Notes to self:
Brotherhood, equality and freedom are appropriately the by-words for economic, political and cultural realms/dimensions of society.
Feelings of Brotherhood stem from shared experience, well expressed by Archibald MacLeish in his poem: “Speech to Those Who Say Comrade” (1935): “Men are brothers by life lived and hurt for it. Hunger and hurt are the great begetters of brotherhood… Those are as brothers who have shared fear… or indignity… Fought together, labored together…”
Philosophers loosely map a spectrum of Right/Left politics onto one between Freedom and Equality, where Freedom is interpreted in terms of free exercise of property rights and equality is interpreted in terms of equal access to justice and opportunity. But Brotherhood, or community, is more ambiguous. Freedom and Equality are defined in terms of mans relation to the institutions of society, whereas Brotherhood concerns individual-to-individual and individual-to-group relationships and is not explicitly addressed or protected by laws or government. Does a sense of community derive from a common identification with family and blood relations, a locale (town or nation), a belief system (religious or political), a passion (a sports team, a hobby group)? We can simultaneously identify with multiple communities, and to varying degrees, but what is the measure of this single value, brotherhood or community? (See Will Kymlicka, “Contemporary Political Philosophy: an introduction”, (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Do meaning and narrative philosophy enter here, in discussion of brotherhood?