Entraide
At Pablo Servigne and Gauthier Chapelle’s, mutual aid isn’t a virtue to be practiced but a fact of life: the tendency of organisms—bacteria, plants, fungi, animals, humans—to associate and support one another, observable from symbiosis to human reciprocity. Far from being the sentimental exception in a nature “red in tooth and claw,” it is one of the two forces shaping the living world, intimately tied to competition. Drawing on Kropotkin’s insight, the authors make it *“the other law of the jungle.”*
l’entraide est un fait omniprésent dans le monde vivant. C’en est même l’un des grands principes.
Servigne and Chapelle overturn a rallying cry. The culture inherited from the 17th century framed competition as the “natural” state of the living and cooperation as an “ideological” veneer; they demonstrate the opposite, drawing on a century and a half of research: “Science has gathered enough evidence to state what should have always remained a staggering commonplace.” Mutual aid is everywhere—lionesses cooperate to hunt, trees and fungi exchange nutrients through their roots, humans give before they receive. It is not the opposite of competition but its counterpart: life maintains “a balance between competition and cooperation, two opposing forces intimately linked and meaningless without each other. A kind of yin and yang.”
The claimed echo is that of Peter Kropotkin, who observed as early as Siberia that “organisms that help each other are those that survive best,” and published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902. Servigne and Chapelle update his thesis with ethology, experimental economics, and molecular genetics—without the moralism: “it is important not to systematically view mutual aid as a morally good act.” We help each other to survive, to close ranks, sometimes to wage war.
Mutual aid ≠ the “law of the jungle” in the sense of social Darwinism, that competitive reading of natural selection that reduces it to the struggle of the strongest: it is its other side, long invisible. And mutual aid ≠ altruism-as-virtue: it is not primarily a duty one imposes on oneself, but a fact of life that can be suppressed or displayed. The moral gesture comes after the biological observation, never before.