Two hundred and nine years ago today, the sun
rose over the English village of Shrewsbury. Susannah Darwin was about to give
birth to her fifth child, Charles. Her husband Robert was a financier. Her
father was a Wedgewood, of pottery fame. Times were not tough in the Darwin
household.
The sun moved over the Atlantic, heading for Hardin County, Kentucky. Later
in the day -- the Darwins' day, anyway -- it passed over the log cabin of
Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, whose son Abraham had just been born. Times were
always tough in the Lincoln household.
All in all, it was a memorable day, if not for the sun, then for the rest
of us.
Forty-nine years later, in 1858, Darwin was an amateur naturalist,
unemployed but content as a man of leisure. He had achieved some degree of fame
with his 1839 book, Journal and Remarks, 1832-1835, known today as The
Voyage of the Beagle, but he had not made any major contribution to
science.
He had been working for over a quarter century on a manuscript about
evolution. He could not bring himself to finish it. That year, he received a
letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist living in the Malay Peninsula.
Wallace in his autobiography said he had been afflicted by a fever. While in
bed, he had come up with a theory of evolution through natural selection. He
sent the outline of his theory to Darwin.
Darwin was stunned. The theory was almost identical with his own, even with
the same section categories. If Wallace got into print first, he would be the
winner, though it was not clear what exactly he would be winner of. Darwin told
some of his friends, who persuaded him to offer Wallace joint authorship of a
paper on natural selection. Wallace agreed. The paper was published in The
Journal of the Linnean Society in 1858. It attracted no interest. Darwin
was still unknown to the world.
In that same year, 1858, Abraham Lincoln lost the race for United States
Senate to Stephen A. Douglas. In 1839, the same year that Darwin's book
appeared, Mary Todd was courted by Douglas, but she decided to end the
relationship in favor of Lincoln. It could be said that Douglas had defeated
Lincoln twice. In 1858, they were both successful lawyers for the Illinois
Central Railroad, but Douglas was the more successful of the two.
In late 1859, Charles Darwin's book appeared: On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life. The entire edition of 1250 copies sold out the first
day. Well, 1170 copies; the others had been sent out as review copies. This was
not a best-seller.
That same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, Lincoln delivered a
speech to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society on the importance of state fairs.
He began with these words: "Agricultural Fairs are becoming an institution
of the country; they are useful in more ways than one; they bring us together,
and thereby make us better acquainted, and better friends than we otherwise
would be." Not a spellbinding beginning. The ending was not much better.
Lincoln seemed to be on a slow track to oblivion.
Then came 1860. Lincoln was invited to give a speech at Cooper Union in New
York City. That led to his nomination for President by the Republicans. In
November, he won the Presidency.
By the end of 1860, Darwin's book was becoming famous, due initially to the
efforts of his friend Thomas Huxley, who wrote four glowing reviews, including
one in the influential Times of London in December of 1859.
At the time of Darwin's death in 1882, Darwin's book, along with his
follow-up book, The Descent of Man (1871), had conquered the
intellectual world. His theory of evolution through natural selection was
re-shaping legal theory. One piece of evidence is Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s,
book, The Common Law (1881).
Deeply affected by 1885 was the new
academic discipline of sociology. Social Darwinism had become a major
intellectual movement. There were two camps. A laissez-faire camp was led by
Herbert Spencer, who coined a phrase that Darwin adopted in later editions of Origin:
"the survival of the fittest." Opposed to him was Lester Frank Ward,
who believed that Darwinian science gives a scientific and educational elite
the ability and therefore the legal right to plan society. Both men appealed to
Darwin's theory as justification.
Lincoln's wartime policies re-shaped
the politics of the United States. This transformation was reflected in a
change of grammar. In 1860, men said "the United States are." After
1865, they said "the United States is."
FORECASTING
Had anyone on February 12, 1859 looked at the careers of these two
fifty-year-old men, he would have concluded that they had made minor
contributions to their respective fields, but that if they had both died that
evening, neither of them would have made it into a history textbook. Two years
later, they had begun to re-shape the modern world. Lincoln had not yet been
inaugurated, but Southern secession was in full swing.
This should remind us that the affairs of men are essentially
unpredictable. In the conclusion to his June 1968 Commentary essay,
"The Year 2000 and All That," Robert Nisbet assessed futurology.
It is very different with studies of change
in human society. Here the Random Event, the Maniac, the Prophet, and the
Genius have to be reckoned with. We have absolutely no way of escaping them. The
future- predictors don't suggest that we can avoid or escape them -- or ever be
able to predict or forecast them. What the future-predictors, the
change-analysts, and trend-tenders say in effect is that with the aid of
institute resources, computers, linear programming, etc. they will deal with
the kinds of change that are not the consequence of the Random Event, the
Genius, the Maniac, and the Prophet. To which I can only say: there really
aren't any; not any worth looking at anyhow.
Ludwig von Mises challenged all central economic planning because he knew
that no one, and no committee, has the ability to see accurately the effects of
government directives. Men cannot derive viable plans in terms of supposed
historical stages. In Chapter 18 of Socialism (1922), he wrote this.
For sociological study the stage theories are
useless. They mislead us in regard to one of the most important problems of
history -- that of deciding how far historical evolution is continuous. The
solution of this problem usually takes the form either of an assumption, that
social evolution -- which it should be remembered is the development of the
division of labor -- has moved in an uninterrupted line, or by the assumption
that each nation has progressed step-by-step over the same ground. Both
assumptions are beside the point. It is absurd to say that evolution is
uninterrupted when we can clearly discern periods of decay in history, periods
when the division of labor has retrogressed. On the other hand, the progress
achieved by individual nations by reaching a higher stage of the division of
labor is never completely lost. It spreads to other nations and hastens their
evolution.
Men are not omniscient. They are bounded by uncertainty. The free market
offers a way to deal with this uncertainty: entrepreneurship. Men of necessity
must face the future. They do their best to see what is coming. They delegate
to specialists in forecasting the responsibility of allocating resources for
future production. Then consumers bid against each other for these goods and
services. By their bids, they bless certain entrepreneurs with profits, but
thereby curse others with losses. Through the incessant process of resource
allocation and bidding, individuals shape the world in which they live.
CONCLUSION
There was no way in 1859 to go long in Darwin or Lincoln futures. There
would have been too few longs to make a market.
I would have preferred to go short. The market would have made hash of my
plans.
Still, I maintain a short position on both Lincoln and Darwin.
Shorting Lincoln's legacy takes
faith in the ability of the free market to bring negative sanctions against the
modern State. But I think that Jacques Barzun and Martin van Creveld are correct. The
nation-state is a viable short: the end of a 500-year bull market.
Shorting Darwin means shorting the university system and the public
schools. My view is this: when the nation-State goes belly-up, tax subsidies to
education will end. In a competitive market, Darwinism will lose. It already
has. Even today, it is accepted by under 20% of Americans. That percentage will
fall if the subsidies to education end.
I love the way the Darwinists in the media stack the deck. It doesn't work.
The Gallup organization surveys Americans' belief in Darwinism every year. The
figures don't change much, year to year. In 2017, those who favored six-day
creationism constituted 38% of those polled. Those favoring intelligent design
-- God's guidance of evolution -- constituted 38%. This view has been anathema
to Darwinists ever since Darwin. He paid no attention to creationists. His
enemy was the idea of intelligent design. He was trying to refute Robert
Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), not
Genesis 1. Only 19% accepted Darwinism in 2017. So, what was Gallup's headline?
This: In U.S., Belief in
Nice try, guys. But you are still losing, despite 100% control over
tax-funded education. Wait until Washington's checks bounce.
I just hope the futures market survives the regulators in the interim.