Whatever Happened to the “Family of Man”?

EDITORIAL, 29 Dec 2025

#931 |  Richard E. Rubenstein – TRANSCEND Media Service

The Near Death and Possible Rebirth of Human Solidarity

Exactly 70 years ago, when I was a high school senior living in a suburb of New York City, I went with my parents to see a photo exhibit called “The Family of Man” at MOMA – the Museum of Modern Art.  I remember it vividly.  Some 500 photos by more than 250 photographers pictured people of virtually every culture involved in common human activities: love, childbirth, work, family, education, war, and peace.  According to Edward Steichen, the great photographer who curated it, the exhibit “was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.”  For the next eight years the show toured the globe . . . but the ideas that inspired it have long since gone into hibernation.  In place of the human family conceived of as our primary identity group we have come to sanctify the ethnic nation.

How did this happen?  What (if anything) can be done about it?  It may help to put the hope for human solidarity in historical context.

The vision of humanity as a coherent group sharing common characteristics – a society actually or potentially like a family – originated in the religions of the axial age.  To Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all people were children of God and descendants of common human ancestors, with each person possessing an equally precious soul.  Eventually, they believed, God would fulfill his promise to create a universal world order, peaceful and just, recognizing the implicit holiness of every individual and every people. Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains made different assumptions about the nature of deity and the soul, but they, too, believed that human beings shared a common nature and were part of an overarching moral-spiritual order.  Early Enlightenment philosophers, secular as well as religious, based the unity of mankind on the universality of reason, the existence of natural law and rights, and the possibility of human progress.  Later analysts in the age of modern science asserted that humans constitute a single biological species, with each individual possessing a common neuro- psychological makeup.

That was the theory – but what about the practice?  Despite these commonalities, it was clear that some forms of diversity might trump unity. The potential unity of humankind did not prevent its actual division into tribes, castes, social classes, and nations — divisions that were deep, long-lasting, and often generative of massive bloodshed and trauma.  Nevertheless, the prophets of solidarity (for they were prophets, not simply analysts of “things as they are now”) asserted that the destiny of human individuals was to create a peaceful world order based on what Immanuel Kant called “cosmopolitical unity.”  Karl Marx objected that this solidarity could not emerge while humanity was divided into unequally privileged social classes, but he insisted that workers’ rule would permit the development of a “species consciousness” transcending narrower forms of identity based on ethnicity and nationalism. A century later, Mohandas Gandhi emphasized that diverse identities of various sorts could be maintained while also being transcended.  For him the human journey was headed toward the goal of “unity in diversity.”

These were some of the concepts underlying the Family of Man exhibit.  They reflected the optimistic hopes of many progressive thinkers and activists in the immediate aftermath of World War II.  Progress, symbolized by the new United Nations building rising a few blocks east of MOMA, meant realizing the potential of all peoples and nations to treat each other with the same sort of compassion, care, and responsibility that one would expect of good friends, if not members of the same family.  An implication was that this fellow-feeling would produce some sort of political unity reaching beyond the nation-state and competing blocs of states. The UN was not a world government nor was it expected to be, but commentators from Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to Winston Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru believed that it was an important step in that direction.

What shattered these hopes and made them seem so abstract, naïve, and utopian?  For years, the standard answer was the Cold War.  After one or two years of international collaboration, the postwar world had divided into hostile communist and capitalist blocs, with each side denouncing each other as evil incarnate, threatening its enemy with nuclear destruction, and fighting “limited” but highly destructive wars.  But the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, and more than a generation later its promised peace dividends remain undelivered.  Not only is there no rebirth of the movement to realize human solidarity, but divisions based on people’s identification with ethnic, religious, and national groups have intensified and become more lethal – even genocidal.

The latest manifestation of these divisions, sometimes called right-wing populism, has seen a resurgence of ethno-nationalist fervor, competition, and violence around the globe, with leaders like Donald Trump  (U.S.), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Volodymyr Zelenski (Ukraine), Narendra Modi (India), Viktor Orban (Hungary), and Benjamin Netanyahu  (Israel), among many others, implementing economic, political, and cultural policies that strongly favor members of their own ethnic “nation” and disfavor members of other groups, internal and international, that they consider competitors and sources of impurity.  The leading prophet of this development was the late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, who argued that Cold War competition between blocs committed to opposed socioeconomic ideologies was giving way to a competition between eight “civilizations” – blocs separated by strongly conflicting cultural values and interests.  Although Huntington’s analysis implied a shift from a dual power struggle toward multipolarity, he and others associated with the neoconservative movement believed that the major “clash of civilizations” of the new era would pit “the West against the rest.”

One has to admire the descriptive power of Huntington’s theory.  From the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Russo-Ukrainian war, the genocidal Israel-Palestine conflict, and brutal civil struggles in Africa and Southeast Asia, violent conflicts often take place along civilizational or tribal-nationalist lines.  What the analysis most obviously lacks, however, is a convincing causal explanation. Why did conflicts between culture-groups come to replace the Cold War struggle?  Why have so many struggles pitted “the West against the rest”?  Why do so many people around the globe, particularly workers, farmers, and members of the small business class, feel that the only way to secure threatened cultural identities and interests is to conflate their ethnic or religious group with the nation and embrace the dogma of “America First” (or India, Pakistan, Israel, Russia, Hungary, Myanmar, or any other nation First)?

Three related ideas help to explain the rise of ethno-nationalist strife: the irresistible movement toward globalization, the persistence of imperialism, and the inability of late-capitalist economic and political institutions to solve working people’s problems.  A brief comment on each factor follows:

1. People are inclined to create and join militant, armed ethnic, religious, or nationalist organizations when they feel that these cultural identities are seriously threatened.  A major source of such threats in today’s world is the movement toward globalization, which is linked to the globalization of capital and trade, but also involves the exposure of every major social group in virtually every nation to the ideas, images, songs, and stories of other groups around the world, as well as to their diseases, medicines, methods of education and communication, and methods of war. Exposure to other cultures alone does not necessarily threaten one’s ethnic, national, or religious identity, but it often does so if those identities are already compromised by poverty or precarity, the loss of political power, or social indignity.  In many nations, for example, “nativist” anti-immigrant passion is fueled by the eroding economic and social status of native groups.

2. “The West against the rest” makes no sense unless one recognizes that in the U.S. the Cold War was immediately followed by the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” declaring America’s intention to remain the world’s sole military superpower and to suppress any potential rivals. This implied the continued maintenance of the U.S. role as the imperial successor to Britain and France in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, as well as continued North American domination of Central and Latin America. Fueled by aggressive oligopoly capitalism, imperialism generates continual violence by empowering oppressive elites in subject nations and by threatening the political and cultural identities of non-elite groups.  Rebels against imperial domination, as well as competitive nations with imperial ambitions of their own, tend to organize resistance by appealing to the ethnic, religious, or national solidarity of aggrieved groups.  Especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the suppression of communist and socialist rebels elsewhere, anti-imperial resistance has emphasized ethnic and religious identities rather than those based on social class.

3. A world troubled by imperialist violence as well as environmental destruction, climate-based disasters, pandemic diseases, mass migrations, and other challenges affecting all humanity desperately needs global solutions to global problems.  But oligopoly capitalism exacerbates such problems rather than solving them. “Late capitalism” generates vast social and political inequalities that undermine the prosperity, power, and social status of working people and threaten their cultural identities.  The system’s fundamental driver, the pursuit of private profit, precludes the public planning needed to deal with climate change, medical challenges, mass migration, and a host of other problems.  At the same time, the masters of the system have sought to protect their privileges by making ideological and political challenges to the capitalist order taboo – unthinkable! – and by controlling the major communications media as well as most educational institutions.  As a result, working people increasingly disadvantaged by soluble social problems are often persuaded that they have been victimized by sinister cultural enemies rather than by profit-seeking, empire-building oligarchs and their political enablers.

To conclude: seldom has the world been more in need of a workable, realizable doctrine of human solidarity.  The antidote to the alarming increase in ethno-national savagery is cultivation of the understanding that our primary identity (in the sense of wholeness, as opposed to partiality) is human, not just ethnic or national.  Regardless of even deep cultural and political differences, we have the inherent emotional and intellectual capacity to treat each other as friends and family members and to build viable institutions reflecting the consciousness of our mutual needs and responsibilities.  But Marx was right: we can’t get there under the aegis of a profit-obsessed system that sets us against each other in the struggle for economic advantage, fails to solve collective social problems, defines our enemies as cultural “others,” and tries to convince us that no better system is possible.

The road to human solidarity isn’t straight or easy.  It is littered with obstacles, including the oligarchy, its political allies, and the rules that a predatory capitalist order imposes on the rest of us.  Changing these leaders and their rules clears the way for real progress toward the only goal worthy of our species: unity in diversity.

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Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 29 Dec 2025.

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