Dog eat dog, cat smack cat
Some years back, television commercials pitched a video cassette collection of the David Attenborough BBC series, The Trials of Life. The ads promised to reveal “the struggle to survive through shocking, uncensored photography,” and offered teaser shots of wild animals tearing each other a new one. The nature-porn narration assured purchasers they would learn “why they call them animals,” with “some scenes unsuitable for younger viewers.”
The unintentionally funny ads reminded me of an old Monty Python skit portraying limpets locked in mortal combat, with John Cleese’s voiceover declaring “this pattern of aggressive behaviour is typical of these nature documentaries.”
The ideas that wild creatures do little more than fight, flee, feed and, um, fornicate – the gladiatorial concept of nature – has long persisted in academia and the popular imagination. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. But is that really so? Is brute competition the principle evolutionary driver in the animal world – and by extension, our own – or do intraspecific and interspecific cooperation and collaboration play a significant role?
We’ve all heard of Charles Darwin. Some of us have even heard of Alfred Russell Wallace, the scholar who independently came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection. But few of us have heard of Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin. Although reduced to a footnote in historical surveys of intellectual thought, the czarist-era Russian nobleman and geographer made significant contributions to evolutionary theory, ecology, and social criticism.
In 1902, Kropotkin gathered these ideas together in the now largely-forgotten Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Yet his ideas on the cooperative nature of life on Earth, though radical in his time, have received greater support over the past three decades. Life, it turns out, may be more cooperative than even Kropotkin thought.
Born into the highest rank of the Russian aristocracy in 1842, Kropotkin’s future comfort seemed assured. His family had descended from the Rurik dynasty, which had governed Russia before the Romanovs. According to John R. Bleibtreu’s study of natural history, The Parable of the Beast, he came from a family of six, with “a servant retinue of over 50 persons including a tailor, a piano tuner, a confectioner, and a band of 12 musicians; all serfs.”
In his early teens, Russian court society accorded Kropotkin the highest honour available to a young nobleman – appointment to the czar’s personal retinue of pages. During his studies at St. Petersburg University, he became fascinated by the theory of evolution, which became for him an “inexhaustible source of higher poetic thought, and gradually, the sense of man’s oneness with nature, both animate and inanimate.” What the young prince considered “the poetry of nature” became the philosophy of his life.
In 1862, he finished his tour of duty as a page, and had to choose a regiment in which he would be commissioned as a junior officer. His fascination with Siberia – its land, peoples and wildlife – led him to select a Cossack regiment near the Manchurian border. Kropotkin’s choice of work locale surprised his superiors, who resisted his eccentric-sounding decision. He reminisced later in life about how his determination also had a political dimension. “Besides, I reasoned, there is in Siberia an immense field for the application of the great reforms which have been made or are coming; the workers must be few there, and I shall find a field for action to my tastes.”
Lessons from Malthus
Successfully winning his choice of post in Eastern Siberia, he met with General Kukel, head of the general staff, who was a personal friend of Bukunin, an anarchist philosopher who had recently escaped from prison in Siberia. Kukel introduced Kropotkin to Bakunin’s wife, and the three spent many evenings talking long into the night.
(Anarchism has connected in the popular imagination with the image of the black-clad, bomb-throwing lover of chaos. In fact, the foundations of anarchist thinking embrace the idea of peaceful collectives living in decentralized systems; a rejection of the top-down models of both communism’s central planning and capitalism’s free market monopolies.)
In those years czarist agents weren’t particularly welcome in these far-flung areas of the Russian Empire, so on his geographical explorations Kropotkin traveled alone and in disguise. In 1865 he undertook his most important exploration of Siberia, in the company of a zoologist and topographer, traveling in an armed party of 10 Cossacks and 50 horses. Mesmerized by the theories of Darwin, he and his colleagues found an interesting divergence between theory and observation.
“We were both under the fresh impression of The Origin of Species, but we looked vainly for the keen competition between animals of the same species which the reading of Darwin’s work had prepared us to expect ... even in the Amuri and Usuri region where animal life swarms in abundance, facts of real competition and struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom under my notice, though I eagerly searched for them.”
Kropotkin conceived a novel idea; the driver of evolutionary advance was not so much competition within a species for limited resources; it was through cooperation within a species to maximize survival against harsh external conditions.
The Russian scholar has been long dismissed as a footnote in biological thinking: a naïve sentimentalist whose scientific thinking was coloured by his anarchist sympathies. But have Darwin’s own ideas a certain culture-bound tint? The latter’s famous “aha” moment came upon reading the work of Thomas Malthus, who correctly held that population grows geometrically, while food resources only grow arithmetically. Darwin concluded that this mismatch leads to an inexorable struggle for survival by living creatures.
In his 1991 essay, “Kropotkin Was No Crank,”Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that Malthus “makes a far better prophet in a crowded, industrial country professing an ideal of open competition in free markets.” Malthus was less comprehensible to Russians. “He was foreign to their experience because, quite simply, Russia’s huge land mass dwarfed its sparse population.” For a Russian to see an inexorably increasing population inevitably straining potential supplies of food and space “required quite a leap of imagination.”
Independently of one another, Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace came across their theory of evolution while reading Malthus. The mutual revelations occurred for both in the tropics, and no other area on Earth is so packed with species, and so replete with bodies in competition. According to Gould, “An Englishman who had learned the ways of nature in the tropics was almost bound to view evolution differently from a Russian nurtured on tales of the Siberian wasteland.”
The ideas of cooperation in the wild fermented in Kropotkin’s imagination as he made further explorations across the steppes. His discovery of the Franz Joseph Land archipelago won him a worldwide reputation as a geographer, and nomination for presidency of the physical geography section of the Russian Geographical Society. At the same time, he had fallen in with a group of intellectuals who gave covert lectures to workers’ groups.
Using the pseudonym Borodin, Kroptokin dressed in peasant disguise while addressing meetings on political and scientific topics. The nobleman’s paranoia found its real-world mirror in official suspicion. The spellbinding lectures by this mysterious six and a half-foot tall figure elicited the interest of the secret police, who apprehended Kropotkin one night after one of his talks. So began his stint in solitary confinement.
The great escape
For close to two years, Kropotkin only had access to an inadequate prison library to help preserve his sanity, along with an exercise regime of his own making, which included walking a minimum of five miles a day back and forth across his cell. A bout of scurvy resulted in his relocation to another prison, and then to the military hospital at St. Petersburg where he hatched his plans for escape.
On the day of the attempt a lookout installed at a room near the prison hospital played a violin from his window. Another lookout sat eating cherries just outside the prison grounds. When the violinist picked up the tempo and the cherry-chewer stopped chewing, the coast was clear. Kropotkin, in a long, green dressing gown, ran for his life, later recalling a sentry so close behind that several times he flung his rifle forward trying to give the prisoner a blow in the back with the bayonet. Amazingly, the prince made it to a waiting carriage driven by a co-conspirator, and sped off to safety.
Writes Blieibtreu: “He shaved his beard, and was provided with an officer’s uniform on the assumption, which later proved quite correct, that in despotic Russia, customs agents, border guards, etc. would be fearful of incurring the displeasure of an officer by delaying him with an overly scrupulous examination of his papers.”
In disguise, Kropotkin arrived in London. He travelled widely through Europe, agitating in his writings for various socialist and revolutionary causes. He narrowly escaped jail in France for his agitation, and returned to London in 1886. Here he hooked up with James Keltie, assistant editor of the British science journal, Nature. Unaware of his true identity, Keltie gave the emigrant Russian work translating items from foreign journals into English. When Kropotkin received his own book on the glacial history of Eurasia to review, the jig was up, and the prince revealed his true identify to the editor.
A particular essay by ‘Darwin’s bulldog,’ Thomas Huxley, caught his attention during this time. “Life was a continuous free fight,” wrote Huxley, “and beyond the limited and temporary relaxation of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.” (Huxley tempered these remarks to say that it is the duty of human culture to resist the brute violence of the animal world, an idea later picked up by Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins.) Kropotkin was inflamed by Huxley’s belief that the natural world is defined solely by struggle. The Russian emigre believed this to be an extrapolation backwards from human militarism and misery to the natural world. Kropotkin penned a series of rebuttals to Huxley for the magazine The Nineteenth Century, which were eventually gathered into his book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
Pegged as an anarchist philosopher, Kropotkin and his writings on evolutionary theory have often been dismissed as politically motivated. Yet Gould points out that if the Russian savant overemphasized mutual aid, British evolutionists surely overemphasized competition. (Certainly the debased message of a social Darwinism, which argued that the weak are owed nothing by the powerful, was not unwelcome to the elite of newly industrialized Britain.) It’s undeniable that a one-size-fits-all reductionism, pushing the competitive aspect of the living world, helped paved the way for the monstrosities of eugenics and Aryanism. Even Darwin’s better interpreters, like Huxley, unwittingly helped this legacy by playing up gladiatorial imagery in their description of life.
More in Part 2.
Fascinating and timely, as always. I always meant to read him; you've done it for me, thanks!
Thanks for this! We all need reminding now and then that science is not born disinterested from the ethers, but is in fact always ideologically guided, esp. from the perspectives of capitalism. (The post-enlightenment scientific representation of women's bodies is a case in point). Your essay is nicely written as well.