Brotherhood Week Is A Bore

It’s February. And mutual expressions of mutual respect are in the air. Interfaith cliches vie with the propaganda of the American dream to decorate a thousand banquets in a hundred cities. Hordes of citizens are advised to ‘love’ everybody. And the most beautiful of human emotions is trivialized into some vague affection for anonymous strangers.

The anarchist legend is abroad in the land. If only good people could be free of wicked rulers who manipulate them to evil ends, if only the ordinary man could respond to the deepest needs of his authentic self, then brotherhood would be possible and all men would live happier ever after. Human nature craves brotherhood. But social institutions distort it.

To feel at one with humanity is as natural as eating and sex. It requires no intense self-discipline; it demands no immense self-sacrifice. The ‘real’ person liberated from the fear of social punishment, will prefer universalism to tribalism, human solidarity to family unity.

Is brotherhood natural?

It all depends on what you mean by ‘brotherhood’. If you mean a love and devotion to those you know intimately, the answer is yes. If you mean an attachment and loyalty to all mankind, the answer is no.

Desmond Morris is most likely right. In his latest book The Human Zoo he points out that, for most of man’s evolutionary history, he has lived in groups smaller than the clan. While it is true that man is disposed to cooperation, his cooperative instinct extends no farther than the hunting group. In an underpopulated world, loyalty to mankind was both inconceivable and at unnecessary. It had no survival value.

Without planned conditioning, a man will lay down his life to save his family and his ‘buddies’. A million years of adaptation to living through hunting guaranteed that instinctive sacrifice. But the human environment has radically changed. Ten thousand years ago the discovery of farming revolutionized the human condition. Surplus food and surplus wealth created the opportunities of trade, urban living, and technology. In ten thousand years man has so altered the scenery and props of daily activity that a million years of patient evolution is irrelevant to his survival. All the behavior patterns that are good for hunters are bad for computer age urbanites.

We cannot voluntarily return to the environment where our instincts are comfortable. To accomplish this feat, we would have to discard our present technology and kill off seven-eighths of the people on this planet. Only nuclear madmen would find the program attractive.

Unless man can reject his nature and feel empathy for people he does not know, he will be destroyed. Without world unity, and without a sense of primary loyalty to the mass of strangers called mankind, disaster is inevitable.

So what is the answer?

The answer, strangely enough, is to be found in the one existing institution that is the greatest enemy of universal brotherhood. It is called the nation-state.

Although the nation-state is the sponsor of the nationalism and chauvinism that subvert all rational attempts to control weapons, population, and pollution, it is ‘artificial’ – in the same way that world brotherhood will have to be ‘artificial’. As Desmond Morris aptly demonstrates, the modern nation-state is too large for the intimacy the cooperative instinct requires. It is a deliberate attempt to forge a unity among men that that transcends their natural empathy.

Unlike the hunting group, no Member, of any nationality can know all the individuals in his tribe, his loyalty is derived from no face-to-face encounter, no personal friendship, no continuous dependence. Once you get beyond the closeness of the family and clan, the national government is as impersonal as a world government – and nationalism is as ‘unnatural’ as universalism.

Then why is nationalism so popular and the nation-state so successful?

The answer is conditioning. If, as a child, you are conditioned to the illusion of intimacy, (even when it does not exist) – as a citizen, you can be led to imagine that the members of your nationality group are just like the members of your family, the age-old instinct for cooperation can be extended beyond the small clan.

After all, most nation-states were the deliberate creations of energetic rulers who, sought to mold a unity where none had existed before. Israelite, nationalism was the end-result of the state policies of David and Solomon. Twelve quarreling tribes and two confederations were subjected to the relentless propaganda of a fictitious common ancestry, a new national god, and the splendor of a national shrine. Later rulers introduced a common set of holidays, shared ritual, and a uniform external appearance of beard and ear locks. Even though one Jew did not know another Jew, the identities of language, clothing, hairstyle and ritual behavior were sufficient to create the illusion of intimacy. The stranger Jew was as familiar as father or cousin.

France and French patriotism were the conscious creations of the Valois and Bourbon kings, who centralized culture. They suppressed regional dialects and elevated the Parisian style to national eminence. Improved roads and trade enhanced their power and made uniformity more feasible. In time, the citizen of Rouen and the merchant of Toulouse spoke the same language, saluted the same flag, sang the same songs, and preferred the same fashions. If they met each other, even though they were strangers, they saw each other as familiar. By the days of Napoleon, every Frenchman believed that he had thirty million brothers, most of whom he had never seen. Such patriotic fervor may seem ‘natural’. But it isn’t.

The illusion of intimacy is the key to unifying groups of people bigger than the prehistoric clan. Without the uniformity of external appearance, speech, and behavior, such oneness would not be possible. Where personal friendship is no longer possible as a bond of brotherhood, easily Visible signs of identity are necessary. If the man cannot be my friend, he must, at least, look like my friend.

One of the purposes of group ritual, even something as trivial as the greeting ‘how are you?’, is to enable people who are strangers to each other to communicate and cooperate. Without these procedures, without these substitutes for intimacy, human relations in an urban society. would collapse. Awkwardness would produce fear and fear would promote aggression.

To be spontaneous at all times, to ‘do your thing’ in any situation, is to subvert social unity. It is to demand the privileges of family and friendship in an impersonal environment that can provide neither. Where the behavior of strangers is, in no way, familiar, loyalty and empathy are not possible.

Nations whose governments Only talk about patriotism, but whose leaders pay no attention to shared language, costumes, flags, and diet, have very little future. In fact, nations that encourage wide differences in language, symbols, and personal appearance, have very little future. They destroy the illusion of intimacy by which they alone survive.

There is a lesson for the advocate of world brotherhood in this reality. If the universalist missionary intends to build human unity. by promoting love, he is destined for failure. He is making a demand on the human nervous system that violates its evolutionary nature. How many people can one person genuinely love, even in friendship? How many people
can one man feel sincerely intimate with? Without intense closeness over long periods of time, human relations are shallow. And that means that most human relations, in an overcrowded, urbanized world, are shallow. Unless they can be formalized by familiar ritual, they cannot exist.

The current cult of pluralism which exalts diversity and difference is an attractive doctrine. It would be nice to live in a world where, every group could ‘do their thing’, where they could paint their bodies anyway they wanted to, dress in whatever costume suited their fancy, use whatever private language they were in the mood to utter, employ whatever public gestures they felt like displaying – and simultaneously bind the people of the world together through openminded toleration. The history of man denies this vision any reality.

The illusion of intimacy demands a certain minimum of visible uniformity. Men must be able to see their unity before they can feel it. There must be something that all men wear, all men say, all men sing, all men publicly respect, if they are to respond to each other as brothers. In the struggle for human unity (which is also the struggle for human survival) wide differences of external appearance and manner are subversive of the intended goal.

Differences of opinions and ideas are not the issue. These are internal, and are, ironically, more trivial. Where strangers must be united, the cliche must be reversed. What is on the ‘outside’ is more important than what is on the ‘inside’. A campaign for world unity starts with the visible. It seeks to establish certain clearly seen patterns of behavior and appearance that allow people of different cultures 1t0 view each other as alike. It avoids the pleasant fantasies of current democratic propaganda and does not try to make compatible what is incompatible. It simply accepts the reality that you cannot maximize individual and group differences and simultaneously foster world brotherhood.

World unity will only be possible if the following conditions prevail. Although they are less important than the issues of disarmament and nuclear disengagement, they are still necessary.

(1) The greatest barriers among the people of the world, are linguistic. Men who cannot talk together cannot live together with any real sense of identity. Ironically, language, which is intended to promote communication among people, frustrates its own goal. The defense of linguistic uniqueness is the most effective way one group shuts itself off from another. Most national governments insist on the exclusive use of the national language for all business and education. Even India is trying to replace universal English with parochial Hindi.

African countries, which are economically the most primitive, are linguistically the most progressive. Since they are often nothing more that collections of diverse tribes with diverse cultures, they are forced, for national purposes, to use either English or French, as their unifying language. The educational result is a more cosmopolitan citizen than the Arab to the north.

Without a world language, mankind lacks the audible substance of brotherhood. Right now, English seems the most likely
candidate for that role. To encourage the use of English in all international communication and as a second language in all countries may be simply a form of underhanded Anglosaxon imperialism. But it is also an act of world citizenship.

(2) There is a surprising unity of appearance among all people in the industrialized nations. International trade and easy communication have reduced the old differences between London, Moscow, and Tokyo. The fashionable housewife walking the Ginza looks very much like the suburban matron shopping Fifth Avenue. Contrary to current public opinion and the intrusion of the hippie style, the dress and decor of all classes in the wealthy nations are becoming increasingly more uniform.

The ‘rub’ comes in the have-not countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The material level of the local peasants and urban workers make their appearance and manner strikingly different from the affluent Western. If the prosperity difference between the rich and poor nations of the world continues to increase, the appearance difference will also increase. The American of the year 2000 will find it very difficult to identify with the contemporary Chinese farmer if his living style is as different from the Chinese as electronics is from night-soil. Compassion and empathy will surrender entirely to contempt.

Only if industrial countries are willing to inhibit the rise in their own standard of living, and share with the have-nots can this division be avoided.

(3) Goodwill missionaries usually deny the importance of race differences. They advise their listeners that race IS only skin deep and quite trivial. All men, they say, must learn to love each other, regardless of physical appearance.

But physical appearance is not trivial. The human nervous system is so constituted that it responds readily to what can easily be perceived. Skin-color, facial structure, and hair texture are more visible, and therefore, in the case of strangers, more significant than personal character. The races of the modern world are still essentially segregated and mutually hostile. Only widespread mescegenation can reduce this hostility. Only the reduction of visible differences can effect a sense of brotherhood. A world in which there is less racial variety is more desirable than a world which exalts group uniqueness at the price of human unity.

Praising visible differences is ideal for the sermon at interracial banquets. But it has little effect on human response. Reducing visible difference is more difficult. But it strikes at the guts. Without more and more interracial offspring, the illusion of intimacy will be hard to achieve.

(4) In a world of strangers, individuality will require good judgment. It will concentrate less on personal appearance and language and will turn to the less visible realm of ideas and values. The socially conscious individualist will be less concerned with personal flamboyance and more concerned with autonomous judgment. He will sometimes even cultivate-conformity of appearance, and ‘good manners’, while he seeks to change and improve the environment around him.

The socially responsible individualist will never underestimate the power of his appearance, manner, and language. He will seek to use them to express his unity with other ten – and not merely to indulge his personal whim.

So what will happen?

I don’t know. All I know is that a society that underestimates the amount of external sameness required for social togetherness will pay the consequences of a short-run individualism. We have to live in a world unrelated to our evolution. Only immense self-discipline will enable -us to survive.