Jivan Vatayan first introduced me to Alfie Kohn’s work on cooperation in his article The Primacy of Cooperation. This morning a google search for essay and cooperation unearthed another gem by an educator in Texas.
John H. Lienhard
I’ll begin by adding a forbidden word—a word that does not mean what you first might think. I want to begin with a word that puts a special spin on cooperation and generosity. That word is anarchy.
The person who did most to define anarchy as a positive social force was Petr Kropotkin. Kropotkin was born a Russian Prince in 1842. His father trained him for the Tsar’s court. But young Kropotkin had read Darwin’s new book, Origin of the Species. He wanted to be a scientist. He hated court politics. So he quit and joined a Cossack regiment in Siberia.
Petr Kropotkin, from Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 1899
Imperial Europe didn’t like the idea that imperial rule is unnecessary. So Kropotkin spent time in jails. He finally found a haven working in England as a science writer. Meanwhile, Darwin’s influence grew. Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw.” In 1888 Huxley wrote a harsh essay on the survival of the fittest: The Struggle for Existence. We started seeing our lot through distorted Darwinian lenses. We started believing that life is nothing but a blood sport.
Both capitalists and the new Marxists bent Darwin to fit their ends. Kropotkin reacted with articles. He showed that cooperation is our primary survival strategy. He wrote:
Life in societies enables the feeblest animals, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest mammals to resist, or protect themselves from the most terrible birds and beasts of prey;
Kropotkin showed how acts of mercy and mutual support were part of all insect, animal, and human societies. In 1902 he wove his studies into a powerful lucid book. He called it Mutual Aid.
Photo by John Lienhard
Kropotkin had supported the Russian revolution. But, as Marxists turned up their own Darwinian rhetoric, he withdrew. Before his death in 1921 he wrote to Lenin, “Vladimir Ilych, your actions are [unworthy of your ideals].” And today we’re learning that Kropotkin’s modes of cooperation are far more subtly active in our ecology than we’d once thought. We find new hope in his words, “[A society] which organizes itself without authority is always in existence. [It is] like a seed beneath the snow.”
It really is you and I who shape our world and who will save our world. Our cooperation and interaction have far more to say than any form of leadership does. We form our world simply by working together and by cherishing one another.
I believe with all my heart that leadership is an illusion. We choose leaders and hold them up as banners—reflecting our mutual aspirations. But it is not they; it is you and I who determine our future. I once had a violist friend who took over a youth orchestra. One day at lunch I asked him how it was to be a conductor. “Oh, John,” he answered,
It’s wonderful. It doesn’t take long. When you lower your baton in a downbeat a wonderful sound comes at you. Very soon you begin to believe that it’s you who’s making that glorious sound.
It is you and I who have always made that glorious sound. It is you and I who always will. Make no mistake about that.
And below the communal nature of any enterprise that we create together, there must ride a kind of generosity. That generosity must bind us in the enterprise. The animals tell us about that kind of generosity. Remember Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Raven? Poe says,
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore
I find it very interesting that Poe seems to see a dimension of charity in his sinister bird. And there is such a dimension. A recent American Scientist article talked about ravens trying to survive a cold northern winter. Carrion is rare and precious. What does a raven do when he finds a carcass? Hoard the treasure for himself? Eat his fill and fly away? What really happens is a surprise. The raven circles the find without landing. Then he flies away. A few days later he’s back with forty companions and they fall upon the meal. By the time the carcass is finished, over a hundred ravens have shared it. Biologists move into the New England forests to study this action. It’s completely reproducible. They’re not sure how ravens communicate their find, but their generosity in the midst of hardship is absolute.
Darwin originally suggested just the opposite—that self-sacrifice acts against the survival of the fittest. Now survival proves to be more complex. Seeing to the survival of the group assures survival of the species. The individual also knows that, because he shares, he will eat when a companion finds food.
It is a system based on trust. It’s the world we all wish we could live in. These biologists do their work methodically, systematically, measuring a hundred cases with tagged birds. The results come back with unerring consistency. And I go back to read Kropotkin’s radical Mutual Aid, published in 1902.
Out of Kropotkin’s years in Siberia observing animal behavior, he brought stories about birds sharing in exactly the same way. Then he quoted an ancient Greek source: A sparrow comes to tell other sparrows that a slave has dropped a sack of corn. And they all go off to feed upon the grain. Kropotkin was horrified by the violence of Darwin’s early followers. He wrote,
They have made modern literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as if it were the last word of modern biology.
Now biologists are rediscovering what Kropotkin and the ancient Greeks already knew: the fact, obvious once you see it, that generosity is our primal survival strategy.
By the way, Edgar Allan Poe missed the point when he cried to the Raven, “Leave no black plume as a token … Leave my loneliness unbroken.” The poor man could’ve learned how needless his self-made loneliness really was from that remarkable and generous bird.
So you see how it strikes me as impossible to talk about cooperation without bringing in the related matter of generosity. That cooperative generosity defines the human species. Our survival depends upon it. I think you’ll find it helpful if we take a moment to visit an African lake where two anthropologists, Malcom Smith and Robert Layton, have studied a strange kind of fish called cichlids.
The cichlids in the lake come in 200 different species. They’re all pretty similar. Only their lips, jaws, and teeth have evolved differently. Some have evolved into fin eaters, some into worm eaters. Some cichlids eat snails. Each cichlid fish has evolved into a tiny niche of the ecology. That kind of subdividing is pretty common. That’s why we count 40,000 species of fish, birds, and mammals.
So why haven’t we splintered like that? Humankind is only one species. One young hunter can chase down a rabbit. Another can spear a fish. Yet we haven’t specialized into one race of rabbit catchers and another of fish spearers. Why are we alike in all but the most minor features—things like hair diameter and skin color? We’re not like the fish in that African lake. We’ve faced every environment on Earth. We’ve had every chance to divide into specialized subspecies.
The answer lies in the eerie texture of human sharing. We share in complex ways no other animal does. Back in camp, the rabbit chaser and the fish spearer exchange food. We’ve done that as long as we’ve existed. Of course it helps that we’re very omnivorous. We eat almost anything. If it lives, we’ve eaten it at one time or another. More important, we’ve also shared it. But: Our sharing goes far beyond food. For example, most societies have taboos about mating across lines of clan, ethnicity, or race.
Yet the important thing about those taboos is that we break them. Intermarriage is another kind of sharing that holds our species together. Then there’s the most important dimension of sharing of all. We share the techniques for gathering food and fulfilling other needs. One cichlid fish had to develop its own specialized jaw for crushing and eating snails. We share our knowledge of snail catching, of rabbit chasing, of fish spearing.
That’s what technology is. Techni–ology is the lore—the ology, the science—of technique. Technology is our primary act of sharing. Technology shapes us into one body instead of a thousand subspecies. We’re bound in a unique and instinctive tether of generosity with our technologies right at the core of that generosity. We are bound into one system. Kropotkin was right. Generosity and mutual aid is our primal survival mechanism.
Read John H. Lienhard’s full article…
Read more about Petr Kropotkin
Read Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Ai d (1902)