Mutual Aid E-Book

Pablo Servigne

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 436

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In the merciless arena of life, we are all subject to the law of the jungle, to ruthless competition and the survival of the fittest - such is the myth that has given rise to a society that has become toxic for our planet and for our and future generations. But today the lines are shifting. A growing number of new movements and thinkers are challenging this skewed view of the world and reviving words such as 'altruism', 'cooperation', 'kindness' and 'solidarity'. A close look at the wide spectrum of living beings reveals that, at all times and in all places, animals, plants, microorganisms and human beings have practised different forms of mutual aid. And those which survive difficult conditions best are not necessarily the strongest, but those which help each other the most. Pablo Servigne and Gauthier Chapelle explore a vast, forgotten continent of mutual aid in order to discover the mechanisms of this 'other law of the jungle'. In so doing, they provide a more rounded view of the world of living things and give us some of the conceptual tools we need to move beyond the vicious circle of competition and self-destruction that is leading our civilization to the verge of collapse.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Notes

Foreword

Notes

Introduction: The age of mutual aid

The law of the jungle

A potentially fatal paralysis

The emergence of another law of the jungle

The construction site of the new century

Notes

1 The history of a forgetting

Everywhere, all the time, and in every colour

Why society didn't see it – a story of myths

Why science didn’t see it – a story of genes

Notes

2 Spontaneous mutual aid

Contrary to popular belief …

How are we to explain these automatisms?

Notes

3 Group mechanisms

The hard core of mutual aid: reciprocity

The transition to the group: extended reciprocity

Very large groups: invisible reciprocity

Notes

4 The spirit of the group

A magical moment: when the group becomes one

Towards universal principles?

Mutual aid taken to the extreme

A tragic moment: when mutual aid collapses

Notes

5 Beyond the group

The big bad wolf principle

Can groups provide mutual aid to each other?

Notes

6 Since the dawn of time

The evolution of human mutual aid

The evolution of mutual aid between peers

The evolution of mutual aid between species

An endless source of innovation

Notes

Conclusion: The new face of mutual aid

Much more than just a law of the jungle

The main principles of mutual aid

Towards a new vision of mutual aid

Notes

Epilogue: For which world?

Are we going to kill each other?

Towards another mythology

Beyond humankind

Notes

Appendix: On the ‘new sociobiology’

An earthquake in the land of sociobiology

The various evolutionary forces behind mutual aid

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: The age of mutual aid

Begin Reading

Conclusion: The new face of mutual aid

Epilogue: For which world?

Appendix: On the ‘new sociobiology’

End User License Agreement

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MUTUAL AID

The Other Law of the Jungle

Pablo Servigne and Gauthier Chapelle

Translated by Andrew Brown

polity

Originally published in French as L’entraide. L’autre loi de la jungle © Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2017. This edition is published by arrangement with Les Liens qui Libèrent in conjunction with its duly appointed agent Books and More Agency #BAM, Paris, France. All rights reserved.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2022

Excerpt from Dans la lumière et les ombres by Jean Claude Ameisen reproduced with kind permission of Librairie Arthème Fayard. © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2008

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4793-7

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938636

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Dedication

To all you who share this enthusiasm, but who sometimes have doubts.

To Marine Simon, so passionate about group dynamics, who interconnected us in 2011.

To Albert Jacquard and Jean-Marie Pelt, who inspired us so much; we had dreamed of getting you to read this book …

Nothing is solitary, everything is solidary.

Man is solidary with the planet, the planet is solidary with the sun, the sun is solidary with the star, the star is solidary with the nebula, the nebula, a stellar group, is solidary with the infinite. Take one term out of this formula and the polynomial becomes disorganized, the equation falters, creation no longer makes sense in the cosmos, and democracy no longer makes sense on earth. So there is solidarity between everything and everything, and between everyone and everything. The solidarity of men is the invincible corollary of the solidarity of all worlds. The democratic bond is of the same nature as the sun’s rays.

Victor Hugo, Proses philosophiques (Philosophical Prose) (1860–5)

We must help each other – such is nature’s law.But one day the Donkey made fun of this law:I don’t know why he made this mistake;For he’s a good creature.

Jean de La Fontaine, ‘The Donkey and the Dog’ (1678)

Acknowledgements

This book deals with mutual aid on a theoretical level. But, behind the scenes, there was quite a bit of practice. We have been helped by many living beings over the past few years.

We would like to start by thanking Marine Simon,1 who introduced us to each other almost seven years ago, precisely in relation to this magical subject of mutual aid. It seems like we’ve known each other forever, so fundamental have been the ideas that the three of us have been able to develop, exchange, share and discover together. Thank you!

Over the past few months, we have benefited from the interest, intuition, understanding and patience of our editors, Henri Trubert and Sophie Marinopoulos, from the aptly named publishing company Les Liens qui Libèrent (The Bonds that Free). What a work of weavers! Thank you also to Élise Roy for her impressive proofreading and correction work.

A huge thank you to Charlotte de Mévius for making it possible to write, so quickly and comfortably, this manuscript that has been running through our heads for years. Thank goodness you were there! We almost didn’t write it … due to the collapse of civilization. We are touched by your friendship and your trust, and by your sensitivity to the worlds of ‘other than human’ creatures.

Thank you also to the courageous and generous reviewers of the first versions of the manuscript, for their compliments, advice and criticism: Benoît Richard, Bruno Corbara, Pablo Michelena, Marine Simon, Rachid Tahzima, Alain Caillé, Philippe Audfray, Élise Monette, Bruno Tracq, Jacques Lecomte, Matthieu Ricard and Serge Tisseron.

Thanks to Alain Caillé for his wonderful foreword, his kindness and his surprising availability given the dynamism of the convivialist movement.

Thank you to all of our loving tribes for their support: in the first place, Raphaël Stevens, the other (inter)dependent researcher and acrobat; Corinne, Helena, Vincent, Nathalie, Aline, Josué, Nathéa, Laurent, Valérie, Azul, Élisabeth, Muriel and other accomplices of the mycelium which now extends beyond the ‘Travail qui Relie’ (‘Work that Connects’); Hélène, Guibert, Michaël, Hermann and other enthusiasts of the planet Lunt; Julie, Pierre, Nico, Corentin and the satellites of the planet Giraf.be.

We also wish to thank all the pioneers, in particular the thousands of researchers who added their special touch and helped to raise up the giant on whose shoulders we stand (and it’s not just Darwin …). Seen from above, it makes us feel dizzy!

Finally, thanks to those who put at our disposal their patience as naturalists, their analytical intelligence, their nocturnal intuitions and their taste for wonder, helping us discover the countless stories of encounters between living organisms of all sizes, of all ages, of all shapes and of all origins, and to reveal their beauty and fragility.

(Pablo Servigne)My first and most heartfelt thanks go to Élise, who helped, supported and encouraged me so intensely and for such a long period that I believe that we have gone beyond the framework of the principles of the living world … It’s your turn to accompany me in giving birth to another little monster! I look forward to expanding our family, this little superorganism to which we give so much and which returns it to us fivefold, for example when our sons, without us realizing it at the time, keep us connected and (inter)dependent.

Thank you also to all those who made it possible, materially and psychologically, for us to write this book, in a real ritual of initiation. You made all the difference! A special dedication to all my neighbours who spontaneously practise mutual aid on a daily basis, by helping out and caring. In town: Mat and Andrea; in the plain: Annette, Francis and Nadia, Jean, Bernard, Philippe G., Philippe M., Daniel and Elke; and, in the mountains: Luc and Flo, Didier and Violaine, Sam and Typhaine, Flo and Aline, Yannick and Virginie (the list is certainly not exhaustive).

A huge thank you to my parents and to my brother, who demonstrate a particularly persistent and comforting kinship altruism, to Jacques Van Helden for having been such stimulating company at the time when we were both giving a critical course in sociobiology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and to former colleagues from the same institution, with whom we shared so many ideas and PDF files! This is all very impersonal, but I hope you will all recognize yourself in these words.

Thank you also to the anarchist friends whom I have met over all these years, and who have engraved in me, by theory as much as by example, the great and warm idea of mutual aid. Thank you to the members of the editorial board of the journal Réfractions, in particular André Bernard, Pierre Sommermeyer and Marianne Enckell, who encouraged me to write on this subject at a time when I didn’t dare. This is all your fault!

Thanks also to the editors of Imagine demain le monde, the Carnets de n’GO, the Institut Momentum, Éditions Aden, Sarkophage, La Revue du MAUSS, Etopia and Barricade for giving me the opportunity to learn my skills on this subject by writing little articles throughout the years.

I also want to name my heroes, my guides, who have inspired me and awakened me for years, to whom I feel deeply connected through the vision of the world they have passed on, a vision that is gentle, sparkling, immensely colourful, systemic and complex, and by their tenacious refusal to separate science and society: Peter Kropotkin, Charles Darwin, Lynn Margulis, Edward O. Wilson, David S. Wilson, Jonathan Haidt, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Edgar Morin, Jared Diamond and Jean Claude Ameisen. You have given me so much through your writings and your talks … This book is proof of the power of indirect reciprocity. Thank you!

My fingers have vibrated to the sound of many musics: Muse, Jean-Paul Dessy, Armand Amar, René Aubry, L. Subramaniam, Dead Can Dance, Daft Punk and numerous others. Thanks also to Yves Blanc and his brilliant radio show La Planète bleue – the most podcasted in the world! –, which I discovered when we were starting the editorial marathon, and which helped me weave the ideas, colours, textures and shapes together.

Finally, thank you, Gauthier, my brother, for being so ‘simpatico’ (from the root meaning ‘to suffer together’) during these few months of sharing when we finally wrote down what we had felt for a long time and couldn’t really express. And it’s not over! If I have sometimes taken you on uncomfortable paths, it was because I was sure to find reciprocity on the way.

(Gauthier Chapelle)Indeed! Thank you, Pablo, for the honour you have done me by associating me with the delivery of your baby after such a long gestation (ten years – much longer than even in sperm whales). Thanks to you, I took enormous pleasure both in re-examining the latest research on the incredible universe of symbiodiversity and in discovering the entire spectrum of human relationships, patiently woven in your networks (of neurons … and of PDF files!). Beyond our incredible complicity of seven years, you also taught me solidarity in writing, while showing patience and wisdom in the face of my belated and/or fiery reactions as a big brother of a proofreader (a lot) and as a scribbler (a little).

I also thank all those who are so close to me, parents, brothers and sisters and children, for having simultaneously welcomed, endured and encouraged my periods of writing, in particular the summer and holiday times: Nicole, Michel and Geneviève, as well as my two big sons Hoël and Ywen.

While paying homage in my turn to the many heroes whom Pablo and I share, I wanted to add a special mention of the extraordinary tellers and transmitters of stories who have so influenced me (some of them have already left us): Jean-Marie Pelt, Desmond Morris, Patrice Van Eersel, Wade Doak, Yves Paccalet, Francis Hallé, Frédéric Lints and Philippe Lebrun – not to mention Adrien Desfossés and his comrades from La Hulotte, the most widely read newspaper in the burrows, who have been educating and delighting me with each issue devoured since 1982 (thirty-five years of subscription) – a huge thank you to Pierre Déom!

Thank you to my godfathers and godmothers Michèle, Constance, Viviane and Jean.

Thank you again to all my naturalist accomplices and lovers of the living, with whom I have shared for so long the joy of encounters with ‘other than human’ creatures, near Brussels or on the other side of the world: Godefroid, Pierre, Marc and Sophie, Fatine, Enzo, Hubert, Benoît, Erik, Jean, Claude, Cova, Henri …

And, of course, thank you to all those creatures without whom life would be infinitely dull: the most familiar ones, like Orion el magnifico, the Great Red Beech, Dony the ethnologist, Dusty the Irish bard, ‘my’ Montpellier maple, ‘my’ avocado tree and ‘my’ ferns2 from Costa Rica; some of the most memorable, such as the Antarctic killer whales, the baobab of Boa Vista, the great crows of Brittany and the Ardennes, the saffron mycenae, the midwife toads, the Atta ants and the Acanthogammarus of Baikal; all their cherished communities, from the coastline of King George Island to the colourful depths of the Weddell Sea, from the Hyères canyons to Mont Sainte-Victoire, from the Blanc-Nez cliffs to the Poulloc foreshore, from the Laerbeek pond to Tenbosch Park, from the cave reliefs of Gembes to the micro-meander of the Samson. Above all, a vibrant thanks to the entire invisible but tireless network of underground bacteria, forest fungi, oceanic phytoplankton and abyssal sponges, you who among so many others bring to our ungrateful species oxygen, fertile soils, purified water, improbable music, shimmering colours, heady scents and daily wonder.

Finally, a deep thank you to you, Marine, for making so much room for the delivery – so soon! – of a second book, at the service of the Earth and the living world, while yourself being so attentive to the one who was at the same time growing within your intimate soil.

Viggo, welcome to the age of mutual aid!

Notes

1.

Facilitator in collective intelligence. See

www.audeladesnuages.com

.

2.

Or am I ‘their’ human? Or are we both at the same time?

Foreword

What a great symbol this is! Two trained biologists have asked a sociologist to write a preface to their excellent book – which has very little to say about sociology, unless it’s actually talking about nothing but sociology. It all depends, of course, on what we mean by sociology. And also by biology, and by economic science, philosophy, and so on. As the reader will soon realize, by bringing to light ‘another law of the jungle’, not the struggle for life or the law of the strongest, but (in addition to, or more powerful than, these phenomena) the law of cooperation and mutual aid, Pablo Servigne and Gauthier Chapelle are transgressing many of the established boundaries between scientific disciplines – boundaries that all too often bristle with barricades and barbed wire. And they are paving the way for general, synthesizing ideas that had prematurely been deemed impossible, even undesirable. Their ambition is great. It involves nothing less than understanding how human beings cooperate in the same way as other living organisms. On this subject, write our authors in the notes to the Introduction, ‘For years, the results, assumptions and theories of each discipline remained contradictory. No overall picture emerged. There were too many gaps between the disciplines, and each continued its work while ignoring the others. It is only very recently that tremendous progress has made it possible to propose a comprehensive structure for this “other law of the jungle”.’

It is this ‘tremendous progress’ that they are sharing with us. Before attempting to specify in a few words how this progress matters to us, I would like to underline the fluidity and pedagogical mastery with which our authors convey us into an infinitely complex universe that they make easily accessible. Among many other examples, one might mention the passage where they explain the formation of a coral reef in terms of a recipe (see below, pp. 147–8). For those, like me, who are not particularly passionate about viruses, bacteria, archaea, cyanobacteria or other dinoflagellate bacteria, we could sum it all up with these beautiful words from Victor Hugo, quoted as an epigraph to this book: ‘Nothing is solitary, everything is solidary.’ From viruses and bacteria to the largest and most complex human societies, Mutual Aid – whose title is borrowed from the anarchist prince Kropotkin and pays homage to him – describes, on every interrelated level of life, all possible interweavings of struggle and rivalry, on the one hand, and of cooperation, mutual aid and reciprocity (direct, indirect or reinforced), on the other, whether between organisms of the same species or of different species. Depending on whether it is cooperation or struggle that predominates, we get one of the following six forms of relationship: symbiosis (or mutualism), coexistence, commensalism, amensalism, predation (parasitism) or competition. From this vast synthesis, the essential lesson that emerges, unlike that of all more simplistic Darwinisms (which Darwin himself did not share), is that in terms of evolution the key to success is not the struggle for life, but rather mutual aid.

Or, to put it more precisely, in the words of two theoretical biologists of evolution, David S. and Edward O. Wilson (oh yes! Edward Wilson, the inventor of sociobiology, who, as we shall see, has radically reversed his initial position, to the dismay of his followers and disciples): ‘Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.’1 And, in the order of living beings, from bacterial societies to human societies, cooperation is hierarchically superior to competition.

This discovery, here meticulously argued and documented, constitutes an essential contribution, one that is simultaneously theoretical, ethical and political, as these levels are always closely intertwined. Where have we got to, actually? In the social sciences – in economics, of course, but also in sociology and in moral and political philosophy – the dogma that has dominated since the 1970s and 1980s is that, in social life, everything (actions, norms, institutions, beliefs, etc.) is explained by the interplay of conflicting interests, conscious or unconscious. This is the same belief that has dominated in biology – in sociobiology in its earliest guise, and in the theory of the selfish gene. This is what I call the axiomatics of interest, or utilitarianism.2

This hegemonic belief lies at the heart of neoliberalism. It was established even before rentier and speculative capitalism began to triumph on a planetary scale, and it has allowed this capitalism to flourish. In fact, the two things are inseparable. If we are to affirm that the only effective and therefore desirable mode of cooperation between humans is the market, we have to convince ourselves and as many other people as possible that we are nothing more than Homo œconomicus, ‘mutually disinterested’, as the star philosopher of the late twentieth century, John Rawls, put it.3 It then becomes easy to take the next step: if the only thing that drives us is our personal interest, and if the first or ultimate form of this self-interest is the lure of monetary gain, everyone is free to try to enrich themselves by all possible means, as fast as possible. There must be no more barriers to check the continued expansion of financial speculation, even at the risk of an inexorable rise in corruption and even crime.

After the work of Matthieu Ricard and Jacques Lecomte, which had opened a first breach in this dogma, Mutual Aid comes at just the right time to help us deconstruct this hegemonic belief. In the field of social sciences, there were only a few of us, in MAUSS,4 who opposed it over the past thirty years or so, and pleaded for a general social science not based on the utilitarian axiomatics of interest but on the discovery of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his famous work The Gift:5 the discovery that, at the heart of the social relationship, we do not find markets, contracts or exchange, but what he calls the triple obligation to give, to receive and to give back – or, if you prefer, the law of reciprocity. What a breakthrough it is to discover with Servigne and Chapelle that, mutatis mutandis, this law does not only concern the human world, but all living beings! Everything they tell us fits perfectly into the ‘gift paradigm’ that has gradually been developed within the framework of La Revue du MAUSS.

It is not difficult to deduce the ethical and political implications of this. Nothing is more urgent now than to fight excess, hubris, the thirst for omnipotence fuelled by neoliberalism that is leading humankind to its demise. So far, one of the main reasons for our inability to emerge from planetary neoliberalism has been a certain lack of theoretical resources. But it is also the lack of a political philosophy in the broad sense, one that would allow us to transcend the great ideologies of modernity: liberalism, socialism, anarchism and communism. It is this doctrine that is being developed by those world-famous authors who recognize themselves under the banner of convivialism.6 Servigne (who is one of these authors) and Chapelle have made a decisive contribution to this. A great example of mutual aid.

Alain CailléEmeritus Professor of Sociology, University of ParisOuest Nanterre-La Défense, editor of the Revue du MAUSSand founder of the convivialist movement

Notes

1.

D. S. Wilson and E. O. Wilson, ‘Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology’,

The Quarterly Review of Biology

, 82, 2007, pp. 327–48 (p. 345).

2.

This is the matrix of economism: that is, the belief that only economics matters. Since the 2000s, in social science, the fashion has swung towards a general deconstructionism. This involves showing that all existing norms and institutions have been constructed historically, and are thus not in the least natural, but arbitrary. Hence it is tempting to conclude that we could, or even should, deconstruct them. It would not be difficult to prove that this theoretical posture represents the ultimate avatar of a general economism.

3.

In

A Theory of Justice

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), Rawls did indeed write ‘mutually disinterested’, but this is not the same as ‘interested only in themselves’; the French translation cited by Caillé reads ‘

mutuellement indifférents

’, which has a slightly more selfish feel, explaining why Rawls is here being seen as more of a neoliberal than he actually was. (Translator’s note.)

4.

For MAUSS, see below, Introduction, p. 6 and n. 3. See also

www.revuedumauss.com

and

www.journaldumauss.net

.

5.

M. Mauss,

The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies

, trans. I. Cunnison (London: Routledge, 1990).

6.

The Convivialist Manifesto

(

www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/global-dialogues/convivialist-manifesto-a-declaration-of-interdependence

), signed by sixty-four independent and committed authors, soon joined by dozens of others around the world, was published in 2013 by Éditions Le Bord de l’eau. It has been translated, abridged or in full, into over ten languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Turkish and Hebrew). Its first merit is to state common values which can be universalized, and on which intellectuals from very diverse ideological tendencies have been able to agree, ranging from the far left to the centre-left, or centreright, or with sympathies lying even somewhat further to the right. This convergence is essential, since we will only emerge from the hegemony of neoliberalism if a broad global consensus can be achieved. One of the central theses of the

Manifeste

(inspired by Marcel Mauss) is that the main political problem is to allow humans to ‘cooperate by opposing each other without killing each other’. Reading Servigne and Chapelle, we discover that this is exactly the problem to which living beings in general have found an answer.

IntroductionThe age of mutual aid

Do you know this story? It’s a myth from the 1980s, but it’s said to come from a much more distant era. Once upon a time, there was life – a ruthless arena where millions of gladiators fought and killed each other. No favours, no quarter, no pity. Aggression had become an essential asset; it was a matter of survival. In this world, intelligence – sorry, cunning – was used for getting ahead of others, or, better, for thrashing them. You had to watch your back. ‘May the best person win!’ was the constant cry. The large ate the small, the fast ate the slow, the strong ate the weak. This was how it had been since the dawn of time; so said the sages. If you weren’t one of the winners, tough luck. Besides, you were probably a little bit to blame … ‘Damn it! Get up and fight! You need to win! To succeed! Don’t you get it?’

This myth dies hard. They say it’s still being told today, all over the world. Told to employees, to encourage them to climb the corporate ladder, or to corporations who need to win a share of the market. It’s said that at the highest level of state you find this obsession with competitiveness, with the battle to win power. Elsewhere, you find the struggle between football teams, candidates for the most prestigious colleges, job seekers …

Of course, these are not real wars; they’re simulated, cathartic, sometimes theatrical. They seem to be a way of channelling human impulses so as to keep us from going under. But do they prevent real confrontations, offences, crimes, armed conflicts, class wars, wars between peoples or wars against living creatures?

The law of the jungle

If you observe living (‘other than human’) beings from the point of view of competition, the picture jumps out at you: the lion eats the antelope, chimpanzees kill each other, young trees elbow each other aside to gain access to light, and fungi and microbes show no pity to each other. The myth unfolds in the light of this ruthless universe. The state of nature is synonymous with chaos, strife, looting and violence. It’s the law of the jungle, the ‘survival of the fittest’, or the ‘war of all against all’, in the words of one of the fathers of liberalism, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Myths give colour to the world. And an idea, when repeated countless times, ends up being true. Just look around: if you say that human beings are naturally altruistic, you’ll probably be viewed as naïve or idealistic. If you say they’re naturally selfish, you’ll have the ‘realists’ on your side.

Since the last century, Western culture, modern and utilitarian, has effectively developed a hypertrophied competitiveness, abandoning its generous, altruistic and benevolent aspects, which are now quite atrophied. Mutual aid? Who still believes in that? Sometimes it miraculously reappears, thanks to an unusual item on the evening news or in an animal video on the Internet that gets watched millions of times. Fascinating!

Let’s be honest: surely everyone has felt the deep joy of helping a loved one or of being given a hand by someone else? And what happens when a region is hit by a flood? Is there more looting than acts of solidarity? Of course not! Neighbours pull together, other people rush in from all sides and take crazy risks to save those who need to be rescued. Strangers from hundreds or thousands of miles away get organized and send in money. More generally, aren’t social security, the redistribution of wealth, humanitarian aid, education and even cooperatives incredible institutions of mutual aid? Why has this fact become so impossible for us to see?

A close examination of the spectrum of living creatures – from bacteria to human societies, via plants and animals – reveals that mutual aid not only is ubiquitous, but has been present since time began. It’s simple: all living creatures are involved in relationships of mutual aid. All of them. Mutual aid isn’t a mere news item; it’s a principle of the living world. It’s even a mechanism of the evolution of living creatures: the organisms which survive difficult conditions most easily are not the strongest; they’re those which manage to cooperate.

In fact, in the jungle, there’s a whiff of mutual aid that we can no longer smell. This book will be an attempt to inhale that inspiration, in a long deep breath.

A potentially fatal paralysis

Aggression and competition do exist in the living world – there’s no denying it. For example, it’s competition that prevents pathogenic bacteria from invading the microbial ecosystem in our mouths. It also allows felines to maintain their territory, and some humans find it stimulates their zeal, even their team spirit. Sport as we play it is a ritualized way of channelling competition, and competition forces us to surpass ourselves, and in some cases to ‘give the best of ourselves’.

But competition also has serious drawbacks. It’s exhausting. Most animals and plants understand this well: they minimize it and avoid aggressive behaviour as much as possible, because they have too much to lose. It’s too risky, too tiring. For a well-equipped individual, one who is well trained and psychologically at his or her best, competition is a challenge which makes progress possible thanks to a powerful effort (in the shortest possible time). But for others, those who are not ready, those who are unwilling or unable to enter the arena, or those who’ve been there too long already, this effort is an endless source of stress.

Moreover, competition separates; it brings out differences. Competitors focus their attention on that ‘little bit extra’, the little something which sets them apart from their competitors and must be kept secret because it will allow them to win the race. Don’t we say, ‘that little bit extra made all the difference’? Competition doesn’t promote social bonds, but rather encourages cheating and distracts from the common good. Indeed, why spend time working in common if this might favour your competitors?

Basically, what is ‘winning’? Finding yourself on the highest podium … dramatically alone? Drawing the gaze of the others by tugging on their gloomy passions: envy, jealousy and resentment? Helping create a planet where 99% are ‘losers’?

By pushing the cult of competition to its extreme, and by institutionalizing it, our society has not only created a violent world, it has above all deprived life of much of its meaning. Unlimited competition is an invitation – even an obligation – to a never-ending race. The disintegration of the bonds between humans and the breaking of our bonds with living creatures has created a great void, an immense need for consolation, which we are trying to constantly fill by frantically accumulating objects, trophies, sexual conquests, drugs or food. Excess, which the Greeks called hubris, then becomes the only way of being in the world.

Competition, infinite expansion and disconnection from the living world have been three founding myths of our society for several centuries now. Their mechanism is demonstrably highly toxic: just as a perpetually expanding cell ends up destroying the organism of which it is a part, an organism that destroys the environment in which it lives, and poisons its neighbours, ends up dying alone in a desert.

Unfortunately, we are now past the stage of mere warnings. This is our reality. Our relationship to the world has caused irreversible shifts: certain natural systems that make up the biosphere have been seriously destabilized, to the point of gravely threatening the conditions of survival of many species on earth, including our own. And this is quite apart from the imminent end of the fossil fuel era, the depletion of mineral resources, widespread pollution, the extreme fragility of our economic and financial system, the growing inequalities between countries and the increasing number of refugees. We have here a situation which resembles a huge tottering game of dominoes, on the verge of a civilizational collapse.1

The assessment of the possible forms that this chain of disasters might assume is called collapsology,2 a discipline which, as well as providing information, connects different environments and different sensibilities: environmentalists, survivalists, academics, soldiers, engineers, peasants, activists, artists, politicians, and so on. In our meetings with all those who are concerned about the present situation, we were struck by how recurrent and urgent the question of mutual aid was. There were frequent questions and reactions such as, ‘How can we keep all this from getting worse?’, ‘We’re heading straight for a Mad Max scenario’, ‘You’d have to bring out the best in human beings to avoid such a fate!’ and ‘We’re selfish beings – people are just going to kill each other!’

If the economic, political and social climate deteriorates rapidly, our imagination, saturated with the monoculture of competition, will always come up with the same old story: the war of all against all and pre-emptive aggressiveness. Through a self-fulfilling prophecy, ‘believers’ will prepare for violence in a climate of fear and create the perfect conditions for real tensions to arise. But another scenario, that of cooperation, could just as easily emerge – so long as we include it in the realm of possibilities!

This book was born from the idea of exploring the conditions for the emergence of behaviour based on the idea of mutual aid. The initial spark – a scientific curiosity going back more than ten years – has recently been fanned by the drive to make contact with another mythology, to expand and enrich another way of imagining things, and to tell captivating stories deeply rooted in the evolution of living creatures. For we hope thereby to minimize the damage caused by this spiral of self-destruction and violence, and – why not? – to foster a virtuous spiral rather than a vicious circle.

The emergence of another law of the jungle

We are neither the only nor the first writers to think about mutual aid. In recent years, scientific articles on this subject have followed one another at a breakneck pace. But unfortunately they remain relatively inaccessible to the general public and are rarely found in school curricula. The same goes for the long philosophical and religious intellectual lineage which dates back to Antiquity and took on a truly scientific dimension in the nineteenth century in the writings of, among others, the naturalist Charles Darwin, the sociologist Alfred Victor Espinas, the geographer Peter Kropotkin and the anthropologist Marcel Mauss.

Make no mistake: the heirs of these ‘naïve’ ideas are numerous. One need only think of the MAUSS movement,3 which was launched in 1981 by Alain Caillé and currently brings together a large panel of intellectuals under the (very stimulating!) banner of convivialism.4 There is also the naturalist overview by Jean-Marie Pelt, La solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains (Solidarity in Plants, Animals, and Humans, 2004), as well as the monumental syntheses in Jacques Lecomte’s La Bonté humaine (Human Kindness, 2012), Matthieu Ricard’s Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World (2015) and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s Common (2019). Philosophers, managers, ecologists, economists, anthropologists and sociologists are scrambling to bring back to the forefront concepts as oldfashioned and outdated as altruism,5 goodness,6 kindness,7 association,8 equality,9 common goods,10 empathy11 and solidarity.12

The strength of this newly emerging, wide-ranging intellectual trend is that it doesn’t just stay in libraries. It goes out into the streets, transforms the world through new modes of consumption, labour, construction, learning, communication, management13 and production.14 The emergence of a culture of common goods, peer-to-peer contact and collaboration is taking on a global dimension affecting every sector. It’s too late to stop it.

In the last century, our world became extremely efficient in terms of the mechanisms of competition. It’s high time to become equally proficient in cooperation, benevolence and selflessness. The other objective of this book is to add a stone to this edifice, to participate in the structuring of this new culture. Drawing on several disciplines, from ethology to anthropology, including economics, psychology, biology, sociology and neuroscience, we offer an overview of the most recent discoveries relating to the very powerful drive among living creatures (and not just humans) to form associations. The idea of including the rest of the living world in our synthesis was so that we could identify the overall principles and a general architecture of what might now be called ‘the other law of the jungle’.

The construction site of the new century

We were surprised to see what an incredible diversity of processes, feelings and mechanisms has been at work since the beginnings of time. But what name are we to give this infinitely complex, rich and colourful world – this tendency which describes both an association between bacteria and an agreement between humans or great apes, involving feelings as subtle as altruism, kindness, friendship, gratitude, reconciliation and a sense of justice? We needed a term that included both actions and intentions, but also all living organisms and all processes.

We have chosen the term mutual aid, aware that it is not defined in the same way by everyone, and that it can sometimes involve a hint of anthropomorphism, especially when it comes to describing the behaviour of living creatures that are nothing like us. But today this term has the advantage of being both accepted in everyday language and sufficiently forgotten in science to be immune from too narrow a definition. It is also, and above all, a nod to the great geographer and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, one of the pioneers of this scientific adventure, who in 1902 wrote a remarkable synthesis, Mutual Aid.15

The subject is obviously colossal. Each chapter of our book could be the subject of a multi-volume treatise! The goal was not to turn it into an encyclopaedia, but to build bridges between disciplines, and in particular between the human sciences and the biological sciences. Seeing their disciplines being given such a broad-brush treatment will obviously frustrate the specialists – we share their feelings, as we would have liked to share even more extraordinary details of the mechanisms of living creaturses.16

We started this project a dozen years ago, with as much enthusiasm as naïvety. Our ‘biological’ label17 had not prepared us to absorb the incredible advances in the human sciences, nor the paradoxes that were emerging from this vast wealth of new discoveries.18 Exploring all of this was a real adventure which only stoked our curiosity the more. Our conclusions are therefore far from definitive, and ultimately turn out to be an invitation to continue exploring.

This book is not a treatise on collapsology, nor a critique of consumer society and capitalism, nor a naturalistic encyclopaedia or a philosophical treatise. It’s an attempt to tie it all together and indicate a route for our generation.

We will begin our journey by demolishing the myth of an aggressive nature ruled by one sole law. Then, over the course of the chapters, we will discover the mechanisms and subtleties of human mutual aid. Finally, we will return to the whole of the living world, which will allow us to touch on some major principles of life on earth.

Notes

1.

For the moment, the industrialized countries have been relatively spared, but only thanks to the fragile protection afforded by technology – a protection which depends on diminishing energy and mineral resources.

2.

P. Servigne and R. Stevens,

How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times

, trans. A. Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

3.

MAUSS stands for Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (Anti-utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences). See the foreword to the present book as well as the

Revue du MAUSS

website (

www.revuedumauss.com.fr/Pages/ABOUT.html

).

4.

See

The Convivialist Manifesto

(

www.gcr21.org/publications/gcr/global-dialogues/convivialist-manifesto-a-declaration-of-interdependence

) and the convivialists’ website (

http://convivialisme.org/worldwide

/).

5.

P. Kourilsky,

Le Temps de l’altruisme

(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009); P. Kourilsky,

Le Manifeste de l’altruisme

(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2011); M. Ricard,

Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World

, trans. C. Mandell and S. Gordon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015); M. Ricard and T. Singer (eds),

Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion

(London: Macmillan, 2015).

6.

J. Lecomte,

La Bonté humaine: altruisme, empathie, générosité

(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012).

7.

E. Jaffelin,

Petit Éloge de la gentillesse

(Paris: J’ai lu, 2010); F. Martin,

Le Pouvoir des gentils: les règles d’or de la relation de confiance

(Paris: Eyrolles, 2014).

8.

J.-L. Laville,

Politique de l’association

(Paris: Le Seuil, 2010).

9.

R. G. Wilkinson and K. Pickett,

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

(London: Allen Lane, 2009).

10.

P. Dardot and C. Laval,

Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century

, trans. M. MacLellan (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); B. Coriat (ed.),

Le Retour des communs et la crise de l’idéologie propriétaire

(Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2015).

11.

F. de Waal,

The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society

(London: Penguin, 2010); J. Rifkin,

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis

(Cambridge: Polity, 2010).

12.

J.-M. Pelt,

La Solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains

(Paris: Fayard, 2004); A. Supiot (ed.),

La Solidarité: enquête sur un principe juridique

(Paris: Odile Jacob, 2015); R. Mathevet,

La Solidarité écologique: ce lien qui nous oblige

(Arles: Actes Sud, 2011).

13.

Despite the recent progress made by certain companies, it is clear that the business milieu is afflicted by appalling inertia. Gauthier Chapelle was a business consultant in sustainable development (in the field of biomimicry) for ten years. He strove to show corporations that, by drawing inspiration from the supportive relationships of the living world, their organization would not only be sustainable, but much more efficient. Unfortunately, he often found that many companies

did not want

to take the risk of changing their structure and purpose.

14.

For an overview, see A.-S. Novel,

La Vie share: mode d’emploi. Consommation, partage et modes de vie collaboratifs

(Paris: Alternatives, 2013); S. Riot and A.-S. Novel,

Vive la corévolution! Pour une société collaborative

(Paris: Alternatives, 2012); D. Filippova (ed.),

Société collaborative: La fin des hiérarchies

(Paris: Rue de l’Échiquier, 2015). On the means of communication, see J. Rifkin,

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); M. Bauwens,

Sauver le monde: vers une économie post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer

(Paris: Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2015). On companies, see F. Laloux,

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness

(Brussels: Nelson Parker, 2014); J. Lecomte,

Les Entreprises humanistes

(Paris: Les Arènes, 2016). On energy, see J. Rifkin,

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

15.

P. Kropotkin,

Mutual Aid

, first published in 1902 and available online:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-mutual-aid-a-factor-of-evolution

. Incidentally, the French translation (

Entr’aide

) was the work of Kropotkin’s friend, also a geographer and anarchist, Élisée Reclus; the word

entr’aide

was a French neologism of his coining, losing its apostrophe in 1931 to become

entraide

. See M. Enckell, ‘Notes sur l’histoire d’un mot’,

Réfractions

, 23, 2009, pp. 5–8.

16.

In this work, we have cited only about a third of the sources known to us.

17.

We are both trained agronomists and animal biology specialists. Above all, we have shared, since our earliest childhood, an unease at being surrounded by the myth of a cruel, aggressive and competitive nature. This does not fit with our experience, our observations or our feelings. Even if our naturalistic sensibility immunized us against this ideological soup, it still took us more than twenty-five years to transform this intuition into certainty, and a few more years to pull the latter into a coherent synthesis.

18.

For years, the results, assumptions and theories of each discipline remained contradictory. No overall picture emerged. There were too many gaps between the disciplines, and each continued its work while ignoring the others. It is only very recently that tremendous progress has made it possible to propose a comprehensive structure for this ‘other law of the jungle’.

1The history of a forgetting

Imagine a beautiful sunny valley where snow-capped peaks stand out against the blue sky, overlooking a mix of multicoloured meadows and dark forests. In these forests in North America, it is common to see two species: the whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) and Rocky Mountain fir (Abies lasiocarpa). But – ecologists ask – how do these two species get along? Do they tread on each other’s toes or, on the contrary, do they need each other?

Across the valley floor, the distribution of pines and firs is random. Researchers have also noticed that when a pine tree dies, the neighbouring fir trees grow more healthily. In other words, the trees seem to hamper each other. You could say they’re in competition. Nothing unusual about that: we all imagine the forest as a place where the trees overshadow each other and where the small shoots have to make their way up to the light, or die.

Science is fully aware of this: for more than a century, ecologists have observed these interactions. These ecologists are steeped in the classical theory which, in the ecology of communities (of plant populations), gives pride of place to competition. However, on rare occasions during the twentieth century, a researcher would occasionally observe something odd: for example, that in some places the grass grew better under poplars. But nobody really paid any attention, because it didn’t fit into the theory.

Let’s return to the cohabitation between pines and firs. It was in the 1990s that the team run by Ragan Callaway, an ecologist at the University of Montana, started to take an interest in these ‘exceptions’. The researchers compared the situation of trees at the bottom of the valley, an environment where life is good, with the situation on the mountainsides, at a certain altitude, where living conditions are much more difficult.1 What a surprise! At altitude, things were utterly different: not only did the firs grow only around pines, but, when a pine died, the surrounding firs fared less well… These trees compete when living conditions are good, but help each other when they become tougher (in cold or windy weather, poor soil, etc.). Until then, people had seen only half the picture.

Callaway and his colleagues were the first to take these observations seriously in plants and measure them accurately on a large scale. For more than twenty years, they travelled the world and accumulated experimental data, published in major international scientific journals,2 which show the extent of mutually beneficial relationships between plants (which they call ‘facilitation’).3 Quite enough to radically change our vision of the world!

Everywhere, all the time, and in every colour

From Darwin onwards and throughout most of the twentieth century, biologists and ecologists believed that the main forces which structured the relationships between species within ecosystems were competition and predation. Their experiments were designed to highlight this, and, of course, this is what they ended up observing. The history of observing the opposite forces (mutually beneficial relationships) has been much slower work. It really only took off in the 1970s. Today, studies number in the thousands, and it would be very daring, even crazy, to synthesize them all. However, here is a small overview.

Among one’s peers

It’s not surprising that ants and bees collaborate in a single colony (the same family). We can also easily observe migratory birds, such as pigeons or arctic terns, flying together (the same species) so as to have a better chance of escaping predators.4 Anyone who has ventured to walk across a colony of arctic terns is not likely to forget the ensuing series of furious dives, their sharp beaks lunging forward, punctuated by particularly explicit cries intended to scare away the intruder, most often a marauding cat or fox.

Associating in order to achieve the same goal is also common among lionesses, who need to hold onto the prey they have caught and prevent hyenas from pilfering it,5