The Brotherhood of Destiny
“They had to learn how to live in relation to others, to the immense host of the conquerors, now dispossessed, who had preceded them on this land and in whom they now had to recognize the brotherhood of race and destiny.” ALBERT CAMUS · THE FIRST MAN
We stay in Camus’s Algeria, but now through the eyes of the older man looking back. The First Man was the novel he was writing when he died, the manuscript found in the wreck of the car. It is his most personal book, an attempt to understand the poor, half-forgotten people he came from. In one of its deepest passages he describes generations of the dispossessed arriving on that hard land, and writes that they had to learn how to live in relation to others, to the immense host of the conquerors, now dispossessed, who had preceded them on this land and in whom they now had to recognize the brotherhood of race and destiny.
It is a hard-won kind of solidarity, the widest we have reached. Camus is looking at wave after wave of people, conquerors and conquered, arriving with pride and being ground down by the same sun and poverty and death, until the differences between them start to look small beside what they share. To live in relation to others, he says, you have to learn to see even the stranger, even the one who came before you and is gone, as kin. A brotherhood not of blood or nation but of destiny, the common fate of everyone who has to live and suffer and die on the same ground.
This is solidarity stretched to its limit, past the people you like, past the people like you, out to the whole anonymous host of humans who walked here before. You did not choose them. They are your brothers and sisters anyway, bound by the one destiny none of us escapes.
Today, widen the circle once. Think of someone outside your people entirely, another time, another place, a stranger you will never meet, and grant them the brotherhood of destiny. They lived the same short human life you are living. That is kinship enough.
