Download Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life AudioBook Free
On the memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two newborns were created an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky vacation cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country real estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when everyone still accepted the biblical profile of creation as the literal fact and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable communal order. But by enough time both men perished, the world acquired changed: standard people known that life on earth was a story of continuous advancement, and the Civil Conflict had proved a democracy could combat for guidelines and undergo. And with these sign insights much else acquired changed besides. Along, Darwin and Lincoln acquired become midwives to the nature of a fresh world, a fresh kind of hope and beliefs.
Searching for the men behind the symbols of emancipation and advancement, Adam Gopnik shows us, in this captivating dual life, Lincoln and Darwin as they really were: family men and communal climbers; ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers; the living man, father, child, and learner behind each myth. Just how do we reconcile Lincoln, the supremely good man we know, with the solidified commander who wittingly delivered thousands of young military to certain loss of life? Why do the relentlessly logical Darwin delay posting his “Great Idea” for almost twenty years? How do inconsolable grief at the increased loss of a beloved child change each man? And what comfort could either find—for himself or for a contemporary society now possessed of the sadder, if wiser, knowledge of our life? Such individuals questions and their answers are the stuff of this booklet.
Above all, we see Lincoln and Darwin as thinkers and authors—as makers and witnesses of the great change in thought that marks truly contemporary times: a hundred years following the Enlightenment, the old rule of beliefs and dread finally yielding to 1 of reason, debate, and observation not merely as intellectual ideals but as a way of life; the wisdom of divinity finally submitting to the verdicts of history and time. Lincoln considering human history, Darwin reflecting on deep time—both reshaped our knowledge of what life is and exactly how it attains so this means. And they developed a new vocabulary expressing that understanding. Angels and Age groups can be an original and personal profile of the creation of the liberal tone—of the way we live now and the way we speak at home and in public. Demonstrating that literary eloquence is vital to liberal civilization, Adam Gopnik shows why our heroes should be possessed by the urgency of utterance, obsessed by the necessity to see for themselves, and endowed with the present to speak for us all.
