Brotherhood in 21st century western society is in decline. Most traditional men’s organizations, including the Freemasons, Elks, and Odd Fellows, report significant declines in membership in recent years. We find a similar trend with the closing of so many pubs and bars where men once gathered to drink, tell bawdy stories and blow off steam.
Popular culture promotes a concept of brotherhood as formed amid war and combat real or imagined. Whether participating in state-sponsored war or black-ops teams, men who fight and kill together become brothers, forging fictional bonds often stronger than any other relationships. In motion pictures like Band of Brothers (2001) and The Expendables (2010-2014), characters overtly embrace one another as brothers, implying that men must survive a reign of fire in order to achieve brotherhood.
Tracking with each of these trends - at least in the United States - is the sharp increase in mass shootings during the past 30 years, and also a sharp increase in “deaths of despair,” particularly suicide among men.
Ninety-eight percent of mass shootings are carried out by men. This uniquely American problem is at least partly due to the easy availability of military-type weapons. According to The Violence Project (2022), these men study the mass shooters who precede them. They imagine themselves rising into manhood with every man, woman and child torn apart by their high-powered munitions. Most are seeking suicidal retribution for a petty grievance, bullying offense or other insult to their fragile egos. Very rarely do shooters suffer from any serious mental illness, as some would suggest.
From the 1990s through to the 2020s, the number of mass shooting incidents in the United States has more than tripled, while the number of fatalities overall has increased more than ten-fold. Extensive research by The Violence Project (2022) for the first time highlights certain key factors that correlate with mass shooter behavior:
- Many suffered early childhood trauma, violence in the home, physical or sexual abuse or severe bullying
- Many are angry or despondent over a recent event and lack the emotional coping skills to manage the crisis
- They often study other shootings online, becoming infatuated with violence or radicalized by hate groups
- They possess the means to carry out the attack, as firearms and especially heavy-duty weapons are easily available in the United States
Michael Kimmel in his book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (2017), points out that aggrieved entitlement is a root causal factor, the sense of loss many American men experience when they can no longer engage masculinity in the traditional ways. These individuals begin to perceive themselves as victims. They use firearms to compensate for their losses, as a way of retrieving, restoring and reclaiming manhood.
Traditional masculinity favored brotherhood and offered numerous ways of building close male bonds similar to that of idealized male siblings. Moreover, brotherhood associated with the neighborhood pub offered easy entry for men at the fringes, those at the edge of loss, or otherwise enmeshed in crisis. Brotherhood was the gathering of men around the fire, swapping stories tinged with generalized antipathy toward women, and howling at the moon in false harmony.
For better or for worse, traditional brotherhood based on lived experience saved many men from their internal demons. Today’s virtual experiences pale in comparison, often derailing positive action in favor of hate and violence. An alternative brotherhood invites men on the edge to take up arms and recover their manhood.
Jackson Katz (Ms. Magazine, 11/21/22), a pioneering scholar and activist on issues of gender, race and violence, puts it this way:
“As long as men, young and old, have easy access to high-capacity killing machines at the same time their society furnishes them with endless heroic masculine narratives about redemptive violence, the next tragedy is always going to be around the corner.”
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