Mutual Aid: The security and longevity of a species.
the counter-intuitive!
During my recent visit to southern India, two aspects of feral life fascinated and impressed me deeply. One being the extreme severity and struggle for existence, because of human agency and or Nature’s fury. Insects, birds, animals, and aquatic creatures spread over natural and urban expanses face enormous destruction of life periodically, every day, hour, and minute. The loss cannot be mapped over a vast territory, and the second being the ‘few spots’ where animal life thrived in abundance, revealing an underlying culture and synergy based on mutual aid.
Akin to what Goethe insisted as “parental feelings”–one that exists within almost every living creature, equates to care for the progeny as well as the surrounding community. The Darwinian logic of “bitter struggle for existence…survival of the fittest” is not visible within many species of birds, animals, and amphibians facing extreme conditions inside degraded ecosystems. What appeared contrary to my earlier understanding was that across species mutual aid is a governing factor of survival, and perhaps the framework of future security. How a species may achieve long term security yet very different from our own species in it’s modern form.
Setting aside the popular axioms of human evolution, I think that mutual aid has pre-human origins and consequently has shaped our moral instincts a long time ago. Almost as an extension of an embedded law within Nature. The following story is a throwback in time, to uncover the natural history of mutual aid as an evolutionary practice, that may also prove crucial for the very survival of human beings in the near future. “Mutual Aid can be viewed as part of the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity.” (Pëtr Kropotkin)
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[Last paragraph below. Ed.]
The triumph of individualism, competition and unbridled growth for the last 150 years is unraveling consequences and threats in ways never seen before. In the domain of ethics, mutual aid reappears as a principle and a “natural tendency.” As the world precipitously falls from a “green paradise” (The Dune) to one of no meaning and mass extinction, it is clear that human beings are the ‘unsociable species’ as individualists and reckless growth freaks. Unlike the natural world, are human beings doomed in this evolutionary game of mutual aid and solidarity?
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