The relational conception of the self: historical threads, part 2

Kropotkin looks at evolution and sees mutual aid as much as competition

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know that one of my themes is that humans are relational creatures and we’d do better if we spent more time recognizing and living up to that understanding of our nature. And you know that I frequently set this conception up as a foil to (patriarchal, ingressive) individualism, which is part of the dominant Western mindset. As I mentioned in part 1 of this occasional series, philosophy fed the individualistic mindset. It also feeds a relational one.

When I’ve written about this, I typically get comments about how evolution shows that everyone is in it for themselves, competition is natural, and only the fittest survive. “Survival of the fittest” is a reading of evolutionary theory that serves individualism well, so in a classic case of selective reading, it’s the slogan that was amplified and that came to permeate Western culture.

But we’ve known for quite some time that it’s actually much more complicated than that. In fact, as

Elissa Strauss

points out in chapter 5 of When You Care, Darwin himself didn’t see evolution in only this way: “Humans, Darwin argued, are as cooperative and caring as they are competitive” (145). Strauss goes on to point out that Darwin himself lived as an example of a caring, attentive father, husband, and friend.

Darwin wasn’t alone in pointing this out, even in his time. In part 2 here, I’d like to take a look at the work of a polymath named Peter Kropotkin. He was a Russian aristocrat who renounced his privileged heritage in favor of becoming a foremost theorist of anarchy. In the service of his revolutionary projects, he was also an accomplished scholar. Among many other things, Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902), arguing in great detail that cooperation was a greater factor in evolution than competition was.

The central thesis of Mutual Aid is that the classic slogan derived from Darwin’s work, “survival of the fittest,” with its violently competitive connotations, is at best an incomplete picture of the way evolution actually works. Kropotkin provides a wealth of examples of how cooperative—not competitive—behavior in both animals and humans is what has enabled their survival over time.¹ He goes so far as to claim that this arrangement, at least within a species (or a tribe within a species), is the primary way species perpetuate themselves. With that rule established for the natural world, Kropotkin’s argument is quite simple: given that peace and cooperation are the rule for animals, and that humans are a product of evolution, it would be extremely surprising if humans were not naturally cooperative as well.

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

And let’s face it: humans are physically pretty wimpy as animals go. We didn’t make it on the evolutionary stage by power. We don’t have great teeth or claws; we’re not especially strong or large, and though we can be somewhat speedy, there are plenty of animals who are faster than us. What we do have is big brains—and each other. That’s a potent combination.

There’s plenty to support this in our experience, too. Modern society as we know it is the result of cooperation on a mind-boggling scale. I like to ask my students how many people you have to trust to get on an airplane. The first answer is usually “one”: the pilot. But when I nod, smile, and keep my mouth shut, they quickly realize that any time you get on a plane, you’re depending not only on the pilot, but a crew of mechanics, airport workers of all kinds, the flight attendants, air traffic control, the people who designed and built the plane—even your fellow passengers. Just one flight represents an enormous network of cooperation. And the same is true for many of the products we use and the activities we engage in on a daily basis. (How many of the people in a college classroom can make shoes?)

Yet humans as cooperators isn’t the dominant view of our nature. Why is this? Kropotkin admits that we tend to “exaggerate the part of human life given to struggles and to underrate its peaceful moods.” Our news and our histories are full of tales of war, violence, and oppression. There are a number of ways to reply to this. One is to survey, as Kropotkin does, the vast history of people living peacefully among themselves. Another is to explain why wars and violence are so prominent in our imagination. What makes the news? Interesting things. And what’s interesting? Exceptions to humdrum everyday existence. There’s nothing exciting about the fact that most people complete their commute to work perfectly smoothly and safely. What we report on the news and in the history books is the unusual stuff: the accidents, crimes, disasters, and wars. But the fact that we report it makes us think it’s a bigger part of life than it really is. Parents worry more than ever about kids being kidnapped, even though this is rarer now than it was when they were growing up.

As philosophers often do, Kropotkin voices and then addresses an important objection to his claims. He recognizes that someone might say to him, “Okay, my friend, I’ll grant that cooperation has played an important role in history and evolution. But still, that’s only one part of the story.” There’s also, the objection goes, the “self-assertion of the individual” for personal and political gain as well as the useful function of freeing individuals from the bonds imposed on them by the various social groups they belong to—tribes, communities, the state, and so on. This objection is pointing out that we’d be nowhere without folks who asserted themselves and pushed for progress: the Galileos, George Washingtons, Elizabeth Cady Stantons, Dorothy Vaughans, Steve Jobses, and so on, who have changed the world in one way or another. The objection is voicing the case of individualism.

Kropotkin starts his reply by saying that the objection isn’t wrong. The point, though, is that all of that is already amply documented; he just wants to amplify the cooperative side of the story. Until we understand that side thoroughly, we won’t have a full picture of human nature. But he also goes on to say that nobody operates in a vacuum. Even success in war depends on the internal cooperation of the people on each side. So does all science, art, and industry, because the ability to produce anything depends on background conditions set up by social cooperation. (Even Hobbes recognized this!) All of the heroes in our history books could do what they did because of the massive background of cooperation that directly or indirectly supported their work.

Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash

Finally, Kropotkin points out that some form of a mutual aid principle is a foundational part of many religions, which goes to show that we hold it as an important ideal of how humans should be. So he doesn’t deny that individuals can leap forward and bring everyone with them. But he reminds us that those leaps take off from a cooperative base.

There’s another objection to Kropotkin’s view. It’s not one he addresses, but my students often bring it up when we discuss his arguments. Someone almost always points out that this cooperation could very well be based on enlightened self-interest, much as Hobbes thinks civil society is. Sure, we cooperate, but only because each of us is better off individually if we do. We wouldn’t cooperate so much if it wasn’t to our advantage.

This objection comes from the same place that makes altruism a puzzle. How do you explain cooperation when life is one big competition? (Roughly: kin selection. When your relatives benefit from your behavior, the whole group’s odds of reproduction go up.)²

But the objection is making an assumption about human nature that Kropotkin is specifically trying to undermine: it’s assuming that humans (and many other species) are at bottom solitary creatures. What Kropotkin is arguing is that this individualistic premise simply isn’t true, at least not in its baldest form. Humans evolved in community with one another, and the instinct for mutual aid is built into our bones. It’s part of what it means to be human. We’re in this together, by nature.³ And since that’s the case, self-interest looks different than it does on the classic view: for us social creatures, self-interest includes the interests of the group(s) we belong to—both the group itself, and the individuals that make it up.

We see what we expect to see. When (patriarchal, ingressive) individualism is the dominant lens, that’s what we’ll see when we look at evolutionary (or any other) theory. If we make a point of noticing that that’s not all there is to it, though, we can start to see other ways of thinking and living.

1. For a fascinating discussion on cooperation in humans and primates, see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

2. For the record, how cooperation evolved would still have been a question that needed the mechanism provided by the theory of kin selection even if altruism hadn’t been puzzling.

3. Which is what kin selection essentially says.