Mutual Aid quotes

However, to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole.

It is not love to my neighbour⁠—whom I often do not know at all⁠—which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire

; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals.

… 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.

Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: “Who are the fittest:

However terrible the wars between different species, and whatever the atrocities committed at wartime, mutual aid within the community, self-devotion grown into a habit, and very often self-sacrifice for the common welfare, are the rule.

The ants and termites have renounced the “Hobbesian war,” and they are the better for it.

Their wonderful nests, their buildings, superior in relative size to those of man; their paved roads and overground vaulted galleries; their spacious halls and granaries; their cornfields, harvesting and “malting” of grain;

or the eider-ducks, among which (like the velvet-ducks, or the coroyas of the Savannahs) several females hatch together in the same nest, or the lums, which sit in turn upon a common covey.

Nature is variety itself, offering all possible varieties of characters, from the basest to the highest: and that is why she cannot be depicted by any sweeping assertion.

Still less can she be judged from the moralist’s point of view, because the views of the moralist are themselves a result—mostly unconscious—of the observation of Nature.

And how false, therefore, is the view of those who speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims!

One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a succession of war massacres.

Association and mutual aid are the rule with mammals. We find social habits even among the carnivores, and we can only name the cat tribe (lions, tigers, leopards, etc.)

It is hardly needful to say that those mammals, which stand at the very top of the animal world and most approach man by their structure and intelligence, are eminently sociable.

Evidently we must be prepared to meet with all varieties of character and habits in so great a division of the animal kingdom which includes hundreds of species.

But, all things considered, it must be said that sociability, action in common, mutual protection, and a high development of those feelings which are the necessary outcome of social life, are characteristic of most monkeys and apes.

… appears very probable that, apart from a few exceptions, those birds and mammals which are not gregarious now, were living in societies before man multiplied on the earth and waged a permanent war against them, or destroyed the sources from which they formerly derived food.

“On ne s’associe pas pour mourir,”

was the sound remark of Espinas; and Houzeau, who knew the animal world of some parts of America when it was not yet affected by man, wrote to the same effect.

Therefore we find, at the top of each class of animals, the ants, the parrots, and the monkeys, all combining the greatest sociability with the highest development of intelligence.

The fittest are thus the most sociable animals, and sociability appears as the chief factor of evolution

, both directly, by securing the well-being of the species while diminishing the waste of energy, and indirectly, by favouring the growth of intelligence.

As to facts of compassion with wounded comrades, they are continually mentioned by all field zoologists. Such facts are quite natural.

Compassion is a necessary outcome of social life.

But compassion also means a considerable advance in general intelligence and sensibility. It is the first step towards the development of higher moral sentiments. It is, in its turn, a powerful factor of further evolution.

one-half died within the next four years, and out of each hundred born, only seventeen or so reached the age of twenty.

The newcomers went away before having grown to be competitors.

It is evident that if such is the case with men, it is still more the case with animals.

v) has so charmingly described: they resort to new kinds of food—and thus, again, avoid competition.

“Don’t compete!⁠—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!”

That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. “Therefore combine—practise mutual aid!

The very persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of the species.

Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.

Going now over to the existing savages, we may begin with the Bushmen, who stand at a very low level of development—so low indeed that they have no dwellings and sleep in holes dug in the soil, occasionally protected by some screens.

This will not seem strange if we remark that scolding, scorning, and the use of rough words are absolutely unknown in Aleut life.

Even their children never fight, and never abuse each other in words. All they may say is, “Your mother does not know sewing,” or “Your father is blind of one eye.”

Many features of savage life remain, however, a puzzle to Europeans. The high development of tribal solidarity and the good feelings with which primitive folk are animated towards each other, could be illustrated by any amount of reliable testimony.

and as they have no baby-farming nor creches for getting rid of the children, every one of them recoils before the necessity of performing the cruel sentence; they prefer to expose the baby in the wood rather than to take its life by violence.

Ignorance, not cruelty, maintains infanticide

;

So also the savage, if he had stayed among us, and received our education, may be, would understand our European indifference towards our neighbours, and our Royal Commissions for the prevention of “baby-farming.”

“Stone houses make stony hearts,” the Russian peasants say. But he ought to live in a stone house first.

Similar remarks must be made as regards cannibalism.

… aside the preconceived ideas of most historians and their pronounced predilection for the dramatic aspects of history, we see that the very documents they habitually peruse are such as to exaggerate the part of human life given to struggles and to underrate its peaceful moods.

The bright and sunny days are lost sight of in the gales and storms.

Even in our own time, the cumbersome records which we prepare for the future historian, in our Press, our law courts, our Government offices, and even in our fiction and poetry, suffer from the same one-sidedness.

Even in our own time, the cumbersome records which we prepare for the future historian, in our Press, our law courts, our Government offices, and even in our fiction and poetry, suffer from the same one-sidedness.

They hand down to posterity the most minute descriptions of every war, every battle and skirmish, every contest and act of violence, every kind of individual suffering; but they hardly bear any trace of the countless acts of mutual support and devotion which every one of us knows from his own experience

; they hardly take notice of what makes the very essence of our daily life—our social instincts and manners. No wonder, then, if the records of the past were so imperfect.

In the district of Dellys, no less than 12,000 people who came from all parts of Algeria, and even from Morocco, were fed in this way.

While people died from starvation all over Algeria, there was not one single case of death due to this cause on Kabylian soil.

The djemmâas, depriving themselves of necessaries, organized relief, without ever asking any aid from the Government, or uttering the slightest complaint; they considered it as a natural duty.

Growth of authority in Barbarian Society—Serfdom in the villages—Revolt of fortified towns: their liberation; their charts—The guild—Double origin of the free medieval city—Self-jurisdiction, self-administration—Honourable position of labour—Trade by the guild and by the city.

Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence.

On the contrary, modern research, as we saw it in the two preceding chapters, proves that since the very beginning of their prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes, maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common …

… had to fight fifty or a hundred years in succession, often more, before their rights to free life had been recognized, and another hundred years to found their liberty on a firm basis—the twelfth century charters thus being but one of the stepping-stones to freedom.

In reality, the medieval city was a fortified oasis amidst a country plunged into feudal submission, and it had to make room for itself by the force of its arms.

In consequence of the causes briefly alluded to in the preceding chapter, each village community had gradually fallen under the yoke of some lay or clerical lord.

… when such leagues were broken, they lived long enough to show that while the supposed peacemakers—the kings, the emperors, and the Church-fomented discord, and were themselves helpless against the robber knights, it was from the cities that the impulse came for reestablishing peace and union.

The cities⁠—not the emperors⁠—were the real makers of the national unity.

Similar federations were organized for the same purpose among small villages, and now that attention has been drawn to this subject by Luchaire we may expect soon to learn much more about them.

The worst was, that the growing autocracies found support in the divisions which had grown within the cities themselves. The fundamental idea of the medieval city was grand, but it was not wide enough.

Mutual aid and support cannot be limited to a small association; they must spread to its surroundings, or else the surroundings will absorb the association.

And in this respect the medieval citizen had committed a formidable mistake at the outset.

Carnival masks and vicious books were burned, a law of charity and another against usurers were passed—and the democracy of Florence remained where it was. The old spirit had gone.

By too much trusting to government, they had ceased to trust to themselves; they were unable to open new issues.

The State had only to step in and to crush down their last liberties.

A thousand representatives were put into the Communal Council instead of four hundred; one hundred men entered the signoria instead of eighty. But a revolution of figures could be of no avail. The people’s discontent was growing up, and new revolts followed.

A saviour⁠—the “tyran”⁠—was appealed to; he massacred the rebels, but the disintegration of the communal body continued worse than ever.

And when, after a new revolt, the people of Florence appealed to their most popular man, Gieronimo Savonarola, for advice, the monk’s answer was:—“Oh, people mine, thou knowest that I cannot go into State affairs … purify thy soul, and if in such a disposition …

To that struggle Biology ascribes the progressive evolution of the animal world. History takes the same line of argument; and political economists, in their naive ignorance, trace all progress of modern industry and machinery to the “wonderful” effects of the same principle.

The very religion of the pulpit is a religion of individualism, slightly mitigated by more or less charitable relations to one’s neighbours, chiefly on Sundays.

“Practical” men and theorists, men of science and religious preachers, lawyers and politicians, all agree upon one thing—that individualism may be more or less softened in its harshest effects by charity, but that it is the only secure basis for the maintenance of society and …

but under the theory of the all-protecting State the bystander need not intrude: it is the policeman’s business to interfere, or not.

And while in a savage land, among the Hottentots, it would be scandalous to eat without having loudly called out thrice whether there is not somebody wanting to share the food, all that a respectable citizen has to do now is to pay the poor tax and to let the starving starve.

The result is, that the theory which maintains that men can, and must, seek their own happiness in a disregard of other people’s wants is now triumphant all round in law, in science, in religion.

… and, as the communes did not obey, a law was issued in 1847 empowering the Government to buy communal meadows in order to sell them in retail, and to make a forced sale of the communal land when there was a would-be buyer for it.

In short, to speak of the natural death of the village communities in virtue of economical laws is as grim a joke as to speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield.

The fact was simply this: The village communities had lived for over a thousand years; and where and when the peasants were not ruined by wars and exactions they steadily improved their methods of culture.

… owing to a concurrence of favourable circumstances, are less miserable than they are on the average, and wherever they find men of knowledge and initiative among their neighbours, the village community becomes the very means for introducing various improvements in agriculture and village life altogether.

Here, as elsewhere, mutual aid is a better leader to progress than the war of each against all, as may be seen from the following facts.

Under Nicholas I’s rule many Crown officials and serf-owners used to compel the peasants to introduce the communal culture of small plots of the village lands, in order to refill the communal storehouses after loans of grain had been granted to the poorest commoners.

What could they obtain through individual effort when South Russia was struck with the marmot plague, and all people living on the land, rich and poor, commoners and individualists, had to work with their hands in order to conjure the plague?

To call in the policeman would have been of no use; to associate was the only possible remedy.

And now, after having said so much about mutual aid and support which are practised by the tillers of the soil in “civilized” countries, I see that I might fill an octavo volume with illustrations taken from the life of the hundreds of millions of …

… know personally—if I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the Socialist movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the word “heroism” constantly on his lips.

But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea.

Every Socialist newspaper—and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone—has the same history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition.

There is the gist of human psychology. Unless men are maddened in the battlefield, they “cannot stand it” to hear appeals for help, and not to respond to them.

The hero goes; and what the hero does, all feel that they ought to have done as well.

The sophisms of the brain cannot resist the mutual-aid feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by thousands of years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of years of pre-human life in societies.

Unless men are maddened in the battlefield, they “cannot stand it” to hear appeals for help, and not to respond to them. The hero goes; and what the hero does, all feel that they ought to have done as well.

The sophisms of the brain cannot resist the mutual-aid feeling, because this feeling has been nurtured by thousands of years of human social life and hundreds of thousands of years of pre-human life in societies.

“But what about those men who were drowned in the Serpentine in the presence of a crowd, out of which no one moved for their rescue?” it may be asked.

There is the gist of human psychology.

Unless men are maddened in the battlefield, they “cannot stand it” to hear appeals for help, and not to respond to them.

The hero goes; and what the hero does, all feel that they ought to have done as well.

“What about the child which fell into the Regent’s Park Canal—also in the presence of a holiday crowd—and was only saved through the presence of mind of a maid who let out a Newfoundland dog to the rescue?” The answer is plain enough.

Man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education.

Among the miners and the seamen, their common occupations and their everyday contact with one another create a feeling of solidarity, while the surrounding dangers maintain courage and pluck.

But the mothers of the poorer classes have not that training.

They cannot stand the sight of a hungry child; they must feed it, and so they do.

“When the school children beg bread, they seldom or rather never meet with a refusal”—a lady-friend, who has worked several years in Whitechapel in connection with a workers’ club, writes to me.

… teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our preceding evolution.

What was the outcome of evolution since its earliest stages cannot be overpowered by one of the aspects of that same evolution.

And the need of mutual aid and support which had lately taken refuge in the narrow circle of the family, or the slum neighbours, in the village, or the secret union of workers, reasserts itself again, even in our modern society, and claims its rights …

The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution.

The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

Going next over to man, we found him living in clans and tribes at the very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of social institutions developed already in the lower savage stage, in the clan and the tribe;

… serviceable, because he could not find in the last century what he would have readily found in medieval Florence or Bruges, that is, the artisans capable of realizing his devices in metal, and of giving them the artistic finish and precision which the steam-engine requires.

To attribute, therefore, the industrial progress of our century to the war of each against all which it has proclaimed, is to reason like the man who, knowing not the causes of rain, attributes it to the victim he has immolated before his clay idol.

For industrial progress, as for each other conquest over nature, mutual aid and close intercourse certainly are, as they have been, much more advantageous than mutual struggle.

… movements of the Reform, and especially in the ethical and philosophical movements of the last century and of our own times, the total abandonment of the idea of revenge, or of “due reward”—of good for good and evil for evil—is affirmed more and more vigorously.

The higher conception of “no revenge for wrongs,” and of freely giving more than one expects to receive from his neighbours, is proclaimed as being the real principle of morality

—a principle superior to mere equivalence, equity, or justice, and more conducive to happiness.

this appearance existed on every portion of the flat, projecting shelves.”

But it was not snow: it was gannets, all calmly seated on their eggs or newly-hatched brood

—their heads all turned windwards, almost touching each other, and in regular lines. The air above, for a hundred yards and for some distance round the rock, “was filled with gannets on the wing, as if a heavy fall of snow was directly above us.”

It hardly need be added that Hudson pays them also a high compliment concerning their intelligence.

Sociability and intelligence always go hand in hand.

At the time when I wrote the chapter inserted in the text, a certain accord seemed to have been established amongst anthropologists concerning the relatively late appearance, in the institutions of men, of the patriarchal family, such as we know it among the Hebrews, or …