The parallel lives of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were explored Wednesday night by Adam Gopnik, an award-winning journalist for The New Yorker and author of several books.
He examined the prominent lives of Darwin and Lincoln, who were both born Feb. 12, 1809. Gopnik said his book was inspired by the surrounding dispute of the famous epitaph uttered over Lincoln’s deathbed by Secretary of State Edwin Stanton, “Now he belongs to the ages” or “Now he belongs to the angels.”
Gopnik interprets these two quotes as two different perspectives of our lives: a fixed life judged by God or a changeable life judged by the ages.
“Both Lincoln and Darwin are the makers and witnesses of that transformation,” Gopnik said.
Darwin introduced the Origins of Species to a culture that believed in the fixed form of nature and species, and Lincoln battled the social order of slavery which the Founding Fathers took for granted through his love of law and reasoning, Gopnik said.
Both Lincoln and Darwin argued on a narrow base of evidence, sympathetic summery and the habit of the understatement of emotional response to evoke transformation, Gopnik said.
“This was a new way of articulating and a very different kind of language,” he said.
The men built their arguments so everyone could understand them. Lincoln slowly and dryly built his evidence to his moral conclusion, just as Darwin introduced the Origins of Species with the simple comparisons of dogs and pigeons.
They addressed their opposition in arguments as well.
“[They] don’t evade it, but address it head on … a discipline of a truly liberal thinker,” Gopnik said.
Lincoln and Darwin each had the habit of deliberately deflecting emotion into simple words.
“We understand the way we can move people is to let them do the work,” he said.
Summarizing the influence of Lincoln and Darwin’s rhetorical and historical lives on modern democracy and science, Gopnik said they are a long way off and yet still near.
“I thought it was very eye-opening,” said Caitlin Jensen, an undecided freshman in the Honors College. “[Gopnik] brought me to his level of understanding.”
Gopnik was awarded with the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism three times and the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting during his career.