Dear Friends,                                                           Misogyny? No! Mutual Aid? Yes!

If we take an ants’ nest, we not only see that every description of work – rearing of progeny, foraging, building, rearing of aphides, and so on – is performed according to the principles of voluntary mutual aid; we must also recognize, with Forel, that the chief, the fundamental feature of the life of many species of ants is the fact and the obligation for every ant of sharing its food.

             Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

My newsfeed showed me something that was both truly horrible and very good and encouraging. A doctoral student at Oxford, Juliet Turner, celebrated receiving her doctorate (so now Dr. Juliet Turner) by a nice, heartfelt and funny post on social media. She received lots of friendly congratulations – and I add mine here – but also some of the vilest misogynistic attacks imaginable, the main point being that she is a traitor to the human race because she has spent all this time as an academic when she should have got married and had children.

I have to admit that I had not realized quite how normal this sort of thing has become, especially online. Yes, I knew patriarchy was making a terrifying come-back, but this automatic, effortless response to a woman’s achievement … well, I’m up to speed now.

I can’t add anything useful to the revulsion against these what do you even call them. But here’s the good and encouraging – for me, at least – Dr. Turner’s thesis is “a study on the evolution of cooperation and division of labour in insects”. This simple description is already fascinating just on its own. But those words “cooperation and division of labour in insects” have a special interest for me.

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, the great Russian anarchist and scientist, made the simple phrase “mutual aid” the heart and soul of all his work, practical, theoretical and scientific. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) is his most important book. As the sub-title suggests he sees mutual aid as a fundamental evolutionary  process not only among humans but all species including insects. He’s always trying to be nice and respectful towards Darwin, laying the blame more on Darwin’s followers, but he cannot avoid saying that Darwin neglected mutual aid as a factor; and greatly exaggerated the role of “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.”

I doubt that anyone in the scientific community pays any attention to Kropotkin these days, and I’m sure they have their reasons. But I was struck by the affinity of Dr. Turner’s words, “cooperation and division of labour in insects”, with Kropotkin’s description of ants.

Kropotkin’s mot d’ordre, Mutual Aid, is the simplest, clearest and most comprehensive declaration of what will allow us all to survive. His founding of mutual aid in evolution is more important now than ever. He establishes an evolutionary connection between humans and all other species that does not place the human higher, but brings them all together in a simultaneous movement in which mutuality is not only a common, but also a necessary factor. If we’re going to speak of nature in regard to animal species including the human then it must include mutuality as integral: this goes for ants – ants’ nature – for sparrows – sparrows’ nature – for cod – cods’ nature – for coyotes – coyotes’ nature – and of course for all of us – human nature. Emphasis not because we’re so great and important but because we do threaten all the others, and the motivations for the threat are so often tied to ideas, fantasies, dreams, nightmares about human nature, about what it is.   

“Human nature” has been the property of vulgar Darwinists and worse since long before Darwin. Whenever you want to assert something but have no argument for it, well, “we all know that’s just human nature” is surprisingly successful. But if I say “we all know that mutual aid is just human nature” it’s not going to fly. Why not? Because for something to be “just human nature” it’s got to be somehow a way to prove that ideas about improving the world are “utopian”, “idealistic”, wishful thinking.

The “hey, this is just the way we are, not much to do about it” view of human nature is the popular version of the original modern account by, let’s call them, the 17^th century boys, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke and Leibniz: the individual is an atomic being, self-contained in its subjective self-consciousness, it is what it is prior to any relations with others.

However prestigious this theory remains, however much it underwrites popular views and countless utterances beginning with “that’s just human nature”, it’s a very odd idea. Is that really how you experience your existence in the world?

For starters, this individual whose “human nature” explains so much is alone, full-grown in mind and body, no prior relations to anyone or anything. That is to say this individual is male, or, at least, masculine according to a dominant idea of masculinity in modern society. Putting aside those males who may not like this idea of masculinity, we come back to a familiar situation: Everyone is an individual just like this. But, then, just over half the world’s population aren’t individuals.

Why can’t women be individuals like this? Because whether they have children or not society assigns them to the role of child-bearing and child-rearing. It’s human nature to be an isolated individual, but women aren’t isolated individuals. So what are they?

There’s an extreme version, long treasured by male novelists of a certain kind, but now chiefly championed in the manosphere, that makes everything crystal clear: to be human is to be always on the verge of murderous violence, that is, to be a man standing alone, always ready to face the enmity of a hostile world, that is a world of men each one just as he. (To call this a Hobbesian world is a gross insult to Hobbes.) Like it or not this is human nature, and men are its bearers – and remember, it’s a really tough job, and men get out there every day and do it, at least, the real men do. And the ones who do are the true human beings, living their nature.

So what about women? Well, obviously, they can’t be men, not their fault, but they can’t. But men are human beings,  so women aren’t. But there is a place for them in human life! They can bear and raise children!

Human nature – manly, whatever it takes to be manly, yes, there will be blood, lots of it, but this is how we are by nature, the law of nature is the law of God. Being a man is never having to say you’re sorry. Being a women is always having to apologize for your existence.

Yes, that’s the extreme version, but once you start with the single, isolated individual, that’s pretty much the way it’s going to go. (I owe the above few paragraphs to conversations with my daughter.)

Is there nothing else? Well, actually, there is. The ordinary lived experience we all have as individuals to begin with. We don’t experience ourselves as unconnected atoms. We feel all the connections with others throughout our lives, and especially in childhood. Many of those who most desperately attempt to achieve “true manhood”, impervious and alone, themselves understand that what drives them is the fear of their childhood dependencies.

Our lived experience is as beings in the world already before anything, among others, so many others over such a range of otherness, but among whom the ones whom we first met, if we were lucky, smiling faces appearing above us as we lay helpless in our cribs, take us out to all others, all otherness, human and beyond. “The infant’s capacity and desire to relate to the world is incipiently present at birth. … Already at three to four months, the infant has the capacity to interact in sophisticated facial play whose main motive is social interest.” (Jessica Benjamin)

Our lived experience certainly includes narrowly self-interested behavior up to and including murderous violence, it also has as its basis a woven fabric of mutual aid, often so taken for granted as to become invisible.

Why does it become invisible? Why does the isolated individual take over? Ages before the dawn of the isolated individual the creation of the state and of private property established an order that was both strictly hierarchical and strictly gendered. Mutuality, naturally egalitarian, was subjected to state power and the patriarchal family.

Mutuality, mutual aid are prior to the state and to the patriarchal family. They continue however much constrained all through the eras of oppression. Modernity creates a possibility; right now, today, we have no idea whether it can rise beyond a mere abstraction (“anything is possible”) to actuality, real, material existence, our lived sensuous experience, the world in which we live.

Modernity creates the isolated individual, something genuinely new, but also heir to the eras of oppression, of state and patriarchy. But it also makes possible the liberation of mutual aid and of the individual who is able to participate in mutual aid. So: two kinds of individual. Which will prevail?

One is exclusively male, the other is capable of any sort of relation with others. To order your being, and the being of all, as exclusively male is to turn masculinity into a horror. The reasons to prefer the other kind of individual seem overwhelming. So far, reason doesn’t seem to be carrying the day. French movies always end, at least they used to, with the single word Fin (the End) alone on the screen. If we could even replace that word with À suivre  (To be continued) it would be just a little more reassuring.

The myth of the isolated individual pretty much explains the horrible misogynistic comments that Dr. Turner received. The idea of the individual as arising from relations with others fits naturally with Mutual Aid. How much, if at all, they fit with Dr. Turner’s work I don’t know. I hope there’s at least some connection. In the meantime, congratulations Dr. Turner! I look forward to learning more from your work on the evolution of cooperation and division of labour in insects.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby