Adam Gopnik has written a short book about Darwin & Lincoln, Ages & Angels, which I look forward to reading
I have not had chance to read it yet – I heard about it on Start the Week with Andrew Marr
The basic idea, the one which is new (they said) is a lovely one to play with: both men taught us how to look horizontally rather than vertically, to see time rather than god as our judge & our cause
In a sense to see the road to eternity in alternative ways - both linear, continuous, reaching to infinity, but orthogonal
You could say that this was just building on something which was in the air – the Cartesian co-ordinates of the Enlightenment, a way of locating all things on a two dimensional plane
Something of the same – god or time? – infused the arguments about population growth at the end of the C18th
Does it have to be either/or, horizontal or vertical?
Some people need to be certain about their belief – it was often remarked that many rejected the strict Catholicism of their childhood only when they could find an alternative certainty in Marx - & was he not also a horizontalist?
And if there is only one new way, does it have to be orthogonal to the one rejected? Perhaps bisecting the angle?
Call it the Third Way
"The right angle, is as it were the sum of the forces which keep the world in equilibrium. There is only one right angle; but there is an infinitude of other angles. The right angle, therefore, has superior rights over other angles” – le Corbusier
