Mutual Aid. Pablo Servigne

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 1. Facilitator in collective intelligence. See www.audeladesnuages.com.

      2 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. СКАЧАТЬ