3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale (23 page)

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Authors: Danbert Nobacon

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“WHY AN ANARCHIST FAIRY TALE?”

No period of history could better illustrate the constructive powers of the popular masses than the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the fortified villages and marketplaces, representing so many “oases amidst the feudal forest,” began to free themselves from their lord’s yoke, and slowly elaborated the future city organization: but, unhappily, this is a period about which historical information is especially scarce; we know the results, but little has reached us about the means by which they were achieved.

Peter Kropotkin
“Mutual Aid A Factor in Evolution”(1902)

A
n anarchist fairytale may seem a contradiction in terms. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, serving girls and slaves? You have met them all in these pages. You found some of the regular doses of violence and struggle which survival compels, but also some fine moments of outstanding cooperation between people and between species.

These ideas are not made up. There are many instances of symbiotic behavior between animal species in the nature we know. As, Bernd Heinrich points out, the raven evolved with the wolf, hence its nickname of wolf-bird. Ravens will, quite unbelievably, shy away from animal corpses food just sitting there waiting to be eaten to the point of not eating it, unless wolves (or surrogate wolves) are present. Ravens, who cannot slice up deer carcasses with their beaks, let the wolves do the hard work and then take their share. But why don’t the wolves just eat the ravens as a tasty hors d’oeuvre? Because wolves learned that if the ravens behave in a particular way, they have, with the advantage of their aerial vision, spotted real food waiting to be eaten in the immediate environs.

In our world, though it is very different in some ways to Stormy’s, there are real kings and queens, and nation states engaged in empire-building wars. There are rulers bent on suppressing those who resist their power. But there are also many exceptions to this, that the history of power neglects to mention. The “exceptions” to deadly competition or top-down domination involve another kind of power. And this power of cooperation between people is sometimes called “anarchism.”

There was an actual anarchist prince in old Russia, called Peter Kropotkin. And contrary to the stereotyped image of the black-cloaked, bomb-throwing anarchist, Kropotkin was a rational, articulate thinker. He saw in the wider world around him some of the quintessential elements of non-hierarchical anarchist society. He developed a theory of the human tendency toward cooperation, or
mutual aid
as he called it, rooted not in wishful thinking, but in observable science.

Building on Russian scientific thought of his day, Kropotkin wrote a book called
Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902).
The book gave a scientifically respectable theory that for many species, cooperation, or mutual aid, was as much a part of survival for the species as a group, as the survival of the fittest was for the individual. In other words, the individual benefited from the cooperation of the group, whereas the group did not necessarily benefit from the elevation of the individual.

Kropotkin based his theories on observations of animals and indigenous peoples he made while working as a geographer and zoologist, during scientific expeditions in Siberia and Manchuria. He found human societies that were not all as competitive, as compared to the dangerously competitive nations of his own Western Europe of the late nineteenth century.

Contemporary scientists are still arguing over the fine details of how social and natural evolution works, and how this is different for each particular species. But present day evolutionists are finding that much of the general sense of Kropotkin’s ideas was on track. For example, evolutionary scientists E. O. Wilson and D. S. Wilson explain,

Hunter-gatherer societies are fiercely egalitarian. Meat is scrupulously shared; aspiring alpha males are put in their place; and self-serving behaviors are censured. Unable to succeed at each other’s expense, members of hunter-gatherer groups succeed primarily by teamwork. (2008)

In evolutionary terms, we are all “modern humans,” descended from those who first walked out of a gorge in Africa and spread across the world. As a species, we are approximately 150,000 years old, and until the dawn of agriculture 13,000 years ago, we were all hunter-gatherers. In other words, for most of our existence we lived co-operatively. And many of us today yearn for community in some form.

With Morainia, I am speculating as to where the line is between egalitarian bands of fifty or a hundred hunter-gatherers, and the sedentary, farming-based societies of a few thousand people which succumbed to hierarchical feudalism. For surely such a change did not happen overnight?

Kropotkin argued against the Social Darwinism of his own time, which advanced the idea that rich people deserved to be rich because they were fitter in evolutionary terms than poor people. Such warped misrepresentations of Darwin’s theory would be used by Hitler, as justification for the master race of Nazi Germany, and a global war for the survival of only the fittest.

Some of the recently discovered evidence that humans evolved to co-operate has been staring us in the face on a daily basis. For example, David Sloan Wilson explains the unique adaptation of humans—among the other ninty-two of their primate cousins studied—of having exposed bright eye-whites (sclera). In contrast, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans et al., along with most other mammals, have mostly concealed or darker-pigmented sclera. The darker sclera, or
nature’s sunglasses,
evolved partly due to the general need of animals in the wild for camouflage to survive. But they also served a need of hierarchical ape society, to conceal information from rivals in their own group.

In stark contrast, humans are literally born to attract each other’s attention by eye contact. The naturally selected exposed eye-white draws us into the window of the soul. Eye contact is how a baby learns about itself from its mother; it is the means by which we fall in love; and it is the basis of our trying to appeal to someone’s better judgment in times of crisis.

It does not take a trained scientist to notice that the very first thing animators do to humanize their cartoon animals into talking life, is to give them very visible eye-whites. The scientist would ask whether our closest relative in evolutionary history, Neanderthal Man, had exposed eye whites? And bone remains only tell us so much, and just as we have no idea what colors dinosaurs actually were, we know nothing of the Neanderthal eye. But at some point, hundreds of thousands of years ago, the human eye diverged from that of other primates, and the advantage in terms of survival, of being better-able to share information and co-operate, was spectacularly successful.

That humans evolved to be involved in parenting over a matter of years, rather than months or weeks, offers more evidence of mutual aid as a factor in evolution. How could a human baby ever live beyond a few hours were its parents, or substitute care-givers, not hard-wired to raise it through the years when it simply could not fend for itself? And beyond family cooperation, there would be no great cities, no great leaps in technology, no man on the moon, no titanium rod in my broken leg, no avoiding untold havoc wreaked by global warming, if humans had not discovered, and do not rediscover, our natural leaning towards mutual aid.

The mess the modern world finds itself in has been built upon the misappropriation of our cooperative nature. Contemporary evolutionists say that when a society is too successful, and the surpluses from co-operating grow too great, then some individuals try to benefit at the expense of the group. A few will take the vertical fast route to power over others. And the grand view of history is littered with individuals who claimed superiority over society by divine right, by force, or by entrenched privilege. These are the tyrannical kings and queens; the hypocritical priests and bishops; the dictators and corrupt politicians, who seem to fill our history books. And now we see a new wave of self-serving corporate bosses, animated with a similar sense of entitlement.

In the year 2010, few would disagree that we have lost our sense of balance with and within our planetary environment. Few would deny, that should we continue to hurtle down this road, there awaits a spectacular collapse, in some form, at some point. Perhaps the way we can avoid such a collapse is by rediscovering the evolutionary self that tends towards mutual aid: the self which makes us human.

You have just read a tale of a world that had collapsed. Some species survived, and some evolved, somehow managing to reinvent their lives from the bottom up, with whatever was closest at hand. Will they go on to make the same mistakes that we are making? There are kings and queens, monsters and all the rest … it is a fairy tale after all … But perhaps unlike many fairy tales, and more like life itself, there are also sprinklings of anarchy and mutual aid in the moments when needs must …

Danbert Nobacon
Twisp, Washington

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my wonderful editor and publisher, Tod Davies.

Alex Cox for imagining the characters in such a spectacular way. Mike Madrid for his tireless efforts in that universe called graphic design, which will always remain a mystery to me.

A toast to Charles Darwin, Jared Diamond, David Sloan Wilson, E.O. Wilson, Bernd Heinrich, Bill Bryson, Alan Weisman et al. for fomenting the dialogues in my head that made the world of this book seem sort-of-possible.

Thanks to the Banks Lake crew for entertaining the Gricklegrack.

And thanks to Laura Gunnip for her belief in me.