Mexican Manna to Mutual Aid

Mexican Manna to Mutual Aid

It is a daily test of imagination to link two words that start with the same letter and then coherently link the words together. So my two M words today are Mexican manna and mutual aid. I figure that with the outbreak of the Mexican swine flu, which has touched people as far away as Israel and New Zealand, Mexicans and the world need manna to get through these difficult times. Not the actual spelt bread eaten in the desert by the ancient Israelites, but good news of better times that will taste sweet like manna.

Mentioned in Exodus Chapter 16, manna was eaten by ancient Jews as they wandered in the desert. Manna had a rather sweet taste. Exodus points out that manna's taste was like wafers drizzled with honey. I almost feel like going to make some, although my culinary skills are dubious at best! In the Book of Numbers, manna came at night when the dew had evaporated. Ancient Jews were instructed to eat just the manna gathered for the day and they saved additional manna for the Sabbath. Manna might have resembled white coriander seeds in colour, it was prepared as cakes to eat, and its taste varied according to who ate it. The Qu'ran describes manna in more spiritual terms as "good things" provided as "sustenance."

Given the current swine flu in Mexico and beyond, we need manna in the spiritual sense. In soccer-mad Mexico, soccer stadiums are empty! Cafes, restaurants, bars, schools, and museums are empty. The main Mexican health chief announced today that cases of new swine flu are levelling off. Is this the manna we are waiting for? Canada had 5 new cases today and the number of infected cases has reached 34. 168 Mexicans have died from the swine flu.

What the swine flu reveals is that your problems over there are my problems here. We are so globally interconnected, but we often live in our isolated worlds. Potential pandemics remind us of our common humanity. And do they not tell us that our spiritual manna can come from mutual aid? That is, from helping each other on the planet, irrespective of our national background, culture, religion, or ideological orientation.

In 1902, a Russian anarchist named Peter Kropotkin published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Kropotkin undermined the prevalent Darwinian attitudes of his epoch by showing that cooperation rather than competition is more fundamental to the survival of animals. Kropotkin was not merely an anarchist dabbling in biological experiments in Siberia. His work has been lauded by some biologists for pointing to the inherent strengths of cooperation in advancing positive individual qualities within some species. It has been criticized by others like Steven Jay Gould who insists that there can be no "moral shortcuts" to how it is we decide to live as societies, or to construct our political institutions. These answers must be found not in nature but within ourselves. Bottom line: We must decide whether we want to stress mutual aid, or competition in terms of how we structure our lives and social and political relationships.

There are so many different answers to what is human nature and whether humans are egoistic or altruistic. Thomas Hobbes subscribed to a dark and pessimistic view of humans in the state of nature before the era of governments: Life is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. Each person can potentially kill us, even the weak, particularly when we are sleeping. For Hobbes, there was a war of all against all, all the time! Rousseau saw man or woman as corrupted by institutions, private property, and government and bureaucratic structures. Before these corrupting institutions came along, the "noble savage" was peaceful, cooperative, and sociable. In the 20th century, perfectionist ideologies such as Fascism, Nazism, and Bolshevik communism rejected both liberal and conservative views of human nature to radically create "new men and women" that were sculpted like marble by their elitist charismatic leaders, the dogmatic Party, and the all-powerful state. The consequences were dark and tragic, including gulags and concentration camps that sought to kill both bodies and the spirit of people seeking to be free from tyranny and abstract ideologies.

Mutual aid is one answer to what is human nature. I cannot posit it as a Truth. And we should not accept that any guardians of Truth declare what human nature is, or what it is not. Humans are capable of great generosity and mutual aid, but also callous indifference and inhumanity towards their fellow creatures and the non-human worlds. Yet, what I can say is that in the midst of the Mexican swine flu, we need spiritual manna and more mutual aid. And the lessons are certainly applicable to the other great problems of our age from nuclear annihilation and environmental decay to poverty and unemployment. When times are dark, we might have the desire to blame our fellow creatures. Perhaps the better gamble is to increase the hope, the stories of manna salvation in the midst of years of desert wandering, and our mutual aid.

Tamir Bar-On