Brotherhood

You may not remember Tom Lehrer, who performed his own satirical songs, very successfully, in the 1960s – but his offerings included a song satirizing the whole idea of National Brotherhood Week. The last stanza began: 

“It’s fun to eulogize the people you despise.”

The foil for this frivolity was a genuine decades-long effort to encourage tolerance, or at least discourage intolerance, among Americans who of course were a highly diverse mixture of ethnicities, religions, and national origins.

But the ironies of brotherhood seem to be inborn in humanity. Why else did whoever wrote the book of Genesis (the first book in the Bible) make it almost begin (Chapter 4) with a story about the very first two brothers (Cain and Abel, the first children of Adam and Eve), one of whom kills the other? Making matters worse, this is no accident or sudden impulse, but deliberate murder, based on pure jealousy. (At least sex doesn’t come into it. No woman is mentioned.)

Thus, it seems, we have the well-known problem of “sibling rivalry” dating back to the original siblings. In our era, the comedy/musical duo called the Smothers Brothers, had a running gag, in which Tom, the elder, complained to his brother, Dick, that “Mom always liked you best.”  

But of course, that is only one side of the coin. On the other side, there’s the natural closeness of family relationships which is not only biological, but comes from living together. That sentiment is exemplified by the story told by Father Edward Flanagan, the founder of the orphanage and educational complex in Nebraska known as Boys Town. He related an incident in which one boy, who was carrying another on his back, told the priest, “He ain’t heavy, Father – He’s my brother.”

Monks in Monasteries have called each other “Brother” for millennia. And college clubs known as Fraternities, use the same brotherly terms (from the Latin “Frater”). But the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” which is still the official motto of the Republic of France and appears on their currency, goes back to the French Revolution of the 1790s, and a time when the feelings between the peasantry and the aristocracy were anything but brotherly, and more symbolized by the guillotine than by clasped hands of friendship.

But what is brotherhood really all about? How should brotherly feelings be expressed? First and most important, I suppose, is helping each other, and doing so more readily than the rules of any “mutual aid” society, club, or other organization would require. The ultimate test would be giving your life to save your brother – or, if not your life, then (something becoming more common nowadays) giving a bodily organ without which you yourself can still survive. Of course, there may be other factors involved which might make it even more compelling for brother to save brother, including a common genetic background.

(Many of my generation may remember the first successful heart transplant, performed in 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa, by Christiaan Barnard, a local surgeon – but there was no relationship between the donor, who of course had to be dead, and the recipient. Still, it was very exciting news, and seemed somehow to emphasize how much we humans all have in common.)

Looking more broadly at the subject, idealists like to think of that common humanity, which makes us so much alike in so many ways, as a brotherhood, which of course should have rendered warfare impossible, but somehow never has. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony supposedly celebrates the brotherhood of man. It was first performed in 1824, and concludes with a choral version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which has the words (in German, of course), “All Mankind shall be brothers,” written in 1785. Between those two dates occurred the long catastrophic period known as the Napoleonic Wars, which included, among much else, America’s second war with Britain and Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia.

Now, more recently, we have had two World Wars. After the first one, the American President, Woodrow Wilson, who had taken his country into it, helped to establish a League of Nations – which theoretically, by discussion and arbitration, would prevent any future war from breaking out. But Wilson could not even get his own country to become a member.

Let’s let Tom Lehrer have the last word. Here is how he concludes his celebration of National Brotherhood Week:

“It’s only for a week, so have no fear –
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!”