“Each atom belonging to me pretty much as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what would be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and basic kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love.
Half a century after Whitman’s atomic concept of belonging and half a century earlier than Dr. King’s “inescapable community of mutuality,” the scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) examined the which means of solidarity in his visionary 1902 guide Mutual Support: A Think about Evolution (public library) — the end result of his pioneering research of the cooperation networks of social bugs and his outrage on the harmful energy constructions and energy struggles of human society, for which he was ultimately imprisoned. After a dramatic escape, Kropotkin spent 4 a long time in exile throughout Western Europe and went on to affect generations of thinkers with this radical insistence on cooperation and solidarity, not the battle for energy, because the true engine of survival and flourishing.
Having fallen underneath Darwin’s spell as a teen, Kropotkin got here to see in evolutionary science an optimistic mannequin for the elevation of human conscience — within the historical past of life on Earth, throughout which organisms have frequently improved their organic adaptation for survival, he discovered assurance for a greater future cast by our continuous ethical enchancment.
Unable to acquire the scientific schooling he yearned for, the younger Kropotkin took a submit as an officer in Siberia (the place Dostoyevsky was serving in a labor camp), then used his army credentials to affix geological expeditions finding out glaciation, all of the whereas witnessing staggering corruption and abuses of energy in native authorities whereas the peasants ruled themselves by deep bonds of mutual belief that appeared purer, extra primal, and nearer to nature than any political energy construction.
Difficult the anthropocentric view of different animals, Kropotkin considers the deepest driving pressure beneath the concord and coherence of nature:
To scale back animal sociability to like and sympathy means to scale back its generality and its significance, simply as human ethics based mostly upon love and private sympathy solely have contributed to slender the comprehension of the ethical feeling as an entire. It isn’t like to my neighbour — whom I usually have no idea in any respect — which induces me to grab a pail of water and to hurry in the direction of his home after I see it on hearth; it’s a far wider, though extra obscure feeling or intuition of human solidarity and sociability which strikes me. So it’s also with animals. It isn’t love, and never even sympathy (understood in its correct sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to type a hoop so as to withstand an assault of wolves; not love which induces wolves to type a pack for looking; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of younger birds to spend their days collectively within the autumn; and it’s neither love nor private sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as giant as France to type right into a rating of separate herds, all marching in the direction of a given spot, in an effort to cross there a river. It’s a feeling infinitely wider than love or private sympathy — an intuition that has been slowly developed amongst animals and people in the middle of a particularly lengthy evolution, and which has taught animals and people alike the pressure they’ll borrow from the apply of mutual help and help, and the thrill they’ll discover in social life.
An epoch earlier than Lewis Thomas speculated in his poetic case for why we’re wired for friendship that “perhaps altruism is our most primitive attribute,” Kropotkin provides:
Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice actually play an immense half within the progressive growth of our ethical emotions. However it’s not love and never even sympathy upon which Society is predicated in mankind. It’s the conscience — be it solely on the stage of an intuition — of human solidarity. It’s the unconscious recognition of the pressure that’s borrowed by every individual from the apply of mutual help; of the shut dependency of each one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or fairness, which brings the person to contemplate the rights of each different particular person as equal to his personal.
Complement with Albert Camus on what solidarity means and Lewis Thomas’s forgotten masterpiece of perspective on how you can stay with our human nature, then revisit Kropotkin on how you can reboot a complacent society and the artwork of placing your reward within the service of the world.
