Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on April 17, 2015 at 1:25am

Should we perhaps consider the elephant in the room? David Graeber is an American anthropologist. His national myth describes the formation of a new society through rebellion against a tyrannical king. And perhaps nowhere on Earth today is the intoxicating brew of unfinished utopian projects and random acts of violence more evident -- or at least more publicized.

Then suppose we proceed as anthropologists used to do by expanding our vision in search of comparative perspective. First stop, the 20th century, when dreams of violence as the great purifier set the world aflame. Hitler Stalin, Mao, their lesser epigones, the list is virtually endless. All embodied visons of new societies recreated and cleansed of ancient dross by the fires of war.

Step back a bit further and realize how our dreams of little communities united by shared values and peaceful exchange fail to match the realities of life among Comanches, Apaches, Iroquois, Aztecs,Incas, Dyaks, Mongols, Somalis or Zulus. Again the list is endless.

But this way lies delirium. Let us get down to the case at hand. In Graeber's analysis the Shilluk become a parable, an exemplary tale of universal human interest. Humans become societies by killing kings. But what else can we say about them?

Can someone find a map showing the distribution of Nilotic peoples in the early 20th century, to give us a sense of where the Shilluk are located in relation to the Dinka, Fong, Nuer,etc.? We are told in the paper that Shilluk territory was relatively densely populated, and that the Shilluk, far from being peaceful peasants, raided the Dinka and the Fong. We know that to the north was Egypt with a deep tradition of divine kings -- though to what extent 20th century Shilluk were aware of this tradition remains unclear. This anthropologist speculates: Are we looking at a situation like that described by Leach in highland Burma, where long political cycles oscillate between the ambitions of petty king wannabes who model themselves on the Burmese and Thai-style kings in the more populous deltas downriver from them clash with the eqalitarian ethos of those who live deeper in the mountains but are tempted by the sins of civilization? Or is this pure rubbish?

Permalink Reply by Lee Drummond on April 17, 2015 at 6:18am

John,

    The Shilluk : Highland Burma is an interesting comparison.  In both cases a single group might at different times have very different subsistence practices and political institutions.  An analogy that occurred to me – that may be a little closer – is, admittedly, rather farfetched.  David’s ethnographic summary of Shilluk economies (plural) describes  semi-nomadic pastoralists who, finding themselves on the fertile banks of the White Nile, took up intensive millet cultivation.  My far-fetched analogy is the Hidatsa-Mandan villages of the upper Missouri, who were Plains hunters settled in agriculture-based communities.  Earlier Kristian brought up ambivalence, and I, of course – you know me – ran with that like a scalded dog.  How did Hidatsa and Mandan manage their conflicting identities of hunter and farmer, with all the sharply discrepant associations those have?  What deep psychic trauma cried out for some sort of resolution?  A possible answer, I’ve suggested elsewhere: their particularly gruesome version of the Sun Dance, O-Kee-Pa, whose graphic depiction got George Catlin booted out of the ranks of American anthropology. 

    In lieu of a divine king?  

 

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on April 17, 2015 at 7:04am

Lee,

Excuse a momentary distraction.

What about the Ndembu, the Central African people studied by Vic Turner? They managed to combine hunting and agriculture without a Sun Dance.

Returning now to the Shilluk, you have clearly articulated the point toward which I was groping. Were the Shilluk whose divine kings Seligman described the same people they were even a decade before or after when he was there to visit them? Is the cultural logic of the institutions he described an enduring phenomenon or something specific to a particular place and historical moment? They may, of course, be both. The association of unfinished utopian projects with violence is common throughout history and worldwide. The association of divinity with arbitrary violence—or at least unexpected misfortune—is also common. The specific forms taken by these associations do, nonetheless, vary widely. 

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on April 17, 2015 at 10:25am

A few points:

1. 'violence' , 'sacredness' and 'sovereignty' are difficult words to pin down (e.g. violence seems to stem from a general principle of force or energy that can have good, bad or ambivalent valuings) 

2. Violence and awe are closely related in most places particularly where the killing of human beings is involved. e.g. amongst Manus where exchange relationships centred on inter-group killing and consumption of human beings followed by a cycle of exchanges involving dog's teeth etc. Killing has structuring effects as people put violence in its place - e.g. Iatmul where the act of violence was celebrated with a complicated rite of reversal with men acting as women, women as men etc. etc. In these systems there is a constant balancing of autonomous violent action with group orientation without the creation of singular leaders.

Esther Goody wrote a paper which I read a long time ago concerning 'Male Herrschaft' -- i.e. the patriarchal principle of male rule or sovereignty over women. Her point was that, when it comes down to it and despite certain kinds of elaborate symbolic analysis, the historical fact of patriarchy can to be reduced to acts of violence that women experience from and which shape their relationship with men: these violent acts are crucial in establishing patriarchy as sovereignty of men over women. 

3. Not everyone in a group feels the same way about the uses of violence, about sacredness, or about the roles these create or about the dynamic of violence/sovereignty. This leaves room for rethinking the place of violence in the social frame. The Shilluk seem to have decided to institutionalise various ways of putting violence in its place -- e.g. by surrounding the king with his wives and making sure the king's children weren't brought up anywhere near him, by limiting the king's military force to outsiders and marginals. By a rite of reversal at his coronation that played out his dependency. By making him stay up all night like the priest at Nemi under threat of being killed in his sleep by a pretender. By having one of his wives' strangle him.

What, though, is 'arbitrary' about 'arbitrary' violence?

The general hypothesis here that the leader takes on the mantle of the 'divine' by an awe-inspiring act of extreme and arbitrary violence is very interesting. It fits with the thug-turned-dictator model of the Twentieth century, but we should be careful about that analogy because it ignores how particular kinds of technological mediation played a central in those events -- millions of people put in slave camps or in concentration camps is not a matter of one person's arbitrary violence but rather of the banal or 'dull' acquiescence of thousands of bureaucrats and others. Even the initial violent coup d'etats in the societies in question was a totally different kind of phenomenon because most people in the countries were totally unaware of what had happened until they were told that the government had been taken over -- even when the events were taking place a few streets away.

Either way, the Shilluk kingship lasted as a system for several hundred years, though maybe in a 'self-similar' rather than a mechanically reiterating way. So, the idea of one arbitrary act of violence may be important, mythically, but is this rather a recognised idea than a fact of everyday experience? (Westermann mentions a hierarchised social order amongst the Shilluk, including a notion that he refers to as 'castes' whatever that may mean in this case i.e. an elaborated social order/role system).

Also, the logic seems to work the other way round and symmetry is built in --- in the Princess Diana case, it would seem that because the Princess had been elected to divinity by the people (she was the 'people's princess') this meant that her death, whatever the actual cause, must represent an act of human sacrifice. Hence, the structural contract between a people and a sovereign is locked into other dimensions of how people already understand the game plan for human relationships. So, perhaps this 'arbitrary' act of violence is not really 'arbitrary' at all?  

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on April 17, 2015 at 11:16am

Taking a quick look at Rapport and Overing's useful 'Key Concepts' survey of anthropology I came across the following quote from Edmund Leach:

"All of us are criminals by instinct ... All creativity, whether it is the work of the artist or the scholar or even the politician, contains within it a deep-rooted hostility to the system as it is"

Permalink Reply by Kristian Garthus-Niegel on April 17, 2015 at 1:57pm

In the wake of the controversies around his work on political processes in Swat, F Barth once stated:

“It is a saddening, but no doubt common, experience to see one’s analyses made banal and one’s points of view reduced to simple stereotypes.”

As stated repeatedly, I perceive Graeber’s Shilluk-text an intellectual marvel; though nevertheless deserving of a thorough critical poking, I’d hardly have it that we fall into simple, malign polemics.

I’m very happy to see the comparative thrust called for by John in action. I’ve thought a lot myself on calling in for reflection that more realistic strand of political anthropology: Schapera, Leach, Barth, Scott etc. Certainly, any attempt at a general anthropological theory of human politics would have to include an explicit address of these works; why does Graeber not do so? Surely not out of ignorance…

Huon, thanks for reminding me of the title (funny how headlines can vanish when one digs into the mess below). As you implicate, in terms of criticizing the analysis at hand, it would be most fair to judge it within its own (as John said) ‘class’; Foucauldian archeology, an epistemological stream (all the denials that this approach is no stream does not dry it up!), of which I admittedly feel quite (again) ambivalent.

The aforementioned realist strand largely emerged from fieldwork in places with quite decentralized power structures; where political processes had not aggregated into clearly sovereign forms. No surprise, then, that on-the-ground interactionist analysis, i.e. of positioned strategizing, manipulation, alliance-formations, transactions, charismatic leadership etc. took precedence to that of more socially consolidated, ideologized forms of power. Greaber’s, I think, should mainly be judged as a variant of the latter kind. As such, I restate the particular comparative relevance of Wolf’s 1999-book. Unlike the realists, Wolf was similarly focused on a general theorizing specifically of the intersection between political power and ideology.

To me, Greaber’s generalized account of the ideological underpinnings of Shilluk rulership during the, say, 18^th-mid 20^th C comes across as highly convincing. Furthermore, I have no trouble accepting a general claim that intrinsic to all sovereign forms of political power is a moral monopolization of practices violence. I just don’t see any big departure from Weber here; though not as formally consolidated as in modern nation states, the sovereignty of Shilluk kings appears to have been clearly territorialized.

My biggest issue regards the attempt to anchor phenomena of ideologically consolidated violence from above in what he calls “fundamental human conditions” (the suggestion is almost a diametric opposite to Wolf’s more ecological thesis!). Here the Foucauldian (or perhaps more precisely, the Nietzschean) twist comes in full force. Now, I think we must be clear that, in archaeological terms, excavating ruins and bones of olde’ is not the same as excavating historical ideas. Of the many differences, the perhaps most significant in the kind of critical idea archaeology that Foucault did is its leanings to psychoanalytic theory (the revival of psychoanalytic theory in cultural anthropology via Foucault and his fellow French-men just as it became abandoned in psychology is in itself quite curious, considering how cultural anthropology once used to be Freudianism’s staunchest critic!).

Reviewing Shilluk/Abrahamic origin myths, Graeber writes:

“The human condition, then, is one of irreparable loss and separation. We have gained the ability to grow our own food, but at the expense of hunger; we have gained sex and reproduction, but at the cost of death. We are being punished, but our punishment seems utterly disproportionate to our crimes.”

As I take him, he claims that it is essentially from the muddy soils of the collective experience of this irresolvable existentialist dilemma, in its distributed social operations among the-persons-to-be-Shilluk, that Shilluk kingship, in all its ideological, ritual and violent abundance, grows.

I’ll raise two issues to such a claim that I find particularly problematic:

First, it is not quite clear whether Graeber means that this condition goes for all of us, or whether he is merely pinpointing a culture-specific ontological orientation. Hence, if other phenomena of political sovereignty are similarly the fruits of aggregates of people coping with ‘fundamental human conditions’, are they the same ones, or do they have to be re-excavated in each individual case?

Second (a point also raised by Lee in his first post), Graeber may indeed have identified one prototypical social form by which humans cope with existential dilemmas, i.e., by subjecting themselves to political sovereigns. Yet, as the realist stream mentioned above clearly illustrates, political sovereignty does by no means emerge everywhere, hence humans can deal with such dilemmas in multiple social forms. Lee suggested that we try thinking of alternative forms, which threw many of us to the realists. As an alternative, Graeber could try to unravel further the particular circumstances that gave rise to the 'political sovereign'-form of coping  among the Shilluk (which might prove to lead down a more Wolfian trail).

Huon, as to the relevance of Graeber’s work to our own societies, it seems like it's more coined at whatever manifests as politically sovereign constellations. Though our antiquated monarchic institutions surely play some role in the symbolic legitimation of their patron nation states, I think they have grown somewhat peripheral in terms of the dynamics Graeber has in mind.

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on April 17, 2015 at 2:33pm

For those with the time and interest, here is another early 20th century source on the Shilluk: https://archive.org/details/shillukpeopleth01westgoog

A Google search for "Shilluk" produces a Wikipedia page with several additional links.

Permalink Reply by Lee Drummond on April 17, 2015 at 11:29pm

 

 

Huon, Kristian,

    Huon,

    These are very good, substantive points.  Sovereignty, sacredness, and violence are slippery  terms.  And, as you ask, what is “arbitrary” about “arbitrary violence”?

    I think there is a strong “inside” vs. “outside” element at work in all of the above.  And each is subject to major political, historical, ideological changes.  For example, right now in the U. S. a band of a couple of dozen (heavily ethnically mixed) “Native Americans” can proclaim themselves a “sovereign nation,” be recognized as such by the federal government, and proceed to build an enormous casino and open up a bunch of smoke shops (to sell cigarettes sans tax).  Not so many years ago, members of that band were essentially displaced persons, impoverished wards of the government.  Now far-flung members of the band, living all over the place, have rediscovered their “national” identity and signed on for a slice of big casino revenues.  In the meantime, the same federal government steadfastly denies sovereign status to the Palestinians, who have languished for generations in Israeli concentration camps.  Sovereignty is a complex, messy – not to say dirty – business. 

    “Violence” is subject to a similar latitude in definition and application.  David writes that we really have to worry when arbitrary violence is transformed through “bureaucratization” and “euphemination” into impersonal routine.  The “wheels of justice” turn slowly – as in the two-year murder trial of star football player Aaron Hernandez.  Alternatively, our government can mete out instant “justice” in the form of a drone strike on a Pakistani village.  You gotta think folks in that village found death raining down from the sky pretty arbitrary.  “Divine” justice, courtesy of the CIA. 

    Complicated as these points are, all this makes me keen to learn your thoughts on the Big Questions you posed when the seminar was being organized:

 

Specifically, since for most of human history people did not aggregate in states; where did the idea of handing over sovereignty to a centralised authority come from? Even more specifically, states are characterised by their control over the use of violence which in most instances is what backs up their ability to do other things like taxing people and guaranteeing their own debts, but why would a people allow the means to commit violence to be centralised when that violence can be (and often is) used against them?

A tough one, I know. 

Kristian:

    You focus on an aspect of David’s argument that, I think, meshes well with Huon’s comments above: societies are complicated, changeful entities which naturally resist attempts to formulate Ur-type interpretations of them.  As you write,

 

My biggest issue regards the attempt to anchor phenomena of ideologically consolidated violence from above in what he calls “fundamental human conditions” (the suggestion is almost a diametric opposite to Wolf’s more ecological thesis!). Here the Foucauldian (or perhaps more precisely, the Nietzschean) twist comes in full force.

 

    Social thought always seems to come up against the impossible requirement to account for an enormous diversity of social arrangements and what we can identify as David’s “fundamental human conditions.”  Surely the irresolvable dilemmas he identifies – springing from a sense of loss and separation – have an important place in any deep social theory, but what, and how do we reconcile all that diversity with the Ur-issues?  Your thoughts? 

   Incidentally, regarding Wolf’s Envisioning Power, he may be more lumping or holistic than you describe, glossing over internal systemic differences within the groups – Aztecs, Kwakiutl, Nazi Germany – he analyzes.  Check out Michael Mann’s review in Contemporary Sociology (available through jstor).  Mann also finds that Wolf does not really tackle the crucial question of how power and ideology fit or don’t fit together.  So, back to the juggling act of diverse social arrangements vis-à-vis “fundamental conditions.”  

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on April 18, 2015 at 1:36am

How do we reconcile all that diversity with the Ur-issues

Look to the biologists my friends.

No, I am not advocating some form of crude reductionism. I am simply pointing out that we are not the only science whose central problem is a vast diversity of answers to a few basic questions. Eat, excrete, grow, reproduce. It doesn't get much more basic than that. But birds, bees, and bacteria all have their own ways of addressing these issues. Our colleagues in the biological sciences have well-developed paradigms for studying how they do it. Evolution and adaptation to specific ecological niches provides a broad framework, and within that broad framework there has now been a shift to the specific mechanisms involved in evolution and adaptation at levels ranging from genome to ecosystem.

Yes, I do realize that since the species we study are humans, we must take into account cultural traditions. But we know that customs and habits change in response to material conditions and interactions with other humans. Culture is at most a matter of dispositions, and there are always those breaking established patterns. They are the ones who drive change. And now we live in times where whole worlds, art, technology, corporations are constantly pushing innovation. So cultural logic alone will never be sufficient to explain what people do.

So here we have the Shilluk. The cultural logic of Shilluk divine kingship is fascinating and may, as I have previously observed, be a parable that directs our attention to the relations of utopian projects to violence in other times and places. But how was that cultural logic affected by the material conditions of Shilluk life and what appears to have been the endemic warfare between themselves and other peoples, the Dinka, Fong, etc.?

Permalink Reply by David Graeber on April 18, 2015 at 2:16am

Hi all, since I've been encouraged to add correctives, let me start out with one minor one:

Kristian Garthus-Niegel said:

1. Data collection: As explicitly stated, hardly any actual anthropological fieldwork was ever conducted among the Shilluk. The presented data, mainly hauled from amateur ethnological writings of British colonial personnel, has quite a hearsay character.

     I probably overstated how bad the sources were. Actually, there's a good deal of material. True it's from missionaries and colonial officials rather than trained anthropologists - though there is Seligman, who's halfway there, and one dissertation does sit at Oxford, on Shilluk ethnohistory (if I remember the author, who was Shilluk, died before completing a book), and there's some other material by professional anthropologists - the main material that the accounts of the inauguration ritual rest on is actually pretty solid, and not vague and "hearsay." John Middleton told me the authors, while officials, had a fair amount of anthropological training at Oxbridge, and were considered pretty bright students, and one of them basically did write up a detailed ethnography, which sits in the archives at Durham in manuscript form. I used some of this material in my account. 

2. Data type: Heavily dominated by cosmological/ritual accounts, which in the first place was quite likely delivered to British colonial personnel by politically motivated Shilluk elites and specialists.

     

    Again,it was both missionaries and officials and it seems to be pretty solid; at least, there are a lot of sources and they tend to corroborate each other. It's the detail of everyday community organisation that has to be pieced together with difficulty. Political material is quite detailed, as well as yes, myth, ritual, and such.

3. Analytic procedure: More or less exclusively centered in psycho-socially framed symbol hermeneutics.

 

    I thought the main theme of the piece was politics and violence, actually.

4. Generalization: The text keeps feeding generalizations at all kinds of levels (i.e. from the Shilluk, to the Nilotic peoples, to centralized states, to the fundamental human condition); yet only two of them are explicitly formulated. The rest come out in much more vague shapes, just so explicit as to keep the reader suspended in a feeling of being continuously on the brink of satori.

  

     Well yes I generalise on various levels. Guilty as charged. It's a theory piece after all. 

Permalink Reply by David Graeber on April 18, 2015 at 2:32am

Huon Wardle said:

Esther Goody wrote a paper which I read a long time ago concerning 'Male Herrschaft' -- i.e. the patriarchal principle of male rule or sovereignty over women. Her point was that, when it comes down to it and despite certain kinds of elaborate symbolic analysis, the historical fact of patriarchy can to be reduced to acts of violence that women experience from and which shape their relationship with men: these violent acts are crucial in establishing patriarchy as sovereignty of men over women. 

I don't suppose you could track this down, I would be very keen to read it. 

What, though, is 'arbitrary' about 'arbitrary' violence?

Well, I thought one of the great themes of the paper was that the violence constitutive of sovereignty is seen to be arbitrary. In the sense of: unstrategic, indeed, unmotivated at least in terms of its particular target, basically just sort of random. Aiming a weapon into a crowd where you could hit anyone is arbitrary in the sense that you haven't picked out someone you want to kill, for some reason, but are specifically not doing that to show that you could kill anyone you like and don't have to have a particular reason. That's arbitrary.

The general hypothesis here that the leader takes on the mantle of the 'divine' by an awe-inspiring act of extreme and arbitrary violence is very interesting. It fits with the thug-turned-dictator model of the Twentieth century, but we should be careful about that analogy because it ignores how particular kinds of technological mediation played a central in those events -- millions of people put in slave camps or in concentration camps is not a matter of one person's arbitrary violence but rather of the banal or 'dull' acquiescence of thousands of bureaucrats and others. Even the initial violent coup d'etats in the societies in question was a totally different kind of phenomenon because most people in the countries were totally unaware of what had happened until they were told that the government had been taken over -- even when the events were taking place a few streets away.

It's been my observation that even in those bureaucratic and systematic forms of state terror, that role of randomness, inexplicable and unjustifiable force, does play an important symbolic role. My direct experience here has been of activist friends who've been arrested and imprisoned. The one thing they always remark on is the jailer's insistence on making up random charges that they know aren't true, that are often on the face of it absurd, even when, in some cases, they could just as easily have made up more plausible or even true ones. One example that stuck in my mind was a jail cell where the authorities had apparently left chipped paint on the wall for each occupant, just so they could falsely accuse whoever was there of chipping paint off the wall and punish them for a crime they knew they didn't commit. Especially since in dealing with activists they were fairly constrained, they couldn't really convict them for anything as they hadn't actually done anything, they waned to create at least some area where they could convey a sense that "justice has nothing to do with anything here; you're under our power; we can accuse you of anything we like and there's nothing you can do about it." Similarly, people were completely randomly selected for, say, felony charges, which were made up completely off the top of policemen's heads. This arbitrariness clearly seemed to be not just a by-product of bureaucratic confusion but an intrinsic part of the exercise of power. "We can do anything we like at any time and don't have to have a reason, we can say anything we like and it doesn't have to have the remotest relation to the truth, we can punish you in any way we like and it doesn't have to have anything to do with justice" - all this was being clearly communicated. 

Either way, the Shilluk kingship lasted as a system for several hundred years, though maybe in a 'self-similar' rather than a mechanically reiterating way. So, the idea of one arbitrary act of violence may be important, mythically, but is this rather a recognised idea than a fact of everyday experience? (Westermann mentions a hierarchised social order amongst the Shilluk, including a notion that he refers to as 'castes' whatever that may mean in this case i.e. an elaborated social order/role system).

I thought the stories and descriptions conveyed quite clearly that fairly random predatory behaviour was typical of kings, throughout this period, which is why subjects tended to flee or hide when they thought they were coming around.

Also, the logic seems to work the other way round and symmetry is built in --- in the Princess Diana case, it would seem that because the Princess had been elected to divinity by the people (she was the 'people's princess') this meant that her death, whatever the actual cause, must represent an act of human sacrifice. Hence, the structural contract between a people and a sovereign is locked into other dimensions of how people already understand the game plan for human relationships. So, perhaps this 'arbitrary' act of violence is not really 'arbitrary' at all?  

Sorry, I lose you here. You seem to have decided that "arbitrary" means "meaningless" and therefore that showing an act has meaning means it is not arbitrary. To the contrary I am arguing that the arbitrariness is the meaning.

Permalink Reply by David Graeber on April 18, 2015 at 2:39am

    It had not occurred to me anyone would take this as implying inaction. Actually I consider it not an investigation into the nature of the state at all, but as I say, of sovereignty. The power held by emperors and kings, which is one of the principles underlying the modern state, but by no means the only one. If it has an activist relevance, it's perhaps to reinforce the growing literature that suggests that the notion of "the people" is a problematic one to use as the basis of resistance to the state because (as many others, most famously Toni Negri, have noted) it is caught up in the constitution of sovereign power itself and seems designed to inevitably reproduce it. I just take the argument a step further and say that "the people" in that sense is constituted in relation to sovereign power, in a relation of mutual antagonism, and always has been; however, there are plenty other bases for political solidarity other than being part of something that might be termed "the people" in this sense, and there are also principles underlying political or even state power other than sovereignty.

Eugene said:

38 pages in and I have to reply, because I might not have the time. I understand that I might have missed many things and possibly some humor.

Now that David is here, I won’t have to ponder too much about the writer’s intentions. So, I’ll begin with the feelings I got from reading the first 38 pages.

This essay seems to be the beginning of a cosmology of the state and alienation, and call to movement, in the present.  Therefore, if I am not careful, the purpose of this paper could slide into a kind of metaphysical obscurity that might possibly lead to inaction.

Next, I see hints at “ritual insurrection” and the connection to terror that alludes to a primordial praxis of social dissidence – solidarity, “everyone must be involved”, which also brings up ethical and moral (or anti-moral and anti-ethical) arguments between those involved in egoist movements and those of social movements. Nevertheless, such is for another discussion, or not?

I also interpreted this paper as a struggle for spaces: meta-burden spaces and actual spaces. When human beings had begun to create a habit of placing burden on top of the jackass, they also began to separate; and, eagerly and actually prostrate to the unfathomable - humiliation turns into antagonism, “he will no longer make fun of us” (this quote might have a different meaning) or “he can no longer take our dignity”: insurrection, a fight for actual and meta spaces.

Perhaps Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid should be taught next to Darwin? Or perhaps cooperation and application could be taught, in schools and our homes, over theory and stagnation?  (This is a metaphor for the various actions that might be necessary for a hopeful outcome. Yes, education is important, as are other ‘things’) 

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