Hierarchy to Evolution.
The Old Story. The Great Chain of Being was a natural but divinely ordered hierarchy that extended from God at the top down to the basest of minerals. Although there were divisions, it formed a kind of continuum, with the lowest of one order of being just above the highest of the next. The lowest of men being thus just above the highest of wild animals. It was a value-ordered hierarchy, from superior to inferior, but that did not imply that the inferior was necessarily evil. Everything had its place in this divine order, and there were obligation in both directions. Princes, masters, and men were superior to subjects, servants, and women. While the subjects, servants and women owed obedience to their superiors, the superiors were obligated to protect and care for those under their sway. That at least was the theory. Wherever power exists it is abused, but at least commonly accepted values recognized that it was abuse.
Harmony. As always, theory and reality never match perfectly, but this theory had the virtue of simplicity, stability, and an ideal of harmony.
There was much more to it than that, of course. Into the mix were theories of kingship, philosophical ideas derived from Aristotle and the neo-platonists, and of course Christian theology. But our business has to do with what came after.
The industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism brought about new power structures and with them came new Just-So Stories. The new stories mixed with the old in shifting and—as noted earlier—often inconsistent ways. As the formerly powerless gained power, they proclaimed the ideal of equality. “We are all equal!” they defiantly proclaimed! (“Well, um, maybe not, uh ... women, slaves, and, well, servants ... but, uh, you know, all.”) It is curious how one part of the brain can believe something that totally contradicts something another part of the brain believes.
Democracy. The political corollary to the philosophic ideal of equality is of course democracy, which means equality of power. It has become a sacred and unquestionable ideal.
So no one openly questions democracy. It nevertheless has many internal enemies. That is for the simple reason that people who have power want to keep it and to get ever more. So the Just-So stories they devise must somehow be consistent with unequal power while not seeming to challenge the ideal of democracy.
Religion to Science. They found what they needed in the development of a new intellectual ideal: modern science. As the eighteenth century moved into the nineteenth and then into the twentieth, science gradually began to replace religion as the source of our information about the world around us. Isaac Newton and his followers seemed to provide a wonderful, beautiful, and most importantly, a rational way to understand the entire universe. But for a while there was one essential area that seemed to escape the grasp of this amazing if mechanistic new science: the mysterious world of living things, and especially, of human beings.
And then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, came Charles Darwin.
