The idea of mutual aid is much older than its present resurgence. Cooperation, after all, has been fundamental to human history. And mutualism, as symbiotic cooperation is called in biology, is vital to life itself. As the Russian prince turned anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued more than a century ago with the subtitle of his Mutual Aid (1902), it is “a key factor of evolution.”
Yet mutual aid/mutualism never seems to get as much attention as conflict/competition does. Ever since Darwin, elites have pushed the self-justifying notion of evolution as a matter of winners and losers, merging biology with market economics and touting what Herbert Spencer termed the “survival of the fittest.” Spencer aligned his reading of Darwin with his own economic theories: the resulting “Social Darwinism” should really be called “Spencerism.” Spencerism’s descent into eugenics underlay elite self-conceptions—as well as murderous reigns of racism and nationalism—for decades. Its reappearance on the American scene in the twenty-first century should be taken as a foreboding.
Mutual aid still gets short shrift. It’s just not as sexy or box office as the idea of “nature, red in tooth and claw”—a line gifted to the world by the poet Alfred Tennyson. Consider nature documentary entertainments: there will be more supposedly exciting scenes of antelopes being hunted by predators than there will be of insects pollinating plants.
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