Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
scope of the latter term, and in this regard we might say that the rhetorical
campaigns of evolutionism are an effort to remedy this. Evolutionism is an
effort to identify modern historical understanding so closely with evolution-
ary science as to collapse “progress” into “science” entirely.
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My job in the next two chapters will be to describe the Christian base-
line from which these features of evolutionism developed. However, I do not
expect the reader to simply believe that the similarities I have outlined thus
far establish such a cultural ancestry. For this reason, the middle chapters
of this topic examine the transitional rhetorical adaptations that bridge the
Baconian revolution with nineteenth-century evolutionism. This transition
did not begin within scientific circles so much as in the broader efforts of
Enlightenment thinkers and their positivist successors to rebuild European
society in science's image. Bacon's rhetoric, by contrast, was more closely
tied to the concerns of scientific patronage than were these later forms, and
the momentum he gave to English science sustained it well into the nine-
teenth century. It was not until the middle of that century, when scientific
practitioners (who were not even yet called “scientists”) faced a patronage
crisis brought on by their own intellectual prosperity, that these Enlighten-
ment adaptations of the Baconian narrative begin to become relevant in
the world of science as such. At this time they provided for advocates like
Huxley the kind of material that the Reformation had provided for Bacon—
a scientized narrative into which the scientific role could be written.
To look at the Enlightenment idea of history as a secularization of the
Baconian one is to accentuate change; but in light of our guiding premise
that cultural evolution is necessarily a mimetic process, we should expect
to find that this process of secularization will be marked by continuity as
well. What complicates this in considering the transition from a Baconian
scientific ethos to one based in evolutionism is the fact that such modernist
ideologies are disposed to deny the very continuity that cultural evolution
would seem to necessitate. We would predict, in light of this, that the rheto-
ric that negotiated this transition would be characterized by forms of inven-
tion that maintain existent cultural patterns while also managing to make
them appear altogether novel. They will involve mimesis (remembering by
imitation) but also a kind of learned forgetfulness that is needed to sustain
the appearance of modernity.
Patterns of this kind are all around simply because modernism is all
around. One example is the persistent habit in commercial marketing of
declaring products to be forever new, as if they had no past. So long as I
can remember, Tide laundry detergent has always been the “New Tide,”
