Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World

Chapter 1
SECULAR RE-ENCHANTMENT
The gentle gentleman Charles Darwin, who was buried in Westminster Abbey, lives in public consciousness within an adjective describing a brutally competitive and mechanistic world, and as the author of a controversial theory that has made him to many the Antichrist. He has survived not only as the icon of a revolutionary shift in the way we think about origins and humanity but as an unpleasant idea. And for those who think about such things, in extending naturalistic explanation even to human behavior, he is seen as perhaps the most striking embodiment of that scientific rationalism that, in Max Weber's terminology, "disenchanted" the modern world. Evolution by natural selection seems to have removed both meaning and consolation from the world; those who discovered it and who now argue for it often engage in a kind of triumphal rationalism that treads all affective and extramaterial explanation underfoot. It is one thing to believe that science can explain the movement of the stars or even the composition of matter; it is quite another to believe that science can explain human nature itself, and all the disorderly intricacies of human life.
Certainly, Weber's reading of the disenchantment of the world was consistent with the responses of many Victorians to the progress of science. As against the scientific naturalists, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and W. K. Clifford, who exuberantly advertised the power of science to transform the world, W. H. Mallock, among their most brilliant and witty antagonists, noted of the world in a book significantly called Is Life Worth Living? that "in a number of ways, whilst we have not been perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling."1 Instead of finding that the new knowledge enspirits and enlivens, Mallock claims that "in the last few generations man has been curiously changing."
And the change is the result of too much knowledge, too much reflection. Man "has become a creature looking before and after; and his native hue of resolution has been sicklied over by thought" (19). Mallock's formulation of the Victorian experience can serve as a strong example of Weber's point that the authority of scientific explanation drives meaning and value from the world.
And the Victorian struggle over this problem takes an even starker shape today. One of the more popular scientific books of recent years is called, not immodestly, How the Mind Works, and its author, Stephen Pinker, recognizing its immodesty, begins on an uncharacteristic "note of humility" by confessing that "we don't know how the mind works." But, Pinker says, we are on our way, arguing that our understanding of how the mind works has been "upgraded" from a "mystery" to a "problem."2 And it is precisely the fact that Pinker's project is recognized as a legitimate enterprise of science--the upgrade from mystery to problem anticipates another upgrade to resolution--that, according to Weber, marks modern culture's understanding that science can indeed explain everything. Weber contends that meaning drains out of the world precisely as we come to believe that "if one wished one could learn" virtually anything; "there are no mysterious incalculable forces."3
There is widespread agreement that this is the case. Pinker's project has deep roots, but in the nineteenth century, particularly in the work of the positivists and scientific naturalists, the enterprise of producing a full scientific description of all phenomena had gained enormous energy. When William James contemplated the project in 1902, he registered a response that confirms Weber's later thesis. "When we read...proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything," he asserts with something like contempt, "we feel-- quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program... menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life."4 He talks of "cold-blooded assimilations" that "threaten...to undo our soul's vital secrets," and of the "assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted" (12-13). James's project is to open the way to a recognition of the importance and validity of the religious experience, but to do that he also makes plain the inadequacy for personal and spiritual satisfactions of this scientific "program." He describes, in effect, the condition of disenchantment, about which Weber was to write, and he feels obliged to engage immediately with what is certainly a fundamentally Darwinian project, the explanation of origins in "lowly" terms.
James mocks the pretensions of those who claim to be on their way to describing "the existential conditions of absolutely everything," but that program is not dead. Nor is it self-evident that it's not worth attempting.