Locke, Darwin, and America’s Future

America’s two guiding lights today are John Locke and Charles Darwin. Locke provided the principles for classical liberalism and the Declaration of Independence; he is the source of our sense that we possess autonomy and rights, and our sense that the story of our progress is one toward greater and greater freedom, with the liberation of the individual from various forms of natural, political, and religious bondage. From Darwin, who provided the scientific basis for evolutionary naturalism, we get our sense that nature, including human nature, is constantly changing, and that we and everything about us are the products of an accidental, impersonal process.

While these two dominant impulses have both had prominent roles in the history of our republic, and so have coexisted for some time, they are deeply in tension with one another. The Lockean idea of natural rights is tied to ideas about the eternity of nature and the eternity of God from the premodern Western tradition — suggesting a kind of stability in our country’s philosophical foundations. It often seems that this stability has been undermined by the Darwinian notion of the constant evolution that underlies all life and that seems both inevitable and, in creating and improving us, good. But Locke and Darwin actually share a view of nature indifferent to the existence of particular human beings or free persons. Lockeanism is even more unstable than Darwinism in its claim that human beings are free enough to transform natural reality into something better — a process which is also constant and ceaseless, one which moves us from the impersonal stability of natural laws to the increasing power of individualism. In fact, it was the very instability of Lockeanism that opened Americans to many of the implications of Darwinian theory.

How, if at all, are we to reconcile the naturalistic and the libertarian impulses we have inherited from Darwin and Locke? It turns out that modern enlightened Americans are stuck with somehow believing that we are radically free to reject all that we’ve been and reinvent ourselves as we please, while at the same time we are wholly subject to the evolutionary and material process that is the complete source of our beings. A true conservative or true defender of human love, liberty, and greatness would see something true in the Darwinian criticism of Locke, just as he would see something true in the Lockean criticism of Darwin.