The Write Note

T.H. Huxley, Peter Kropotkin, and the Struggle for Existence in Human Societies.

A social movement, like an abscess, often develops slowly. But sometimes it’s like striking a match. For the female factory workers of the Bryant and May Company it was the painful burning of swelling gums followed by mutilating ulcerations as their lower jaw began to decay. After years of inhaling yellow phosphorus vapor in unventilated factories many of these young match workers in East London developed the telltale signs of what was popularly known as “phossy jaw,” or as it’s known today, bisphosphonate-induced osteonecrosis. Bone is a living system that constantly renews itself. When the chemicals used to make “strike-anywhere” matches were ingested in such high quantities they couldn’t be fully absorbed by the liver. Instead, individual molecules would bind to bone cells and inhibit their ability to regenerate. The rotting tissue emitted a foul odor and some women had to have their jawbones surgically removed to prevent necrosis, not an easy undertaking in an era before anesthetic. But when an estimated 1,400 match-girls went on strike in July, 1888 to protest for better working conditions, it started a fire that became known as New Unionism. Soon after came the London dock workers’ strike, and within twelve months the UK’s Trade Union Congress had increased its membership from 670,000 to 1,593,000. [1]

For Thomas Henry Huxley and Peter Kropotkin these labor developments were interpreted very differently, and yet both saw in them important connections with their work in evolutionary biology. Huxley, who had pulled himself out of East London poverty through a combination of sheer brilliance and stubborn determination, was greatly concerned about what the workers democracy movement meant for social stability. Now the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences and a living legend in the recently established field of evolutionary biology, Huxley had come to identify with the aristocracy he’d worked so hard to be accepted by. Kropotkin, however, had rejected the silver spoon he had once been fed with as a Russian prince after coming face to face with the exploitation that made such ostentatious luxury possible. For him, the growing workers movement was the only path by which the poor could achieve any justice in a world that was undergoing radical change. Both saw in these developments a force of nature — one ominous, the other hopeful — and these conflicting visions would ultimately collide on the pages of the Nineteenth Century.

It had been twenty-eight years since Huxley gave his already mythic reply to Samuel Wilberforce after the Oxford Bishop had demanded to know “whether he was descended from an ape on his grandmother’s side or his grandfather’s.” Huxley’s response, according to a letter dated three months after the debate, is probably the most famous line he ever wrote in his long and illustrious career:

If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

Whereupon there was inextinguishable laughter among the people, and they listened to the rest of my argument with the greatest attention.

However, by 1888 Darwin’s bulldog was tired and the bite had gone out of him, quite literally after the extraction of his last four teeth. Slack-jawed and with failing health, he was regularly plagued with financial worries. Ironically, the self-made man felt compelled to support a host of needy dependents who had grown accustomed to an aristocratic lifestyle. But the most profound blow was when his favorite daughter, the artistically talented Mady, died of pneumonia at 28. He experienced “terrible anxiety” over his daughter and descended into a deep depression which he described simply as a “deadness that hangs about me.” He was prescribed cocaine to help him make it through lectures and informed the Royal Society that he would be resigning. “I would rather step down from the chair,” he wrote, “than dribble out of it.” Friends and colleagues, such as the sociologist Beatrice Webb and author H.G. Wells, noted that he was a mere semblance of his former self. “The old lion is broken down,” Webb wrote, “he has only the remains of greatness.” [2]

While Huxley had no love for the populism that had taken shape during his lifetime what was perhaps most alarming for him was the extent to which these radicals were touting evolution as a basis for upending the social order. It was opposing this trend that he intended to make his final fight. Ironically, it was Huxley himself who had helped fan this fire of populist biology. His well-attended lectures on evolution to workingmen, his strident anti-Creationist critiques (against those he called “the worst forms of clerical and political despotism”) and his sincere belief that science would uplift the masses were an inspiration for those desperate for social change. As his biographer Adrian Desmond would write:

One understands how he became a working-class hero, why cabbies refused his fare and delegations petitioned him as they once would have nobility — supplication that showed the tremendous power acquired by the scientist.

But now he was backpedalling. Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels had twisted Huxley’s argument of human and ape evolution to earn political points by saying this transition was “the product of labour.” His advocacy of education was being criticized by the socialist Walter Crane who demanded whether “pauperism [could] be cured by technical education?” Even his agnosticism resulted in blowback when, in 1883, the secularist G.W. Foote was jailed for publishing The Freethinker in which he quoted “blasphemous passages” by Huxley, while the scientific giant was protected from similar prosecution by his elite position. To Huxley, Darwinism was becoming associated with “dirty Radicals” and he feared for his reputation in the Royal Society as well as everything he had struggled to escape from during his early life in East London. He had to respond:

Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency — as is, no doubt, possible — that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably and more or less prematurely.

Sounding nearly identical to Herbert Spencer, who would later be targeted as a social Darwinist, Huxley next set to establish once and for all how natural selection should be understood for human societies. It was a familiar landscape he described, emphasizing how evolution crafted all aspects of the natural world through a process of ruthless competition and the survival of the strong over the weak. However, Huxley’s new synthesis had one unique addition: evolution stopped functioning in “civilized society.”

It was in 1888 that Huxley penned his essay “The Struggle for Existence in Human Societies” in the preeminent journal the Nineteenth Century. Previously, when arguing against religious orthodoxy, Huxley had made the case that the foundation for human morality could be found in animal sociability, but no longer. “[T]he animal world,” Huxley wrote, “is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight–whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.” And just as this “struggle for existence to the bitter end” exists in animals, so too in humans.

[A]mong primitive men, the weakest and stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other sense, survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.

When Kropotkin read such views from the leading figure in evolutionary research he was appalled. He hadn’t engaged in any direct fieldwork for many years, but he continued to write regular reviews for the journal Nature and his background in Russian biology had impressed upon him the importance of cooperation between members of a group as a factor of evolution. As he wrote in the Nineteenth Century in direct response to Huxley’s claims, later incorporated in his 1902 book Mutual Aid:

[I]t may be remarked at once that Huxley’s view of nature had as little claim to be taken as a scientific deduction as the opposite view of Rousseau, who saw in nature but love, peace, and harmony destroyed by the accession of man. . . Rousseau had committed the error of excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts; and Huxley committed the opposite error; but neither Rousseau’s optimism nor Huxley’s pessimism can be accepted as an impartial interpretation of nature.

In order to support his argument that mutual aid should be considered an important component in the evolution of social species Kropotkin had to look no further than Darwin himself. Challenging Huxley’s use of the phrase “struggle for existence,” which came directly from On the Origin of Species, Kropotkin proceeded to demonstrate how Huxley had twisted Darwin’s original meaning in order to convey an incorrectly narrow interpretation:

[A]t the very beginning of his memorable work [Darwin] insisted upon the term being taken in its “large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.”

In this way, the struggle for existence shouldn’t be understood as simply a “gladiator’s show” in a “Hobbesian war of each against all.” This was to pervert the explanatory brilliance of Darwin’s metaphor. For surely, as Darwin went on to describe in the very next passage following the portion that Kropotkin quoted, it would be incorrect to say that a plant on the edge of a desert was struggling against other plants but, rather, that it was involved in a “struggle for life against the drought.” [3]

But at this point Huxley wasn’t focused on the science, he had a political agenda to carry out. By admitting any role for sociability in evolution he would simply open the door to arguments in favor of “fiddle-faddling with the distribution of wealth.” He had to stick to his guns. As Adrian Desmond would write:

He now bolstered a competitive Darwinism, to make it immune to mutualist attacks, while denying that it could provide any natural basis for our ethics of love. . . Man came of age when he ceased emulating Nature and started ‘combating it’.

Having countered any hint of sociability in nature Huxley then took care to undermine the Lamarckian position of those socialists and communists who argued for an inevitable improvement in species, the same way they advocated for an inevitable improvement in society. Indeed, Huxley pointed out that “it is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection.” However, when it comes to human civilization and the social order, Huxley changed course to argue that perfection was still in reach.

[O]f all the successive shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of individual against individual is most strictly limited. The primitive savage, tutored by Istar, appropriated whatever took his fancy, and killed whomsoever opposed him, if he could. On the contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of others.

In other words, morality in social behavior did not exist in this Hobbesian state of nature. Only in the “advanced civilizations” did the progress of public morality allow humans to rise above the animal kingdom so that they may “establish a kingdom of Man.” In seeking to undermine his opponents argument he inadvertently backed himself into a corner. He couldn’t allow social instincts to be the foundation of morality or he would have to acknowledge that “advanced civilizations” didn’t have any stronger grip on moral behavior than any other society. To maintain the social order that kept the deserving on top required that evolution cease to function in civilized society (at least in the obsessively competitive form which is all Huxley would allow).

Over a series of five publications Kropotkin provided every ethological detail he could accumulate demonstrating the importance of sociability and mutual aid in the natural world. He moved on from there to critique Huxley’s assumptions on indigenous societies before moving on to discuss cooperative networks in ancient civilization, medieval societies, and among the nineteenth century world. However, Kropotkin’s primary concern was to establish the important factor that mutual aid played in natural selection while, at the same time, not falling into the trap of denying competition on ideological grounds:

As soon as we study animals — not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains — we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

That summer as the match-girls took to the street to demand safer working conditions and a living wage Huxley was “living the life of a prize pig,” as he wrote to the editor of the Nineteenth Century, Sir James Knowles. “[N]o exercise, much meat and drink, and as few manifestations of intelligence as possible.” The purpose of the letter, Huxley explained, was to respond to Kropotkin’s article which he had recently finished reading.

I am astonished to find that there is a kick left in me – even when your friend Kropotkin pitches into me without the smallest justification. . . What a stimulus vanity is! – nothing but the vain dislike of being thought in the wrong have induced me to trouble myself or bore you with this letter. Bother Kropotkin!

I think his article very interesting and important nevertheless.

While it is a truism that good science is fundamentally apolitical, all scientists live in a specific political and cultural milieu that influences how they seek to understand the natural world. Huxley and Kropotkin are no different than any of us, though they faced different concerns than we do today. That either individual should have been engaged in political pursuits shouldn’t undermine the quality of their science, except for in those instances where the political took precedence over evidence from the natural world. As we survey our world today, how much of East London have we simply exported while we maintain the same standards of inequality? How many unspoken assumptions do scientists have in the questions they seek to ask and the way in which they frame their inquiry? Are we all, as Pablo Neruda wrote, nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead of human eyes? When we navigate the distant star do we simply reel ourselves back in again? The historical is relevant insofar as the questions from the past remain current. For the scientist and the anarchist of the nineteenth century the political and the natural were inextricably bound. How are we any different today?

References:

[1] Henry Pelling (1970). A History of British Trade Unionism. New York: Penguin Books.

[2] Adrian Desmond (1997). Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest. Massachusettes: Addison-Wesley.

[3] Peter Kropotkin (1902). Mutual Aide: A Factor of Evolution New York: McClure, Philips & Co.