The Darwinian Grand Narrative
David Brooks, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, recently published a column which I read in The Lakeland Ledger called Darwin’s Place in the Grand Narrative. There is much distaste these days for “grand narratives,” unifying stories which explain and order all of our experience. Popular postmodern thought denies the existence of a grand narrative. We can never get outside of our own vantage point to see reality as it is.
Brooks argues that, although many grand narratives (such as that offered by Orthodox Christianity) have been rejected, one particular grand narrative has quietly crept in to establish itself as the story which explains and shapes all that we do.
It occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere.
Scarcely a month goes by when Time or newsweek doesn’t have a cover article on how our genes shape everything from our exercise habits to our moods… Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior.
Brooks rightly observes that this grand narrative is shockingly different from those narratives which it has replaced:
The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs. According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code… Reason is not separate from emotion and the soul cannot be detached from the electrical and chemical pulses of the body. We are tools of mental processes we are not even aware of.
Despite the postmodern influence in our culture today, I agree with Brooks that America is not a postmodern society. He states:
We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to.
This is a saddeningly accurate description of the world from a Darwinian perspective. It is not God who shapes history, but undirected processes acting on molecules and matter. Humans are mere “machines” whose purpose is to perpetuate ourselves and our species.