Cultural Dilemma

...It is not the same thing as "friendship" (a relatively modern idea which in its most common form excludes politics...

...The family, the community, the church, the vocation: these and others provide emotional support for fewer and fewer Americans, and without them, McWilliams argues, we find it nearly impossible to continue our growth, to move on to "higher" forms of fraternity...

...reviewed by Dennis Hale It is historian Wilson Carey McWil-liams's purpose to explore the reasons for the decline of "fraternity" as a political word, and in so doing he has conducted an invaluable exploration into America's intellectual and political history, its confused present, and its sometimes grim future...

...If we remember the word and what it has meant, perhaps we will one day discover the thing itself...

...And yet, McWilliams contends, the final goal of fraternity cannot be allowed to obscure the value of the lesser fraternities, for the latter grow out of the former...

...This is when the "lesser fraternities" play their role, and it is the tragedy of American life that these lesser fraternities are everywhere eroded by the forces of mass industrial society...

...In America, this process of growth is hampered and distorted in numerous ways...

...If George Orwell was right in his belief that the tyranny of the future would abolish an idea by abolishing the word that signified it, then there is simply no way to measure the service McWilliams has performed simply by rescuing fraternity from the dusty alcoves where it had been consigned...

...In McWilliams's treatment of it, fraternity appears as a discipline: although the desire for fraternity is natural, so is its opposite, the "illusion of self-sufficiency...

...McWilliams is not one to peddle false hopes: one reviewer has called this book a "cry from the heart," and that it certainly is...

...Fraternity is a union premised on affection and growth...

...The older tradition, however, argued that fraternity was a means to the good life, while the newer theory held that fraternity was a reward the good life would provide at some point in the distant future...

...It is also an immensely threatening and at times frightening society: the individual, torn between his affection for others and his fear of them, is buffeted and pummeled by political and economic forces which undermine what little security he has managed to acquire...

...It is necessary to tell...

...McWilliams is not the first to sense that something extremely important is missing from modern life...

...And certainly, one must persuade as many as will listen that following modernity still another distance down the path will lead to universal fratricide more surely than to the realization of universal fraternity...

...Mr...

...And unlike the generalized "love for one's fellows," fraternity is a more "intense" interpersonal bond, "limited in the number of persons and in the social space to which it can be extended...

...There is a feeling here of time running out, of lost possibilities, that goes against the modern grain...

...the grim truth of the matter: that political and civic fraternity are impossible under modern conditions: that the chances of fraternity within the polity, in lesser groups, are small enough: that there is no simple tactic which can produce brotherhood...

...Unlike friendship, therefore, it presumes something of an adversary relationship (at least part of the time): a tension between brothers and sisters that grows out of a desire to see all of the brotherhood complete the journey, a willingness to tell another when he has strayed from the path...

...Nor is it the same thing as "love for one's fellows," which the more common term "brotherhood" tends to suggest...

...Fraternity must be encouraged and taught if it is to survive...

...It is the theme of fraternity that both unites and divides the two cultures, for each gave fraternity an honored place in its scale of values...

...The goal of a universal fraternity...

...is the bribe which progress offers to tradition...

...In desperation he looks around him for support, and often finds none at all...

...It widens the individual's horizons, drawing his attention away from private concerns, leading him to search for truths not immediately accessible to the isolated human intelligence...

...Fraternity" is no simple thing to understand...

...In another sense this is a hopeful book...

...American culture has long been known to be individualistic in its bias, hostile to communities and collectives of all sorts, deeply in love with the romance of the "self-made man...

...Beginning with the Puritans, McWilliams demonstrates how that older tradition, with its hostility to commerce, industry, technology, and empire, struggled to find its way in a rapidly changing world, accommodating itself to that world at one moment, fighting it at another, but always losing ground to "modernity...

...Far less is fraternity a synonym for "alliance" or "unity of interests...

...And yet it contains elements of all these, and more...

...Hale is a free lance writer and a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York...

...While the lesser fraternities are founded on characteristics over which we have little control—religion, race, community—fraternity in its higher form is a "relation of affection founded on shared values and goals...

...There have been two traditions in American life, and McWilliams plays the one against the other: the liberal "enlightenment" against the more traditional religious culture that has barely managed to survive into our own time...

...The characteristic failure of the American liberal tradition has been to ignore this lesson, and to substitute for the real if limited fraternities of life a mystical faith in a fraternity not of this time or place—a fraternity to be enjoyed only after the achievement of a Utopia of material abundance and private freedom...

...yet he may be the first to track that sense of loss to its source, and in doing so he has contributed an appraisal we can read and ponder with profit...

...It is a commitment of men and women to make a journey from "opinion to knowledge" together, and to help one another along the way...