(photo from U. Berkeley, with the caption: “New study reveals the brain mechanism that makes rats feel empathy for other rats, yet refrain from helping rats they deem to be ‘outsiders’. Photo by Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal”)
Chris Hedges is a busy guy. In addition to being one of the most relentless public critics of the US/Western Empire (no matter who is in power), the award-winning journalist and former war correspondent also frequently interviews a wide variety of people with unique insights on the state of the world.
Recently he interviewed Canadian-born sci-fi author Ray Nayler, who’s spent much of his life working in Russia, Western Asia, and Vietnam in a variety of diplomatic, peace volunteer, and naturalist roles (most recently with NOAA). The interview was mostly about Ray’s latest novel Palaces of the Crow, which I am currently reading.
In this time of ‘forever wars’, Ray uses the novel to raise questions about whether humans are naturally cooperative or competitive, naturally violent or peace-loving. Here’s the publisher’s introduction to the novel:
In Ray Nayler’s speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows.
Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl. Czesław is an underage Polish soldier who deserts the Red Army and runs into the freezing Lithuanian wilderness. Kezia is a Roma horse trader whose family is on the run from Soviet collectivization. As the German blitzkrieg crashes across the border in June 1941, all three are caught up in the onslaught. Along with a nameless, abandoned boy who cannot speak, they are driven into the primeval forest, where they survive by forming an unbreakable bond with one another―and with Neriya’s intelligent crows, who have a magnificent secret of their own to protect.
As the war goes on, the crows warn the children of danger and help them hide from the human threats of the forest―not only the Germans but also Russian deserters, Polish partisans, fascist Lithuanian police, and the other bandits and outcasts wandering the treacherous landscape.
In the interview, Ray conveys his own opinion on human nature by contrasting his novel with the similarly-themed William Goldman novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of schoolchildren shipwrecked on an island alone who, freed from parental and social constraints, quickly exhibit humanity’s darker side. Ray explains that in real life, the children that Goldman based his story on actually cooperated and supported each other, the opposite of the behaviour described in his novel. And in Ray’s novel, cooperation is key to the children’s survival. The cooperation among the crows, and between the crows and children, reflects his view that we are naturally a collaborative, egalitarian, and peace-loving species, and naturally inclined also to communicate and cooperate with the other species we share this fragile planet with.
I have often written that I believe that this is indeed our basic nature, and that I think it is only in times of extreme stress (like in today’s collapsing civilization) that we essentially go insane and exhibit predominantly violent and selfish behaviours. And since we don’t ‘remember’ less stressful times, we assume this is our ‘natural’ behaviour.
Chris and Ray start their discussion with a review of philosopher-anarchist-naturalist Peter Kropotkin’s claim (in 1902) that social animals (like humans, and crows) survive and thrive only by cooperating, not only with each other but with other species. Kropotkin calls this the “theory of mutual care”. To this end, throughout his life (much of it spent in prison for his beliefs) he advocated the gradual abolition of central authority, private property and money, in favour of small self-organizing local communes sharing everything in a ‘gift economy’ where everyone was given what they needed, not what they ‘earned’ or ‘merited’.
The late biologist-philosopher Stephen J Gould (yeah, I know, I’m a huge fan) argued that Kropotkin’s view of humans’ natural proclivity for cooperation was very consistent with anthropological evidence, and that much of Darwin’s writing was deliberately misconstrued by many scientists (“survival of the fittest” is actually about species that “fit” with their environments, not those that compete and kill their ‘weaker’ ecosystem cohabitants). And they both agreed that Social Darwinism (the claim that our cultural behaviour ‘naturally’ mimics our alleged biological competitiveness, ferocity, and hierarchical propensities) is nonsense.
In Ray’s words:
What Kropotkin really learned from animals is that so long as they have resources that they need to survive, they will cooperate and work in mutual aid with one another. The only time that Kropotkin says Darwin’s theory really makes sense is when resources become scarce, then competition sets in.
So I have concluded, and I think Peter, Chris and Ray would probably agree, is that the western Cult of Individualism is, essentially, a form of mental illness.
If stress and scarcity is at the core of this mental illness, then Chris, Ray, and Hannah Arendt would seem to be of one mind about what this illness is based on and manifests as. When Chris cites Hannah as arguing that “rootlessness and disconnection” is the root of all human evil, Ray says:
Rootlessness, the inability to perceive oneself as connected to the rest of the world, the other, and the past, is perhaps what creates the psychotic map of the world that is evil. When one sees the world as a place from which to draw exploitatively for one’s own benefit and thinks that that is a structure worth following, then one becomes capable of doing great evil. I call this ‘extractive individualism’.
We can’t fix the disconnection that now permeates every facet of human life and experience, or the mental illness that it precipitates. But we can be aware that we are the victims of this disconnection and illness, not its natural or deliberate perpetrators. And when we do, we can re-learn to be kind to each other.
Ray says:
Everything that is successful and worth doing has to begin with care as its first step. First, you care and then you do a thing.
This attitude of focusing our energies on what we care about, and exemplifying that care, is what permeates everything that Ray does. He says care for his readers also drives and inspires everything he writes. It shows in the painstaking, perfectionist quality of his writing and the passionate idealism it expresses.
Maybe his idealism is naive. It may well be. He wants to believe our basic human nature, in spite of all the current evidence to the contrary, is cooperative, egalitarian, and peaceful. And because he wants to believe it, he does. I want to believe it, too. But I’m not yet sure it’s true.
There’s much more in the interview worth listening to, and the link above takes you both to the video and the transcript. Notably, they talk about the dehumanizing effect of war, and the enduring, damaging, twisted legacy of war, especially WW2, even 80 years later.
And they talk about how we conveniently ‘re-write’ history to pretty it up, to reinforce what we want to believe actually happened, and to reinforce our entrenched worldviews.
Much to think about here. Thanks to Chris and Ray for this inspiring and grounding interlude in a time of fear, uncertainty, and despair.
