I was astonished. Noche was the seasoned cow horse, not Rasa. If anything, I would have expected my dog to rush at the cattle as the mare ran home. For weeks afterward, my brain worked overtime, combining and recombining the “facts” I had learned about the “drama of survival.” Ultimately, I was less confused by Nala’s reticence to attack than by the question of why a herbivore, and a slightly lame one at that, would defend us both.
It took me twenty years to collect research capable of shedding some light on this event. (As in the case of emotional and social intelligence, pivotal studies on animal behavior that seem so obvious now simply weren’t available in the 1990s.) Slowly, bits and pieces of the puzzle were revealed through multiple disciplines, infusing my writing with lots of questions and, thankfully over time, a growing list of answers that eventually allowed me to discern some useful patterns.
In part 1, I summarize and expand upon the most relevant theories and examples I presented in The Power of the Herd — ideas that in some cases challenge our most treasured, tenacious views about nature while foreshadowing a more balanced, mutually supportive approach to power. In the process, we’ll revisit long-held misconceptions about the instinctual behaviors, emotional vitality, and intellectual capacity of all animals, including the talented, sometimes overly aggressive species known as Homo sapiens.
Hidden Revolution
Most people are familiar with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Related research by Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, however, has virtually gone underground. The Russian geographer and naturalist published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902. Over the next fifty years, the book was rejected, in some cases actively suppressed, by royalty, fascists, capitalists, and communists alike. Based on a collection of essays and magazine articles he wrote in the late 1800s, Kropotkin’s observations of supportive social behavior in nature struck some corporate and political leaders as “dangerous.” In fact, even before Mutual Aid made it into bookstores, Kropotkin was obliged to put his keen, insightful intellect to other uses, namely figuring out how to escape from jail.
The czarist-era Russian nobleman hadn’t intended to cause so much trouble. Born a prince (though he rejected that title at age fourteen), he had significant connections and resources to draw upon. When Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, Kropotkin was inspired to contribute to the scientific literature on this topic. Commandeering a group of ten Cossacks and fifty horses, he trotted off to Siberia, hoping to gather case studies to support and further define the intricacies of evolution. But soon enough, he was confused and disillusioned by what he saw — or perhaps more specifically, by what he didn’t see.
“I failed to find — although I was eagerly looking for it — that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution,” (italics added) Kropotkin wrote on the very first page of Mutual Aid.
He was even more disturbed by the fast-growing relationship between Darwinism and sociology, emphasizing that he “could agree with none of the works and pamphlets that had been written upon this important subject. They all endeavored to prove that Man, owing to his higher intelligence and knowledge, may mitigate the harshness of the struggle for life between men; but they all recognized at the same time that the struggle for the means of existence, of every animal against all its congeners, and of every man against all other men, was ‘a law of Nature.’”
In Kropotkin’s experience, this potentially destructive view “lacked confirmation from direct observation.” By then, he had witnessed significant instances of mutual support and competition avoidance in the vast numbers of animals he encountered in the Siberian outback. Bears hibernating, squirrels storing nuts for the winter, and herds of large herbivores languidly migrating were the most obvious examples, but Kropotkin also noticed an even more profound theme emerging.
“The first thing which strikes us is the overwhelming numerical predominance of social species over those few carnivores which do not associate,” he wrote, later adding that on the “great plateau of Central Asia we find herds of wild horses, wild donkeys, wild camels, and wild sheep. All these mammals live in societies and nations sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of individuals, although now, after three centuries of gunpowder civilization, we find but the debris of the immense aggregations of the old. How trifling, in comparison with them, are the numbers of the carnivores! 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.”
Kropotkin insisted that mutual aid is not an exception to the rule; it is a law of nature. Supportive behavior, he wrote, “enables the feeblest of insects, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from the most terrible birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the species to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy and to maintain its numbers albeit a very slow birthrate; it enables the gregarious animals to migrate in search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admitting that force, swiftness, protective colors, cunningness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.”
Kropotkin’s view of evolution subsequently moved him to social activism, though in this context his ideas were a bit too revolutionary. To find so many incidents of mutual aid and nonpredatory behavior in the animal kingdom was one thing. To become a vocal anarchist as a result of these observations was quite another. While some of his discoveries won him worldwide recognition as a geographer, he subsequently took on a decidedly subversive mission, disguising himself as a traveling peasant lecturer named Borodin to spread nature-inspired visions of social reform, encouraging peaceful collectives of free, empowered people living in decentralized systems. After landing in a Russian prison as a result of these antics, he continued to promote his ideas throughout Europe upon his escape. From Kropotkin’s perspective, cooperation not only trumped competition in the drama of survival, it hinted at a deeper reality pulsing beneath the twentieth century’s increasingly unbalanced obsession with instinct and intellect.
The Beat Goes On
The heart, and all it stands for, is not a human invention. It’s a force of nature.
Science prefers to dissect it and repair it. Religion alternately strives to promote it and control it. Art is unabashedly fueled by it. And yet leaders in all these disciplines have tried to hoard the heart’s legendary wisdom by spreading, throughout history, the incessant propaganda that our species is the only one that feels, cares, suffers, yearns, loves — and therefore deserves to thrive at the expense of all the others.
At the same time, oddly enough, far too many leaders engage in activities that require suppressing empathy and connection. The Egyptians, after all, did not build the pyramids with compassion as their prime directive. From slavery and war to modern factory farming, child labor, and environmental devastation, conquest-oriented pursuits demand that people sacrifice their hearts to the glory of some brilliant idea, outlandish ambition, or intriguing profit-making venture.
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the concept of evolution was used as yet another way to justify callous, opportunistic behavior. Co-opted by aggressive political and business factions that had previously used the divine right of kings and other religious metaphors to control the masses, Darwin’s theory was reduced to slogans that promoted the survival of the fittest and competition for limited resources as laws of nature. Dictators, robber baron–style capitalists, and other human predators felt all the more inspired to develop “efficient” ways of exploiting resources, animals,