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Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 300 pp.; $54.95
Isms multiply when ideologies collide. Strange though it may seem at "the end of history," words we smile or scoff at were once casus belli, fought over like territory, flung about like grenades. Nineteenth-century English first felt the impact of "evangelicalism" (1831), "socialism" (1837), "secularism" and "vegetarianism" (1851), "altruism" (1853), "positivism" (1854), "sacerdotalism" (1861), "agnosticism" (1869), "imperialism" (1870), and "pragmatism" (1898). Other isms, like ensigns, heralded the followers of great men: "Owenism" (1833), "New man ism" (1838), "Malthusianism" (1848), "Moody-and-Sankeyism" (1875), "Spencerism" (1880), and "Marxism" (1897). Coined in innocence or forged in anger, words like these became "calls to battle," not only in politics and religion, but—Ludwig Fleck reminds us—in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. When their "logical meaning" was spent, they still retained a "magical power" to provoke or persuade "simply by being used."
The most durable of Victorian scientific isms is "Darwinism." It entered the ideological fray in 1856 when a clergyman damned the soft-porn poet Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. Four years later, Darwinism began to acquire its modern sense, referring to views ex pressed in the Origin of Species (1859). This was thanks to a rising sea-squirt specialist, Thomas Huxley, who in the same breath puffed an arms magnate by dubbing the Origin "a Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism." Huxley went on to target popular audiences with the ultimatum "it is either Darwinism or nothing," by which he promoted evolutionary naturalism with an anti-creationist edge. But his rhetoric proved divisive and made more enemies than friends. Too often, it seemed, Darwinism was used or abused by partisans rather than treated for what he believed it to be, bona fide science.
So Huxley back-pedaled, claiming to be agnostic about "lunar politics," and then Darwin himself stepped in. Under his auspices (with a little help from the Catholic anatomist St. George Mivart) Darwinism was born again in the 1870s as the theory of evolution by natural selection tout court, without metaphysical or ideological entailments. Huxley continued to shun the D-word (nor did he ever endorse natural selection) and lived to see the "want of unanimity among Darwinians in matters of Sociology and Politics" cited as happy proof that "the principles of the Master are perfectly neutral on such questions." By 1900 pundits were labeling the partisan use or abuse of Darwin's science "Social Darwinism."
All of which suggests that Darwinism has a history like that of other isms. No philosophical fancy footwork, no political jiggery-pokery can avoid this. Raymond Williams once remarked on "the isolation of isms" during the nineteenth century and their "transfer from theological to political controversy." He failed to see that science was just as involved. Here too isms multiplied as dogmas clashed, denominations splintered, and excommunications took place; here too were ideologues, guerrilla groups, and palace coups. At stake was the nature of science itself and its bearing on human progress. And at the center of conflict stood Darwinism, repeatedly defused and rearmed, its charge diluted but finally distilled as the "universal acid" with which to day Dan Dennett and others would dissolve all fundamentalisms except their own.
How then may Darwinism be most aptly studied? As military history, it would seem, and we still hear of Darwin's inflaming "the warfare of science with theology" or, more often, fomenting "the Darwinian revolution." Indeed, judging from historical literature, Darwinism has generated all sorts of excitement. It may "come to" a place like America and there have "impacts" as people "react" or "respond" to it. It may have "implications" independent of context, for "it"—Darwinism—is conceived as an essence hovering above (or seeping through) history's accidents, an idea or set of ideas that, like a chart-busting pop group, creates consternation wherever it goes. But pop artists are real, earthy; no one thinks the tried-and-tired methods of intellectual history are up to understanding them. The same cannot be said of Darwinism. Its historians have yet to discover the rich resources of media studies, material cultural studies, and ethnomethodology, now routinely exploited by interpreters of other protean subjects, like Madonna Ciccone.
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