Long story short…he reminds me that:
“Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.”
(Above image courtesy Nadar – NYPL, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7604176)
This is a very brief fanboy review of Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902).
Reading Kropotkin right now helps calm my occasionally stressed parental brain that can’t help but worry about the coming storms. He utilizes evolutionary biology to understand the human condition, while taking a vital stance against the (still ongoing) norms of social Darwinism that mire our political and economic thought.
Kropotkin highlights an important oversight in the way Darwin is read, namely the over-emphasis on struggle and the narrow-minded corruption of the same. This is something Darwin, both, warned about and succumbed to. Negativity bias is after all, very, very real.
Citing documented evidence from the animal kingdom as well as our species’ ancient and more recent ancestors, Kropotkin shows that mutual aid is indeed just as much a part of our nature as mutual struggle is; But very importantly, he doesn’t want mutual aid to be confused with love – “It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy – an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.”
He makes this distinction to depart from any unnecessary romanticization of mutual aid and social cooperation, while simultaneously disabusing us of the (corrupted) Darwinist notion that competition and struggle is the norm.
This is why it gives me hope. It feels plainly common sensical. Cooperation is who we are, not just as a species, but a larger global biome. This is not to suggest that competition or struggle are non-existent. Far from it in fact.
“That life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for life, taken in its widest sense, has been illustrated… [and] could be illustrated by any amount of evidence.”
In other words, stating that life is a struggle is, essentially, a lazy truism.
“Life in societies enables the feeblest of insects, the feeblest of birds, and the feeblest mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from, the most terrible birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the species to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy and to maintain its numbers albeit a very slow birth-rate; it enables the gregarious animals to migrate in search of new abodes. Therefore while fully admitting that force, swiftness, protective colours, cunningness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.” (emphasis mine)
They who think themselves individualists be mired in delusion. The only reason we live, Kropotkin reminds us, is because others live with us.
“In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.”
Links to referenced text:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution
https://libcom.org/article/mutual-aid-factor-evolution-peter-kropotkin
love liberation struggle 