Scarcity by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Unlike his contemporaries John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Darwin expressed no anxiety about the destructive consequences of human activities on the natural world. Perhaps it simply did not occur to him that humans might damage the Tree of Life.

The rich legacy of Malthus and Darwin opened up many new lines of inquiry in the late nineteenth century, from ecology and eugenics to anarchist social theory. T. H. Huxley argued that all biological organisms, including animals and humans, were defined by a constant struggle for existence, in which everyone strove to gain as large a share of society’s resources as possible. In contrast, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) dismissed Social Darwinism in favor of a theory of mutual aid.66 Drawing on evidence from the fields of biology, anthropology, history, and sociology, as well as his extensive travels throughout Siberia, Kropotkin decentered interspecies struggles and emphasized how animals and humans are constantly engaged in various forms of mutual aid. Whether among microbes, animals, or humans, altruism and cooperation drove evolutionary change. Thus, biological life was not simply a never-ending struggle over scarce resources but also defined by a rich tapestry of cooperative practices.67 Among humans, the principle of mutual aid had been marginalized by the formation of centralized states and the ideology of individualism. Against Malthus and Huxley, Kropotkin argued that competition among people was a highly contingent social dynamic that could be eliminated by the proper organization of society.68 The challenge facing humanity was therefore to develop new kinds of institutions that would enable people to embrace their cooperative spirit fully, and restore mutual aid as the fundamental social dynamic.

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