The Price of Altruism (5 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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. The 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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