But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and it occurs to our
men of science to go back to nature and find out what really are her
ways. If you will read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in
Evolution," you will find a complete refutation of the old bourgeois
biology, and a view of nature which reveals in it the germs of human
morality. Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it is
the social and not the solitary animals which are most numerous and most
successful. There are many millions of ants and bees for every hawk or
eagle, and certainly in the state of nature there were thousands of deer
for every lion or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social
creatures have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the
imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral codes of
mankind. The different animals prey upon one another, but they do not
prey upon their own species, except in a few rare cases. The only beast
that makes a regular practice of exploiting his own kind is man.
By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows that mutual aid
and mutual self-protection are the means whereby the higher forms of
being have been evolved. Insects and birds and fish, nearly all the
herbivorous mammals, and even a great many of the carnivores, help one
another and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the treetops
drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because there were so
many of them, and when they saw him they all set up a shriek and clamor
which deafened and confused him. And when by and by these monkeys
developed an opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club,
and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and fell upon
the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they did it because they
had learned solidarity--even as the workers of the world are today
learning solidarity in the face of the beast of capitalism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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