The Price of Altruism (4 page)

For Darwin the mystery lay in trying to explain how such different behavior and morphology arose in a single species, for since all the workers had no off spring, natural selection could hardly be fashioning their traits through their own direct kin. What this meant was that the queen and her mate were somehow passing on qualities through their own progeny—massive heads, gardening scissor teeth, and mysterious altruistic behavior—that they themselves did not possess, an obscurity that Darwin found “by far the most serious special difficulty, which my theory has encountered.”
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This was a problem of heredity: How could traits, both of form and of behavior, perform such Houdini acts in their journey from generation to generation?

It was also a glaring exception to “nature, red in tooth and claw.”
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If evolution by natural selection was the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole of living creation, little ants and bees and termites were islands of chivalry in a sea of conflagration. Why—how—this anomalous sanctuary of “goodness”?
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To solve the mystery Darwin asked a simple question: Who benefits? The answer, he thought, was the “community,”
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for those who could forage or fight would surely free others to partake in procreation, on the very same principle that rendered the division of labor “useful to civilised man.” If selection sometimes worked at a level higher than the individual, even the ultimate sacrifice of the stinging bee or ant centurion could evolve. This was quite an idea, for the very essence of Darwin’s theory, as he declared in
The Origin of Species
, was that “every complex structure and instinct” should be “useful to the possessor.” Natural selection could “never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each.”
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And yet it did.

Darwin was impressed. It was the strongest evidence yet, he thought, for the incredible power of natural selection. In truth, he would come to believe, it was actually entirely much bigger. “The social instincts,” he wrote in
The Descent of Man
, “which no doubt were acquired by man, as by the lower animals, for the good of the community, will from the first have given him some wish to aid his fellows, and some feeling of sympathy.”
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Evolution was the key to the beginnings of morality in humans.

Rheumatism had almost killed Kropotkin. With the help of family connections and a friendly doctor’s note, he was transferred after twenty-one months to the detention house and from there to the military hospital. Finally, even though he was sickly and frail, there was a glimmer of hope: The hospital was not nearly as well guarded as the fortress. The day of the escape was fixed. It was to be June 29 (old style), the day of Saints Peter and Paul—his friends having decided to throw, he later wrote, “a touch of sentimentalism into their enterprise.”
³⁶
A red balloon climbing into the blue sky would be the signal to make a dash for the gate, where a carriage would whisk him to freedom. But the impossible happened that day: No red balloons could be found in all of St. Petersburg, and when one was finally discovered and snatched from the hand of a howling boy, it would not fly, nor would the apparatus for making hydrogen, hurriedly bought from an optician’s shop, revive it. The woman who finally strung the flaccid balloon to an umbrella, walking up and down behind the hospital wall, did not help either: The wall was too high and the woman too short, and the signal never reached poor Kropotkin.

The next morning a relative came to visit at the hospital carrying a watch that she asked that he be given. Unsuspected, it was passed to him, though the timepiece was far from innocent. Hidden inside was a cipher, detailing the new plans for escape that very day. At 4 p.m.

Kropotkin went out to the garden for his afternoon stroll. When he heard the cue of an excited violin mazurka, he made a desperate dash for the gate. “He runs! Stop him! Catch him!”—a sentry and three soldiers were in hot pursuit, so close that he could feel the wind of the bayonet thrust toward him.
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That evening they clinked glasses at Donon’s, St. Petersburg’s finest restaurant: The secret police would never think of looking there. The escape was a feat of true altruism: Untold accomplices had selflessly braved grave danger—one signaling with handkerchiefs, a second by means of synchronized cherry eating, a third distracting the guard, a fourth playing the violin, a fifth commanding the carriage—Kropotkin was aglow with pride. But he would have to leave. Soon he crossed the Finnish border and was on a steamer headed for London.

Mady Huxley died of pneumonia on November 20, 1887. The great neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had come to England to examine her—the loss of vision and voice having led her father to fear “the worst of all ends—dementia.” She was to him a “brilliant creature,” his fair and beloved third child. A specialist on “hysteria” and teacher to the young Sigmund Freud, Charcot determined that Mady suffered from a grave mental illness and invited her to Paris for hypnosis. It was too late. Arriving at the Salpêtrière Hospital, exhausted, she succumbed before the treatment could remove her emotional “conflicts.”
³⁸

Staggering, in pain, Huxley traveled to Manchester for a talk he felt honor bound to give. As the train sped north through the West Midlands—Coventry, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent—he glanced at England passing by. For more than four years now he was president of the Royal Society, the winner of medals, and very sun of the scientific
orbis terranum
.
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But if Huxley had come a long way from above the butcher’s shop in Ealing, so too had England from its affluent “Age of Equipoise.” Dissenters and Nonconformists had waged a battle for meritocracy against Church and Crown in the 1850s, ’60s, and ’70s, but this was long yesterday’s triumph. Great boring machines were now miraculously digging the Channel tunnel deep beneath the sea, yet millions in the cities and countryside took to bed hungry. The “interminable Depression” had coincided with “a specialist age” at its finest hour technology was failing the masses.
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And the masses were swelling. Britain’s population had reached 36 million and was adding nearly 350,000 hungry mouths every year. As growth rates had surged, a new phrase made its way from France and Germany. English Darwinians had by tradition few qualms about folding the social into the biological: For them animals and man bowed just as humbly before Nature and her laws. But as political socialism took a bite at the Malthusian core of survival of the fittest; as suffrage, labor unrest, and the “Woman Question” ushered in a new age of extremes—a currency was needed to remind civilization of its beastly beginnings. Were the teeming congestion and competitive strife not confirmation enough of Malthus’s prediction? Huxley called industrial competition with Germany and the United States a form of international “warfare,” and
Nature
and the
Times
applauded.
⁴¹
But if mercantalism had morphed into an all-out image of battle, if Darwin’s Malthusian struggle had been writ large on the world as a whole—there were those who were prepared to fight it. It was against such men and women that “social Darwinism” would now be wielded.
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Leading the way was Herbert Spencer, Huxley’s X-Club companion, a “bumptious” man with a “breathless vision” of evolution galloping ahead to perfection. No one had swallowed Darwin so wholly, even if some (including Darwin himself) thought it had gone down the wrong pipe. For the “Prince of Progress” the physical, biological, social, and ethical all danced to the tune of evolution.
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Historical destiny was like the womb and the jungle, the growth of civilization “all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower.”
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An eminent Victorian who had dabbled in phrenology, he had coined the “survival of the fittest.”
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Friend to Mill, follower of Comte, and a lover of George Eliot, Spencer honed to perfection the belief in human perfectibility. But it was the strong, not the meek for him, who carried the future in their bones, their struggles and triumphs the true holy of holies, their might—the right and just. To let it be, government would need to step aside, even when its actions seemed “progressive.” Intervention, after all, was really a curse disguised as a blessing, the conquest by maudlin sensibility of the necessity of natural law. Unfettered competition alone would lead to the advance of civilization in the long run—endowments and free education be damned and myopia forlorn.

From the Left other voices came buzzing. Henry George’s
Progress and Poverty,
a popular appeal for land nationalization, was rapidly gaining readers.
⁴⁶
Touting Rousseau’s noble savage, George led a frontal attack on property and competition. Even the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, from his retirement nest in Dorset, took a jab at “Darwinism”—a term no one had done more than he to establish.
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Women, he now claimed, when liberated economically by socialism, would freely choose the righteous among men. As such they would be humankind’s great redeemers, breeders of goodness into future generations.
⁴⁸
This was a different woman from Darwin’s in his
Descent of Man
, to say the least.
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But even if Wallace’s utopia seemed far-fetched and would need to be nudged along by higher forces (a spiritualist, he had removed man from the arena of natural selection), it hardly mattered anymore. Beaten over the head by natural rights, ancient communes, and the promise of equality, the Darwinian establishment was reeling. Perhaps competition was not the natural law they said it was. Perhaps their “religion of Science” was an illusion, nothing but a false “religion of despair.”
⁵⁰

Huxley was taking the fire. After all, he had fashioned himself the very embodiment of “science as panacea.” Spencer was a “long-winded pedant,” he thought, a “hippopotamus,” as misguided in his sacrifice of the masses on the altar of Darwinism as he was in his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. And yet nature really
was
brutal, like “a surface of ten thousand wedges” each representing a species being “driven inward by incessant blows.”
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Success always came at the expense of another’s failure. How then to escape the trap into which the patrician Spencer had willfully fallen? How to wrest morality for the masses from the bloody talons of Nature?

These were his mind’s torments as the train pulled into London Road Station, Manchester. At Town Hall, before his crowd, the darkness in his soul poured itself onto the natural world. Glassy-eyed and imagining his daughter, Huxley unmasked the vision of Nature’s butchery: “You see a meadow rich in flower & foliage and your memory rests upon it as an image of peaceful beauty. It is a delusion…. Not a bird that twitters but is either slayer or [slain and]…not a moment passes in that a holocaust, in every hedge & every copse battle murder & sudden death are the order of the day.”
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As “melancholy as a pelican in the wilderness,” as he wrote to a friend, Huxley was sinking into depression.
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The Manchester address was printed in February’s
Nineteenth Century
, and soon became a disputed cause célèbre. In “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society: A Programme” Huxley asked readers to imagine the chase of a deer by a wolf. Had a man intervened to aid the deer we would call him “brave and compassionate,” as we would judge an abetter of the wolf “base and cruel.” But this was a hoax, the spoiled fruit of man’s translation of his own world into nature. Under the “dry light of science,” none could be more admirable than the other, “the goodness of the right hand which helps the deer, and the wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the wolf” neutralizing each other. Nature was “neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral,” the ghost of the deer no more likely to reach a heaven of “perennial existence in clover” than the ghost of the wolf a boneless kennel in hell. “From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show,” Huxley wrote, “the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest…living to fight another day.” There was no need for the spectator to turn his thumbs down, “as no quarter is given,” but “he must shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both vanquished and victor.”
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Darwin and Spencer believed that the struggle for existence “tends to final good,” the suffering of the ancestor paid for by the increased perfection of its future off spring. But this was nonsense unless, “in Chinese fashion, the present generation could pay its debts to its ancestors.” Otherwise, it was unclear to Huxley “what compensation the
Eohippus
gets for his sorrows in the fact that, some millions of years afterwards, one of his descendants wins the Derby.” Besides, life was constantly adapting to its environment. If a “universal winter” came upon the world, as the “physical philosophers” watching the cooling sun and earth now warned, arctic diatoms and protococci of the red snow would be all that was left on the planet. Christians, perhaps, imagined God’s fingerprint on nature, but it was Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess, whose meddling seemed to Huxley more true. A blend of Aphrodite and Ares, Ishtar knew neither good nor evil, nor, like the Beneficent Deity, did she promise any rewards. She demanded only that which came to her: the sacrifice of the weak. Nature-Ishtar was the heartless executioner of necessity.
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