The Price of Altruism Page 2

  Across the Baltic and North seas at the very same time, Thomas Henry Huxley was fastening his bow tie in preparation to open, together with the president, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the Thursday meeting of the Royal Society in Burlington House, Piccadilly, London.

  Pictures of his carriage ride that afternoon flashed like fiery moths in his mind: Magsmen, cracksmen, shofulmen and prostitutes, child fences, religious fakes, and grimy boxers and promoters—this was the Victorian underworld, lying on his route to England’s sanctum sanctorum of science. He knew the gutters and fever nests well: He had come from them. As he settled into the velvet-cushioned oak chair, he stole a nervous glance across the room.

  Born in 1825 above a butcher shop in Ealing, a small village twelve miles west of London, he was forced at ten to abandon school to earn the pittance his unemployed father could not provide him. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a “beer-swilling, opium-chewing” medical man of a brother-in-law in Coventry, before being fastened to a lowlife mesmeric doctor back in town. At times the young Huxley thought he might drown in what a later biographer would call the “ocean stream of life” that was London—teeming with “whores, pandars, crimps, bullies.” He found refuge in the dreary apothecary shop, grinding drugs in solitude. Steadily a rage grew within him. How could the middle class remain so coldly indifferent, he wondered in his diary and in countless letters to friends, to such unabashedly squalid suffering?3

  With hard work and determination he gained a scholarship to Charing Cross Hospital, and later won the gold medal for anatomy and physiology at the University of London. At twenty, to pay back debts, he joined the Royal Navy as assistant surgeon on board the HMS Rattlesnake, surveying the coasts and innards of Papua New Guinea and Australia and dissecting otherworldly invertebrates from the wild southern seas. The specimens and papers he sent back home quickly made a name for him as an authority on the oceanic hydrozoa. At twenty-five he was elected to the Royal Society. Before long he was the professor of natural history at the Royal School of Mines, Fullarian professor at the Royal Institution, Huntarian professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He led important royal commissions, setting out to fix the British world: Trawling for Herrings on the Coast of Scotland, Sea Fisheries of the United Kingdom, the Contagious Diseases Acts, Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science.

  He shuffled the papers in front of him. The seat of Britain’s most learned men of science for more than 300 years, the Royal Society was undergoing dramatic change, mirroring the very face of the nation. Gone were the courtly days of yesteryear, the unchallenged loyalties to Crown and Church. As doctors, capitalists, and even those strange birds, “academics,” began ringing at the bell, a fresh spirit was being ushered in. The new patrons were merchants and builders of empires abroad, not “blue blooded dilettantes” and “spider-stuffing clergy.” For Britain itself, as for its august Royal Society, the new gods became “utility and service to state; its new priests, the technocrats and specialists.” Men, that is, just like Huxley. 4

  Earlier that week he had been hosted by the radical caucus of Birmingham. A statue of the chemist Joseph Priestley was being unveiled, and Huxley seemed just the man to do the talking. With the city fathers hanging on his every word, he painted the townsfolk a vision of “rational freedom” sanctioned by a science-driven state. The post, the telegraph, the railway, vaccination, sanitation, road building—all would be well served if run by government. Improving life for British citizens in this way was the only way to stave off the bloody revolutionary rage scourging the rest of Europe.5

  Clearing his throat to open the meeting, Huxley had calmed. It was the spring of 1874 and he was secretary of the Royal Society. The imperial botanist, Hooker, sitting beside him, had just declined a knighthood as beneath the dignity of science. Huxley smiled to himself. If a little boy from Ealing could make it, the system must be true and just after all. In a cutthroat world of competition, he had clawed his way from the gutter to the very heights of Victorian living. Brimming with fiery spirit—“cutting up monkeys was his forte, and cutting up men was his foible” the Pall Mall Gazette observed of him—he was the unblinkered professional public servant at the service of the modern, benevolent state.6

  “My fellows, I call this meeting to order.”

  When the four-wheeled carriage crossed the Palace Bridge over the Neva some days and interrogations later, notwithstanding the silence of the stout Circassian accompanying officer, Kropotkin knew he was being taken to the terrible fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

  Here Peter the Great had allegedly tortured and killed his son Alexis with his own hands; here Princess Tarakanova was kept in a water-filled cell, “the rats climbing upon her to save themselves from drowning” here Catherine buried political prisoners alive. And here, too, great men of letters had recently been chained: Ryleyev and Shevchenko, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pisarev. The revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, too, had spent eight hard years there before the czar offered him the choice of banishment to Siberia, which he gladly accepted. Bakunin ended up escaping from Siberia in 1861 to Yokohama and from there to San Francisco and then New York. When he finally burst into fellow revolutionist and exile Alexander Herzen’s apartment in London sometime later, “Can one get oysters here?” was the first thing the great anarchist bellowed. With such thoughts in his mind Kropotkin smiled under his beard and promised himself: “I will not succumb here!”7

  Immediately he was ordered to strip and handed a green flannel dressing gown and gigantic woolen stockings of “an incredible thickness.” Boat-shaped yellow slippers were thrown at his feet, so big that they fell off when he tried to walk. The prince was to be treated like any other inmate. Still, the military commander of the fortress, General Korsakov, a thin and tired old man, betrayed enfeebled vestiges of the tug of stature in czarist Russia, seeming visibly embarrassed by the occasion. “I am a soldier, and only do my duty,” he said, not quite looking the prince in the eye. Kropotkin was paraded through a dark passageway guarded by shadowed sentries. A heavy oak door was closed behind him, and a key turned in its lock.

  The room was a casemate, “destined for a big gun,” Kropotkin later wrote in his memoirs, with an iron bed and a small oak table and stool. The sole window, a long, narrow opening cut in a wall five feet deep and protected by an iron grating and a double iron window frame, was so high that he could hardly reach it with his outstretched fingers. Defiant, he began to sing, “Have I then to say farewell to love for ever?” from his favorite Glinka opera, Russlan and Ludmila, but was soon silenced by the basso reproach of an invisible guard.

  The cell was half dark and humid. Absolute silence reigned all around. Assessing his surroundings, the prince determined to keep his body fit. There were ten steps from one corner to the other. If he paced them 150 times, he would have walked one verst—two-thirds of a mile. Then and there he decided to walk seven versts every day: two in the morning, two before dinner, two after dinner, and one before going to sleep. And so he did, day in and day out, month in and month out. And he let his mind roam.8

  Darwin called him “my good and kind agent for the propagation of the Gospel,” though “good” and “kind” were perhaps not quite the words for the slashing rapier of “Darwin’s bulldog.” For Huxley the alternative was “to lie still and let the Devil have his own way,” for the resistance to the logic of materialism and evolution seemed to him nothing short of the workings of Satan. Darwin’s nemesis, Britain’s leading anatomist, Richard Owen, had called Huxley a pervert with “some, perhaps congenital, defect of mind” for denying divine will in Nature, but this sort of thing only stoked his internal fires. Finally, from the heights of the Royal Society, Huxley, known to his enemies as “the Devil’s disciple,” could begin to bring about the revolution.9

  The first blow was struck from Russia. Vladimir Kovalevskii had come to London to work on hippopotamus evolution and was soon befriended by H
uxley. Darwin’s philosophy of descent with modification by the merciless hand of Nature’s blind selector had been fought over with rancor on the pages of popular newspapers and debated with disdain in the halls of museums. But evolution still remained at the margins of true scientific discourse. More than a decade following the publication of the Origin of Species, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society had yet to print one article related to Darwinism, stubbornly clinging to “facts” and avoiding “theory,” and keeping as far from controversy as its blue-bloodedness could afford. But Huxley and his X-Club friends were now the new masters.10 When the secretary read Kovalevskii’s paper to the society, George Gabriel Stokes complained that it was an abomination that a nihilist known to the Russian secret police be allowed to air such folly. Comparing Darwinian speculations with the axioms of Newton was a blow to the very foundations of knowledge. For Stokes, Cambridge’s Lucasian professor of mathematics, the “continuous curve” connecting the creative acts was a piece of “divine geometry,” the very considered opposite of “Creation by Caprice.” Yet Huxley arranged for sympathetic reviewers, and “On the Osteology of the Hyopotamidae” soon appeared in the pages of Transactions. It took the hippopotami and a nihilist Russian, but the fiery lad from Ealing had finally traversed the Royal Society’s impasse. A flood of “free-thinking” was about to violently burst open the pearly gates of England’s scientific holy of holies.11

  Kropotkin was born in Moscow in the winter of 1842. His maternal grandfather had been a Cossack army officer—some said of note—but his father’s side provided the truly important pedigree. The Kropotkins were scions of the great Rurik dynasty, first rulers of Russia before the Romanovs.12 At a time when family wealth was measured in numbers of serfs, the family owned nearly twelve hundred souls in three different provinces. There were fifty servants in the Moscow home, and another seventy-five at the Nikolskoye country estate. Four coachmen attended the horses, five cooks prepared the meals, and a dozen men served dinner every evening. It was a world of birch trees, governesses, samovars, sailor suits, and sleigh rides that young Peter was born into, “the taste of tea and jam sharpened and sweetened by the sense of the vast empty steppes beyond the garden and imminent end of it all.”13

  Not all was idyllic. Like other famous sons of Russian landed nobility—Herzen, Bakunin, Tolstoy—Peter would come to despise the particular flavor of Oriental despotism baked in the juices of Prussian militarism and overlaid with a foreign veneer of French culture. Ivan Turgenev’s short story “Mumu,” describing the misfortunes of the serfs, came as a startling revelation to an apathetic nation: “They love just as we do; is it possible?” was the reaction of sentimental urban ladies who “could not read a French novel without shedding tears over the troubles of the noble heroes and heroines.” 14 Images etched themselves on young Peter’s mind: the old man who had gone gray in his master’s service and chose to hang himself under his master’s window, the cruel laying waste of entire villages when a loaf of bread went missing, the young girl who found her only salvation from a landlord-arranged marriage in drowning herself. Increasingly, thinking and caring sons of the ruling elites of imperial Russia witnessed up close the meanness and sterility of the feudal world into which they were born, and fretted over the future of their beloved Russia. Many wondered: What is to be done?15

  Aleksei Petrovich Kropotkin, a retired army officer who had seen little real action but nevertheless lived entirely according to military custom, thought he knew very well what his son needed to do: Little Peter’s artistically inclined mother died of consumption when he was just four, and thereafter he would be groomed for the life of a soldier. When a serendipitous opportunity presented itself to showcase his son at a gala costume party in honor of Czar Nicholas I’s twenty-fifth anniversary, eight-year-old Peter’s uniform was prepared with particular attention. And there he was, dressed as a Persian page with a belt covered with jewels, and hoisted by his uncle, Prince Gagarin, to the platform, when the czar himself beheld him. Taking the young boy by the arm, Nicholas I led him to Maria Alexandrovna, the pregnant wife of the heir to the throne, saying: “That is the sort of boy you must bring me.” 16

  The czar would not live to regret his words, but his heir would. The Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg was the training ground for Russia’s future military elite; only 150 boys, mainly sons of the courtly nobility, were admitted to the privileged corps, and upon graduation could join any regiment they chose. The top sixteen would be even luckier: pages de chambre to members of the imperial family—the card of entry to a life of influence and prestige. When Peter was sent there by his father at fifteen, he already considered it a misfortune. But despite himself he graduated at the top of the class and was made personal liege to Alexander II, Nicholas having died some years earlier. It was 1861, and insurrections were growing more violent and expensive, opposition more damagingly vocal. The new czar was coming under increasing pressure to grant freedom to his serfs. When he finally signed the Edict of Liberty on March 5 (according to the old Russian calendar), Alexander seemed to Peter transcendent. The sentiment was fleeting. The glamour of richly decorated drawing rooms flanked by chamberlains in gold-embroidered uniforms took his breath away at first, but soon he saw that such trifles absorbed the court at the expense of matters of true importance. Power, he was learning, was corrupting.

  As he shadowed the czar at a distance, with the requisite combination of “presence with absence,” the aureole he once imagined over the imperial ruler’s person gradually gloomily eroded. The czar was unreliable, detached, and vindictive, and many of the men around him were worse. With the Corps of Pages, Kropotkin had learned to march and fence, build bridges and fortifications, but his true interests, he already knew, lay elsewhere. Secretly he began to read Herzen’s London review, the Polar Star, and even to edit a revolutionary paper. When the time came to pick a commission he determined to travel to the far expanses of eastern Siberia, to the recently annexed Afar region. His father and fellow cadets were shocked—after all, as sergeant of the corps the entire army was open to him. “Are you not afraid to go so far?” Czar Alexander II asked him before he was to leave, surprised. “No. I want to work. There must be much to do in Siberia to apply the great reforms which are going to be made.” “Well, go; one can be useful everywhere,” the czar replied, but with such an expression of fatigue and complete surrender that Kropotkin thought at once, “He is a used up man.” 17

  Thirty years before Kropotkin set out for the Afar, Charles Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagle. En route to Buenos Aires in October 1832, Darwin noticed swarms of phosphorescent zoophytes, each smaller than the dot above this i. They illuminated the waves surrounding the ship with the glow of a pale green light as it sailed into the dark unknown ocean. Darwin was aware of the prevalent explanation: The tiny marine creatures had been put there by God to help sailors avoid shipwreck on gloomy nights at sea. This was the doctrine of finalism, or teleology, the very backbone of a tradition of natural theology on which Darwin’s generation had been reared.18

  But the young lad from Shrewsbury would not have God’s benevolence stand as a proxy for scientific explanation. The glow ordained to direct lost sailors, he was certain, was simply phosphorescence caused by the decomposing bodies of the millions of dead zoophytes caught among the live ones—a process by which the ocean purified itself. This was purpose enough, God’s benevolence notwithstanding. The true beauty of Nature could be unmasked only by uncovering her own laws, not God’s divinations. The Reverend William Paley figured natural design to be proof of godly design—how else to explain the excellence of the crystalline lens of the eye of the trout, or the aerodynamic perfection of the wing of the eagle? But the answers in his Natural Theology now seemed to Darwin like questions: If God were bracketed, and natural laws sought out in his stead, how could the seamless fit between organisms’ forms and functions be explained? How did Nature come to seem so perfect?19

  One way to look at the probl
em would be to study Nature’s imperfections, long recognized as a puzzle, and unsuccessfully explained away by the argument for design. Why on earth do flightless kiwis have vestiges of wings, snakes relics of leg bones, or moles traces of once-busy eyes? The mysteries of biogeography kept tugging at his mind, too: Why are there fewer endemic species on islands than on the mainland? Where did these species come from? Why are they so similar to mainland species if their natural surroundings are so different? A fixity-of-species man upon embarkation, Darwin returned to England in October 1836 leaning toward a more dynamic view of Nature and her ways. Still unsure of the physical law to explain away all conundrums, he nevertheless arrived after nearly five years at sea with “such facts [that] would undermine the stability of species.”20

  And then something momentous happened.21 In October 1838 Darwin read An Essay on the Principle of Population by the clergyman and former professor of political economy Thomas Malthus. The idea that population increases geometrically while food supply increases arithmetically was meant by Malthus to prove that starvation, wars, death, and suffering were never the consequence of the defects of one political system or another, but rather the necessary results of a natural law. A Whig and a supporter of Poor Law action to ameliorate the condition of the destitute, Darwin was not sympathetic to Malthus’s reactionary politics, but applying the clergyman’s law to nature was different. Immediately he realized that given the struggle for existence everywhere, “favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then,” he wrote, “I had at last got a theory by which to work.” Evolution by natural selection was nothing more and nothing less than “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”22