Mutual Aid and the Struggle for Life
Text: Acts 6
Speaker: Joel Miller
Locusts, beetles, land crabs, termites, ants, and bees. This could be the beginning of a list of things you hope not to find in your house during a round of spring-cleaning. These are also some of the creatures that show up in the first chapter of an old book by the Russian Peter Kropotkin called Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution. I came across the book a couple summers ago in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. When you’re in a cool bookstore in a cool city it’s pretty self-evident that buying a book there will make you at least a somewhat cooler person. This one caught my attention because of the artwork bordering the text of each page, a 21st century enhancement of a 19th century book. The author was new to me, but the topic was one I think a lot about, mutual aid.
Peter Kropotkin was writing a generation after...