KIN
‘Family feelings are designed to help our genes replicate themselves.’35
For Steven Pinker a Trickster Nature cons and hoodwinks us with Little House On The Prairie sentiments into spreading her nefarious molecules. But why does Nature have to trick us out of our own nature? There’s no reason, except that Steven Pinker has fallen into the fallacy acutely observed by the philosopher AN Whitehead a century ago:
Scientific reasoning is completely dominated by the presupposition that mental functionings are not properly part of nature.
Darwin deplored the fallacy of a true self separate from our evolved self. For him, as for Whitehead, mental functionings are inextricably part of nature. But not for Steven Pinker:
‘And if my genes don’t like it,’ he writes in How The Mind Works, ‘they can go jump in the lake.’
Steven Pinker’s view of humanity derives, then, from Darwin’s contemporary the famous Victorian scientist, Dr Jekyll. The more nineteenth century the sentiment, the more twenty-first century the language. Here’s that quote in full with which I started this section:
‘Family feelings are designed to help our genes replicate themselves. Our emotions about kin use a kind of inverse genetics to guess which of the organisms we interact with are likely to share our genes.’
I don’t know what the word ‘organism’ has ever done to Steven Pinker to make him treat it so badly. Since he starts off the sentence talking about human emotions, then ‘people’ is the natural choice of word here. But Steven Pinker can’t be using folk terms like ‘people’. So he goes for what would be a more scientific word, if only science meant syntactical incoherence, for to say organisms in this context makes no sense. Nobody uses any kind of inverse genetics to guess whether the snail they are flicking over the garden wall shares their genes. You use your loaf. Guessing doesn’t come into it:
‘Hang on a sec, didn’t I meet this snail at my Cousin Flo’s wedding?’
Now, people, on the other hand, might well try to guess if they are related to other people. So the word ‘people’ would make sense. But some things are more important than making sense. Making an impression, for example. The word ‘organisms’ makes a very good impression. It says Dispassionate Scientist At Work. And that’s pretty important to flag up right now because we are entering the Rocky Realm of Cold Hard Truths. Some of you may want to turn back now. The rest of you – buckle up for some heavy shit. Ready? Turns out all those warm soft feelings we cherish are illusions. Only those who share your genes really matter to you when all is said and done. Yeah. Heavy. Can you handle the ugly reality that family feelings are little more than kin-selection and less than kind? Can you live with the dark side?
Behind this macho posturing, however, lies a peculiarly cosy view of family life that averts its modest gaze from anything unsightly. Not so Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson, who in her critique of Pinkerism asks:
‘Might there not be fewer of these interfamilial crimes, honour killings [and] child abandonments,’ if family feelings really were designed to help our genes replicate themselves?36 And if ‘our emotions about kin’ are calculating ‘which organisms share our genes’ then why, asks Hilary Rose, did slave owners in the antebellum South, routinely sell children fathered upon slaves without a backward glance?37
So much for genes getting us to dance to their music.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Peter Kropotkin came back from the brink of death to make a major contribution to evolutionary theory, with his book Mutual Aid: A Factor In Evolution.
I first learnt about Kropotkin from Dr Natasha Rodionova, of the University of Novosibirsk. In a remote Siberian station one night, its small coal-fire insufficient to stop our breath steaming like the samovar of strong tea on the table, Natasha told me his story.
‘In late-nineteenth-century St Petersburg,’ she said, ‘Prince Peter Kropotkin was leading a precarious double-life. By day, an internationally renowned scientist, by night part of a clandestine organisation bent on the overthrow of the Tsar. When Kropotkin was told that the secret police, the dreaded Third Department, were onto him, he didn’t flee the country, but stayed to deliver lecture on glaciation to the Russian Geographical Society.’
‘Sounds risky,’ I said.
‘Risky. What do you know of risky? Once I was working in Kremlin – don’t ask me how I came to be there – I was cultural attaché and it fell to me to welcome an official delegation of the Chinese Communist Party led by none other than Chairman Mao himself, who was wearing a blue tunic with green trousers. In an effort to break the ice on what was a rather stuffy, formal diplomatic occasion, “Chairman Mao,” I said to him, “blue and green should never be seen except upon an Irish Queen.” He looked at me and went, “Ha, ha. Her whole family and her village.”’
‘Why doesn’t Kropotkin flee?’
‘He does not flee,’ she said, ‘because he believes nobody will ever see through his cunning disguise. When Kropotkin speaks to hundreds of revolutionary artisans at the underground meetings he assumes an alter ego. He pretends to be a weaver called Borodin. No-one is supposed to know that Borodin the humble weaver is actually Prince Peter Kropotkin, the celebrated aristocratic scientist. But I fear he is not quite as good at the double-life as he imagines, his imposture was not perhaps so convincing. It rather seems he used to come straight from Imperial Court functions at the Winter Palace, change out of his princely robes, dress up as Borodin the weaver, appear at a clandestine revolutionary meeting, stand on a platform in front of hundreds of workers and say: “Cor blimey, mateys! What about these lah-de-dahs toffs swanking around in their fancy coach and horses, eh? Me? I’m happy wiff the ole donkey ‘n’ cart, long as I can have a knees-up wiff a pint o’ beer in me hand.”38
‘Kropotkin is thrown into the notorious Tsarist dungeon the Petropavlovskaya Krepost, condemned to solitary confinement for the rest of his life. His cell is so damp that after two years he is given two months to live.’
‘Desperate,’ I said.
‘What do you know of desperate, golubchik, you from the pampered West, with your crochet lady toilet roll covers? There is a bucket in the corner of Kropotkin’s cell for his kaka. But there is no crochet lady on the bucket. If there was, she would be filthy. You would not be calling her crochet lady, but crochet hag, but in her heart she is still lady.’
‘Who are we talking about here?’
‘Do not try to psychoanalyse me. In my village we have an old saying: Help, help the Cossacks have burnt down our farm and killed everyone but me! Ah. Tea is ready. Shall I be mother?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘OK,’ she said and shouted: ‘I have no idea who your father was!’ Once the tea was poured, she continued. ‘After two years in solitary, Kropotkin is given two months to live and moved to the prison’s hospital wing to die. But here the cell is dry, there is a fireplace, Kropotkin’s health revives, and each morning he finds he can shuffle a little further across the hospital exercise yard, where he notices that the courtyard gates are opened each morning for the delivery of timber for a new TB ward. Thus plans are hatched for what turns out to be the most celebrated escape in all Europe, an escape plan as elaborately choreographed and with almost as large a cast as a dance sequence from Oliver! Worked out by his sister, the escape plan involves a violinist playing a mazurka at an open window across the street, a woman carrying a bunch of red balloons which can be seen over the prison wall, a relay of people eating cherries on street corners in a one mile radius of the prison, a racehorse put between the shafts of a carriage. In fact this champion racehorse proves to be too fast: when Kropotkin makes his dash through the gates and jumps into the carriage, the racehorse takes the first corner at such a clip that the carriage tips onto one wheel and its roof gets wedged into a narrow alley. Kropotkin is stamping the carriage floor down flat, soldiers are running towards him, and the whole escape might have ended there and then, but for the sudden appearance of five hundred dancing cockneys singing Who Will Buy My Lovely Red Roses?’
‘Perhaps,’ I suggested to Natasha, ‘Kropotkin didn’t flee because he really really wanted to give this talk on glaciation?’
‘Glaciation,’ she repeated witheringly. ‘What do you know of glaciation? When you have seen the only man you ever loved swept away by a glacier then you can talk to me about glaciation. For me the U in U-shaped valley spells unutterable loss, untimely death, ululating unguish.’
‘Forgive me. Natasha Dmitreya.’
‘It is hard for you to imagine now, but glaciation was once a revolutionary idea. If valleys and rocks and mountains can be swept away then why not the Tsar? Here I have a gift for you.’
Natasha’s gift was a thing of beauty: a signed first edition of Kropotkin’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist.
In this wonderful memoir, Kropotkin describes how he made good his escape:
I crossed Sweden without stopping anywhere, and went aboard a steamer at Christiana. As I went to the steamer I asked myself with anxiety, ‘Under which flag does she sail, – Norweigian, German, English?’ Then I saw floating above the stern the union jack, – the flag under which so many refugees, Russian, Italian, French, Hungarian and of all nations, have found an asylum. I greeted that flag from the depth of my heart.
Anglophile though he was, Kropotkin found England and in particular London a terrible let down. Now, I sometimes feel I should have been born a Russian. I feel they understand me better than my own people. (At the moment, for example I am reading Tolstoy in the original Russian. Just the verbs). Other times, though, I think I’ll never understand the Russians. And this next extract from Kropotkin’s memoirs definitely falls into the latter case:
I confess that at first I found London to be a disappointment following the intoxicating cultural, political and artistic ferment of Continental Europe. But then I discovered Bromley.
While Kropotkin is in Bromley (it may not be Tashkent but it is Kent) he reads T H Huxley’s splenetic article The Struggle for Existence in Human Society (1888) in which Huxley says that nature is a gladiatorial contest in which the weak go to the wall, and woe betide us if we fail to apply this maxim to human society for we shall sink under the burden of supporting those unfit to live. This appalling pamphlet inspires Kropotkin to write Mutual Aid – A Factor in Evolution.
Yes, there’s a struggle for existence in nature, he argues in Mutual Aid, but it is most often a struggle against the elements, against a hostile environment, in which struggle those species that stick together do rather better than ones that don’t. It’s penguins plural that have evolved to withstand six week long Antarctic blizzards by huddling together and sharing incubation duties. Penguins. The penguin – singular – hasn’t evolved to do anything except menace the good people of Gotham City.
If selfishness is indeed a fundamental principle of nature, as claimed by T H Huxley and Herbert Spencer (the man who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’) then how come when vampire bats return from a hunting expedition successful hunters feed unsuccessful bats with blood from their own mouths? Why does the vervet monkey risk her life to warn the rest of the troop that a leopard’s nearby?
Kropotkin described how sentinel crabs in Brighton Aquarium guard the soft-bodied crabs during molting season, and will die protecting them. And he looked at the way in which female African buffalo appear to vote which way the herd should move. During rest time the cows all lie down facing different directions. At the end of the rest time, whichever cow has accumulated the most bodies behind her, that’s the direction the whole herd moves. And as they migrate across the Serengeti, should one buffalo fall into a ravine, not only does the rest of the herd make strenuous efforts to rescue her but they also, somehow, resist the urge to say:
‘And it was your idea to come this way and all!’
When he extends his argument to human beings, Kropotkin has a star witness in Charles Darwin, who, in 1871’s Descent of Man says:
Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and produce the most offspring.
Nothing could be truer and nothing could be further from current understanding of evolution by natural selection. Having actually been a soldier, however, Kropotkin is less keen on putting this into fighting talk than Darwin is here:
[A tribe] [...] always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good [...] would on the whole be victorious over most other tribes and this would be natural selection.
For Kropotkin, the selective advantages accrue not so much because of platoon morale, as Darwin imagines, but because a diverse population is in better fettle to meet the staggering diversity of shocks and challenges with a diversity of responses:
When humanity makes progress it’s nearly always because of nervous wrecks, invalids, weaklings, the chronically ill and infirm and so-called inferior people.
Darwin himself fits the bill here by having been severely debilitated for the best years of his life by Chagas disease.
Now, to be clear, just so there are no misunderstandings, what no-one is saying, not Darwin, nor Kropotkin, nor even the Prince Crackpot writing these words, no-one is saying that competition isn’t as intrinsic to life as interdependence. It’s just that competition doesn’t have what it takes to drive evolution very far. That’s all.
When I asked Natasha why negative, pessimistic views of nature are seen as somehow more scientifically rigorous than sunny ones, she replied:
‘Despair is its own sentimentality. I remember my mother used to say to me, “Natasha, medicine only works if it tastes so foul as to make you feel physically sick.” But now that she is on a morphine drip the views have changed.’
Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works, Penguin (1999). |
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Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind, Yale University Press (2011). |
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Hilary Rose, Alas Poor Darwin, Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, Edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Vintage (2001). |
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I don’t mean to offend any Paul Weller fans here. But for neither man is the pretence successful. Only the consequences are much worse for Kropotkin. |