An Anagram of "Kropotkin and Darwin" is "Onward, Kind Pinko Rat"
In my previous post, I discussed Thomas Malthus’ influence on Darwin, and how that influence gave the Social Darwinists of the late nineteenth century some good material for their bad ideas. Continuing to explore the impact of evolution on political theory, we introduce Peter Kropotkin.
Charles Darwin conducted much of his research in South America. But Prince Peter Kropotkin went to Siberia. This came as a surprise to just about everyone but himself. He was Russian royalty, had served in the Page Corps at the Tsar’s court, and was expected to live a respectable, comfortable life in St. Petersburg. But he wanted to study science and geography. With no easy way out of his military service and into a university, he requested an assignment in Siberia, where he could at least make maps and study wildlife. His father tried to stop him, but the son prevailed. And so Prince Peter Kropotkin went to Siberia.
He made maps and studied wildlife, but he notes, “I failed to find—although I was eagerly looking for it—that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.” His inability to find that struggle eventually led Kropotkin to write Mutual Aid, a book arguing that sociability and cooperation are more important factors in evolution than battles over resources or the struggle to survive.
He points out that most birds hunt, feed, and migrate cooperatively. Canines hunt together, as will even the legendarily solitary members of the feline family. Defense is also more effective in groups. “Life in societies allows the feeblest insects, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from, the most terrible birds and beasts of prey.” And as Kropotkin points out, when a primary food source disappears, animals don’t actually start killing each other for what’s left of it, but will usually switch to a secondary source or migrate. “The fittest are thus the most sociable animals, and sociability appears as the chief factor of evolution.”
Kropotkin would have loved a 2011 study by Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and Peggy Mason at the University of Chicago. They put 60 rats in pairs, and after two weeks, put one of each pair in a trap. Its friend would almost invariably free its captive companion, even with no reward beyond friendship and altruism. A further experiment allowed the rats to choose between chocolate and freeing their friend, and even when the rats ate chocolate before opening the trap, they usually saved a piece for their soon-to-be-free comrade. Altruism, unrelated to any kind of cost/benefit analysis, appears to be a mammalian function.
The people Kropotkin encountered in Siberia reinforced his observations about cooperation and mutual aid. Far away from St. Petersburg and the administrative apparatus of the Russian Empire, “to live with the natives, to see at work all the complex forms of social organization which they have elaborated far away from the influence of any civilization, was, as it were, to store up floods of light which illuminated my subsequent reading.” He notes that he had “entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing, and the like.” But he quickly learned that to get anything done, it had to get done, “not in military fashion, but in a sort of communal way.”
During the travels Charles Darwin conducted that informed The Origin of Species, he landed in Tierra del Fuego, just off the southernmost tip of South America. The people lived communally, far away from the administrative apparatus of any state. Through observing them, Darwin determined that people, like other animals, need centralized authority to flourish.
The perfect equality among the individuals composing these tribes, must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals, whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so it is with the races of mankind.
Both Kropotkin and Darwin visited remote areas far from state control, observed the people and animals around them, noted that they didn’t rely on bossing each other around to get things done, and came to very different conclusions about whether this was good or bad. Is it possible to say that either scientist was right?
In Mutual Aid, Kropotkin predicted that “we must be prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical pond life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of micro-organisms.” Subsequent science has shown that Kropotkin was correct about this. The evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis pioneered much of the research into the bacterial origins of cell organelles. After the discovery of DNA, it was initially believed that all genetic information was kept within cell nuclei. But beyond the nucleus, in the cytoplasm, are organelles with genes of their own. Mitochondria, for instance, produce oxygen in the process of respiration. Their presence is essential to all aerobic activity. Without them, none of us could breathe. Margulis and others eventually established that mitochondria were a separate bacterium that entered cells eons ago, and have stayed ever since. In other words, eukaryotic cells developed through the symbiosis of prokaryotic cells. Mitochondria still possess their own DNA, and replicate independently of the nucleus. They were independent. They remain independent. But they are part of every cell.
Similar partnerships appear throughout the natural world. In Symbiotic Planet, Margulis describes a worm often mistaken for seaweed. Photosynthesizing algae live within these translucent worms, making them appear green. They lay on the beach together, and the algae produce food for both organisms. Each part of this pair performs parts of their shared functions. Although they remain genetically separate organisms, they act as a single being. The algae “live and grow, die and reproduce, inside the bodies of the worms.” Where one organism ends and the other begins is ambiguous.
Kropotkin emphasized in Mutual Aid that cooperation within a single species often plays a more important role in survival than competition. Subsequent science has shown that cooperation extends even beyond single species and into partnerships between species.
Darwin saw competition as the most important factor in evolution. Defeat your rivals, horde the best stuff, and pass along your genes. His followers, often coming from a similar time, place, and background, were like, yeah that makes sense. But it’s making less and less sense with time. Meanwhile, cooperation and mutual aid are gaining wider and wider acceptance.
The once-heretical views of Kropotkin, Margulis, and others are entering mainstream science and becoming common sense. This is partly due to better microscopes and over a century of subsequent discoveries. More evidence makes these ideas easier to defend and explain. But our outlooks have also transformed over time. What Margulis once had difficulty getting past peer review and into publication has become widely accepted. Her discoveries now appear in school textbooks as accepted facts. Suzanne Simard appeared in the documentary Fantastic Fungi (2019), explaining her work on mycelial connections facilitating communication between trees. The film was something of a surprise hit, gathering wide audiences and a long theatrical run.
As our minds continue to transform, and cooperation continues to leap out of the microscope and into our lives, the ways we interact with the planet and each other will change as well. How profoundly we transform our world is up to us, but the materials we need were always already there. Human life, like all other life, was built and sustained through millennia of mutual aid and symbiosis. Of course, there are counterexamples used to defend fighting and hierarchy. Lobsters, those gross insects of the sea with rudimentary nervous systems, have been known to fight and flex for dominance, and are often tossed around as proof that fighting and flexing are “natural.” We can select all sorts of examples from nature to defend specific actions as “natural.” We can select data from the natural world to defend just about anything we’d like to do. Maybe the question shouldn’t be what is natural, but how do we want to live? I suggest we try to be more like the rats sharing chocolate than the lobsters starting fights.