Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Givers, Doers, and Thinkers introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. We speak with philanthropists, foundation leaders, reformers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, religious believers, historians, sociologists, philosophers, journalists, and anyone else who will help us understand contemporary civil society’s achievements and failures. We also sprinkle in practical advice for nonprofit leaders and fundraisers. This is the podcast for anyone interested in that vital space where philanthropy and civil society intersect.
Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Susan McWilliams Barndt & the practice of fraternity
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Introduction to Fraternity in America
Speaker 1This week on Givers , doers and Thinkers . We talk to Pomona College political scientist , susan McWilliams-Bart about the shockingly under-emphasized concept of fraternity . Our conversation takes place in the context of the publication of the 50th anniversary edition of her father , Wilson Carey McWilliams' book the Idea of Fraternity in America . We talk about why fraternity is not much practiced or talked about in America and about the great alternative tradition her father articulated and stood for . Let's go Welcome to Givers , doers and Thinkers a podcast on philanthropy and civil society . I'm Jeremy Beer and it's great to have you with us . We are recording on April 1st 2025 , and I'm pleased to have as our guest political philosopher Susan McWilliams-Bart .
Speaker 1Professor of politics at Pomona College , author of the American Road Trip and American Political Thought , and editor of A Political Companion to James Baldwin and the Best Kind of College an insider's guide to America's small liberal arts colleges .
Speaker 1Those are all worthy books . I commend them to your attention , but we're going to chat mostly today about a book written by Susan's father , wilson Carey McWilliams , an influential political theorist who taught for many years at Rutgers University . That book is called the Idea of Fraternity in America and it was just brought out in 2023 , by the University of Notre Dame Press . In the special 50th anniversary edition , which I have over my shoulder right here , susan provided an excellent and substantial introduction to the book . So as we talk this season about American history and how it's been shaped by Americans associating with one another to pursue the common good or the good life or both , I thought it would be very timely to consider the concept of fraternity , which we don't hear a lot about in America anymore . If we ever did I'm not sure we ever did We'll ask Susan how are you , susan ?
Speaker 2I'm good , I'm glad to be here . Thanks for having me on the podcast , jeremy .
Speaker 1Thank you for joining us . It was good to walk down memory lane with you prior to recording about the Liberty Funds and Front Porch Republics and other conferences we have been at with each other in the past . But let's talk about fraternity . So usually , you know , people hear fraternity if they think anything besides Greek life on campuses . They think of the French Revolution , right , liberté , égalité , fraternité . We talk not so much about the American experiment . What are we talking about when we talk about fraternity , at least in your father's conception of the term ?
Speaker 2Well , I think my father chose the word fraternity in part because of its resonance with the French Revolution and to draw attention to the fact that in the American political tradition we talk a lot about liberty , we talk a lot about equality , but we almost never talk about fraternity .
Speaker 2And I think that part of what he was trying to get at in that idea and title was to draw our attention to what's missing in American life and American politics at its very core . What are the things that are sort of off the table in our political discourse ? We talk a lot about rights , we talk about freedoms , we talk a lot about equality , we talk a lot , sometimes we even talk about justice , but we rarely talk about fraternity . And by fraternity my father really meant the whole constellation of human relationships that aren't defined by biology , that aren't defined by us deriving mutual private benefit from each other like relationships have gained , but relationships from which we derive deep meaning . Those can be friendship , those can be romantic relationships , those can be all the kinds of connections that we might have with other people to whom we're not related but who we might want to call brother or sister , where we have such a deep sense of connection with them that it's almost as if we're family Is fraternity .
Speaker 1how's it related to the concept of community ? Would that be ? That's the more American term , right , or solidarity , which is more of an ecclesial term , like I'd like you to talk about ? How are those things ? How are they different or the same ?
Speaker 2Well , I you know , I thought a lot about why my father chose the word fraternity as opposed to community and again , I think it's because community is a word that gets tossed around in American politics and life . A lot People use it casually .
Speaker 2People use it in advertising , right ? People use it on the internet all the time . Community means this whole unwieldy range of things that Americans use sometimes when they're shopping or to indicate that they're fans of the same sports team . And my father , I think , really wanted to suggest that even the way that Americans think about community misses something about what's really important to us as human beings , like the kinds of relationships we really want to have . And I think he didn't use the word community and I think he did use the word fraternity to suggest that
Understanding Fraternity Beyond Greek Life
Speaker 2even in those places in American life where we think we're connected to other people , we're often missing a feeling of a deeper kind of connection . That's a really important thing for human beings to have and to see .
Speaker 1It's funny because from my I'm just going to go in any direction . You're suggesting all sorts of things here , to me From my Burkean perspective .
Speaker 1right , I can't . I think French Revolution to me is always filtered through Burke . It's just , I can't take it any other way . And it's like there's a rallying cry of fraternity , and then there's this wiping the slate clean of all these bonds and relationships and history and traditions through the actions of the radical revolutionaries . How did your father , or do you , kind of , square that circle ? Are we separating somewhat the idea of fraternity from its sort of , from the revolution , the actual historical revolution ? Yeah , I think so .
Speaker 2Absolutely . I don't think Dad was in any way a fan of the French Revolution , especially the kinds of effects that you talk about . I think when he was thinking about fraternity he was also really thinking about ancient Greek , Judeo-Christian ideas or like deep kinship that transcends biology . So he talks about fraternity in this book , even though I think he does gesture at the French Revolution . He's really trying to think about a much more ancient anthropological kind of definition yeah , well one .
Speaker 1It's funny that , um , I like how you're describing this . I was just reading um , a , uh , a biography of black elk this is just yesterday , literally and um , one of the things that lakas . They would use the words brother , sister , uncle , nephew in non-biological ways to indicate this sort of deep sense of kinship or connection to someone , and I think it's . It may be it's diagnostic to think that that's something that's this sort of marginal aspect of American life is present in the and I'm sure not just Lakota's . I'm sure this was something that a number of Native peoples did , but it's not something we would do in America . There's a sort of flight from that deep connection . Is that fair to say ?
Speaker 2Yeah , the only place where I think you do see it consistently in American political life is in African-American community where you'll hear people refer to each other as brother and sister often .
Speaker 2That , I think to my father , is actually a sign that we see that kind of language in these communities that have always been martialized in American politics . It's a sign of the marginal place , of that kind of aspiration in American politics . And in fact one of the things that my dad does in this book which is super interesting because he wrote it 50 years ago is he really puts Black political thought at the center of American political life . It says Black political thought can really reveal to us some of the things that are missing , that go sort of deeper . From a kind of account of racism , Dan was found as saying that people who think that racism is the big problem in American politics are only really scratching the surface of what their understanding is . That's about what's deeply wrong .
Speaker 1In what sense would that be the case ?
Speaker 2Well , in part he thought that , like both racism and other kinds of like I don't want to call them superficial phenomenon , but like evident phenomenon often had a lot to do with the failure to have a kind of language or a place for fraternity in American politics . After all , what we now call anti-Black racism has a lot to do , of course , with the legacy of slavery . And what is slavery ? But the idea that human beings can treat each other as property ? It's the absolute rejection of a kind of principle as human fraternity , which is to say , we're all brothers and sisters under the skin . And so my father thought that the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States was one way in which we saw a kind of consistent failure in American political life to value what fraternity really means .
Speaker 1All right , so we're going to come back to all this in a second . I'm going to take you back , though , to set the scene a little bit for people . Just intellectual history here in the context . What's the intellectual context for this book ? Your father's writing it obviously in 1970 . Well , it's published in 73 , right , that's right . What's the context for him ? We have the new left happening now , the kind of post hippie era . Maybe you're still in that era . How does this all relate to what was happening at that time ?
Speaker 2So my father was a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1960s . Most people have a sense of what Berkeley looked like in the 1960s but my father was at Berkeley in the early 1960s . Most people think that the beginning of the new left starts with Mario Savio and the free speech movement , but before there was the free speech movement at Berkeley there was a group called Slate and my father was one of the founding members of Slate . Slate and my father was one of the founding members of Slate and Slate was an early new left political activist group that was mostly focused on getting increased student voice in university governance . They were also really interested in questions of racial equality on campus and in the area and that was the new left . When the new left was really driven by a kind of communal ethos like it was about participation in governance . It was about bringing people together .
Speaker 2I started writing fraternity as his dissertation in that context , dissertation in that context and I think you can really see that kind of early 60s energy infused in the book . He starts the book by saying something like Americans , especially young Americans , cannot see their country in the land around them and it's a very kind of early 60s Berkeley critique . What happened over the course of the next decade , which everybody who knows the story of the 1960s knows , is that that early communal energy of the 1960s started to dissipate into a more hedonistic , individualistic , do what feels good ethos , and my father watched that disintegration with some amount of despair . Even the group that he had founded disbanded because they decided that there was no way to improve the system by working for within the system , right it was another example of , you know , like dropping out of the system entirely , of the system entirely .
Speaker 2By the time he wrote the book version of Idea of Fraternity in America , my father was both thinking about the underlying sense that Americans are yearning for kinds of community and human connection that are very hard to find in American politics , and I think he was also musing about how that early communal energy in the 1960s had really fallen apart .
Speaker 2And even the very , very communal experience . Experiments
Constitutional Framers' Devil's Bargain
Speaker 2of that era often sell prey to a kind of like individual . You know , all these communes fell over , basically yeah , and I think he was . I think's that the context of this book is him trying to think about where that problem in american life comes from . And what he says is is that the problems that people were feeling so clearly and so publicly in the 1960s in berkeley and places like that are not problems that have to do with , let's say , post-war life and they're not problems that have to do with recent technology .
Speaker 2They're problems that go all the way back to the constitutional framing of the United States and are kind of sewn into the fabric of American life .
Speaker 1Which is why this is a great discussion to have , since we're kind of tying this loosely to America 250 this season , and this is sort of the radical I want to in a good sense sort of nature of your father's contribution is like hey , this is not a falling away from the pristine , perfectly framed um founding uh , I'm going to put the way I know you know he used the term framers , not founders , which I appreciate . Um , it's not a falling away caused by German progressives infiltrating our intellectual life in the late 1800s , early 1900s . It is sewn into the from the beginning . Yeah , talk about what went wrong . What , in your father's view , or your view , did the framers and maybe you can talk about why he calls them the framers , because these things are tied together what went wrong ?
Speaker 2Well , my father thought that there was .
Speaker 2I think my father understood the constitutional framing and I'll say parenthetically , he called the constitutional framers framers as opposed to founders , because he thought that a lot of people have a claim to be American founders and that Americans have a claim to be American founders , that Americans have a claim to be American founders , that somebody like WEB Du Bois has a claim to be an American founder , that anyone who's helping to really shape the American nation whether or not they were there at the moment the Constitution was signed has a claim to be a kind of founder or father of the country . But he thought that at the time of the constitutional framing the framers made in some ways a kind of devil's bargain . They put together a system that favors the individual , favors natural right , favors freedom and favors governments on a really vast scale , and I think most americans know the reasons why . That was an appealing thing to do , right , um , it created power , it created stability , uh , for the nation , um , it allowed for the like gigantic nation that the united states is today to come into play . But the cost of that my father thought was that the Kramers really set up a system that made forming relationships very difficult , that made having stable communities very difficult and in that sense , made some parts of our human life that are very elemental to us very difficult .
Speaker 2And one of the things that I think about when I think about the constitutional framing and then I think was on dad's mind as well , is that very early on in the federalist papers , when James Madison is talking about you know basically the whole bit about what they're doing . He says two things , One of which is that he says when James Madison is talking about , you know basically the whole bit about what they're doing . He says two things , One of which is that he says look , the real problem that we're gonna have to face is the problem of section , because factions can destabilize governance and so we're gonna make a , you know , a nation so big that it's hard for factions to form . That makes a lot of sense as a kind of political theory . But it's also possible to think that faction is another word for like group of people who believe in something and come together to act in service to their beliefs . Faction is another word for identity , group or community . Behind the constitution , it assumes that communities of people are a problem for politics , not something like that .
Speaker 2Communities of people are something that's good for politics or constituent of politics , right exactly and the other thing that madison says , um and he says this right before this whole fiction , um on faction is he says you know what's going to make the united states great ? Roads are going to make the united states great . We're going to have so many roads . Know what's going to make the United States great ? Roads are going to make the United States great . We're going to have so many roads and people are going to be able to move around all the time . It's going to facilitate commerce . It's going to facilitate representation across this vast expanse .
Speaker 2Again , we understand why Madison thought that was an appealing vision . Right , it works . It does allow people to gather in Washington DC and from all these vast different places . But again , the cost of that is to set up a nation in which people are moving around all the time and in that , in its own way , it makes communities harder , it makes relationships harder , it breaks up families and every American knows how geographically vast the scopes of our lives are . So , ultimately , in these ways and others , dad thought that for all of the good things that the Constitution did , it came at a kind of human cost and that the human cost I think my dad thought was so profound that it's always a kind of destabilizing , dangerous like force in the background as American politics , that the constitution has set up a system that creates , in some ways , unhappy conditions of life for people , and Americans don't really understand what it is that's making them unhappy , because it's so baked into the system .
Speaker 1Right .
Speaker 2Living in this giant mobile , individualistic
The Alternative American Tradition
Speaker 2, privately oriented , anti-communal country that we don't sometimes even have the language to understand what it is that's making us unhappy .
Speaker 1Right and one of his , I guess , really well put . One of his goals , then , is what he does in this book and throughout his whole career is to retrieve what he calls an alternative tradition in American thought and life . Right Of people he sees as sort of who did understand something of what was going on . But what dynamic had been put into place or was in place that , um um liberated people and also created a certain level of of restlessness and unhappiness at the same time ? Um talk about that alternative tradition . I do wish I had a bet . I do wish you had a better name for this alternative tradition . I'll say I , I do too .
Speaker 2Well my father thought that throughout American well , I mean , I guess the bottom line is , my father thought that whatever the constitution says and whatever the language of our politics is , people want to love and be loved by other people . Right , we want to be in communities with other people .
Speaker 2And I think my father thought that that always shows through in American politics , even if it's subterranean , even if it's at the upturns , even as it's on the margins . And my father thought that there is again what he called the alternative tradition in America of people who saw the need for fraternity , who managed to find ways to both articulate and sometimes to enact a kind of alternative space or vision within American politics . He thought the Puritans were an early example of a group that had tried to do this , though ultimately they sort of failed on that , had tried to do this , though ultimately they , you know , they sort of failed on that count . He thought that a lot of writers like Hawthorne and Melville and Twain really saw that problem in American politics .
Speaker 2He and , as I indicated before , one of the things that I think is super cool about his argument- is that he saw a fraternal tradition or an alternative tradition emerging really consistently in the writings of immigrants , in African-American political thought and literature and in religious like in different religious groups writing and literature and tradition , and so a lot of what he does in this book is just try to find these resources , Because one of the things I want to be clear about is that , even though my dad had a kind of foundational critique of the American constitution , he loved the United States .
Speaker 1He's not anti-American . We should make that clear .
Speaker 2He's not anti-American at all , and I think that the spirit of the book is really saying like any regime right , every regime has its weak points and its frailties . The American regime and the American constitutional order has weaknesses and frailties that we feel really bone deep .
Speaker 1But the american political tradition also has resources within it um that can help us mitigate against those weaknesses and frailties what's kind of different about what he says , too , is is is to make this super clear for people is that the weakness and frailty is exactly what we think of as a strength , and that all is that , we're told , is in the liberal individualism , to use the term that you use in your introduction . I don't know , does he use those words in the ?
Speaker 2He has a sound of liberalism and individualism yeah .
Speaker 1Yeah , so we think of those as as strengths in many ways , but he , early on , and now it's everybody talks about those as weaknesses , but this is 50 years ago , from a non-anti-American perspective , calling those out , well , no , that's exactly what is a strength is exactly the source of our weaknesses as well .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , I think that's a good rule in politics and maybe in human life , right that ?
Speaker 2the blessings are one in the same . I think my father really appreciated I mean , he was a liberal arts professor . Professors are , you know , beneficiaries of the liberal order ? Maybe no more than you know more than anybody else and being able to speak and say what they think without regard , for you know what their parents thought or said or what people in power think or say . So he understood the values of liberalism but really thought that the liberal orders come at a kind of human cost that we should be aware of also , that we can live better lives as individuals and that we can be better parents and better family members , that we can be better community members and live in healthier , more stable communities . He was not without hope for American politics , even though this book at times has a kind of tone of despair about it .
Speaker 1Well , what are the wellsprings by which the alternative tradition you call it the fraternal tradition just now , which I like very much ? What are the wellsprings by which it's refreshed , even today , According to Hamer ? What would you think ?
Speaker 2He found signs of the alternative tradition all the time . Like many similar thinkers who have a kind of critique of liberalism , he thought that religion always had a role to play in directing our attention , in the company of other people , to higher order goods . I think he also thought that religious congregations were a way of bringing people together in relationship , deep relationships oriented around big questions and morality and ways that were good for people's lives . But he also saw signs of the alternative tradition and wellsprings of hope in sort of ordinary associations . Much like Tocqueville , who I know you like to mention from this podcast , my dad was a big believer in local association , in civic associations , in dinner parties and in parties and barbecues and the ordinary ways in which people come together .
Speaker 2One of the things also that you don't see as much in this book but you see in his later writing is that he was always on the lookout for signs about the longing for fraternity in American politics and so near the end of his life he was very charmed by the emergence of the Harry Potter book series and we I mean we forget it now , but Harry Potter wasn't supposed to be a super successful book , right Like it was sort of reluctantly published and it took off Right , like it was sort of reluctantly published and it took off .
Speaker 2And my father took one look at that , at that series , and said here's a story about some kids who come together in friendship and stick with each other against terrible odds and terrible threats to defeat . You know , an enemy who's teaching is like mastery and , and you know , in some ways a kind of impersonal technology . And he saw just in the readership of harry potter a kind of wellspring for hope and he thought that a whole generation of american children would grow up , maybe even not consciously but on some level , understanding that life is better when you are with friends and where you put your trust in them , maybe to the point of being willing to stake your lives on their actions .
Speaker 1You know that's that's . I'm glad we got to get Harry Potter into this . I'm glad you brought that up . Okay , one thing you write is my father took it as axiomatic that as human beings , we all long to be recognized by and live in relation with others . And my question to you is is that longing the reason why we have such intense identity politics today ? That it's this ? It's like there's such an unfulfilled longing in our families or institutions , genuine we don't really have genuine communities in some in a thick sense anymore .
Speaker 2Would that be the case ? Absolutely . I mean , I teach at , you know , a selective liberal arts college , and so , like I've been watching , I've sort of been
Identity Politics and the Longing to Belong
Speaker 2deep in the identity politics space on the campus left for a good while now , and part of what you know I think you see both up close and in the big picture is so much Americans , particularly young Americans , really want to find spaces of belonging . Young Americans really want to find spaces of belonging . And how often they'll talk , they'll use the word community to mean their racial group or their , like , racial plus socioeconomic group , and I think that when you see that word appear in that way , it shows this underlying longing to belong and to matter .
Speaker 2It also doesn't escape my attention , and I suspect my father would say though this is my thinking and not his that the rise of identity politics happened right in the moment when two other things happen . One is where we get the great de-churching in American politics , which is people stop having especially young Americans stop being raised with a sense of religious identity or as members of religious congregation , and the internet appears and both . It's interesting that both of those things happen at the same moment . We get these calls for identity politics , and I think it's very clear that identity politics is one of many ways in which you see a kind of yearning for fraternity bubbling up to the surface in a very problem , yeah , and he talks about how that yearning doesn't always take healthy directions .
Speaker 1And he talks , too , about how we are always seen to be seeking community and yet disappointed by the communities that we find , which I found to be a really arresting insight . I've never seen that anywhere else .
Speaker 2Yeah , he really thought that Americans like walk community but we're real bad at it Because our language and our habits like don't point us for community . We're so used to talking in the language of right and interest and that's used to talking in the language of right and interest and that's not like good community building language . Sometimes I like to say to my students okay , give me a political position that you have , but don't explain it in terms of right , and it's very , very hard for them or for most Americans to do that . But right language is very individual . It's weird to say like something like you can't really say well , people have a right to community or a right to love right . Like that starts to sound even potentially pretty creepy . Right we have .
Speaker 2So we don't have great language to express our longing for community and we also like use the word , as I said before , in so many ways because we want it so badly . We attach it to things that are going to be dissatisfying . So , like on my a lot of colleges , you'll hear people talk about the campus community , and community is a super weird word to think about a place where people are moving in and moving out Everybody's there because they're paying or being paid , and where everybody's there basically to advance their private interests , and so even the things that we call community or experience as community , and it's true . For most of my students , being at a residential liberal arts college is going to be one of the more communal feelings that they have in their entire lives , but it's a pretty like thing for a community , indeed , right um it's for standards for community are low and we take , you know , community wherever we can get it , but most of the places where we're getting it , uh , we actually don't get what we're looking for .
Speaker 2Um , probably in the contemporary world , and and this is why I think being part of what's so great about this book right now is , though it was written in 1973 , it seems even more on the nose now , um in the internet age . Um , but I think all the time about the fact that the more you use social media , the the lonelier you report being , and that's a really good example of how my father thought Americans are always like creating and making these new forms of what they think are being connected or in community , but it actually doesn't satisfy their real connection or community .
Speaker 1We have such a hard time giving up the language and the habits of individualistic liberalism , right , it's very hard to generate sort of anything that seems to be sort of a healthy pushback against that , so , which makes me wonder what you think about . So we have this time in the 60s and 70s when you get a lot of pushback against liberalism from the left , and now you get it very much so from the right . You can give me one or both kind of from the right reaction against liberalism . That has obviously a lot of traction now .
Speaker 2Well , I don't think he would be surprised by it at all . Most of that element of you know right-wing politics in the United States is a lot less new than people think . It is right . People think that because Trump himself is relatively new , that everything around Trump is also new , but it's not For decades . I think conservative thinkers have been very articulate about the costs to community and the inhospitability of the American like of the United States to neighborhood , to family , to all sorts of human relationships that are not like exchange relationships .
Speaker 2And so I think , like that piece has been on the right for a while . But I also think , you see , in the very idea of like the movements themselves on the right , like people at least people on the left love to call Trumpism a cult . I don't know like whether or not I think that's right . I guess I think it's not right because in Dad's sense it's a kind of , again , desire to be part of a group and an identity right , a desire to have some sense of people out there who are your people , who you're tied to in this thing that's bigger than yourself . And so I think he would see , like what we call Trumpism before that probably the Tea Party much as he sees like identity politics on the left , as this , I think again faulty , like expression of the desire to have a real relational grounding and sense of belonging that has to do with politics .
Speaker 1I think he had an appropriate ambivalence toward what he called fraternities of battle . There's a good and bad about that , the bad being that it requires a pretty strong sense of there being an enemy .
Speaker 2Yeah , well , he . I mean , I'm going to redirect a little bit , but to answer your question .
Speaker 2You can redirect anytime , Susan you know like today when we talk about toxic masculinity a lot . I think my father was worried about masculinity and men in the united states in the 1970s . I think he thought that the kinds of things we're talking about the emphasis on like a like rugged , individual , right uh , what's really a kind of like , if my students would say , like male coded value , right , like cowboys are supposed to be rugged and individualistic and not relational and not dependent on anybody . And so I think my father's thought that the kind of crisis of fraternity hit men particularly hard and that one of the things
Practical Ways to Cultivate Fraternity
Speaker 2that you consistently see in American politics is groups of men coming together in this longing for fraternity , but in ways that are misguided , in that they are destructive . He was thinking here about things like gangs . He was probably thinking here about things like certain kinds of extra hedonistic college fraternities .
Speaker 1Yeah .
Speaker 2And I think that he I mean he says in the book right , these are false forms of fraternity , because any kind of group that's oriented around destruction is eventually going to involve some amount of self-destruction , and it's also going to mean that there are , you know , soldiers left on the battlefield who the rest of you know , the group is left to mourn . And so he did worry in particular about the tendency of American men to form like destructive groups as a kind of psychological response to this society that really sort of doubly excluded or devalued their potential as husbands and brothers and fathers and sons .
Speaker 1There's relational identity . Yeah , all right . Last question for me here , I think , susan , practically speaking , how can people sort of mitigate the worst aspects of liberal individualism in their lives , or how can they ? How can reflecting on or being committed to fraternity help in a practical way ?
Speaker 2Well , I mean , I think my dad , like I said , would advise many of the things that Tocqueville would advise . You know join community groups , start community groups , try to know your neighbors , try not to move too much , try to cultivate relationships with other people . Don't drop people the second they do something that you find mildly distasteful . But I also think you know , aside from that like level of community engagement , you can think internally about asking yourself different kinds of questions when you're thinking about what to do in your life . And when I talk to my students , you know the question that they always get is what you know , what do you want to do after graduation ? And sometimes I say to them okay , that's a good question , but maybe you should also ask with whom do you want to be after graduation ?
Speaker 2Is there a friend that you have that's so good , a friend that you know that even if you have a bad day at work , your life's going to be okay , if you can come back to that roommate and roll your eyes and tell some jokes . And you know , have a beer or do whatever else . And you know , have a beer or do whatever else . I think we're taught when we're making life decisions in the United States to really focus often on the what as opposed to the who and the with whom , and I think putting those questions first in your own mind is a kind of small way of prioritizing fraternity internally in a country that devalues fraternity so much externally .
Speaker 1That's perfectly put . We have to end there because that was so well done . Thank you , that's great , great advice . Thank you for this conversation . Susan has already forewarned me that she has no social media presence at all , except a small one on LinkedIn . So if you want to connect with her , you can connect with her on LinkedIn , but mostly really encourage you , if this interests you at all , to buy this book . It's available from the University of Notre Dame Press and everywhere books are sold . As they say , the Idea of Fraternity in America by Wilson Carey McWilliams , and thank you , susan McWilliams-Bart , for your time . Thanks , jeremy . Hey , thanks for joining us for today's podcast . If you enjoyed it , we invite you to subscribe and or rate and or review us on YouTube , apple , spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts . Thanks a lot .