A Paradise Built in Hell (14 page)

 

 

 

Peter Kropotkin saw the state and coercive institutions as instead the source of social ills and believed in the essential goodness of unregulated humanity. He became one of the great revolutionaries of the turn of the twentieth century, though his route to that role was an unlikely one. He was born a prince into a society both elegant and barbaric. His aristocratic Russian father owned fifteen hundred “souls,” as the serfs were called when they were described as property. Each large landowner prided himself on a medieval independence in a country far from the industrial capitalism of western Europe. On the great estates, almost everything from piano tuning to making harnesses for the horses was done by serfs and servants, and many masters had their own orchestras. Kropotkin’s father had bought two fine first violinists “with their large families, for a handsome sum of money, from his sisters,” forced serfs to marry against their wishes, and sent those men who defied him into the army. Kropotkin’s mother died early, and the servants became allies in protecting the boy and his beloved brother Alexander against their stern father and even invited them to their dances.

The boys responded gratefully to these people. When he was still very young, his French tutor told him about Mirabeau, a moderate in the French Revolution who renounced his aristocratic title, and Kropotkin was inspired to drop the honorific before his name. The sweet-natured and tenderhearted Kropotkin’s politics might by his contemporary and countryman Leo Tolstoy have been called love. The two later became colleagues whose political affinities outweighed their differences; the Christian anarchist Tolstoy even corrected the proofs of an essay of Kropotkin’s, and the two worked together to relocate the persecuted pacifist sect of the Doukhobors, or Spirit Wrestlers, from Russia to western Canada. The playwright George Bernard Shaw met the former prince later in life and wrote, “Personally Kropotkin was amiable to the point of saintliness, and with his red full beard and loveable expression might have been a shepherd from the Delectable Mountains.”

After an education in the czar’s Corps of Pages, Kropotkin turned down the opportunity to join an elite military branch in the capital and pressed to be sent to Siberia to explore. “The five years that I spent in Siberia were for me a genuine education in life and human character,” he wrote afterward, adding, “Siberia is not the frozen land buried in snow and peopled with exiles only that it is imagined to be, even by many Russians. In its southern parts it is as rich in natural productions as are the southern parts of Canada, which it resembles.” He traveled over fifty thousand miles by boat and horse, across unmapped mountain ranges, down the Amur River with convoys of winter supplies and convicts for crew, through forests, into remote outposts, and, in disguise as a merchant, across the border into Chinese Manchuria. He was already deeply discontented with his hierarchical society and passionate about amending injustice. During his years in the remote edges of the Russian empire, he lived and worked with peasants, prisoners, tribal peoples, and others far outside the usual acquaintance of most European aristocrats. He surveyed the Amur region of far northeastern Asia and later redrew the map of that continent—a prodigious achievement in geography and exploration. He might have had a good career as a scientist had his political passions not taken precedence. After an era as an explorer he became a radical, then a prisoner who made a daring escape, then an exile for many years, most of them in England. The Russian Revolution made it possible for him to return but was also a huge disappointment to him, a soaring moment of liberation that collapsed into a new authoritarian regime.

In the middle of
Catastrophe and Social Change
, Samuel Prince suddenly references Kropotkin. “Catastrophe and the sudden termination of the normal which ensues become the stimuli of heroism and bring into play the great social virtues of generosity and of kindliness—which in one of its forms is mutual aid. The new conditions, perhaps it would be more correct to say, afford the occasion for their release,” he writes on page 55, and on the next page he footnotes Kropotkin’s 1902 treatise
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
. Two pages later, he adds, “Communication has transformed mutual aid into a term of worldwide significance. As at San Francisco, when from all directions spontaneous gifts were hurried to the stricken city . . . so it was at Halifax.” Though that aid wasn’t actually mutual; it was altruistic, given from afar by strangers who needed and expected nothing in return. Or perhaps it is mutual in a broader sense: such aid knits together a larger society in which standards of compassion and generosity are maintained. Those who give receive a sense of themselves as members of a civilized world in which they will receive aid when their need arises. But in Halifax itself the first aid was often directly mutual, when people who were themselves impacted reached out to others in need—Joe Glube, for example, distributing food and caring for the wounded while his home and business were smashed up and he himself essentially homeless. We often hear about heroes in disasters, but the window of time when acts of physical courage matter is often very brief, and those when generosity and empathy are more important to survival last for weeks, months, years.

Mutual aid means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity. In this sense it is reciprocity, a network of people cooperating to meet each others’ wants and share each others’ wealth. When the Mission District residents in earthquake-torn San Francisco refused to let institutional kitchens replace their community kitchens, they were refusing to let mutual aid give way to charity, which would define them as the needy with nothing to give rather than the community with everything to give each other. When Dorothy Day established the Catholic Worker, she endeavored to make the aid mutual by making the people they served active participants in the work projects. In flood-ravaged New Orleans, the radical group Common Ground Relief ’s slogan is “Solidarity, Not Charity.” In Halifax, Prince noted, “the preference upon the part of the refugee for plural leadership and decision” and “the resentment which succeeds the intrusion of strangers in relief leadership.” People preferred to care for each other rather than to be cared for by strangers or governed by others.

Altruism and charity are distinct if not in the acts themselves at least in the surrounding atmosphere: altruism reaches across with a sense of solidarity and empathy; charity hands down from above. The latter always runs the risk of belittling, patronizing, or otherwise diminishing its recipients in underscoring the difference between those who have and those who need. It takes away a sense of self while giving material aid. Giving and receiving can have strange reciprocities. In Burma, Buddhist monks traditionally live on alms. Being allowed to give confers a blessing on the giver, so much so that during the 2007 uprising in that nation some monks refused to accept anything from the military and their families, thereby cutting them off from the workings of spiritual advancement as surely as excommunication exiles a Catholic. It also means that the monks live on faith in the generosity of others (though poverty in Burma after the 2008 typhoon became so dire that some monasteries resorted to buying food, because the laypeople were themselves destitute and hungry). Giving is itself the gift, and there can be a deep mutuality between giver and recipient in the horizontality of altruism rather than the hierarchy of charity. More complex exchanges take place in the arts: is it the writer or singer who is giving the work, or the reader or listener who brings the gift of attention, or are they knit together in a mutuality whose give-and-take is complicated? Seen in a larger context, continual exchanges knit together a society, form the conversation of which it is made. This is the aid described by Kropotkin that is mutual and thereby foundational to community and society.

The term
mutual aid
has become standard language for disaster preparedness. In that context, it describes the agreements among agencies to assist each other in crises, often by crossing the jurisdictional or geographical lines of their everyday activities. In California, the statewide system is called “EMMA,” Emergency Managers Mutual Aid, born out of the realization after the 1994 Northridge earthquake near Los Angeles that services needed to be coordinated. The nationwide EMAC, or Emergency Management Assistance Compact, is “an interstate mutual aid agreement that allows states to assist one another in responding to all kinds of natural and man-made disasters.” Most typically, such mutual aid is represented by the out-of-state firefighters who gather at the site of huge wildfires and the experts in search and rescue and other specialties who gather at the sites of more urban disasters.

Kropotkin would have argued that the mutual aid evident in the aftermath of the Halifax explosion demonstrated not only ordinary human but broader evolutionary tendencies. He begins his book
Mutual Aid
by saying, “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. 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 the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.” In the late nineteenth century, Darwin’s work had been taken as scientific confirmation that life was essentially competitive, each pitted against each for survival. (A century before, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had stood conventional belief on its head to argue that a decent original humanity had been corrupted by civilization.)

This was often extrapolated into what later was called Social Darwinism, the premise of which was that the conduct of contemporary human beings inevitably echoed their own primordial behavior and nature’s essential bleakness. It justified callousness toward those who lost out in the economic struggle: they did so because they were unfit, ill adapted, and lazy, rather than because the system was unfair—a common justification of colonial rapacity, the deprivation of the poor, and basis for theories of racial inferiority. They deserved it, or they were at least doomed and could not be saved, if the forces that trampled them down were as inevitable as nature itself. Social Darwinists also tend to share Thomas Malthus’s belief that life must almost inevitably be a scramble for the scarce resources of the earth, a scramble in which some must die because there is not enough for all. Capitalism’s fundamental premise is scarcity, while a lot of tribal and gift economies operate on a basis of abundance. Their generosity is both an economic and an ethical premise.

Mutual Aid
countered a whole worldview, but it was prompted in particular by a celebrated 1888 essay by “Darwin’s bulldog,” the English scientist Thomas Henry Huxley. In “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” he argued that primordial humans “strove with their enemies and their competitors; they preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of generations, alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyena, whose lives were spent in the same way; and they were no more to be praised or blamed.” It was a spectacularly grim view of human beings as animals governed by the rules of this stingy nature. That view is pervasive in contemporary society. It is behind, for example, the statement in a potboiler book on the Halifax explosion that “the elements of civilized society were broken down and for many all that remained was the jungle law of self preservation.” Civilization was thought to be a veneer beneath which the beast still snarled, and early humankind and “primitive” peoples were usually imagined as living harsh, chaotic, desperate, and deeply isolated lives, enemies to each other in pursuit of a life that was inevitably described as struggle for survival.

Kropotkin challenged the foundations of this worldview: if animal life itself and earlier and simpler forms of human society were not ruthlessly competitive, then the justification for the selfish side of contemporary human society as natural or inevitable would crumble. He argued instead that cooperation is as or more important a factor in survival, beginning with mutual aid among insects, birds, and mammals. Subsequent chapters dealt with social contracts and structures among all kinds of peoples, including medieval and modern European society. He noted that rather than being individuals pitted against each other, most traditional and tribal peoples live in extended families, or clans, whose organization shapes all relationships and conduct, who share wealth, cooperatively maintain community codes of conduct, and collectively punish violations against them. “The very persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who obey only their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of the species. Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.” Later he elaborated, “For thousands and thousands of years, this organization has kept men together, even though there was no authority whatosever to impose it.”

His indignation was inspired by his great kindness as well as his observations in Asia’s far northeast and his wide readings in the literature of travelers, ethnographers, and historians. And it was shaped by his political agenda, for by the time he wrote
Mutual Aid
he was one of the theorists of the political philosophy called
anarchism.
The word means, literally, in Greek, “the absence of government.” It is often used nowadays as a synonym for mayhem, chaos, and riotous behavior because many imagine that the absence of authority is equally the absence of order. Anarchists are idealists, believing human beings do not need authorities and the threat of violence to govern them but are instead capable of governing themselves by cooperation, negotiation, and mutual aid. They stand on one side of a profound debate about human nature and human possibility. On the other side, the authoritarian pessimists believe that order comes only at the point of a gun or a society stacked with prisons, guards, judges, and punishments. They believe that somehow despite the claimed vileness of the many, the few whom they wish to endow with power will use it justly and prudently, though the evidence for this could most politely be called uneven. The cases drawn from disaster largely contradict this belief. It is often the few in power rather than the many without who behave viciously in disaster, and those few do so often exactly because they subscribe to the fearful beliefs of Huxley, Le Bon, and others.