On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was published. God-fearing America widely condemned its thesis and its author. Almost 150 years later, Americans remain unconvinced. A CNN survey finds that three times more Americans (83%) believe in the virgin birth of Jesus than believe in evolution (28%).
We have yet to embrace biological Darwinism. However, social Darwinism, a concept that distorted Darwin’s theories to justify the injustices of industrialization, has won us over completely. Pointedly, it was Herbert Spenser, one its chief exponents, not Darwin, who coined the phrase that came to be used as a shorthand for evolution, “survival of the fittest.”
Every social inequity was justified as an inevitable byproduct of the struggle for existence. The rich and powerful flocked to the new self-serving doctrine. For Andrew Carnegie, the “law” of competition is “best for the race because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” “We accept and welcome great inequality(and) the concentration of business…in the hands of a few.”
Today the vast majority of Americans refuse to embrace biological Darwinism. We still can’t get our egos around the idea that humanity is descended from apes. Social Darwinism, on the other hand, has few if any critics. We firmly believe we’re hardwired to be competitive. Indeed, we’ve all but internalized the idea that we’re all better off when we design systems that force us to engage in savage competition. Which leads us to act on two corollary axioms. Where there are winners, there must be losers. And losers are not to be coddled: safety nets make us weak.
A couple of years ago the Washington International Center, host to thousands of international visitors over the years, issued a booklet to help foreigners understand the fundamental elements in the American mindset that guide our behavior. One of those elements is our belief in the value of competition. “Americans believe that competition brings out the best in any individual,” notes The Values Americans Live By. “Consequently the foreign visitor will see competition being fostered in the American home and in the American classroom, even on the youngest age level…You may find the competitive value disagreeable, especially if you come from a society that promotes cooperation rather than competition.”
Among the avid readers of Darwin’s first editions was the Russian geographer and zoologist, Peter Kropotkin. He respectfully reviewed the writings of Herbert Spenser, but found them contradicted by his own empirical research. After five years examining wildlife in Siberia, Kropotkin wrote, “I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence…which was considered by most Darwinists…as the dominant characteristic – and the main factory of evolution.”
Peter Kropotkin
Kropotkin honored Darwin’s insights about natural selection, but he believed the governing principle of natural selection was cooperation, not competition. The fittest were those who cooperated. He spent the rest of his life promoting that concept. His science led him to embrace and become the leading advocate of a theory of social structure called anarchy. To Americans anarchy is synonymous with chaos. To Kropotkin it is synonymous with harmony. In his article on Anarchy in the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica he wrote that anarchy is a society “without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption…”
In 1902 his seminal book, Mutual Aid, was published. With chapters on animals, tribes, medieval cities and modern societies, it marshals the scientific evidence on the widespread and beneficial nature of cooperative systems. I find the chapter on medieval cities the most fascinating. In the 12-14th centuries, hundreds of cities emerged around newly formed marketplaces. These marketplaces were so important that laws embraced by kings, bishops and towns protected their providers and customers. As the markets grew, the cities gained autonomy, and organized themselves into political, economic and social structures that to Kropotkin made them a fascinating and instructive working model of anarchism.
The medieval city was not a centralized state. It was a confederation, divided into four quarters or 5-7 sections radiating from a center. In some respects it was structured as a double federation, one of all householders united into small territorial units: the street, the parish the section. The other was of individuals united by oath into guilds according to their professions.
The guilds established the economic rules. But the guild itself consisted of many interests. “The fact is, that the medieval guild…was a union of all men connected with a given trade: jurate buyers of raw produce, sellers of manufactured goods, and artisans – masters, ‘compaynes,’ and apprentices.” It was sovereign in its own sphere, but could not develop rules that interfered with the workings of other guilds.
Four hundred years before Adam Smith, medieval cities had developed rules that allowed the pursuit of self-interest to support the public interest. Unlike Adam Smith’s proposal, their tool was a very visible hand indeed.
Medieval cities were no bigger than many of our big city neighborhoods. Indeed, the population of a single city block in Manhattan would likely exceed the number of residents of most of these cities. Yet from cities of 20,000-90,000 people came technological and artistic developments that still astonish us. Eight hundreds years later tourists continue to flock to medieval cities to examine their art and architecture.
Life in these cities was not nearly as primitive as the Dark Ages to which our history books assign them. Florence in 1336 had 90,000 inhabitants. Some 8-10,000 boys and girls (yes girls) attended primary schools and there were 600 students in four universities. The city boasted 30 hospitals with over 1000 beds. Laborers in these medieval cities earned a living wage. Many cities had an 8-hour workday.
Indeed, Kropotkin writes, “the more we learn about the medieval city, the more we are convinced that at no time has labor enjoyed such conditions of prosperity and such respect as when city life stood at its highest.”
The city-states were undermined from within and from without. The nation state emerged. The historical road turned in another direction. Kropotkin’s most impressive evidence consists not only of what happened when free small cities ruled the new non-agrarian economies but what happened when they disappeared.
“…the losses which Europe sustained through the loss of its free cities can only be understood when we compare the seventeenth century with the fourteenth or the thirteenth. The prosperity which formerly characterized Scotland, Germany, the plains of Italy was gone. The roads had fallen into an abject state, the cities were depopulated, labor was brought into slavery, art had vanished, commerce itself was decaying.”
Mutual Aid is rarely read today. No one remembers Peter Kropotkin. But Kropotkin’s thesis, that cooperation, not competition, is the driving force behind natural selection, continues to accumulate empirical evidence.
There is almost no evidence, outside the sports arena, that we perform better when we are trying to beat others than when we are working alone or with them. Sociologist Alfie Kohn in his book No Contest, analyzed hundreds of studies conducted over the past 60 years and found that cooperation consistently proves more productive than competition.
We are taught to compete in school. Gold stars are our rewards. But the evidence is overwhelming that students learn significantly more in cooperative learning situations. Many worry that gifted students will be held back if they must work directly and cooperatively with slower students. David Johnson, co-director of the Cooperative Learning Center at the University of Minnesota, says just the opposite is true. The superior student learns more because “whoever explains, learns. You want every kid in every class to maximize the time they spend explaining material to others.”
Which leads us to anthropologist Jules Henry’s question. “A competitive culture endures by tearing people down. If the desire to compete is not inherent in humans and animals, and if it creates so many problems, why do we so single mindedly encourage it?”
The debate about Darwin and evolution will rage on until Americans accept that the theory of natural selection is not a threat to religion. But when Darwin comes up, perhaps we could also ask what people believe is the primary force driving natural selection. And why. It would give us the opportunity to introduce people to the idea that the fittest individuals and societies and species are those that cooperate and develop rules that enable and encourage them to do so.