relatives during her undergrad years (following her father I might add) and get up late, slouch around until class—majoring in Afternoon Studies—mooch a few bucks from dad, spend the evening in the company of humans and agreeable stimulants, until sinking into bed around three, ready to start the cycle all over again? God, in His Wisdom, saw this great danger, and so made our reproductive urges stronger than our abilities to find food and space, and the struggle for existence pops right out. You have to work in order to survive. That young relative I might add is now working nonstop in law school.
Charles Darwin was up to his neck in natural theology—after his years as an undergrad at Cambridge, he could quote Paley by heart—and so Malthus fit right in. And the moral of my little story, apart from the fact that I am showing off my knowledge as I repeat last night’s lecture and that if Gina never again reads a word I say I have only myself to blame? I think it is what Thomas Kuhn taught us in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Of course we are going to judge people in the past. Socrates was a good man. Hitler was a bad man. Of course we are going to read the past for what we can learn today. That is why I am giving a course on Darwin. But we should always be careful to realize that the past is a foreign country—okay, I know, L. P. Hartley not Thomas Kuhn—and that the problems that were important and motivating in the past are not necessarily our problems today. And that should be taken into account, both in judging the worth of ideas and actions and the virtues of the actors involved.
