The Price of Altruism Read online

  As “melancholy as a pelican in the wilderness,” as he wrote to a friend, Huxley was sinking into depression.53 The Manchester address was printed in February’s Nineteenth Century, and soon became a disputed cause célèbre. In “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society: A Programme” Huxley asked readers to imagine the chase of a deer by a wolf. Had a man intervened to aid the deer we would call him “brave and compassionate,” as we would judge an abetter of the wolf “base and cruel.” But this was a hoax, the spoiled fruit of man’s translation of his own world into nature. Under the “dry light of science,” none could be more admirable than the other, “the goodness of the right hand which helps the deer, and the wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the wolf” neutralizing each other. Nature was “neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral,” the ghost of the deer no more likely to reach a heaven of “perennial existence in clover” than the ghost of the wolf a boneless kennel in hell. “From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show,” Huxley wrote, “the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest…living to fight another day.” There was no need for the spectator to turn his thumbs down, “as no quarter is given,” but “he must shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both vanquished and victor.”54

  Darwin and Spencer believed that the struggle for existence “tends to final good,” the suffering of the ancestor paid for by the increased perfection of its future off spring. But this was nonsense unless, “in Chinese fashion, the present generation could pay its debts to its ancestors.” Otherwise, it was unclear to Huxley “what compensation the Eohippus gets for his sorrows in the fact that, some millions of years afterwards, one of his descendants wins the Derby.” Besides, life was constantly adapting to its environment. If a “universal winter” came upon the world, as the “physical philosophers” watching the cooling sun and earth now warned, arctic diatoms and protococci of the red snow would be all that was left on the planet. Christians, perhaps, imagined God’s fingerprint on nature, but it was Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess, whose meddling seemed to Huxley more true. A blend of Aphrodite and Ares, Ishtar knew neither good nor evil, nor, like the Beneficent Deity, did she promise any rewards. She demanded only that which came to her: the sacrifice of the weak. Nature-Ishtar was the heartless executioner of necessity.55

  But what, then, of man—was he, too, to bow in deference to the indifferent god of inevitability? As for all other creatures “beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family,” for man too the “Hobbesian war of each against all” had been the normal state of existence. Like them he had “plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution,” keeping his head above water and “thinking neither of whence nor whither.” Then came the first men who for whatever reason “substituted the state of mutual peace for that of mutual war,” and civilization was born. Self-restraint became the negation of the struggle for existence, man’s glorious rebellion against the tyranny of need. But no matter how historic his achievement, ethical man could not abolish “the deep-seated organic impulses which impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course.” Chief of these was procreation, the greatest cause of the struggle for existence.56

  Of all the commandments, “Be fruitful and multiply” was the oldest and the only one generally heeded. Despite his best intentions, then, ethical man was locked once more in the nonmoral “survival of the fittest.” Population was driving him to war. For the dark moment Huxley could see no tonic, though, contra the socialists, he was certain that no “fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth” could deliver society from its tendency toward self-destruction. Industrial warfare having replaced natural combat, the corporatist Huxley made a plea for state-sponsored technical education. But this was as much medicine, he knew, as an eye doctor’s recommending an operation for cataract on a man who is going blind, “without being supposed to undertake that it will cure him of gout.”57

  For Darwin morality had come from the evolution of the social instincts, but for Huxley they were a vestige of amoral beginnings.

  Instincts were antisocial; their primeval lure the bane of man’s precarious existence. Desperately seeking the cure for social ills, Huxley nevertheless would not search for it in nature. Nor, weeping over the loss of Mady on the train ride back from Manchester, could he find any solace there.

  Malthus was already dead when Russian Nights became a best seller in the 1840s. The novel’s author, Prince Vladimir Odoesky, had created an economist antihero, driven to suicide by his gloomy prophecies of reproduction run amok. The suicide was cheered on by the Russian reading masses: After all, in a land as vast and underpopulated as theirs, Malthusianism was a joke. England was a cramped furnace on the verge of explosion; Russia, an expanse of bounty almost entirely unfilled. But it was more than that. “The country that wallowed in the moral bookkeeping of the past century,” Odoesky explained, “was destined to create a man who focused in himself the crimes, all the fallacies of his epoch, and squeezed strict and mathematical formulated laws of society out of them.” Malthus was no hero in Russia.58

  And so when the Origin of Species was translated in 1864, Russian evolutionists found themselves in something of a quandary. Darwin was the champion of science, the father of a great theory, but also an adherent to Malthus, that “malicious mediocrity,” according to Tolstoy.59 How to divorce the kind and portly naturalist Whig from Downe from the cleft-palated, fire-breathing, reactionary reverend from Surrey?60 Both ends of the political spectrum had good grounds for annulment. Radicals like Herzen reviled Malthus for his morals: Unlike bourgeois political economy, the cherished peasant commune allowed “everyone without exception to take his place at the table.” Monarchists and conservatives, on the other hand, like the Slavophile biologist Nikolai Danilevsky, contrasted czarist Russia’s nobility to Britain’s “nation of shopkeepers,” pettily counting their coins. Danilevsky saw Darwin’s dependence on Malthus as proof of the inseparability of science from cultural values. “The English national type,” he wrote, “accepts [struggle] with all its consequences, demands it as his right, tolerates no limits upon it…. He boxes one on one, not in a group as we Russians like to spar.” Darwinism for Danilevsky was “a purely English doctrine,” its pedigree still unfolding: “On usefulness and utilitarianism is founded Benthamite ethics, and essentially Spencer’s also; on the war of all against all, now termed the struggle for existence—Hobbes’s theory of politics; on competition—the economic theory of Adam Smith…. Malthus applied the very same principle to the problem of population…. Darwin extended both Malthus’s partial theory and the general theory of the political economists to the organic world.” Russian values were of a different timber.61

  But so was Russian nature. Darwin and Wallace had eavesdropped on life in the shrieking hullabaloo of the tropics. But the winds of the arctic tundra whistled an altogether different melody. And so, wanting to stay loyal to Darwin, Russian evolutionists now turned to their sage, training a torch on those expressions Huxley and the Malthusians had swept aside. “I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense,” Darwin wrote of the struggle for existence in Origin. “Two canine animals, in a time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture.”62 Here was the merciful getaway from bellum omnium contra omnes, even if Darwin had not underscored it. For if the struggle could mean both competition with other members of the same species and a battle against the elements, it was a matter of evidence which of the two was more important in nature. And if harsh surroundings were the enemy rather than rivals from one’s own species, animals might seek other ways than conflict to manage such struggle. Here, in Russia, the fight against the elements could actually lead to cooperation.

  London did not keep Kropotkin for long. T
he Jura Federation that had turned him anarchist during the blizzard in Sonvilliers beckoned once again, and within a few months he was in Switzerland knee deep in revolutionary activity. On March 18, 1877, he organized a demonstration in Bern to commemorate the Paris Commune. Other leaders of the Jura feared police reaction, but Kropotkin was certain that in this instance violence would serve the cause. He was right. Police brutality galvanized the workers, and membership in the federation doubled after the demonstration. The peacefulness of the Sonvilliers watchmakers notwithstanding, Peter was developing a political program: collectivism, negation of state, and “propaganda of the deed”—violence—as the means to the former through the latter.

  It was the young people who would bring about change. “All of you who possess knowledge, talent, capacity, industry,” Kropotkin wrote in 1880 in his paper Le Révolté, “if you have a spark of sympathy in your nature, come, you and your companions, come and place your services at the disposal of those who most need them. And remember, if you do come, that you come not as masters, but as comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for yourselves in a new life which sweeps upward to the conquest of the future; that you come less to teach than to grasp the aspirations of the many; to divine them, to give them shape, and then to work, without rest and without haste, with all the fire of youth and all the judgment of age, to realize them in actual life.”63

  On March 1 (old style), 1881, Alexander II was assassinated in Russia. Once his trusted liege, Kropotkin welcomed the news of his death as a harbinger of the coming revolution. But he would have to watch his back now. The successor, Alexander III, had formed the Holy Brotherhood, a secret counteroffensive that soon issued a death warrant against Kropotkin. Luckily Peter had been expelled from Switzerland for his support for the assassination, and now, back in London, he was given warning of Alexander’s plot. Undeterred, he exposed it in the London Times and Manchester Chronicle, and a deeply embarrassed czar was made to recall his agents. Still, if Kropotkin had escaped with his life, he was less lucky with his freedom. Despairing of the workers’ movement in England, he traveled to France, where his reputation as an anarchist preceded him. Within a few months he was apprehended and sentenced, and spent the next three years in prison. It was soon after his release following international pressure that the news arrived: his brother Alexander, exiled for political offences, had committed suicide in Siberia.64

  It was a terrible blow. Alexander had been his lifelong friend, perhaps his only true one. But his suicide also made Peter all the more determined to find confidence in his revolutionary activities. Increasingly he turned to science: the science of anarchy and the science of nature. They had evolved apart from each other, but the two sciences were now converging, even becoming uncannily interchangeable. When Darwin died in the spring of 1882, Kropotkin penned an obituary in Le Révolté. Celebrating, in true Russian fashion, the sage of evolution entirely divorced from Malthus, the prince judged Darwin’s ideas “an excellent argument that animal societies are best organized in the community-anarchist manner.”65 In “The Scientific basis of Anarchy,” some years later, he made clear that the river ran in both directions. “The anarchist thinker,” Kropotkin wrote, “does not resort to metaphysical conceptions (like the ‘natural rights,’ the ‘duties of the state’ and so on) for establishing what are, in his opinion, the best conditions for realising the greatest happiness for humanity. He follows, on the contrary, the course traced by the modern philosophy of evolution.” 66 Finding the answers to society’s woes “was no longer a matter of faith; it [is] a matter for scientific discussion.”67

  Meanwhile, navigating anxiously between Spencer’s ultraselfish ethics and George and Wallace’s socialist Nature, Huxley had found an uneasy path to allay his heart’s torments. If instincts were bloody, morality would be bought by casting away their yoke. This was the task of civilization—its very raison d’etre: to combat, with full force, man’s evolutionary heritage. It might seem “an audacious proposal” to create thus “an artificial world within the cosmos,” but of course this was man’s “nature within nature,” sanctioned by his evolution, a “strange microcosm spinning counter-clockwise.” Huxley was hopeful, but this was optimism born of necessity: For a believing Darwinist any other course would mean utter bleakness and despair.68

  Like Darwin, Huxley saw ants and bees partake in social behavior and altruism. But this was simply “the perfection of an automatic mechanism, hammered out by the blows of the struggle for existence.” Here was no principle to help explain the natural origins of mankind’s morals; after all, a drone was born a drone, and could never “aspire” to be a queen or even a worker. Man, on the other hand, had an “innate desire” to enjoy the pleasures and escape the pains of life—his aviditas vitae—an essential condition of success in the war of nature outside, “and yet the sure agent of the destruction of society if allowed free play within.” Far from trying to emulate nature, man would need to combat it. If he was to show any kindness at all outside the family (to Huxley the only stable haven of “goodness”), it would be through an “artificial personality,” a conscience, what Adam Smith called “the man within,” the precarious exception to Nature-Ishtar. Were it not for his regard for the opinion of others, his shame before disapproval and condemnation, man would be as ruthless as the animals. No, there could be no “sanction for morality in the ways of the cosmos” for Huxley. Nature’s injustice had “burned itself deeply” into his soul.69

  Years in the Afar, in prisons, and in revolutionary politics had coalesced Kropotkin’s thoughts, too, into a single, unwavering philosophy. Quite the opposite of Huxley’s tortured plea to wrest civilized man away from his savage beginnings, it was rather the return to animal origins that promised to save morality for mankind. And so, when in a dank library in Harrow, perusing the latest issue of the Nineteenth Century, Kropotkin’s eyes fell on Huxley’s “The Struggle for Existence,” anger swelled within him. He would need to rescue Darwin from the “infidels,” men like Huxley who had “raised the ‘pitiless’ struggle for personal advantage to the height of a biological principle.”70 Moved to action, the “shepherd from the Delectable Mountains” wrote to James Knowles, the Nineteenth’s editor, asking that he extend his hospitality for “an elaborate reply.” Knowles complied willingly, writing to Huxley that the result was “one of the most refreshing & reviving aspects of Nature that ever I came across.”71

  “Mutual Aid Among Animals” was the first of a series of five articles, written between 1890 and 1896, that would become famously known in 1902 as the book Mutual Aid. Here Kropotkin finally sank his talons into “nature, red in tooth and claw.” For if the bees and ants and termites had “renounced the Hobbesian war” and were “the better for it” so had shoaling fish, burying beetles, herding deer, lizards, birds, and squirrels. Remembering his years in the great expanses of the Afar, Kropotkin now wrote: “wherever I saw animal life in abundance, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support.”72

  This was a general principle, not a Siberian exception, as countless examples made clear. There was the common crab, as Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus had noticed, stationing sentinels when its friends are molting. There were the pelicans forming a wide half circle and paddling toward the shore to entrap fish. There was the house sparrow who “shares any food” and the white-tailed eagles spreading apart high in the sky to get a full view before crying to one another when a meal is spotted. There were the little titis, whose childish faces had so struck Alexander von Humboldt, embracing and protecting one another when it rains, “rolling their tails over the necks of their shivering comrades.” And, of course, there were the great hordes of mammals: deer, antelope, elephants, wild donkeys, camels, sheep, jackals, wolves, wild boar—for all of whom “mutual aid [is] the rule.” Despite the prevalent picture of “lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims,” the hordes were of astonishingly greater numbers than the carnivores. If the al
truism of the hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps) was imposed by their physiological structure, in these “higher” animals it was cultivated for the benefits of mutual aid. There was no greater weapon in the struggle of existence. Life was a struggle, and in that struggle the fittest did survive. But the answer to the questions, “By which arms is this struggle chiefly carried on?” and “Who are the fittest in the struggle?” made abundantly clear that “natural selection continually seeks out the ways precisely for avoiding competition.” Putting limits on physical struggle, sociability left room “for the development of better moral feelings.” Intelligence, compassion and “higher moral sentiments” were where progressive evolution was heading, not bloody competition between the fiercest and the strong.73

  But where, then, had mutual aid come from? Some thought from “love” that had grown within the family, but Kropotkin was at once more hardened and more expansive.74 To reduce animal sociability to familial love and sympathy meant to reduce its generality and importance. Communities in the wild were not predicated on family ties, nor was mutualism a result of mere “friendship.” Despite Huxley’s belief in the family as the only refuge from nature’s battles, for Kropotkin the savage tribe, the barbarian village, the primitive community, the guilds, the medieval city—all taught the very same lesson: For mankind, too, mutualism beyond the family had been the natural state of existence.75 “It is not love to my neighbor—whom I often do not know at all,” Kropotkin wrote, “which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals.”76