Brotherhood of Humanity
This week you are learning about the Stoic idea called the Brotherhood of Humanity, known in ancient Greek as oikeiosis (pronounced oy-KAY-oh-sis), which means something like "belonging" or "affiliation." It is the recognition that every human being is, by nature, a member of one single community, and that your care for others should radiate outward from yourself to your family, your neighbors, your city, and ultimately to all of humanity. The Stoics believed this was not a sentiment or a feeling you had to manufacture; it was a fact about what we are. Learning to live by it is one of the most practical and demanding things Stoic practice asks of you.
Passage
Then, too, there are a great many degrees of closeness or remoteness in human society. To proceed beyond the universal bond of our common humanity, there is the closer one of belonging to the same people, tribe, and tongue, by which men are very closely bound together; it is a still closer relation to be citizens of the same city-state; for fellow-citizens have much in common — forum, temples colonnades, streets, statutes, laws, courts, rights of suffrage, to say nothing of social and friendly circles and diverse business relations with many. But a still closer social union exists between kindred. Starting with that infinite bond of union of the human race in general, the conception is now confined to a small and narrow circle.
— Cicero, On Duties 1.53
Reflection
Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, picks up where Hierocles left off. He points out that the rings are not all equal: shared language, shared laws, shared streets and temples pull people closer. But notice what he says first: underneath all of those particular bonds, there is one bond that holds everything together, and it belongs to the whole human race. Every closer bond you feel with a friend or a neighbor is a smaller version of that original, universal connection. The Brotherhood of Humanity is not an add-on to your local loyalties; it is what makes those loyalties intelligible in the first place.
Go deeper
Think of someone you feel very little natural connection to, perhaps a stranger from a very different background: what would it mean, concretely, to treat the universal bond as real with that person today?
Practice
Spot the Bond
During one conversation or interaction today, whether with a cashier, a colleague, or a neighbor, pause internally before or after and name one thing you genuinely share with that person: a need, a fear, a hope, a capacity for reason. It does not need to be spoken aloud. The point is to make the universal bond visible to yourself, even briefly.