Mutual Aid | Peter Kropotkin | Penguin

 

I picked up Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin because the cover illustration looked interesting.  It was nothing like the fanciful colourful covers of contemporary novels.  I had never even heard of Peter Kropotkin.  But I was willing to invest some time in this book as it was published by Penguin (do I sound like I'm biased?  But I learnt that some publishers tend to offer a wide selection of titles that really can be eye-opening and like what I call 'broaden one's perspective').

In Biology class, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolutionary and natural selection was taught, and I suspect we all were 'brain-washed' into 'survival of the fittest'.  Although a Christian teacher didn't believe in evolutionary theory, she still had to talk about it in class.  Yet Peter Kropotkin's interesting observations of mutual aid was unknown - was it because he stood for anarchist communism?

First published in 1902, Mutual Aid is a product of the tumultous times, what with a turn of the century, preceding the Bolshelvik Revolution in Tsarist Russia and the Xinhai revolution in Manchurian Ching.  Yet for me, it reads like Kropotkin's observations of animals and communities aiding each other to ensure survival of the species towards prosperity even.  Sure within each species there may be cut-throat survival, yet cooporation do exist, and it would have made biology class a lot more interesting if Mutual Aid was introduced and the class could discuss if homo sapiens had progressed solely due to 'survival of the fittest', or if there was more at work?