The Man in the Jar

Sometime around 350 BC, a man was living in a large clay jar in the marketplace of Corinth. The jar was the kind used to store wine or grain, tipped on its side, and he slept in it. He owned a cloak, a staff, and a bag for bread. He had once owned more. Back in his home city of Sinope, on the Black Sea, he or his father had handled the coinage, and he had been caught defacing it, chiseling the faces off the coins to ruin them. For that he was thrown out of the city. He never got another one.

People asked him where he was from. A man with no city was a strange thing in the Greek world, almost a non-person, and the question had teeth. His answer became one of the most quoted lines in the history of the West. He said he was kosmopolitês: a citizen of the world.

We have been repeating that phrase for twenty-four centuries, and we say it with a warm feeling. To call yourself a citizen of the world now is to say you have grown past the small loyalties, that you see every human being as a brother, that your heart has widened to the size of the planet. It is a generous, hopeful thing to say. It puts you on the right side of history.

The man who coined it was a homeless beggar who had wrecked his own money, insulted nearly everyone he met, and belonged to no one. When Alexander the Great, the man then trying to conquer the whole world by the sword, came to see him and offered him anything he wanted, the beggar told him to move because he was blocking the sun.

The distance between what that phrase meant to him and what it means to us is the subject of this essay. The gap is not small, and closing it in the wrong direction has cost more lives than almost any idea I can name.

The Circle That Keeps Widening

Start with the hopeful story, because most of us believe it, and because it is partly true.

The story goes like this. Human beings began by caring only about their own family. Then the family widened into the clan, the clan into the tribe, the tribe into the city, the city into the nation. At each step, people learned to feel a bond with strangers they would never meet, simply because those strangers were now inside the circle. The circle has never stopped widening. And if you draw the line forward, it points at one place: the whole human race. The brotherhood of man is not a fantasy. It is the next ordinary step in a process that has been running for as long as there have been people.

Charles Darwin told this exact story in The Descent of Man, and he told it well:

As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

That last sentence carries the whole hope. Once you can feel a bond with a fellow citizen you have never met, the only thing stopping you from feeling it for a stranger in another country is an artificial barrier. Artificial means made-up. Made-up means removable. Prejudice, ignorance, borders drawn by dead kings: knock those down, and sympathy flows out to cover everyone. The philosopher Peter Singer gave this idea its modern name, “the expanding circle,” and a lot of careful history backs it up. Slavery really was abolished. Torture really did become a scandal instead of a public entertainment. The idea that every human being has rights, simply for being human, really did go from strange to obvious in a few centuries. That is real moral progress, and anyone who sneers at it is not paying attention.

The ancients felt the pull too, long before the word “progress” existed. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, writing notes to himself at night during a war, kept reminding himself that

every rational animal is his kinsman, and that to care for all men is according to man’s nature.

Kinsman. Not “fellow member of a useful arrangement,” but family. Aristotle had said that a human being is “by nature a political animal,” made to live in a community the way bees are made to live in a hive. Put these together and the hopeful story looks like plain common sense. We are built for fellowship. The fellowship has been growing. The brotherhood of man is just the fellowship finished, the circle finally closed with no one left outside.

If you believe that, you are in excellent company, and you are holding the belief this essay is about to break. So hold it firmly first. The stronger your grip on it now, the more you will feel it give way.

Two Things We Call by One Name

Here is the crack. The hopeful story treats “the brotherhood of man” as one thing, growing steadily. It is actually two different things wearing one name, and they do not grow at the same rate. One of them scales up to cover the planet with room to spare. The other one cannot, and never has, and the confusion between them is where the trouble starts.

The first thing is justice. Justice is thin. That is not an insult; it is its strength. Justice is a set of rules I owe to everyone the same: do not enslave a person, do not torture a person, do not lie to a person in a way that robs them, keep the promise you made. These duties are the same whether the person is my brother or a stranger on the far side of the earth whose name I will never learn. Because they ask so little warmth and so much restraint, they travel well. They fit a stranger as easily as a friend.

Immanuel Kant saw this clearly, and he built a whole idea of world citizenship on it. But it is built out of a particular kind of bond, and the kind matters. He called the right of a world citizen

a juridical principle, as distinguished from philanthropic or ethical principles.

“Juridical” means it belongs to law and justice. “Philanthropic” means it belongs to love. Kant is telling us, right at the start, that the world citizen’s real claim is a claim of justice, not of love. And notice how modest the claim is. His famous “right of a man as a citizen of the world” is only

the right… to attempt to enter into communion with all others, and for this purpose to visit all the regions of the earth, although this does not constitute a right of settlement.

That is the whole thing. Cross the border in peace. Ask to trade, to talk, to pass through. Do not be treated as an enemy just for showing up. It is a real right and a decent one, and most of the world still does not honor it. But it is a long way from the warm picture of all mankind as one loving family. Kant’s world citizen is owed courtesy at the gate. He is not owed a hug.

The second thing hiding inside “brotherhood of man” is love, and love is thick. Love is not a rule you apply evenly. It is an attachment, and attachment plays favorites. It has to. Thomas Aquinas, who spent a great deal of care on the question of how a Christian should love, did not conclude that we must love all people equally. He asked, in order, whether we ought to love those closer to us more than those farther away, whether we ought to love our own children more than our own parents, whether we ought to love a benefactor more than someone we have helped. He worked out an order of love, because he understood that a love with no order is not bigger. It is just blurry. Augustine gave the same idea its sharpest name, the ordo amoris, the ordering of loves, and treated a disordered love as a sickness of the soul, not a triumph of it.

Michel de Montaigne, three centuries later, wrote the sentence that catches the whole problem in one breath. He was a genuine cosmopolitan, well-traveled, skeptical of his own country’s habits, and he wrote:

I consider all men my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as I do a Frenchman, setting this national bond after the universal and common one.

A beautiful line, and every modern citizen of the world would frame it. But keep reading, because in almost the same breath Montaigne says of Paris:

I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am a Frenchman only by this great city.

There it is, the honest man contradicting himself in public. He loves all men as compatriots. He loves Paris to her warts. The first love is real, and it is thin as paper. The second love is real, and it is thick as blood. When he says he embraces a Pole as he does a Frenchman, he means he grants the Pole the same justice, the same basic human standing. He does not mean the Pole makes his chest ache the way his city does. No one’s does. That is not a moral failure in Montaigne. It is what love is.

Now go back to the man in the jar, because the people who invented world citizenship understood this in a way we have forgotten. The Stoics, who turned Diogenes’ wisecrack into a serious philosophy, did not become citizens of the world by loving everyone more. They did it by attaching to each person less. Epictetus, the great Stoic teacher, told his students exactly how the trick was done. When you love your own child, he said, hold the love loosely, the way you would hold a cup you know might break:

if you kiss your own child, or your brother or friend, never give full license to the appearance… but check it, and curb it as those who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal.

He even gave the words to say. While you are kissing your child, murmur to yourself, “Tomorrow you will die.” A child, a friend, a home city are like a fig in season, given to you for a while and then taken back, and if you cry when the fig is gone you are, in his words, “a fool” wishing “for a fig in winter.” This is how the original citizen of the world got free to belong everywhere. He cut the cords that tied him to anywhere in particular. Diogenes, Epictetus said admiringly, made “all the earth his country, and no particular place.” He could do that because he had made no place his home.

The Stoics did teach a kind of care for all people, and an honest critic will bring it up. One of them, Hierocles, drew a picture of circles around each person, the self at the center, then family, then city, then all humanity at the rim, and he told his student to work at pulling the outer circles inward, to treat the far-off stranger a little more like kin. That sounds like the warm expanding circle, and it is the ancient root of it. But look at what the care was made of. It was the duty to deal justly and do no harm, owed to every reasoning being alike. It was not the ache of attachment. The Stoic pulled the outer circle inward by widening his sense of duty, and at the very same time he was taught to hold the inner circle, his own child, loosely enough to survive its breaking. Concern went outward, thin and even. Attachment stayed home, and was kept on a short leash even there.

So the first jolt is this. The brotherhood of man, as we imagine it, is love at maximum, love that has grown so large it covers everyone warmly. But love does not grow that way. It thins as it widens, until at the scale of all mankind it is either the thin thing we should honestly call justice, or it is the cool detachment of a man in a jar who has stopped letting anyone break his heart. The warm, thick, everyone-is-my-true-brother feeling we picture at the center of the ideal is the one thing that cannot actually reach that far.

You might think there is a way around this. If love won’t scale, maybe we don’t need it to. Maybe we can build the brotherhood out of structure instead of feeling. Bind humanity into one body politic, one great community, and let the institution do what the heart can’t. That was the next move in the tradition, and it runs straight into a different wall.

You Cannot Add Your Way to One

The dream of one human community assumes that unity is like a pile: start with families, add them up into a village, add villages into a city, keep adding, and eventually the pile reaches all the way around the globe. One big family, just very big.

Aristotle, who first described that ladder, refused to climb it to the top, and his reason still holds. The unity of a family is not the same kind of unity as the unity of a city. A family is held together by love and blood and daily need. A city cannot be. It is too big for everyone to love everyone; it is held together instead by shared laws and a shared sense of justice, which is a colder and more general glue. When you move from family to city, you do not get more of the same bond. You get a different bond, thinner and wider, doing a different job. Adding families together does not produce a giant family. It produces a city, which is another thing.

The same break happens again at the top of the ladder, and it is fatal to the pile theory. A world community cannot be a giant city any more than a city can be a giant family, because the bond that holds a city together has run out. Aristotle thought a real political community needed to be small enough to be, in his phrase, “taken in at a single view,” small enough that citizens could actually know something of one another and share a common life. Stretch it past that, and the thing holding it together is no longer there. You have not built a bigger city. You have built something that has the map of a city and none of its glue.

This is why the honest thinkers about a world state, as opposed to the dreamers, kept coming back to one hard requirement: a state needs an inside and an outside. The sociologist Max Weber gave the definition most people still use. A state, he said, is

a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

Everything hangs on the last three words: within a given territory. A state is defined by a boundary. Inside the line, one authority holds the ultimate power; outside the line is someone else’s business, or no one’s. Take away the boundary and you take away the definition. A world state would have no outside, no territory as opposed to some other territory, nothing to be the state of. This is not a small practical snag. It is the reason the United Nations is not a world government and was never designed to be one. It has no monopoly of force. It cannot make anyone do anything. It is a place where states, which are real, come to talk.

John Stuart Mill put his finger on the human version of the same problem. He was asking a smaller question, whether one government could hold together several nationalities, and his answer scales all the way up:

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling… the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.

Fellow-feeling. Self-government needs a “we,” a public that reads the same news and argues as one people even while it disagrees. Mill did not think you could manufacture that “we” by drawing a border around people who don’t have it. And a world with no outside has the weakest “we” imaginable, because “we” gets its edges from “they,” and at the scale of all mankind there is no “they” left to give the “we” a shape.

So the structure route dead-ends in the same place the love route did. You cannot love your way to the brotherhood of man, because love thins as it spreads. And you cannot build your way there either, because the community that would house it has no walls, and a community with no walls is not a community.

Which leaves one route that has actually worked. It is the ugliest one, and the tradition is honest about it.

The Brotherhood in Armor

There is one way, and only one, that a single sovereign order has ever been laid over a large and mixed population, one final authority with the last word over everyone inside it. Not love, and not a signed agreement among equals. Conquest. The voluntary unions people reach for as counterexamples turn out, on inspection, to prove the rule. The United States and the European Union are real and valuable, and neither was built by an army. But neither is the brotherhood of all mankind. They are bounded clubs with a hard edge and a clear outside, and they pool only some powers while letting each member keep its own government, its own name, its own thick loyalties. They are exactly the limited, dissoluble arrangement Kant said was the most we could safely have. Push past that limit, toward one real authority over everyone on earth with no outside left, and the only tool that has ever done the job is the sword.

Dante, in his book on world government, gave the cleanest argument for the dream. Wherever two parties can quarrel, he said, there must be a judge over both of them, or the quarrel has no resolution but force. Two neighbors have a judge. Two cities can have a judge. But two independent kingdoms have no one above them, so between kingdoms every dispute falls back to war. Follow the logic up and up and you reach a single judge over all, a world monarch, “necessary,” Dante wrote, “for the well-being of the world.” It is a tidy argument. It has convinced serious people for seven hundred years. And every time anyone has tried to make it real, the world monarch has arrived at the head of an army.

Listen to how Virgil, the poet of the Roman Empire, described the promise of a world under one rule. He put the words in the mouth of the king of the gods, foretelling Rome:

To these I set no bounds, either in space or time; Unlimited power I give them… the grim, steel-welded gates of War Be locked.

World peace, world order, the gates of war bolted shut forever. And the price, stated in the same poem, was a power with no bounds in space or time, held by one people over all others. Peace, yes. Peace the way a boot has peace with the ground under it.

Augustine, who loved Rome and mourned it, would not let the pretty version stand. He looked at the great Roman peace, the pax Romana that supposedly united the known world, and he told the truth about its cost:

the imperial city has endeavoured to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace… how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity!

How much slaughter has provided this unity. The one-world dream, every time it has come near to flesh, has been a unity provided by slaughter. The brotherhood arrives in armor, and the brothers who don’t want in are the ones the armor is for.

Even Kant, who wanted perpetual peace more than any philosopher ever has, who wrote that “the morally practical reason utters within us its irrevocable veto: There shall be no war,” could not talk himself into the world state. He worked out why, and his reason is not squeamishness, it is engineering. A single government stretched over the whole earth, he saw, would be too big to govern:

with the too great extension of such a union of states over vast regions, any government of it… must at last become impossible; and thus a multitude of such corporations would again bring round a state of war. Hence the perpetual peace… becomes in fact an impracticable idea.

So the man who wanted world peace with his whole heart concluded that the world government meant to secure it was impossible, and that trying to force it would only breed new wars inside the giant thing. What he allowed himself to hope for instead was much smaller: a loose league of nations, “a voluntary combination… dissoluble at any time,” and beyond that only what he called “a continuous approximation.” Not the destination. A permanent walk toward a destination you never arrive at.

By now every road is closed off. Love can’t reach the brotherhood; it thins. Structure can’t build it; it has no walls. And force can get there, but what it delivers is an empire wearing the brotherhood’s name, which is the opposite of the thing. It starts to look as if the brotherhood of man is simply impossible, a beautiful nothing.

That is not quite the conclusion. The truth is stranger and more useful than “impossible.” The brotherhood of man is not merely hard to reach. Reaching it, as a finished destination, is the dangerous part.

When the Circle Finally Closes

Kant already gave us the gentler half of the answer, and it is worth keeping. He called world peace an “approximation,” something we must “work for” even though we may never arrive. Philosophers have a name for an ideal like that: a regulative ideal. It is a star you steer by, not a harbor you dock in. You never reach the star, and you are not supposed to. Its whole job is to keep you pointed the right way. Understood like that, the brotherhood of man is real and even necessary, the way north is real. It tells you which way to lean. It is a direction.

The catastrophe comes when people mistake the direction for a place and try to move in. And here we reach the hardest thing in this essay, the observation that turns the whole hopeful story inside out. It comes from Sigmund Freud, who watched the First World War shatter the comfortable European faith that civilized nations had grown too brotherly to slaughter each other. Freud’s dry verdict on that faith was that

our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed.

They had not fallen. They had never climbed. The brotherhood had been a story we told about ourselves.

But Freud went deeper than disappointment, and found the mechanism. You do not have to buy his darker theory, the talk of a death instinct buried in us, to take the mechanism seriously, because the same pattern shows up without any of his machinery, both in plain history and in ordinary experiments on how groups form. Sort a room of strangers into two teams by a coin toss, give the teams nothing to do and nothing to fight over, and within minutes each team favors its own and looks down on the other. The bond and the bias arrive together, out of nothing. That is the thing Freud was pointing at. He was puzzled by the old command, “love thy neighbour as thyself,” which he thought was one of the least natural things ever asked of a human being, “nothing is so completely at variance with original human nature,” he wrote, because the plain truth is that a stranger has done nothing to earn my love and will often gladly do me harm. Homo homini lupus, he quoted: man is a wolf to man. And then he explained how communities get people to bind together in love anyway, despite the wolf. They give the wolf somewhere else to go.

It is always possible to unite considerable numbers of men in love towards one another, so long as there are still some remaining as objects for aggressive manifestations.

That sentence is the hinge of everything. A group can love inward only while it has an outsider to aim its aggression at. The love and the hostility are not opposites that happen to coexist. They are two ends of one thing. The warmth on the inside is paid for by the coldness at the edge. Freud noticed that neighboring peoples who are almost identical are often the ones who mock and fight each other hardest, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the English and the Scots, and he called it “the narcissism of minor differences.” We do not need a big enemy. We will manufacture a small one, because the group needs the edge in order to have a middle.

Now put that mechanism together with the dream of a brotherhood that finally includes everyone. A brotherhood of all mankind has no outside. There is no “they” left to receive the aggression that the “we” runs on. And Freud’s grim prediction is that the aggression does not vanish. It turns inward, and the all-embracing brotherhood is forced to invent the enemy it structurally requires. He watched it happen in his own century and named the cases without flinching:

Once the apostle Paul had laid down universal love between all men as the foundation of his Christian community, the inevitable consequence in Christianity was the utmost intolerance towards all who remained outside of it.

The most universal love produced the most intense hunt for heretics, because a love that claims everyone cannot tolerate anyone standing outside its claim. Freud saw the same shape in the politics of his day. The dream of a German world-order, he wrote, called up a hatred of the Jews as its shadow. And the new brotherhood being built in Soviet Russia was cementing its universal-human future with the persecution of a class enemy, which led Freud to one of the coldest sentences ever written about utopia:

one only wonders, with some concern, however, how the Soviets will manage when they have exterminated their bourgeois entirely.

He was asking a real question. A brotherhood defined against an enemy needs the enemy to keep existing. Kill the last bourgeois, convert the last unbeliever, unmask the last reactionary, and the brotherhood loses the thing that was holding it together. So it does not stop. It finds a new enemy inside its own ranks, and the revolution eats the revolutionaries, and the church burns its own. This is not a story about a good idea being abused by bad people. It is a structural fact about what happens when you try to build universal love as a finished, this-worldly community. The French revolutionaries who put “fraternity,” brotherhood, on their banners also built the guillotine, and they used it most enthusiastically on each other, because once “the brotherhood of man” is a nation you can be a citizen of, being un-brotherly becomes treason, and there is always someone who can be accused of it.

Dostoevsky, watching the same idea rise, gave the warning in one line. Of the men who dreamed of uniting all humanity in justice while throwing out everything above humanity, he wrote:

They aim at justice, but, denying Christ, they will end by flooding the earth with blood.

Whether or not you share his faith, the diagnosis is precise. The purest, most universal aim, human unity itself, was the one he expected to drown the world. Not because unity is bad, but because a unity that must be completed, that cannot rest until everyone is inside, will always find someone who is still outside, and will always reach for the sword to bring them in or cut them off.

That is the turn. The brotherhood of man does not fail by falling short of its goal, the way most ideals disappoint us a little. It fails by arriving. The closer a movement gets to actually enclosing all of humanity in one warm mandatory love, the more it needs a heretic to hold itself together, and the more dangerous it becomes to be the heretic. The ideal is safest as a direction and deadliest as a destination.

Return: The Man in the Jar

Which brings us back to Diogenes, in his jar, in the marketplace, the first man to call himself a citizen of the world.

We have been assuming, all these centuries, that he was our ancestor, the first to feel the warm wide love we mean by the phrase, the founding brother of the brotherhood of man. The record says otherwise. He did not gather all mankind into one embrace. He let go of everything that would have tied him to any smaller circle. He gave up his city, his money, his home, his good name, his dignity in the eyes of respectable people. He reached “the world” not by adding every human being to his heart but by subtracting every particular claim on it until nothing local was left. He belonged everywhere in the only way a man can belong everywhere, which is by belonging nowhere.

He was not a brother to all men. He was a man who had escaped brotherhood, and found a hard freedom on the far side of it. That is a real thing to be, and there is something bracing in it, the same bracing coldness you feel in Epictetus telling you to kiss your child and whisper that she will die. But it is the opposite of what we thought we were signing up for when we borrowed his word. We wanted to love everyone. He had arranged to need no one. We should at least know that the phrase we wear so warmly was coined by a man who would have found our warmth soft, and our confidence funny, and who would probably have told the whole brotherhood of man to stand out of his sunlight.

So what is left, once the warm dream is gone? Not nothing. Two real things, and they are the two we started with, the two that “the brotherhood of man” kept mashing into one.

The first is justice, thin and universal and worth everything. You do owe the stranger something, and Kant named it right: safe passage, honest dealing, the plain refusal to treat a person as an enemy or a tool just because they were born past your border. That obligation does scale to all mankind. It asks little warmth and a great deal of restraint, and honoring it fully would remake the world. And because it asks only restraint, not belonging, it needs no enemy to prop it up. It never has to complete itself by hunting down a heretic, because it is not trying to melt anyone into one body. It only draws a line under what you may do to a human being, any human being at all, and dares you to cross it. Defend it. Widen it. Call it what it is, which is justice, not love.

The second is love, thick and local and impossible to fake. The people you can actually love are the ones in front of you, the ones whose warts you know, the city you would defend to its spots. That love does not scale, and the attempt to stretch it over all humanity does not enlarge it. It thins it into a slogan, and a slogan of universal love is exactly the thing that, Freud warned, comes looking for an enemy.

Dostoevsky, who feared the bloody version of the dream, also wrote the sentence that shows the honest version. Through the voice of a wise old monk he said that active love, real love that does real work for a real person, “is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” Love in dreams wants applause and the whole of humanity for its object and results by tomorrow. Active love gets up in the night for one sick child, one difficult neighbor, one particular unglamorous person, and it is harder than any manifesto. The man who loves mankind loudest is very often the one who cannot stand the person next to him, and history’s great brotherhoods have been built by exactly that man.

The brotherhood of man is a direction to face, not a country to move to. Face it. Owe the stranger justice, and mean it. Then turn around and do the harsh and dreadful thing, which is to love, in daylight, with your hands, the few actual people the world has placed within your reach. That is as far as the warmth goes. It turns out to be very far, and it never once required you to belong to everyone. It only required you to belong, all the way, to someone.