"Kropotkin Was No Crackpot"

Stephen Jay Gould

In late 1909, two great men corresponded across religions,
generations, and races. Leo Tolstoy, sage of Christian
nonviolence in his later years, wrote to the young Mohandas
Gandhi, struggling for the rights of Indian settlers in
South Africa:

"helps our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal.
The same struggle of the tender against the harsh, of
meekness and love against pride and violence, is every year
making itself more and more felt here among us also."A year later, wearied by domestic strife, and unable to
endure the contradiction of life in Christian poverty on a
prosperous estate run with unwelcome income from his great
novels (written before his religious conversion and
published by his wife), Tolstoy fled by train for parts
unknown and a simpler end to his waning days. He wrote to
his wife:

"My departure will distress you. I'm sorry about this, but
do understand and believe that I couldn't do otherwise. My
position in the house is becoming, or has become,
unbearable. Apart from anything else, I can't live any
longer in these conditions of luxury in which I have been
living, and I'm doing what old men of my age commonly do:
leaving this worldly life in order to live the last days of
my life in peace and solitude."

But Tolstoy's final journey was both brief and unhappy. Less
than a month later, cold and weary from numerous long rides
on Russian trains in approaching winter, he contracted
pneumonia and died at age eighty-two in the stationmaster's
home at the railroad stop ofAstapovo. Too weak to write, he
dictated his last letter on November 1, 1910. Addressed to a
son and daughter who did not share his views on Christian
nonviolence, Tolstoy offered a last word of advice:

"The views you have acquired about Darwinism, evolution, and
the struggle for existence won't explain to you the meaning
of your life and won't give you guidance in your actions,
and a life without an explanation of its meaning and
importance, and without the unfailing guidance that stems
from it is a pitiful existence. Think about it. I say it,
probably on the eve of my death, because I love you."

Tolstoy's complaint has been the most common of all
indictments against Darwin, from the publication of the
_Origin of Species_ in 1859 to now. Darwinism, the charge
contends, undermines morality by claiming that success in
nature can only be measured by victory in bloody battle--the
"struggle for existence" or "survival of the fittest" to
cite Darwin's own choice of mottoes. If we wish "meekness
and love" to triumph over "pride and violence" (as Tolstoy
wrote to Gandhi), then we must repudiate Darwin's vision of
nature's way--as Tolstoy stated in a final plea to his
errant children.

This charge against Darwin is unfair for two reasons. First,
nature (no matter how cruel in human terms) provides no
basis for our moral values. (Evolution might, at most, help
to explain why we have moral feelings, but nature can never
decide for us whether any particular action is right or
wrong.) Second, Darwin's "struggle for existence" is an
abstract metaphor, not an explicit statement about bloody
battle. Reproductive success, the criterion of natural
selection, works in many modes: Victory in battle may be one
pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis, and mutual aid may also
secure success in other times and contexts. In a famous
passage, Darwin explained his concept of evolutionary
struggle (_Origin of Species_, 1859, pp. 62-63):

"I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense including
dependence of one being on another, and including (which is
more important) not only the life of the individual, but
success in leaving progeny. 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. ... As the
mistletoe is disseminated by birds, its existence depends on
birds; and it may metaphorically be said to struggle with
other fruit-bearing plants, in order to tempt birds to
devour and thus disseminate its seeds rather than those of
other plants. In these several senses, which pass into each
other, I use for convenience sake the general term of
struggle for existence."

Yet, in another sense, Tolstoy's complaint is not entirely
unfounded. Darwin did present an encompassing, metaphorical
definition of struggle, but his actual examples certainly
favored bloody battle--"Nature, red in tooth and claw," in a
line from Tennyson so overquoted that it soon became a
knee-jerk cliche for this view of life. Darwin based his
theory of natural selection on the dismal view of Malthus
that growth in population must outstrip food supply and lead
to overt battle for dwindling resources. Moreover, Darwin
maintained a limited but controlling view of ecology as a
world stuffed full of competing species--so balanced and so
crowded that a new form could only gain entry by literally
pushing a former inhabitant out. Darwin expressed this view
in a metaphor even more central to his general vision than
the concept of struggle--the metaphor of the wedge. Nature,
Darwin writes, is like a surface with 10,000 wedges hammered
tightly in and filling all available space. A new species
(represented as a wedge) can only gain entry into a
community by driving itself into a tiny chink and forcing
another wedge out. Success, in this vision, can only be
achieved by direct takeover in overt competition.

Furthermore, Darwin's own chief disciple, Thomas Henry
Huxley, advanced this "gladiatorial" view of natural
selection (his word) in a series of famous essays about
ethics. Huxley maintained that the predominance of bloody
battle defined nature's way as nonmoral (not explicitly
immoral, but surely unsuited as offering any guide to moral
behavior). From the point of view of the moralist the animal
world is about on a level of a gladiator's show. The
creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight--whereby
the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to
fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his
thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

But Huxley then goes further. Any human society set up along
these lines of nature will devolve into anarchy and
misery--Hobbes' brutal world of _bellum omnium contra omnes_
(where _bellum_ means "war," not beauty): the war of all
against all. Therefore, the chief purpose of society must
lie in mitigation of the struggle that defines nature's
pathway. Study natural selection and do the opposite in
human society:

"But, in civilized society, the inevitable result of such
obedience [to the law of bloody battle] is the
re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for
existence--the war of each against all--the mitigation or
abolition of which was the chief end of social
organization."

This apparent discordance between nature's way and any hope
for human social decency has defined the major subject for
debate about ethics and evolution ever since Darwin.
Huxley's solution has won many supporters--nature is nasty
and no guide to morality except, perhaps, as an indicator of
what to avoid in human society. My own preference lies with
a different solution based on taking Darwin's metaphorical
view of struggle seriously (admittedly in the face of
Darwin's own preference for gladiatorial examples)--nature
is sometimes nasty, sometimes nice (really neither, since
the human terms are so inappropriate). By presenting
examples of all behaviors (under the metaphorical rubric of
struggle), nature favors none and offers no guidelines. The
facts of nature cannot provide moral guidance in any case.

But a third solution has been advocated by some thinkers who
do wish to find a basis for morality in nature and
evolution. Since few can detect much moral comfort in the
gladiatorial interpretation, this third position must
reformulate the way of nature. Darwin's words about the
metaphorical character of struggle offer a promising
starting point. One might argue that the gladiatorial
examples have been over-sold and misrepresented as
predominant. Perhaps cooperation and mutual aid are the more
common results of struggle for existence. Perhaps communion
rather than cambat leads to greater reproductive success in
most circumstances.

The most famous expression of this third solution may be
found in _Mutual Aid_, published in 1902 by the Russian
revolutionary anarchist Petr Kropotkin. (We must shed the
old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers
furtively stalking about city streets at night. Kropotkin
was a genial man, almost saintly according to some, who
promoted a vision of small communities setting their own
standards by consensus for the benefit of all, thereby
eliminating the need for most functions of a central
government.) Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman, lived in English
exile for political reasons. He wrote _Mutual Aid_ (in
English) as a direct response to the essay of Huxley quoted
above, "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,"
published in _The Nineteenth Century_, in February 1888.
Kropotkin responded to Huxley with a series of articles,
also printed in _The Nineteenth Century_ and eventually
collected together as the book _Mutual Aid_.

As the title suggests, Kropotkin argues, in his cardinal
premise, that the struggle for existence usually leads to
mutual aid rather than combat as the chief criterion of
evolutionary success. Human society must therefore build
upon our natural inclinations (not reverse them, as Huxley
held) in formulating a moral
order that will bring both peace and prosperity to our
species. In a series of chapters, Kropotkin tries to
illustrate continuity between natural selection for mutual
aid among animals and the basis for success in increasingly
progressive human social organization. His five sequential
chapters address mutual aid among animals, among savages,
among barbarians, in the medieval city, and amongst
ourselves.

I confess that I have always viewed Kropotkin as daftly
idiosyncratic, if undeniably well meaning. He is always so
presented in standard courses on evolutionary biology--as
one of those soft and woolly thinkers who let hope and
sentimentality get in the way of analytic toughness and a
willingness to accept nature as she is, warts and all. After
all, he was a man of strange politics and unworkable ideals,
wrenched from the context of his youth, a stranger in a
strange land. Moreover, his portrayal of Darwin so matched
his social ideals (mutual aid naturally given as a product
of evolution without need for central authority) that one
could only see personal hope rather than scientific accuracy
in his accounts. Kropotkin has long been on my list of
potential topics for an essay (if only because I wanted to
read his book, and not merely mouth the textbook
interpretation), but I never proceeded because I could find
no larger context than the man himself. Kooky intellects are
interesting as gossip, perhaps as psychology, but true
idiosyncrasy provides the worst possible
basis for generality.

But this situation changed for me in a flash when I read a
very fine article in the latest issue of _Isis_ (our leading
professional journal in the history of science) by Daniel P.
Todes: "Darwin's Malthusian Metaphor and Russian
Evolutionary Thought, 1859-1917." I learned that the
parochiality had been mine in my ignorance of Russian
evolutionary thought, not Kropotkin's in his isolation in
England. (I can read Russian, but only painfully, and with a
dictionary--which means, for all practical purposes, that I
can't read the language.) I knew that Darwin had become a
hero of the Russian intelligentsia and had influenced
academic life in Russia perhaps more than in any other
country. But virtually none of this Russian work has ever
been translated or even discussed in English literature. The
ideas of this school are unknown to us; we do not even
recognize the names of the major protagonists. I knew
Kropotkin because he had published in English and lived in
England, but I never understood that he represented a
standard, well-developed Russian critique of Darwin, based
on interesting reasons and coherent national traditions.
Todes's article does not make Kropotkin more correct, but it
does place his writing into a general context that demands
our respect and produces substantial enlightenment.
Kropotkin was part of a mainstream flowing in an unfamiliar
direction, not an isolated little arroyo.

This Russian school of Darwinian critics, Todes argues,
based their major premise upon a firm rejection of Malthus's
claim that competition, in the gladiatorial mode, must
dominate in an ever more crowded world, where population,
growing geometrically, inevitably outstrips a food supply
that can only increase arithmeticall. Tolstoy, speaking for
a consensus of his compatriots, branded Malthus as a
"malicious mediocrity."

Todes finds a diverse set of reasons behind Russian
hostility to Malthus. Political objections to the
dog-eat-dog character of Western industrial competition
arose from both ends of the Russian spectrum. Todes writes:

"Radicals, who hoped to build a socialist society, saw
Malthusianism as a reactionary current in bourgeois
political economy. Conservatives, who hoped to preserve the
communal virtues of tsarist Russia, saw it as an expression
of the 'British national type.'"

But Todes identifies a far more interesting reason in the
immediate experience of Russia's land and natural history.
We all have a tendency to spin universal theories from a
limited domain of surrounding circumstance. Many geneticists
read the entire world of evolution in the confines of a
laboratory bottle filled with flies. My own increasing
dubiousness about universal adaptation arises in large part,
no doubt, because I study a peculiar snail that varies so
widely and capriciously across an apparrently unvarying
environment, rather than a bird in flight or some marvel of
natural design.

Russia is an immense country, under-populated by any
nineteenth-century measure of its agricultural potential.
Russia is also, over most of its area, a harsh land, where
competition is more likely to pit organism against
environment (as in Darwin's metaphorical struggle of a plant
at the desert's edge) than organism against organism in
direct and bloody battle. How could any Russian, with a
strong feel for his own countryside, see Malthus's principle
of overpopulation as a foundation for evolutionary theory?
Todes writes:

"It 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."

If these Russian critics could honestly tie their personal
skepticism to the view from their own backyard, they could
also recognize that Darwin's contrary enthusiasms might
record the parochiality of his different surroundings,
rather than a set of necessarily universal truths. Malthus
makes a far better prophet in a crowded, industrial country
professing an ideal of open competition in free markets.
Moreover, the point has often been made that both Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed the theory of
natural selection after primary experience with natural
history in the tropics. Both claimed inspiration from
Malthus, again independently; but if fortune favors the
prepared mind, then their tropical experience probably
predisposed both men to read Malthus with resonance and
approval. No other area on earth is so packed with species,
and therefore so replete with competition of body against
body. 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.

For example, N. I. Danilevsky, an expert on fisheries and
population dynamics, published a large, two-volume critique
of Darwinism in 1885. He identified struggle for personal
gain as the credo of a distinctly British "national type,"
as contrasted with old Slavic values of collectivism. An
English child, he writes, "boxes one on one, not in a group
as we Russians like to spar." Danilevsky viewed Darwinian
competition as "a purely English doctrine" founded upon a
line of British thought stretching from Hobbes through Adam
Smith to Malthus. Natural selection, he wrote, is rooted in
"the war of all against all, now termed the struggle for
existence--Hobbes' 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' partial theory and the general
theory of the political economists to the organic world."
(Quotes are from Todes's article.)

When we turn to Kropotkin's _Mutual Aid_ in the light of
Todes's discoveries about Russian evolutionary thought, we
must reverse the traditional view and interpret this work as
mainstream Russian criticism, not personal crankiness. The
central logic of Kropotkin's argument is simple,
straightforward, and largely cogent. Kropotkin begins by
acknowledging that struggle plays a central role in the
lives of organisms and also provides the chief impetus for
their evolution. But Kropotkin holds that struggle must not
be viewed as a unitary phenomenon. It must be divided into
two fundamentally different forms with contrary evolutionary
meanings. We must recognize, first of all, the struggle of,
organism against organism for limited resources--the theme
that Malthus imparted to Darwin and that Huxley described as
gladiatorial. This form of direct struggle does lead to
competition for personal benefit.

But a second form of struggle--the style that Darwin called
metaphorical--pits organism against the harshness of
surrounding physical environments, not against other members
of the same species. Organisms must struggle to keep warm,
to survive the sudden and unpredictable dangers of fire and
storm, to persevere through harsh periods of drought, snow,
or pestilence. These forms of struggle between organism and
environment are best waged by cooperation among members of
the same species--by mutual aid. If the struggle for
existence pits two lions against one zebra, then we shall
witness a feline battle and an equine carnage. But if lions
are struggling jointly against the harshness of an inanimate
environment, then fighting will not remove the common
enemy--while cooperation may overcome a peril beyond the
power of any single individual to surmount.

Kropotkin therefore created a dichotomy within the general
notion of struggle--two forms with opposite import: (1)
organism against organism of the same species for limited
resources, leading to competition; and (2) organism against
environment, leading to cooperation.

"No naturalist will doubt that the idea of a struggle for
life carried on through organic nature is the greatest
generalization of our century. Life is struggle; and in that
struggle the fittest survive. But the answers to the
questions "by which arms is the struggle chiefly carried
on?" and "who are the fittest in the struggle?" will widely
differ according to the importance given to the two
different aspects of the struggle: the direct one, for food
and safety among separate individuals, and the struggle
which Darwin described as 'metaphorical'--the struggle, very
often collective, against adverse circumstances."

Darwin acknowledged that both forms existed, but his loyalty
to Malthus and his vision of nature chock-full of species
led him to emphasize the competitive aspect. Darwin's less
sophisticated votaries then exalted the competitive view to
near exclusivity, and heaped a social and moral meaning upon
it as well.

"They came to conceive of the animal world as a world of
perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals, thirsting
for one another's blood. They made modern literature resound
with the war-cry of _woe to the vanquished_, as if it were
the last word of modern biology. They raised the 'pitiless'
struggle for personal advantages to the height of a
biological principle which man must submit to as well, under
the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon
mutual extermination."

Kropotkin did not deny the competitive form of struggle, but
he argued that the cooperative style had been
underemphasized and must balance or even predominate over
competition in considering nature as a whole.

"There is an immense amount of warfare and extermination
going on amidst various species; there is, at the same time,
as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual
aid, and mutual defense. . . . Sociability is as much a law
of nature as mutual struggle."

As Kropotkin cranked through his selected examples, and
built up steam for his own preferences, he became more and
more convinced that the cooperative style, leading to mutual
aid, not only predominated in general but also characterized
the most advanced creatures in any group--ants among
insects, mammals among vertebrates. Mutual aid therefore
becomes a more important principle than competition and
slaughter:

"If we . . . ask Nature: 'who are the fittest: those who are
continually at war with each other, or those who support one
another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire
habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have
more chances to survive, and they attain, in their
respective classes, the highest development of intelligence
and bodily organization."

If we ask why Kropotkin favored cooperation while most
nineteenth-century Darwinians advocated competition as the
predominant result of struggle in nature, two major reasons
stand out. The first seems less interesting, as obvious
under the slightly cynical but utterly realistic principle
that true believers tend to read their social preferences
into nature. Kropotkin, the anarchist who yearned to replace
laws of central government with consensus of local
communities, certainly hoped to locate a deep preference for
mutual aid in the innermost evolutionary marrow of our
being. Let mutual aid pervade nature and human cooperation
becomes a simple instance of the law of life.

"Neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor
the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which
came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging
philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of
human solidarity, deeply lodged in men's understanding and
heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding
evolution."

But the second reason is more enlightening, as a welcome
empirical input from Kropotkin's own experience as a
naturalist and an affirmation of Todes's intriguing thesis
that the usual flow from ideology to interpretation of
nature may sometimes be reversed, and that landscape can
color social preference. As a young man, long before his
conversion to political radicalism, Kropotkin spent five
years in Siberia (1862-1866) just after Darwin published the
_Origin of Species_. He went as a military officer, but his
commission served as a convenient cover for his yearning to
study the geology, geography, and zoology of Russia's vast
interior. There, in the polar opposite to Darwin's tropical
experiences, he dwelled in the environment least conducive
to Malthus's vision. He observed a sparsely populated world,
swept with frequent catastrophes that threatened the few
species able to find a place in such bleakness. As a
potential disciple of Darwin, he looked for competition, but
rarely found any. Instead, he continually observed the
benefits of mutual aid in coping with an exterior harshness
that threatened all alike and could not be overcome by the
analogues of warfare and boxing.

Kropotkin, in short, had a personal and empirical reason to
look with favor upon cooperation as a natural force. He
chose this theme as the opening paragraph for _Mutual Aid_:

"Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the
journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and
Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of
the struggle for existence which most species of animals
have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous
destruction of life which periodically results from natural
agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast
territory which fell under my observation. And the other
was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed
in abundance, 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."

What can we make of Kropotkin's argument today, and that of
the entire Russian school represented by him? Were they just
victims of cultural hope and intellectual conservatism? I
don't think so. In fact, I would hold that Kropotkin's basic
argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and
some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the
best pathway to advantage for individuals. If Kropotkin
overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe
had exaggerated competition just as strongly. If Kropotkin
drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept
of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and
for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying
imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial
workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the
competitive mode.

I would fault Kropotkin only in two ways--one technical, the
other general. He did commit a common conceptual error in
failing to recognize that natural selection is an argument
about advantages to individual organisms, however they may
struggle. The result of struggle for existence may be
cooperation rather than competition, but mutual aid must
benefit individual organisms in Darwin's world of
explanation. Kropotkin sometimes speaks of mutual aid as
selected for the benefit of entire populations or species--a
concept foreign to classic Darwinian logic (where organisms
work, albeit unconsciously, for their own benefit in terms
of genes passed to future generations). But Kropotkin also
(and often) recognized that selection for mutual aid
directly benefits each individual in its own struggle for
personal success. Thus, if Kropotkin did not grasp the full
implication of Darwin's basic argument, he did include the
orthodox solution as his primary justification for mutual
aid.

More generally, I like to apply a somewhat cynical rule of
thumb in judging arguments about nature that also have overt
social implications: When such claims imbue nature with just
those properties that make us feel good or fuel our
prejudices, be doubly suspicious. I am especially wary of
arguments that find kindness, mutuality, synergism,
harmony--the very elements that we strive mightily, and so
often unsuccessfully, to put into our own
lives--intrinsically in nature. I see no evidence for
Teilhard's noosphere, for Capra's California style of
holism, for Sheldrake's morphic resonance. Gaia strikes me
as a metaphor, not a mechanism. (Metaphors can be liberating
and enlightening, but new scientific theories must supply
new statements about causality. Gaia, to me, only seems to
reformulate, in different terms, the basic conclusions long
achieved by classically reductionist arguments of
biogeochemical cycling theory.) There are no shortcuts to
moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can
offer comfort or solace in human terms--if only because our
species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not
constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral
dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered.
They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us--the most
difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or
consensus.