The Price of Altruism (3 page)

Aleksei Petrovich Kropotkin, a retired army officer who had seen little real action but nevertheless lived entirely according to military custom, thought he knew very well what his son needed to do: Little Peter’s artistically inclined mother died of consumption when he was just four, and thereafter he would be groomed for the life of a soldier. When a serendipitous opportunity presented itself to showcase his son at a gala costume party in honor of Czar Nicholas I’s twenty-fifth anniversary, eight-year-old Peter’s uniform was prepared with particular attention. And there he was, dressed as a Persian page with a belt covered with jewels, and hoisted by his uncle, Prince Gagarin, to the platform, when the czar himself beheld him. Taking the young boy by the arm, Nicholas I led him to Maria Alexandrovna, the pregnant wife of the heir to the throne, saying: “That is the sort of boy you must bring me.”
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The czar would not live to regret his words, but his heir would. The Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg was the training ground for Russia’s future military elite; only 150 boys, mainly sons of the courtly nobility, were admitted to the privileged corps, and upon graduation could join any regiment they chose. The top sixteen would be even luckier:
pages de chambre
to members of the imperial family—
the
card of entry to a life of influence and prestige. When Peter was sent there by his father at fifteen, he already considered it a misfortune. But despite himself he graduated at the top of the class and was made personal liege to Alexander II, Nicholas having died some years earlier. It was 1861, and insurrections were growing more violent and expensive, opposition more damagingly vocal. The new czar was coming under increasing pressure to grant freedom to his serfs. When he finally signed the Edict of Liberty on March 5 (according to the old Russian calendar), Alexander seemed to Peter transcendent. The sentiment was fleeting. The glamour of richly decorated drawing rooms flanked by chamberlains in gold-embroidered uniforms took his breath away at first, but soon he saw that such trifles absorbed the court at the expense of matters of true importance. Power, he was learning, was corrupting.

As he shadowed the czar at a distance, with the requisite combination of “presence with absence,” the aureole he once imagined over the imperial ruler’s person gradually gloomily eroded. The czar was unreliable, detached, and vindictive, and many of the men around him were worse. With the Corps of Pages, Kropotkin had learned to march and fence, build bridges and fortifications, but his true interests, he already knew, lay elsewhere. Secretly he began to read Herzen’s London review, the
Polar Star
, and even to edit a revolutionary paper. When the time came to pick a commission he determined to travel to the far expanses of eastern Siberia, to the recently annexed Afar region. His father and fellow cadets were shocked—after all, as sergeant of the corps the entire army was open to him. “Are you not afraid to go so far?” Czar Alexander II asked him before he was to leave, surprised. “No. I want to work. There must be much to do in Siberia to apply the great reforms which are going to be made.” “Well, go; one can be useful everywhere,” the czar replied, but with such an expression of fatigue and complete surrender that Kropotkin thought at once, “He is a used up man.”
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Thirty years before Kropotkin set out for the Afar, Charles Darwin set sail on the HMS
Beagle
. En route to Buenos Aires in October 1832, Darwin noticed swarms of phosphorescent zoophytes, each smaller than the dot above this
i
. They illuminated the waves surrounding the ship with the glow of a pale green light as it sailed into the dark unknown ocean. Darwin was aware of the prevalent explanation: The tiny marine creatures had been put there by God to help sailors avoid shipwreck on gloomy nights at sea. This was the doctrine of finalism, or teleology, the very backbone of a tradition of natural theology on which Darwin’s generation had been reared.
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But the young lad from Shrewsbury would not have God’s benevolence stand as a proxy for scientific explanation. The glow ordained to direct lost sailors, he was certain, was simply phosphorescence caused by the decomposing bodies of the millions of dead zoophytes caught among the live ones—a process by which the ocean purified itself. This was purpose enough, God’s benevolence notwithstanding. The true beauty of Nature could be unmasked only by uncovering her own laws, not God’s divinations. The Reverend William Paley figured natural design to be proof of godly design—how else to explain the excellence of the crystalline lens of the eye of the trout, or the aerodynamic perfection of the wing of the eagle? But the answers in his
Natural Theology
now seemed to Darwin like questions: If God were bracketed, and natural laws sought out in his stead, how could the seamless fit between organisms’ forms and functions be explained? How did Nature come to seem so perfect?
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One way to look at the problem would be to study Nature’s imperfections, long recognized as a puzzle, and unsuccessfully explained away by the argument for design. Why on earth do flightless kiwis have vestiges of wings, snakes relics of leg bones, or moles traces of once-busy eyes? The mysteries of biogeography kept tugging at his mind, too: Why are there fewer endemic species on islands than on the mainland? Where did these species come from? Why are they so similar to mainland species if their natural surroundings are so different? A fixity-of-species man upon embarkation, Darwin returned to England in October 1836 leaning toward a more dynamic view of Nature and her ways. Still unsure of the physical law to explain away all conundrums, he nevertheless arrived after nearly five years at sea with “such facts [that] would undermine the stability of species.”
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And then something momentous happened.
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In October 1838 Darwin read
An Essay on the Principle of Population
by the clergyman and former professor of political economy Thomas Malthus. The idea that population increases geometrically while food supply increases arithmetically was meant by Malthus to prove that starvation, wars, death, and suffering were never the consequence of the defects of one political system or another, but rather the necessary results of a natural law. A Whig and a supporter of Poor Law action to ameliorate the condition of the destitute, Darwin was not sympathetic to Malthus’s reactionary politics, but applying the clergyman’s law to nature was different. Immediately he realized that given the struggle for existence everywhere, “favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then,” he wrote, “I had at last got a theory by which to work.” Evolution by natural selection was nothing more and nothing less than “the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms.”
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After all, if one great lesson had been gleaned from the journey, it was the awesome abundance of life on the planet. On the massive vines of “wonderful” kelp off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, plummeting forty-five fathoms into the darkness, Darwin found patelliform shells, troche, mollusks, bivalves, and innumerable crustacea. When he shook, out came “small fish, shells, cuttle-fish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, starfish, beautiful holuthuriae, planariae, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms.” The “great entangled roots” reminded Darwin of tropical forests, swarming with every imaginable species of ant and beetle rustling beneath the feet of giant capybaras and slit-eyed lizards, under the watchful gaze of carrion hawks. The splendor and variation were endless. “The form of the orange tree, the coconut, the palm, the mango, the tree-fern, the banana,” Darwin wrote nostalgically, surveying the tropical panorama at Bahia as the
Beagle
pushed for home, “will remain clear and separate; but the thousand beauties which unite these into one perfect scene must fade away; yet they will leave, like a tale heard in childhood, a picture full of indistinct, but most beautiful figures.”
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In truth, Darwin knew, nature was one grand cacophonous battle—brutal, unyielding, and cruel. For if populations in the wild have such high rates of fertility that their size would increase exponentially if not constrained; if it is known that, excepting seasonal fluctuations, the size of populations remains stable over time; if Malthus was right, as he surely was, that the resources available to a species are limited—then it follows that there must be intense competition, or a
struggle for existence
, among the members of a species. And if no two members of a population are identical, and some of these differences render the life chances, or
fitness
, of some greater than others—
and are inherited
—then it follows that the selection of the fitter over the less fit will lead, over time, to evolution. The consequences were unthinkable, yet Darwin’s logic was spotless. From the “war of nature, from famine and death” the most exalted creatures had been created. Malthus had brought about in him a complete “conversion,” one which, he wrote to his trusted friend Joseph Hooker in 1844, was “like confessing a murder.”
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Prisons to reform, schools to build, tribunals to assemble—the great administrative apparatus of the state was waiting to be marshaled. Wide-eyed, Kropotkin had joined the Cossack regiment, eager to bring justice to faraway districts. Gradually he saw his considered recommendations all dying a silent death on the gallows of bureaucracy and official corruption. When a Polish insurrection broke out in the summer of 1863, Alexander II unleashed a terrible reaction, all reforms and their spirit long forgotten. Disillusioned, Kropotkin gradually turned to nature. Fifty thousand miles he traveled—in carts, on board steamers, in boats, but chiefly on horseback, with a few pounds of bread and a few ounces of tea in a leather bag, a kettle and a hatchet hanging at the side of his saddle. Trekking to Manchuria on a geographical survey he slept under open skies, read Mill’s
On Liberty
, and beheld with astonishment “man’s oneness with nature.”
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Kropotkin’s primary concern now became working out a theory of mountain chains and high plateaus, but he was keen, too, to find evidence for Darwin’s great theory. He had read
The Origin of Species
at the Corps of Pages, and in a way this was his polar voyage of the
Beagle
. What he saw, then, came as a great surprise: Darwin spoke of a fierce struggle between members of the same species, but everywhere he looked Kropotkin found collaboration: horses forming protective rings to guard against predators; wolves coming together to hunt in packs; birds helping each other at the nest; fallow deer marching in unison to cross a river. Mutual aid and cooperation were everywhere.

Like Darwin upon his return from his journey, after five years of adventure Kropotkin had yet to develop a fullblown theory of nature. But if Darwin’s belief in the fixity of species had been shaken on the
Beagle
, Kropotkin’s assurance of the struggle for existence was completely shattered on the Afar. By the time he arrived in St. Petersburg in April 1867, he wrote, “the poetry of nature” had become the philosophy of his life.
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At the same time, he had lost all faith in the state: Once a constitutionalist who believed, like Huxley, in the promise of benevolent administration, Kropotkin emerged from the great Russian expanses fully “prepared to become an anarchist.”
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It was in Switzerland some years later that he became a full-fledged revolutionary. The death of his father finally setting him free, news of the Paris Commune drew Kropotkin to Europe. In Zurich he joined the International, gaining a taste for revolutionary politics. But it was in Sonvilliers, a little valley in the Jura hills, that something really moved him. In the midst of a heavy snowstorm that “blinded us and froze the blood in our veins,” fifty isolated watchmakers, most of them old men, braved the weather in order to discuss their no-government philosophy of living. This was not a mass being led and made subservient to the political ends of a few apparachiks. It was a union of independents, a federation of equals, setting standards by fraternal consensus. He was touched and deeply impressed by their wisdom. “When I came away from the mountains,” Kropotkin wrote, “my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.”
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Back in St. Petersburg he joined the Chaikovsky Circle, an underground group working to spread revolutionary ideas. For two years, between learned debates at the Geographical Society and lavish imperial soirees, Kropotkin became “Borodin.” Disguised as this peasant he ducked into shady apartments to lecture on everything from Proudhon to reading and arithmetic, slipping away again like a phantom. Communalism and fraternity were the anarchist response to the state, order without Order. Here was the creed: Left to his own devices, man would cooperate in egalitarian communes, property and coercion replaced by liberty and consent. Progress was being made uniting the workers in revolt against the czar when the police began taking serious counteraction. A group of agitating weavers had been arrested, and a raid on a student apartment produced a revolutionary manifesto authored by one P. A. Kropotkin. It was then that he knew that he would have to leave without delay. Now, pacing in his prison cell, Kropotkin could not help but grimace: if only he had forgone that last talk on glacial formations!

If competition between individuals was, scandalously, Nature’s way, she had forgotten to whisper the news to some of her smaller creatures. Many an ant species, Darwin knew, was divided into fixed, unbreachable castes. The honeypot ant of the American deserts has workers whose sole job is to hang upside down, motionless, like great big pots of sugared water, so that they may be tapped when the queen and her brood are thirsty. Members of another caste in the same species have gigantic heads with which, Cerberus-like, they block the nest entrance before intruders. The leaf-cutter ants of South America sport castes that differ in weight up to three hundredfold, from miniature serene fungus gardeners to giant ferocious soldiers. In the ant world some tend to the queen, others to the nest, others to food, others to battle—each to his caste and each to his fate. What Darwin found amazing was that besides the queen and a few lucky males, all the rest of the ants are effectively neuters. This made no sense if success in the battle for survival was measured by production of off spring.
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