The Price of Altruism Read online

  After all, if one great lesson had been gleaned from the journey, it was the awesome abundance of life on the planet. On the massive vines of “wonderful” kelp off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, plummeting forty-five fathoms into the darkness, Darwin found patelliform shells, troche, mollusks, bivalves, and innumerable crustacea. When he shook, out came “small fish, shells, cuttle-fish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, starfish, beautiful holuthuriae, planariae, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms.” The “great entangled roots” reminded Darwin of tropical forests, swarming with every imaginable species of ant and beetle rustling beneath the feet of giant capybaras and slit-eyed lizards, under the watchful gaze of carrion hawks. The splendor and variation were endless. “The form of the orange tree, the coconut, the palm, the mango, the tree-fern, the banana,” Darwin wrote nostalgically, surveying the tropical panorama at Bahia as the Beagle pushed for home, “will remain clear and separate; but the thousand beauties which unite these into one perfect scene must fade away; yet they will leave, like a tale heard in childhood, a picture full of indistinct, but most beautiful figures.”23

  In truth, Darwin knew, nature was one grand cacophonous battle—brutal, unyielding, and cruel. For if populations in the wild have such high rates of fertility that their size would increase exponentially if not constrained; if it is known that, excepting seasonal fluctuations, the size of populations remains stable over time; if Malthus was right, as he surely was, that the resources available to a species are limited—then it follows that there must be intense competition, or a struggle for existence, among the members of a species. And if no two members of a population are identical, and some of these differences render the life chances, or fitness, of some greater than others—and are inherited—then it follows that the selection of the fitter over the less fit will lead, over time, to evolution. The consequences were unthinkable, yet Darwin’s logic was spotless. From the “war of nature, from famine and death” the most exalted creatures had been created. Malthus had brought about in him a complete “conversion,” one which, he wrote to his trusted friend Joseph Hooker in 1844, was “like confessing a murder.”24

  Prisons to reform, schools to build, tribunals to assemble—the great administrative apparatus of the state was waiting to be marshaled. Wide-eyed, Kropotkin had joined the Cossack regiment, eager to bring justice to faraway districts. Gradually he saw his considered recommendations all dying a silent death on the gallows of bureaucracy and official corruption. When a Polish insurrection broke out in the summer of 1863, Alexander II unleashed a terrible reaction, all reforms and their spirit long forgotten. Disillusioned, Kropotkin gradually turned to nature. Fifty thousand miles he traveled—in carts, on board steamers, in boats, but chiefly on horseback, with a few pounds of bread and a few ounces of tea in a leather bag, a kettle and a hatchet hanging at the side of his saddle. Trekking to Manchuria on a geographical survey he slept under open skies, read Mill’s On Liberty, and beheld with astonishment “man’s oneness with nature.”25

  Kropotkin’s primary concern now became working out a theory of mountain chains and high plateaus, but he was keen, too, to find evidence for Darwin’s great theory. He had read The Origin of Species at the Corps of Pages, and in a way this was his polar voyage of the Beagle. What he saw, then, came as a great surprise: Darwin spoke of a fierce struggle between members of the same species, but everywhere he looked Kropotkin found collaboration: horses forming protective rings to guard against predators; wolves coming together to hunt in packs; birds helping each other at the nest; fallow deer marching in unison to cross a river. Mutual aid and cooperation were everywhere.

  Like Darwin upon his return from his journey, after five years of adventure Kropotkin had yet to develop a fullblown theory of nature. But if Darwin’s belief in the fixity of species had been shaken on the Beagle, Kropotkin’s assurance of the struggle for existence was completely shattered on the Afar. By the time he arrived in St. Petersburg in April 1867, he wrote, “the poetry of nature” had become the philosophy of his life.26 At the same time, he had lost all faith in the state: Once a constitutionalist who believed, like Huxley, in the promise of benevolent administration, Kropotkin emerged from the great Russian expanses fully “prepared to become an anarchist.”27

  It was in Switzerland some years later that he became a full-fledged revolutionary. The death of his father finally setting him free, news of the Paris Commune drew Kropotkin to Europe. In Zurich he joined the International, gaining a taste for revolutionary politics. But it was in Sonvilliers, a little valley in the Jura hills, that something really moved him. In the midst of a heavy snowstorm that “blinded us and froze the blood in our veins,” fifty isolated watchmakers, most of them old men, braved the weather in order to discuss their no-government philosophy of living. This was not a mass being led and made subservient to the political ends of a few apparachiks. It was a union of independents, a federation of equals, setting standards by fraternal consensus. He was touched and deeply impressed by their wisdom. “When I came away from the mountains,” Kropotkin wrote, “my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.”28

  Back in St. Petersburg he joined the Chaikovsky Circle, an underground group working to spread revolutionary ideas. For two years, between learned debates at the Geographical Society and lavish imperial soirees, Kropotkin became “Borodin.” Disguised as this peasant he ducked into shady apartments to lecture on everything from Proudhon to reading and arithmetic, slipping away again like a phantom. Communalism and fraternity were the anarchist response to the state, order without Order. Here was the creed: Left to his own devices, man would cooperate in egalitarian communes, property and coercion replaced by liberty and consent. Progress was being made uniting the workers in revolt against the czar when the police began taking serious counteraction. A group of agitating weavers had been arrested, and a raid on a student apartment produced a revolutionary manifesto authored by one P. A. Kropotkin. It was then that he knew that he would have to leave without delay. Now, pacing in his prison cell, Kropotkin could not help but grimace: if only he had forgone that last talk on glacial formations!

  If competition between individuals was, scandalously, Nature’s way, she had forgotten to whisper the news to some of her smaller creatures. Many an ant species, Darwin knew, was divided into fixed, unbreachable castes. The honeypot ant of the American deserts has workers whose sole job is to hang upside down, motionless, like great big pots of sugared water, so that they may be tapped when the queen and her brood are thirsty. Members of another caste in the same species have gigantic heads with which, Cerberus-like, they block the nest entrance before intruders. The leaf-cutter ants of South America sport castes that differ in weight up to three hundredfold, from miniature serene fungus gardeners to giant ferocious soldiers. In the ant world some tend to the queen, others to the nest, others to food, others to battle—each to his caste and each to his fate. What Darwin found amazing was that besides the queen and a few lucky males, all the rest of the ants are effectively neuters. This made no sense if success in the battle for survival was measured by production of off spring.29

  For Darwin the mystery lay in trying to explain how such different behavior and morphology arose in a single species, for since all the workers had no off spring, natural selection could hardly be fashioning their traits through their own direct kin. What this meant was that the queen and her mate were somehow passing on qualities through their own progeny—massive heads, gardening scissor teeth, and mysterious altruistic behavior—that they themselves did not possess, an obscurity that Darwin found “by far the most serious special difficulty, which my theory has encountered.”30 This was a problem of heredity: How could traits, both of form and of behavior, perform such Houdini acts in their journey from generation to generation?

  It was also a glaring exception to “nature, red in tooth and claw.”31 If evolution by natural selection was the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole of living creation, l
ittle ants and bees and termites were islands of chivalry in a sea of conflagration. Why—how—this anomalous sanctuary of “goodness”?32 To solve the mystery Darwin asked a simple question: Who benefits? The answer, he thought, was the “community,”33 for those who could forage or fight would surely free others to partake in procreation, on the very same principle that rendered the division of labor “useful to civilised man.” If selection sometimes worked at a level higher than the individual, even the ultimate sacrifice of the stinging bee or ant centurion could evolve. This was quite an idea, for the very essence of Darwin’s theory, as he declared in The Origin of Species, was that “every complex structure and instinct” should be “useful to the possessor.” Natural selection could “never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each.”34 And yet it did.

  Darwin was impressed. It was the strongest evidence yet, he thought, for the incredible power of natural selection. In truth, he would come to believe, it was actually entirely much bigger. “The social instincts,” he wrote in The Descent of Man, “which no doubt were acquired by man, as by the lower animals, for the good of the community, will from the first have given him some wish to aid his fellows, and some feeling of sympathy.”35 Evolution was the key to the beginnings of morality in humans.

  Rheumatism had almost killed Kropotkin. With the help of family connections and a friendly doctor’s note, he was transferred after twenty-one months to the detention house and from there to the military hospital. Finally, even though he was sickly and frail, there was a glimmer of hope: The hospital was not nearly as well guarded as the fortress. The day of the escape was fixed. It was to be June 29 (old style), the day of Saints Peter and Paul—his friends having decided to throw, he later wrote, “a touch of sentimentalism into their enterprise.”36 A red balloon climbing into the blue sky would be the signal to make a dash for the gate, where a carriage would whisk him to freedom. But the impossible happened that day: No red balloons could be found in all of St. Petersburg, and when one was finally discovered and snatched from the hand of a howling boy, it would not fly, nor would the apparatus for making hydrogen, hurriedly bought from an optician’s shop, revive it. The woman who finally strung the flaccid balloon to an umbrella, walking up and down behind the hospital wall, did not help either: The wall was too high and the woman too short, and the signal never reached poor Kropotkin.

  The next morning a relative came to visit at the hospital carrying a watch that she asked that he be given. Unsuspected, it was passed to him, though the timepiece was far from innocent. Hidden inside was a cipher, detailing the new plans for escape that very day. At 4 p.m.

  Kropotkin went out to the garden for his afternoon stroll. When he heard the cue of an excited violin mazurka, he made a desperate dash for the gate. “He runs! Stop him! Catch him!”—a sentry and three soldiers were in hot pursuit, so close that he could feel the wind of the bayonet thrust toward him.37

  That evening they clinked glasses at Donon’s, St. Petersburg’s finest restaurant: The secret police would never think of looking there. The escape was a feat of true altruism: Untold accomplices had selflessly braved grave danger—one signaling with handkerchiefs, a second by means of synchronized cherry eating, a third distracting the guard, a fourth playing the violin, a fifth commanding the carriage—Kropotkin was aglow with pride. But he would have to leave. Soon he crossed the Finnish border and was on a steamer headed for London.

  Mady Huxley died of pneumonia on November 20, 1887. The great neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had come to England to examine her—the loss of vision and voice having led her father to fear “the worst of all ends—dementia.” She was to him a “brilliant creature,” his fair and beloved third child. A specialist on “hysteria” and teacher to the young Sigmund Freud, Charcot determined that Mady suffered from a grave mental illness and invited her to Paris for hypnosis. It was too late. Arriving at the Salpêtrière Hospital, exhausted, she succumbed before the treatment could remove her emotional “conflicts.”38

  Staggering, in pain, Huxley traveled to Manchester for a talk he felt honor bound to give. As the train sped north through the West Midlands—Coventry, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent—he glanced at England passing by. For more than four years now he was president of the Royal Society, the winner of medals, and very sun of the scientific orbis terranum.39 But if Huxley had come a long way from above the butcher’s shop in Ealing, so too had England from its affluent “Age of Equipoise.” Dissenters and Nonconformists had waged a battle for meritocracy against Church and Crown in the 1850s, ’60s, and ’70s, but this was long yesterday’s triumph. Great boring machines were now miraculously digging the Channel tunnel deep beneath the sea, yet millions in the cities and countryside took to bed hungry. The “interminable Depression” had coincided with “a specialist age” at its finest hour technology was failing the masses.40

  And the masses were swelling. Britain’s population had reached 36 million and was adding nearly 350,000 hungry mouths every year. As growth rates had surged, a new phrase made its way from France and Germany. English Darwinians had by tradition few qualms about folding the social into the biological: For them animals and man bowed just as humbly before Nature and her laws. But as political socialism took a bite at the Malthusian core of survival of the fittest; as suffrage, labor unrest, and the “Woman Question” ushered in a new age of extremes—a currency was needed to remind civilization of its beastly beginnings. Were the teeming congestion and competitive strife not confirmation enough of Malthus’s prediction? Huxley called industrial competition with Germany and the United States a form of international “warfare,” and Nature and the Times applauded.41 But if mercantalism had morphed into an all-out image of battle, if Darwin’s Malthusian struggle had been writ large on the world as a whole—there were those who were prepared to fight it. It was against such men and women that “social Darwinism” would now be wielded.42

  Leading the way was Herbert Spencer, Huxley’s X-Club companion, a “bumptious” man with a “breathless vision” of evolution galloping ahead to perfection. No one had swallowed Darwin so wholly, even if some (including Darwin himself) thought it had gone down the wrong pipe. For the “Prince of Progress” the physical, biological, social, and ethical all danced to the tune of evolution.43 Historical destiny was like the womb and the jungle, the growth of civilization “all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower.”44 An eminent Victorian who had dabbled in phrenology, he had coined the “survival of the fittest.”45 Friend to Mill, follower of Comte, and a lover of George Eliot, Spencer honed to perfection the belief in human perfectibility. But it was the strong, not the meek for him, who carried the future in their bones, their struggles and triumphs the true holy of holies, their might—the right and just. To let it be, government would need to step aside, even when its actions seemed “progressive.” Intervention, after all, was really a curse disguised as a blessing, the conquest by maudlin sensibility of the necessity of natural law. Unfettered competition alone would lead to the advance of civilization in the long run—endowments and free education be damned and myopia forlorn.

  From the Left other voices came buzzing. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, a popular appeal for land nationalization, was rapidly gaining readers.46 Touting Rousseau’s noble savage, George led a frontal attack on property and competition. Even the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, from his retirement nest in Dorset, took a jab at “Darwinism”—a term no one had done more than he to establish.47 Women, he now claimed, when liberated economically by socialism, would freely choose the righteous among men. As such they would be humankind’s great redeemers, breeders of goodness into future generations.48 This was a different woman from Darwin’s in his Descent of Man, to say the least.49 But even if Wallace’s utopia seemed far-fetched and would need to be nudged along by higher forces (a spiritualist, he had removed man from the arena
of natural selection), it hardly mattered anymore. Beaten over the head by natural rights, ancient communes, and the promise of equality, the Darwinian establishment was reeling. Perhaps competition was not the natural law they said it was. Perhaps their “religion of Science” was an illusion, nothing but a false “religion of despair.”50

  Huxley was taking the fire. After all, he had fashioned himself the very embodiment of “science as panacea.” Spencer was a “long-winded pedant,” he thought, a “hippopotamus,” as misguided in his sacrifice of the masses on the altar of Darwinism as he was in his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. And yet nature really was brutal, like “a surface of ten thousand wedges” each representing a species being “driven inward by incessant blows.”51 Success always came at the expense of another’s failure. How then to escape the trap into which the patrician Spencer had willfully fallen? How to wrest morality for the masses from the bloody talons of Nature?

  These were his mind’s torments as the train pulled into London Road Station, Manchester. At Town Hall, before his crowd, the darkness in his soul poured itself onto the natural world. Glassy-eyed and imagining his daughter, Huxley unmasked the vision of Nature’s butchery: “You see a meadow rich in flower & foliage and your memory rests upon it as an image of peaceful beauty. It is a delusion…. Not a bird that twitters but is either slayer or [slain and]…not a moment passes in that a holocaust, in every hedge & every copse battle murder & sudden death are the order of the day.”52