Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage by Jacques Barzun

Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage Reviews

• 
  Clif

  Jacques Barzun was a well regarded cultural critic and historian whose best known work is From Dawn to Decadence, subtitled a history of Western cultural life from 1500 to the present. In the work I'm reviewing here, written much earlier, in 1931, Barzun puts the same phenomenal wide-ranging knowledge on display.
  
  His objection voiced in this critique is, broadly, the placing of system over and above individual human behavior; that there is some grand design that humanity works out unknowingly, a path that must be followed against which each individual life is hardly more than decoration on a Great Truth behind things.
  
  He chooses the work of Darwin, Marx and Wagner as together exemplifying this one grand idea obsession in the last part of the 19th century, thought to be an advance over the affect driven Romanticism of the first half of the same century. For Darwin, Barzun calls the problem scientism, that evolution explains the physical world, that the material world is a machine.
  
  Marx presents the grand idea as socio-economic, where capitalism must produce class warfare that in turn will bring socialism as the final answer to the problem of man, his work and the unjust distribution of the proceeds. The process must occur as Marx predicts and only fools cannot see it.
  
  Wagner's work was seen by him as the final coming together of all the arts in his masterpiece that blends the visual, the aural (vocal/instrumental) and the literary into one magnificent synthesis for which mankind has been yearning since the dawn of time.
  
  This is heady stuff, not surprising coming at a time when material/scientific advances were revealed almost daily to an awed public easily persuaded that it was a new world where the old could be cast aside as mythical nonsense that hid the truth. Barzun feels strongly that this dismissal of what came before is hasty and unwarranted, that there are no sudden cultural changes, that ideas grow from many sources
  
  He wants credit given where it is due, criticizing all three men for failing to acknowledge others before them who laid the groundwork for the Big Idea that each wants associated with one name alone. Though Darwin largely gets a pass on his personal behavior, Marx and Wagner are shown to be quite blinded by their own evaluation of their work, hard to deal with, quick to dismiss any criticism and in their self-assurance attracting large numbers of avid followers ready to acknowledge a master.
  
  Now, in the 21st century, the three men are set apart. Marx is discredited. In spite of his astute criticism of capitalism, identification of its cyclical nature and characteristic routing of wealth to the few at the expense of the many, the profit motive has taken over the world, given new life (to date) on the basis of technical advances and, within the last 40 years, on financial voodoo while the class conflicts that Marx thought inevitable in an industrialized world have not come to pass. If Bernie Sanders brings a mild form of socialism to the United States, it won't be through violent revolution by an army of fast-food workers. The threat now is of environmental collapse.
  
  Richard Wagner? I'd bet a poll of 100 Americans on the street would show only a tiny percentage of those questioned, if anyone at all, able to say who the man was. His idea of a grand synthesis of the arts might today best be seen (though free of Wagner's pretentiousness) in science fiction movies where the audience is assaulted by sights and sounds, special effects that would have delighted Wagner and an end-of-the world screenplay with appeal to viewers starved for meaning in daily life.
  
  Charles Darwin fails in my estimation to deserve Barzun's criticism. Though the great truth zeitgeist at the time may have influenced Darwin, with him it bore real fruit with his Origin of the Species even though he had no idea of the mechanism of heredity that we now know is in the processing of DNA. His comprehensive gathering of evidence for his ideas Barzun admits. Darwin's thinking was founded on reason applied to evidence and has always been open to refutation from scientific investigation. Notably, nothing significant has been found to refute his theory in the 160 years since Origin was published.
  
  Marx and Wagner, however, dealt in emotional longing for system in things cultural, a very different area than what science deals with. They wanted to find a solidity and predictability within cultural changes that are not there to be found. For Marx and Wagner, Barzun's critique holds up.
  
  To his credit, Barzun foresaw in this book the extremes to which ideology can drive societies as proven by Hitler's masterful employment of myth, and the popularity of eugenics that sought to make predatory and racist ideas acceptable through the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism.
  
  Deep reading is a pleasure with an author as clear in his writing as Jacques Barzun. His mastery of source material is impressive. His work deserves the attention required for a book like this to be understood. And it's free and the public domain online.
• 
  Roberto Yoed

  Antiscientific and antimaterialistic rambles.
• 
  Douglas

  Barzun joins these three in his book because major works by each appeared in 1859, and also because each forwards a flavour of anti-Romantic materialism: in science, in society, and in art. In the 80 further years since Barzun's first publication of this book, these particular personages have suffered widely differing fates. Darwin's reputation only grows. Applications of Marx's ideas have led to some of the great tragedies of the 20th century, and history as dialectic is a failure. But, class-based approaches to social and economic analyses are powerful supplements to other approaches, and dialectic approaches to analysing systems can themselves be powerful. Wagner had won Hitler's admiration, one imagines quite proudly were Wagner to have been alive, and German culture is only now regathering any sort of world force.
  
  I will consider Barzun on Darwin as this is what I know. His treatment of Darwin as a thinker is a disappointment. I cannot address his critiques of Marx or Wagner so I will not not read him on them. I'd rather know more before reading him again, given the inadequacy which I find his approach to Darwin.
  
  Barzun goes to great pains to show that evolution was not novel with Darwin. Everyone knows of Lamarck's theory of evolution, very ill treated according to Barzun, and evolutionary ideas had been "in the air" for several decades. Darwin's contribution was Natural Selection (NS), and the connection with inheritance. This seems to stump Barzun. He continually denigrates Darwin for calling it "my theory" because evolution is not novel, but that is not what Darwin is calling his theory, NS is. The Origin begins, after all, with artificial selection, to illustrate the speed and specificity with which a human-directed process can produce change, to support that NS can itself have considerable power. Darwin wrote that obviously artificial selection is not the same process as natural selection: for one thing, species are not easily created that way. Darwin knew that other, unknown things were being selected in nature that lead to the production of separate species.
  
  Darwin was perfectly correct to put forward NS as the creative mechanism behind evolution, and evolution by natural selection as "his" theory. This is not the same as claiming evolution for himself.
  
  Darwin's comfort with an extensive gray zone -- things that must be true but he has no ready explanation for -- causes Barzun great disquiet. For Darwin, these are variation and inheritence. With hindsight we know that both arise from the genetic and genomic structures of individuals and populations, and both are inextricably linked. It was a profound strength of Darwin's theory -- one that gives it equal power in environments containing lifeless ooze -- that the precise mechanisms underlying inheritance and variation need not be known for NS to work creatively. Darwin spent several books applying it to great effect, from sexual selection (which Barzun on p.61 footnotes as a "now discarded theory" -- ha!) to orchids to floral heteromorphy to plant mating systems, all of which got whole books to themselves in relatively short order. Meanwhile Barzun's idolised Newton spent much energy on now-forgotten odd spiritualisms, apparently admirable because they admit some sort of dualism, rather than regrettable wastes of Newton's genius.
  
  Barzun praises Samuel Butler and his Life and Habit for his desire to replace or supplement Natural Selection with "mental action," however low and limited. Barzun writes "[b]est of all, [his] hypothesis got rid of the inexplicable mechanism by which the evolution and the life of living things was made to result from chance push-pulls from outside." How do we approach the desires of a virus, or E. coli? The basic features of evolution by natural selection work in a lifeless ooze, must have worked in a lifeless ooze. Where do we find the mental action there? I have no idea what Barzun is after here apart from some nod to vitalism. It is no different from asking that thermodynamics be reformulated in terms of mental action.
  
  None of the other voices Barzun marshals to criticise Darwin have stood the test of time. Simple dumb luck might have resulted in one or two, but nope. Not a good showing for Barzun's judgement.
  
  The silliest of all is that Barzun's pronounces the ill health of evolution by NS by believing the mutationists, who rediscovered Mendel's work at the turn of the century but whose attempts to build genetic theories were even at the time worth little. With this Barzun is 30 years late, writing words as wasted as Newton's spiritualisms. When the first edition of this book was published in 1941, RA Fisher's The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection had been out for 11 years. Fisher thoroughly took apart the mutationists and merged Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolution by natural selection. The Modern Synthesis was named the next year, 1942. It joined natural selection with genetic drift, recombination, and mutation as the main mechanisms of evolution. Barzun chooses not to know. Maybe it's the math.
  
  Barzun also denigrates Darwin's mental abilities using Darwin's own deprecations of his mental abilities. Odd. Many times Barzun claims Darwin appropriates evolution as "my theory" but then takes Darwin at his word when he criticises himself. If Darwin had been a thoroughgoing egotist or iconoclast, perhaps Barzun would have liked him more. But, while Darwin was a genius he was also an involved husband and family man, and was in the midst of struggling with the very same things that motivated Barzun to write this section of his book: the materialist consequences of evolution by natural selection. It caused crises for Darwin, for his family, for his faith. He knew the societal consequences, yet he continued the work, with flowers, and plants, and earthworms.
  
  Barzun also uses the changes Darwin made to subsequent editions of Origin as evidence that Darwin acknowledged various weaknesses. Biologists prefer the first 1859 edition for its strength and clarity, and see later changes as products of Darwin's personal struggles and of his continuing frustrations at lacking a theory of inheritence and variation. And nevertheless, there are the books that apply the theory to orchids, and other flowers, and so on.
  
  There seems quite a bit of room for Barzun to have pursued his overall goal of exploring the consequences of materialism, but criticising Darwin in the way he did certainly wasn't fruitful and showed poor judgement. I would like to read cultural critics, especially non-religious writers who consider these kinds of issues. But it would show poor judgement on my part to read Barzun any further.
• 
  Aaron

  The weakest of the few cultural studies I've read of Barzun's, and also the earliest. Much of his later themes are explored here, but not with as expert of skill as he accomplishes later in his career. One of the criticisms he voices for each cultural colossus, is that they were hugely influenced or repeated the same conclusions as an elder or contemporary in their discipline, but isn't able to convince me that this is a failing of the individuals he is studying. Why the audience embraces one voice over a different, similar one is the fault of the audience and not the producer of the piece. Much time is wasted on that point here.
• 
  David F.

  I find Barzun's assessment of Darwin to be seriously lacking in grasp of actual Darwinian theory and prone to confuse Darwinism with the very different stuff of Social Darwinism. I also think he over-rates the importance of Wagner. But his perspective, while far too conservative for my taste, is an interesting one. On first reading this book, about five decades ago, I found its discussion of Social Darwinism quite enlightening and highly relevant to the then rising tide of Goldwater conservatism.
• 
  Katy

  Connecting evolution, socialism, and nationalism, this book has an intersting take on the mid to late 1800s and 3 people who changed the world. It's also formatted according to each man, so if you don't really care about Wagner, you don't have to read about him.
• 
  Paul Gosselin

  Here we have a Frenchman who is attacking Darwin! It is VERY rare that a educated Frenchman would attempt such a thing and quite amazing as this book was published in 1940, just before the United States entered the war (and France was under Nazi occupation).
  
  Now one must take into consideration that this was written BEFORE the modern Creationist movement had gotten off the ground (and long before the Intelligent Design movement had been dreamed of). Thus the creation movement was at this time an underground movement, and in academia and science evolution was MASSIVELY dominant. So Barzun didn't have any scientific material with which to criticise evolution. It is for this reason that Barzun's critique is for the most part philosophical and sociological. It goes without saying that such criticism required real courage because Barzun basically had to rely solely on his own resources for his argument. Sometimes Barzun vaguely refers to evolution as a form of 'religion', a concept that I have examined in detail in my Flight Volume 2.
  
  This books bears some parallel with another early criticism of the evolution proposed by C. S. Lewis in his essay The Funeral of a Great Myth, first published in 1945 and included in the collection of essays: Christian Reflections. Given the chronological aspect, it is possible that Lewis had knowledge of Barzun's book and was influenced by it, but we know that eventually Lewis would read and be influenced by the British creationist Bernard Ackworth, though in 1940 Ackworth may well have been VERY busy with the war effort, specifically developing sonar for the anti-U-boat battles.
  
  By criticising Darwin directly, Barzun does something quite unusual for a Frenchman and I wonder what motivated him to do that. The subtitle of the book (Critique of a Heritage) suggests that Barzun is attacking a much larger target than Darwin, which is the Enlightenment as a whole.
  
  Barzun's other targets are Karl Marx and Richard Wagner. Barzun examines their scholarship and personal lives and this lead me to wonder if had any of these individuals had come into power and influence comparable to that possessed by Hitler or Stalin, then the 20th century could conceivably have even been WORSE... The odd thing is that the most disgusting individual among the three appears to be Wagner, the artist/composer.
  
  In the last chapters Barzun attempts to find a way out of the rigid materialism that so dominated the late 19th and 20 centuries in the West, but because he does NOT dare totally reject the Enlightenment, he drifts around rather aimlessly, his final destination appears close to the Postmodern perspective...
• 
  Shane Hill

  Fine read but a little hard for me to follow at times....
• 
  Bill Hammack

  Point well taken about scientism, I read some reviews of the book, most of which missed the point. Barzun isn't attacking science, but outlining where it has been abused and extended without
  reason. For example, of course there is evolution and natural selection, but the jump from this that the world is mechanical and the grinding forces of "evolution" created the world misses the question
  what was there before matter? Science has no answer. Barzun does a great job of outlining how evolution was a common idea before Darwin, and that he did great work, but that the times were also rip to receive his ideas. Barzun makes the point - you have to read in a bit - that Darwin's scientific work was an advance, but applying the way evolution is applied as large to society and as a world view only needs Darwin's antecedants on evolution, thus it wasn't Darwin but the Times that set our mind in the cast they are today. He also does an excellent job on Marx, but the section of Wagner just isn't well enough argued.
• 
  Michael

  Not a difficult read but not a very interesting one either. The book is subtitled "critique of a heritage" and makes clear that the subjects of the book were indebted to predecessors and have left an impact on economics, art, and biology out of proportion to their originality.
  The last chapters which discuss the scientific and philosophic trends of the present time (1940) were the least interesting and essential.
• 
  Sam

  Blowing my mind one page at a time. It's a lot to digest, so I may have to use this space from time to time to ruminate.
• 
  Belle Meade School

  901.9