Communicating Brotherhood

[A paper to the Arcane School Conference London June 14^th 2008.]

The first paragraph of The Preparatory Thoughts for this year’s conference can be applied to thinking about the energies involved in communicating brotherhood. It asks us to “Watch and interpret current events”. It tells us to “note the expression of the precipitating and penetrating energies, in order to cooperate as far as your insights permit, and thus further the right production of the required effects.” We need to recognise these energies in their effects and support those effects in the way we think about life, in the way we talk about life, and in the way we act upon life.

Communicating brotherhood to others is never going to be easy. While brotherhood has merit as an ideal, it lacks real evidence that it will work on a global scale in any kind of practical way given the behaviour we experience in our daily lives. This reality we find in the expression “trust in Allah, but tie up your camel”. While we want to act as if everyone is honest, we know that people do nasty things to each other and we need to take that kind of behaviour into account.

Some of the likely consequences of a globally practised brotherhood pose real challenges to many good people and the starting point for any conversation about brotherhood must be the acceptance of the idea of humanity as a unitary whole. This means thinking about ourselves as a species and not as individuals, as races, as ethnic groups, nor indeed as football teams. We need to relate to each other as a species sharing physical, emotional and mental characteristics. That which we have in common by far outweighs that which is different about us.

To communicate brotherhood we need to constantly communicate recognition that we are a single species and that the challenges we face now and which we will face in the years ahead, are challenges for the species as a whole. We need to communicate that what differences exist within the species are real, but they are cultural and as such are subject to change over time. In reality they are result of local solutions to local problems, even where those problems are common to all humanity.

I can take a newborn baby from any ethnic group in the world, bring it to another cultural environment, raise it within that community and it will be the same and different, to the same degree as any other member of that community is the same or different. The obvious example of this lies in the United States where the population is made up of representatives of almost every ethnic and cultural group on the planet. The United States is an indication of what a fully integrated humanity will at least look like, but it is not fully homogeneous due to historical cultural segregation within the US. The association of Boston with the Irish is an example of this but as each generation passes, the characteristics that the citizens of the United States share will be more obvious that those which show difference. We know that given enough time a black candidate can win the Democratic Party nomination and run for president in the US. That John F Kennedy, a catholic Irish American could become president of the US in the 60’s was considered a major step forward at that time, just as Barack Obama’s nomination is now. But it does highlight one requirement for brotherhood and that is the free movement of people across the surface of this planet.

One people, one planet, one humanity will mean open borders. International trade and tourism requires international travel and people are on the move the way they have always been. They meet and develop relationships and though they may not recognise it as such, it is a manifestation of brotherhood in action. If we are serious about communicating brotherhood to others, our message must communicate our acceptance of the free movement of people across national borders.

A consequence of the free movement of people is the free movement of capital. If I am truly free to move about this planet which the concept of brotherhood requires me to hold, then I must also be free to take my wealth with me. I must be free to take my business skills from location to location just as the journeymen carpenter or mason did in years gone by. Trade must be free and open. Many of you will be aware of the phrase Celtic Tiger. It refers to the period of massive expansion of the Irish economy in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. That period of expansion was based on the ready availability of investment finance from countries like Germany.

According to David McWilliams in his book The Pope’s Children, we Irish borrowed German savings and invested it in Irish jobs. Where did we get those jobs? Well we took them from you here in the UK and from the USA. Some Irish people got very rich and many just did OK but it was still a transfer of wealth from one location to another. And that wealth is on the move again. Ireland is loosing skilled manufacturing jobs to the Eastern European countries like Poland and Slovakia in the same way as the UK lost them to us. But in their wake has been left an economy that even in a down turn is expected to grow at a rate above the European average next year.

If we want to communicate brotherhood to others we need to support the cycle of macroeconomic development. As agrarian economies become low skilled manufacturing economies and then information technology economies. It’s not always going to be comfortable as those jobs leave and our neighbours loose their jobs, but comfortable never fosters development. The problems we face today, the developing countries will face tomorrow but the process must continue until all of our people have access to the same ladder of economic development. ‘Our people’ being humanity, of course. If you can be educated in your own country, if you can earn a living in your own country, if you can be safe in your own country, you are more inclined to look upon the place where I live with benign curiosity and in a spirit of brotherhood.

Trade connects and with it travels ideas. Central to the process of communicating brotherhood is the communication of ideas from one place to the next and from one mind to the next. This is about access to knowledge and the greatest revolution in providing access to information since the invention of the printing press is taking place all around us. One of the most exciting projects I’ve come across is the Hole in the Wall Project in India.[i] The project places free internet kiosks in playgrounds in poor areas and allows local kids unlimited access. The project found that with some basic instruction, the kids teach themselves how to navigate the internet very quickly. Ongoing studies by the project are discovering all kinds of positive outcomes for the communities involved including an increase in knowledge about the world beyond their own locality. Children are not slow to talk about things they’ve leaned and one can just imagine the conversations that are taking place in households in India, but also in Cambodia and in Uganda where the project has been adopted. Minds are being opened through access to information.

A word of caution. There is a danger in having unlimited access to information and the danger is greatest for those nations where the technology is most developed. With so much choice we run the risk of self-censorship. We run the risk of selecting the same channels every time we watch TV, the same sites every time we access the internet. We run the risk of removing accidental discovery from our lives. The technology is such that unless we make deliberate choices to seek out the different, the unknown, the unfamiliar, we will end up in knowledge ghettos of our own making. The technology will not help us if all it does is recreate in cyberspace closed isolated communities.

If the only people you ever really communicate with are those who read the books you read or visit the websites you visit or watch the TV channels you watch then you’re experience when you meet with something new will be to be suspicious of it, to fear it and to separate yourself from it. Unlimited access to information will not ensure that such information is used wisely. While projects like The Hole in the Wall Project have enormous potential for how we educate people in general, they also bring us face to face with one of the consequences of education and that is improved access to new ideas.

Access to ideas without the emotional stability required for complete understanding can result in lots of people loosing their lives. Human history is littered with revolutions, particularly since the middle of the 18^th century. These revolutions tend to involve poorly thought out solutions to problems whose true nature is not fully understood. They are often led by individuals to whom one can justifiably apply the phrase ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. There is nothing more dangerous than the man who is convinced that the end is justified by the means. This is especially true when the means involves someone else’s end.

And so we have to face the thorny issue of justifiable war. Attempting to communicate brotherhood as an ideal without applying oneself to its practical implementation can be self-defeating and maybe even destructive. Protecting societies whose value systems invoke brotherhood from those whose understanding is incomplete or whose stage of development is such, that caring about sharing is not really a priority. I had to think about this a few years ago when my then eighteen year old son decided to join the Irish Army Reserve. It was an adventure that only lasted eighteen months or so but he was able to educate me with regard to how big a difference there is between an Army that sees its primary role as peace keeping in the context of the United Nations and one which sees itself as the enforcer of current government policy. Government policy does not always reflect the will of the people. Certainly it can be at variance with concepts of human brotherhood and soldiers of all kinds need to keep this in mind.

Nevertheless, the protection of societies and groups in transition will be a very important aspect of communicating brotherhood. The Christian ideal of turning the other cheek may have more to do with forgiveness for the initial assault then with passive resistance to continued aggression. How we deal with conflict as we search for the harmony that brotherhood aspires to, is something that will need to occupy us greatly if we intend to be honest about our communication of brotherhood. The Tibetan suggests to us that we must “learn to induce those conditions of clarity and truth which will overcome the ancient rhythms and deep-seated habits”[ii] If we want to communicate brotherhood, then fostering a culture of openness and honesty is a very practical and pragmatic way of overcoming deep-seated habits of separation.

When George Mitchell arrived in Northern Ireland in 1995 to act as mediator between the Irish and British governments and the various paramilitary groups, he was told he was wasting his time and that the conflict couldn’t be ended. He was told “We have been killing each other for centuries and we are doomed to go on killing each other forever.” [iii] His report on arms decommissioning in 1996 noted that “common to many of our meetings were arguments, steeped in history, as to why the other side cannot be trusted. As a consequence, even well-intentioned acts are often viewed with suspicion and hostility.” [iv]

But there has clearly been progress and in communicating brotherhood it helps to bring that progress to peoples’ attention. In May 2000, President of Ireland Mary McAleese noted that we have “so often raided the past for proof of our difference…” She also suggested that we “look more carefully at our histories and find in shared memories, sources of unity rather than division…”[v] My own study of history in recent years suggests to me that the new emphases that historians are placing on a common social history rather than on national histories will demonstrate that we have more in common than we were once led to believe was the case.

In 2005 I was present at a session run by a social worker with many years experience working with interface communities in Northern Ireland. Interface communities are those streets where the first ten houses belong to one tradition and the next ten houses belong to the other. In working with teenagers in these areas, he found that it was necessary to spend six months or even longer working with each individual community before you could even consider bringing them together. He found it was necessary to provide each group with a sense of its own legitimacy, its own history, its own tradition, in order to provide them with the self-confidence they would need to remain open to the history, the tradition and legitimacy of the other.

His process is not unlike that of Community Building. M. Scott Peck, the author of that now classic work The Road Less Travelled, wrote another, lesser known book called The Different Drum. In The Different Drum, Peck outlines his model of Community Building. The stage of initial meeting where people pretend to be getting along, he calls Pseudo-community. According to the Community Building in Britain (CbiB) website[vi], at this stage “the group is characterized by polite interaction as individuals ‘test the waters’ of relationship, operating on the assumption that group members have few differences that divide them”.

Pecks model requires passage through a stage he labelled Chaos, where “the previously unspoken differences begin to emerge. Typically, participants deal with the discomfort caused by the discovery of difference by seeking to “fix” others or to “convert” people to their point of view.” The later stages Peck labelled Emptiness and Community. I suspect that a similar sequence of stages will have to be journeyed through by individuals, groups and nations before Brotherhood becomes a global reality.

Pretending we are all Brothers and Sisters will not work. True Brotherhood means we face the reality of difference, shine a light on it, value it. We need to be willing to enter into the chaos that arises when in pursuit of the true harmony that resides on the other side of conflict. It has to be sustainable. It cannot be scuppered by the first ill wind that comes along and that means sharing resources.

At its most basic it’s about looking out for your neighbours in a way that seems to have been lost but which anecdotal evidence suggests was very common among the less materialistic generations that have preceded ours. In all honesty, I suspect they were less materialistic because they had nothing much to be materialistic about. But it was also about what L. J. Hanifan, writing in the US in 1916 called Social Capital and referred to as “those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy”.[vii]

In the madness of fossil fuel dependency I see signs of some very clever thinking and of the energies invoking brotherhood. What the process of industrialisation started in the mid 18^th century could result in the realisation of that idea “think globally, act locally”. We now have the technology to keep humanity interconnected, while the post-carbon era forces us to live locally. Transition Towns, as in communities that are already preparing for post-carbon fuel lifestyles, exist in places such as Totnes in Devon here in the UK and Kinsale in County Cork in Ireland. I discovered these through YouTube, the video website, and recommend you seek out the documentaries and interviews with people like Richard Heinberg and Rob Hopkins. Not coveting the resources of others simply because we don’t actually need them will go a long way towards creating a brotherhood friendly environment.

In the longer term, thinking of ourselves in terms of one humanity occupying one planet requires us to consider the resources of that planet as been a common resource. All very well you might say when we have consumed our own and now want to take everyone else’s. But the consumption of those resources over the last 200 years has given us technologies or at least the prospect of technologies that make sustainable living on this planet a realistic possibility. Maybe, just maybe, it was a phase humanity had to pass through in preparation for what comes next. We need to further that preparation and rather than look back, be willing to adopt the technologies involved early in their life cycles, adapt them to local circumstances and share them with others.

Brotherhood, to be of value, must be freely chosen in the presence of some already existing alternative. It must be tested in the crucible of daily living where the needs of the group are voluntarily put before the needs of the individual and the needs of the multi-group are put before the needs of any single group. Communicating Brotherhood needs to be personal, from me to you. It needs to be global and include everyone, everywhere. It needs to have a go at addressing the problems of humanity in a real way. It needs to be willing to expose the mind to messages and ideas that we may find upsetting and irritating, and it needs to never, ever shoot the messenger. In communicating brotherhood, as John Waters the journalist and writer, once advised me “you need to listen until it hurts”.

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[i] http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

[ii] DINA 1, p27

[iii] Quoted in an Irish Times article by Brian Mercer Walker, May 7^th, 2008.

[iv] See http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/docs/mitch.htm

[v] Quoted in an Irish Times article by Brian Mercer Walker, May 7^th, 2008.

[vi] http://www.communitybuilding.co.uk/communit.htm

[vii] Wikipedia – result of google search on ’social capital’