When do issues stop being as important as which side you're on?
I've been asking myself this question a lot over the past five years. So often political and social arguments seem to fall along the exact same lines, over and over, regardless of the arguers or their intelligence level - they parrot the party line, as though they are trained spokesmen. Otherwise well-educated, well-meaning people will jump to the defense of the reigning sociopath, simply because he claims to support "their" issue. Objectivity comes off as wishy-washy; reason is a cursable offense. Even truth becomes negotiable - so long as "our side" is upheld.
This isn't some new, modern plunge into pre-revolutionary polarization. It's a side-effect of the human instinct toward tribalism. We're social animals, after all; social interaction is, for us, as primal an urge as reproduction and feeding. Loyalty to a group is not in itself good or bad, naturally; it's how the instinct plays out in a society - whether it strengthens bonds, or divides society against itself.
Analyzing the tribal structure, I've formulated the following elements of this most human of phenomena:
1. Shared Origin.
Initially, tribes were based upon the family unit. Since travel was difficult before the domestication of the horse, these families remained together, growing through intermarriage with other tribes (willingly or unwillingly); they were related, and by default limited to a certain territory. If a portion of the tribe broke away and settled elsewhere, they tended to forget most of the details of their original territory, essentially beginning their new tribe's history at the point of settlement. Even as family units became villages, villages cities, and cities became kingdoms, a member of a tribe based their identity on their place of birth and their relatives.
While physical origin and relationships remain important to human beings, we've added a second type of "origin": an origin of circumstance - socioeconomic levels, education, political affiliation, and/or experience. Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance, is a loose tribe based on the shared experience of alcoholism, and the attempt to break their dependancy. Such tribes band together for mutual protection and support, rather than arising organically from shared family bonds.
2. Common Tradition.
"Tradition" here indicates traditions of story, belief, and ritual. This can be as complex as Orthodox Jewish traditions, or as simple as a clique of high school kids who meet by the fence every day to smoke. Traditions of story - i.e. oral traditions, just-so stories, or cultural heroes - are a kind of glue, holding the tribe together around the proverbial campfire; bards and storytellers were extremely important, and deemed to hold quasi-mystical power. Stories also helped to justify certain beliefs; often it's not clear whether the belief arose first, or the story. Consider the case of Jacob wrestling God in Genesis - the story is used to explain, as an aside, why the Israelites don't eat the tendon attached to the hip, since the angel touched Jacob's hip and wrenched it out of its socket:
3. Common Enemy.
This is where the negative aspects of tribalism really kick in: tribes need a common enemy - the "Not-us" by which they define themselves.
Common enemies are conceived most obviously through war and conquest - the Blood-Feud. A tribe that suffered a defeat at the hands of a stronger tribe will automatically hate them. From the time of bride-stealing and seasonal raiding parties, all the way to our modern state of nations and warfare, inter-tribal grudges can last for generations, sometimes hundreds of years: India versus Pakistan; Greece versus Turkey; England versus France. The current Palestinian-Israeli conflict is definitely modern, rising from the fallout of Imperialism in the region; but one could argue its roots go back to the Israelite conquest of Canaan.
But there is another way Common Enemies can arise: through fear of cultural disintegration. It's an odd phenomenon of tribalism that all the aforementioned blood relations, traditions, stories, and rituals can't hold a tribe together; even strong tribes will fragment, and fragment, and fragment again - whether through internal disagreement, or mere entropy. A family who builds their hut outside the village circle is likely to break off and form its own tribe, simply due to its relative isolation. Two different tribes are just as likely to trade as to fight, and as they trade, they exchange culture. It's important to realize that technologies and manufacturing techniques are just as much a cultural aspect as beliefs and rituals; each time a "new thing" is transferred from one culture to another, it changes the new culture significantly. Consider the introduction of metal blades to the Native Americans. The new implements had the advantage of being far more convenient than stone tools: obsidian is far sharper and keeps an edge longer than metal, but it's time-consuming to make, shatters instead of bending, and good sources of the stone were a limited resource, often guarded by hostile tribes. Metal was cheap, and the Europeans had a seemingly infinite supply of the stuff. The skills needed to knap arrowheads, knives, and axes became obsolete overnight. An aspect of Native American cultural technology disappeared, almost as if it had never existed, as they became dependent on Europeans for this new technology.
The transference of culture, whether through technology or new ideas, creates anxiety in the older generation of a tribe as their more malleable offspring choose to learn new techniques and abandon the Old Ways. Rootlessness becomes a psycho-social issue, as the young drift from the tribe and the old feel abandoned. Change is not comfortable, and inevitable, organic change creates the worst anxiety of all. What arises from this feeling of disintegration is what we call "Conservative backlash", or "returning to the old ways", though both are a misnomer. What is being created, out of whole cloth, is a new tribal template, a means to define who We are versus who They are. Out of this arises the phenomena of Isms - Nationalism, Communism (which drew on Romantic ideas about noble savagery and original man), Nazism, Racism.
Common Enemies, in this light, don't come ready-ordered. It is essential to create your common enemy. Ethnic stereotyping is an excellent way to create an enemy: "We are not like the (insert ethnic group here). They are lazy, sneaky, sexually depraved, moronic, and have strange beliefs. We are hardworking, honest, chaste, and educated. They are clamoring at our gates, to take our jobs, money, women, and destroy our culture. We must therefore neutralize them." Whether or not this formula is expressed in such blunt terms, all tribally-oriented literature follows the exact same template in creating enemies, whether it is a 19th-century racist diatribe, or a 21st-century blog post about an opposing political party.
It's important to note that, while having a Common Enemy can glue a failing tribe together, it's caustic medicine to those inside the tribe. This aspect of tribalism becomes stronger as traditions and roots become weaker; it's often the last gasp of a culture attempting to protect itself. One could argue that Nazism was a sort of deadly immune reaction in a weakened culture. Germany was barely a nation, and after World War I nearly ceased to exist. Internal social, economic, and ethical conflicts gave power to tribal-political groups seeking to "resurrect" Germany. The Nazis, with their swooning, Romanticized notions of German history and culture (much of which was cobbled together or outright invented) padlocked to a snarling Rottweiler of militarism and racist Nationalism, won out over the less concretely-idealized Socialists and Communists. Trading disintegration for this kind of integration seemed good to many Germans at the time, but cultural blood-poisoning quickly set in. All Germans suffered. Anyone remotely outside the lockstep party line was ratted out and liquidated. The Holocaust was only the most dramatic, savage, and evil manifestation of a tribal culture that would, if unchecked, eventually eat its own heart out.
History is clear: any tribe that jumps on a Common Enemy tack as a means of salvation is doomed. The result is militarism, exclusionism within, and the multiplication of enemies without. While this aspect of tribalism cannot be completely avoided, it can at least be mitigated by elevating the other aspects of tribe hood and mitigating the tribe's instinct to attack other tribes.
4. Locus of Tribehood.
This aspect of tribalism emerges at the intersection of the other three, and serves as the focal point of the tribe, if not the glue that holds it together. In "primitive" cultures (I hate that term), the locus of tribe hood was often a group of fetish objects, held in the main meeting hut or tent, which represented the gods or ancestral spirit patrons of the tribe. These fetish objects or "idols" were carried with the tribe wherever it went, serving as bearers of of the divine and physical manifestations of tribal tradition. As migratory bands settled in villages, and villages evolved into city-states, the fetish object was planted in a temple, often as a statue, where it became the patron deity of the city-state.
The rise of kingdoms and empires complicated the Locus aspect. No longer could the totality of the tribe's locus be concentrated in one fetish object; the deities were too numerous. Deities were spiritualized, transformed into Pantheons who lived Up There - whether on Mount Olympus or some other cosmic location, with their temples and sacred groves as communication centers with mortals. For the most part, however, the Gods had become too abstract to serve as a locus of tribehood; a human ruler now served as a focal point. The King, or Emperor, now took on the full weight of the tribe's focus, adoration, and expectations. One might argue that the Roman Senate couldn't possibly have kept Rome together as it expanded into an empire, simply because it was too fragmented; the Empire needed one focal point...this may be stretching things a bit, since Imperial Rome only truly arose after Julius Caesar seized power; but I think this is quite reasonable. Having a coin stamped with an image of Roma was all well and good, but it's too abstract, doesn't command as much attention as the image of Caesar, man and god.
Kingdoms and Empires had their heyday; the rise of the modern understanding of Nationhood - a sort of manufactured uber-tribalism - turned the Nation itself into a fetish object, regardless of who sat on the throne. Written Constitutions became the fetishes of democracies, while the figure of the "Emperor" still had power in totalitarian states, whether he be recognized as such.
On a much smaller scale, these LoT's can be difficult to locate. In a family, sometimes the surname itself becomes the locus of tribe hood: "We are Smiths" becomes a sort of mantra, even an incantation at times, to define the family unit. One might argue that the Internet's LoT is the Funny Cat Meme: regardless of political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, or creed, Funny Cat Memes are universally recognized and adored. Even an abstract idea could become a locus of tribe hood, changing a loose affiliation into a more strongly-cemented group.
Tribalism is the essential human social experience. Here I've reduced the phenomenon to four core aspects; in practice, it's often a lot messier. There are tribes-within-tribes, tribes-intersecting-tribes, and individuals can belong to many different tribes. It's rare for a person to belong to no tribe, by strict definition; even "social butterflies" have a home base of sorts, from which they feel a sense of belonging and history.
I generally use "tribalism" in the negative sense, to express my frustration with the way humans lose their reason as they divide along political or religious lines; in Christianity this is especially grievous, as the tenants of Jesus Christ are often thrown out the window as soon as a perceived "enemy of the faith" arises. What happens to, "My Kingdom is not of this world," and, "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood"? The self-sacrifice and unresistance of the Martyrs, and the perfect love and nonjudgment of Christ, is forgotten; all is swept aside by the human instinct to neutralize or destroy the perceived enemy of the tribe.
But it is essential to remember that tribalism is not an evil thing; as always, the way it's expressed is what makes it beneficial or destructive. We as humans must struggle to form a "human tribe", one which embraces and protects its own inner tribality even as it declares we are all Human. Smaller tribes - cultures, languages, traditions - should be protected, since they are precious and unique; our Common Enemies should not be flesh-and-blood people, but destructive ideas, socioeconomic inequality, and natural disasters. Much of this will rely on how well we examine our individual and group beliefs, and judge whether they need to change to accommodate the existence of other belief systems, and whether or not they align with factual reality rather than emotional reactionism. I believe we can build a better world if we build up the positive aspects of tribalism, and work to mitigate the negative, enemy-creating part of our human social instinct.
Rick Out.
I've been asking myself this question a lot over the past five years. So often political and social arguments seem to fall along the exact same lines, over and over, regardless of the arguers or their intelligence level - they parrot the party line, as though they are trained spokesmen. Otherwise well-educated, well-meaning people will jump to the defense of the reigning sociopath, simply because he claims to support "their" issue. Objectivity comes off as wishy-washy; reason is a cursable offense. Even truth becomes negotiable - so long as "our side" is upheld.
This isn't some new, modern plunge into pre-revolutionary polarization. It's a side-effect of the human instinct toward tribalism. We're social animals, after all; social interaction is, for us, as primal an urge as reproduction and feeding. Loyalty to a group is not in itself good or bad, naturally; it's how the instinct plays out in a society - whether it strengthens bonds, or divides society against itself.
Analyzing the tribal structure, I've formulated the following elements of this most human of phenomena:
1. Shared Origin.
Initially, tribes were based upon the family unit. Since travel was difficult before the domestication of the horse, these families remained together, growing through intermarriage with other tribes (willingly or unwillingly); they were related, and by default limited to a certain territory. If a portion of the tribe broke away and settled elsewhere, they tended to forget most of the details of their original territory, essentially beginning their new tribe's history at the point of settlement. Even as family units became villages, villages cities, and cities became kingdoms, a member of a tribe based their identity on their place of birth and their relatives.
While physical origin and relationships remain important to human beings, we've added a second type of "origin": an origin of circumstance - socioeconomic levels, education, political affiliation, and/or experience. Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance, is a loose tribe based on the shared experience of alcoholism, and the attempt to break their dependancy. Such tribes band together for mutual protection and support, rather than arising organically from shared family bonds.
2. Common Tradition.
"Tradition" here indicates traditions of story, belief, and ritual. This can be as complex as Orthodox Jewish traditions, or as simple as a clique of high school kids who meet by the fence every day to smoke. Traditions of story - i.e. oral traditions, just-so stories, or cultural heroes - are a kind of glue, holding the tribe together around the proverbial campfire; bards and storytellers were extremely important, and deemed to hold quasi-mystical power. Stories also helped to justify certain beliefs; often it's not clear whether the belief arose first, or the story. Consider the case of Jacob wrestling God in Genesis - the story is used to explain, as an aside, why the Israelites don't eat the tendon attached to the hip, since the angel touched Jacob's hip and wrenched it out of its socket:
When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man...Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon. (Genesis 32: 25, 32)
Common beliefs initially manifest as taboos, the breaking of which will bring ill fortune. Taboos are thought of, in the "civilized" world, as laughable and backward superstitions; but they are not actually as unreasonable as they sound, and represent a sophisticated kind of thinking. Consider the taboos surrounding the dead in many ancestor-worshipping cultures: in traditions with no cosmically-separated afterlife, the dead tend to hang around, existing in a sort of half-life. Just like cranky relatives, they want to be honored and visited; they are often lonely, and don't like being dead. And individual who was powerful in life often retains their power in death, manifesting as the ability to sicken or kill ungrateful living relatives. Thus, human beings honor and cherish their dead, bringing them food and alcohol - not just because they miss them, but because the dead have a certain vitality and like to make demands. Even in our scientific, calculating, "reasonable" modern life, we still follow various funerary taboos: funerals where we pay respects to the deceased, flowers to keep evil spirits at bay (and to mask the scent of death - odor and evil were often intertwined). Fences or berms around graveyards are not just to keep the living out, but to keep the dead in. One doesn't "whistle past the graveyard" because it irritates the sleeping dead. The list goes on and on; whole books have been written on the subject, and I won't attempt to encompass the subject here. The point is, tribes are identified by, and identify with, their personal beliefs and taboos.
In 21st-century American culture, "beliefs" have taken on a more abstract meaning, encompassing everything from religious affiliation to your stance on sociopolitical issues. But the idea of "taboo" still holds. A person who disagrees with our strong beliefs is still, in effect, "downgraded" in our eyes, if only metaphorically - by expressing a deviant belief, they have broken taboo. And there are still consequences. In a hardline conservative family, a child who comes out as gay is "guilty" of violating family taboo. The family (read: tribe) must now decide whether it adjusts its beliefs, or casts out the taboo-breaker.
3. Common Enemy.
This is where the negative aspects of tribalism really kick in: tribes need a common enemy - the "Not-us" by which they define themselves.
Common enemies are conceived most obviously through war and conquest - the Blood-Feud. A tribe that suffered a defeat at the hands of a stronger tribe will automatically hate them. From the time of bride-stealing and seasonal raiding parties, all the way to our modern state of nations and warfare, inter-tribal grudges can last for generations, sometimes hundreds of years: India versus Pakistan; Greece versus Turkey; England versus France. The current Palestinian-Israeli conflict is definitely modern, rising from the fallout of Imperialism in the region; but one could argue its roots go back to the Israelite conquest of Canaan.
But there is another way Common Enemies can arise: through fear of cultural disintegration. It's an odd phenomenon of tribalism that all the aforementioned blood relations, traditions, stories, and rituals can't hold a tribe together; even strong tribes will fragment, and fragment, and fragment again - whether through internal disagreement, or mere entropy. A family who builds their hut outside the village circle is likely to break off and form its own tribe, simply due to its relative isolation. Two different tribes are just as likely to trade as to fight, and as they trade, they exchange culture. It's important to realize that technologies and manufacturing techniques are just as much a cultural aspect as beliefs and rituals; each time a "new thing" is transferred from one culture to another, it changes the new culture significantly. Consider the introduction of metal blades to the Native Americans. The new implements had the advantage of being far more convenient than stone tools: obsidian is far sharper and keeps an edge longer than metal, but it's time-consuming to make, shatters instead of bending, and good sources of the stone were a limited resource, often guarded by hostile tribes. Metal was cheap, and the Europeans had a seemingly infinite supply of the stuff. The skills needed to knap arrowheads, knives, and axes became obsolete overnight. An aspect of Native American cultural technology disappeared, almost as if it had never existed, as they became dependent on Europeans for this new technology.
The transference of culture, whether through technology or new ideas, creates anxiety in the older generation of a tribe as their more malleable offspring choose to learn new techniques and abandon the Old Ways. Rootlessness becomes a psycho-social issue, as the young drift from the tribe and the old feel abandoned. Change is not comfortable, and inevitable, organic change creates the worst anxiety of all. What arises from this feeling of disintegration is what we call "Conservative backlash", or "returning to the old ways", though both are a misnomer. What is being created, out of whole cloth, is a new tribal template, a means to define who We are versus who They are. Out of this arises the phenomena of Isms - Nationalism, Communism (which drew on Romantic ideas about noble savagery and original man), Nazism, Racism.
Common Enemies, in this light, don't come ready-ordered. It is essential to create your common enemy. Ethnic stereotyping is an excellent way to create an enemy: "We are not like the (insert ethnic group here). They are lazy, sneaky, sexually depraved, moronic, and have strange beliefs. We are hardworking, honest, chaste, and educated. They are clamoring at our gates, to take our jobs, money, women, and destroy our culture. We must therefore neutralize them." Whether or not this formula is expressed in such blunt terms, all tribally-oriented literature follows the exact same template in creating enemies, whether it is a 19th-century racist diatribe, or a 21st-century blog post about an opposing political party.
It's important to note that, while having a Common Enemy can glue a failing tribe together, it's caustic medicine to those inside the tribe. This aspect of tribalism becomes stronger as traditions and roots become weaker; it's often the last gasp of a culture attempting to protect itself. One could argue that Nazism was a sort of deadly immune reaction in a weakened culture. Germany was barely a nation, and after World War I nearly ceased to exist. Internal social, economic, and ethical conflicts gave power to tribal-political groups seeking to "resurrect" Germany. The Nazis, with their swooning, Romanticized notions of German history and culture (much of which was cobbled together or outright invented) padlocked to a snarling Rottweiler of militarism and racist Nationalism, won out over the less concretely-idealized Socialists and Communists. Trading disintegration for this kind of integration seemed good to many Germans at the time, but cultural blood-poisoning quickly set in. All Germans suffered. Anyone remotely outside the lockstep party line was ratted out and liquidated. The Holocaust was only the most dramatic, savage, and evil manifestation of a tribal culture that would, if unchecked, eventually eat its own heart out.
History is clear: any tribe that jumps on a Common Enemy tack as a means of salvation is doomed. The result is militarism, exclusionism within, and the multiplication of enemies without. While this aspect of tribalism cannot be completely avoided, it can at least be mitigated by elevating the other aspects of tribe hood and mitigating the tribe's instinct to attack other tribes.
4. Locus of Tribehood.
This aspect of tribalism emerges at the intersection of the other three, and serves as the focal point of the tribe, if not the glue that holds it together. In "primitive" cultures (I hate that term), the locus of tribe hood was often a group of fetish objects, held in the main meeting hut or tent, which represented the gods or ancestral spirit patrons of the tribe. These fetish objects or "idols" were carried with the tribe wherever it went, serving as bearers of of the divine and physical manifestations of tribal tradition. As migratory bands settled in villages, and villages evolved into city-states, the fetish object was planted in a temple, often as a statue, where it became the patron deity of the city-state.
The rise of kingdoms and empires complicated the Locus aspect. No longer could the totality of the tribe's locus be concentrated in one fetish object; the deities were too numerous. Deities were spiritualized, transformed into Pantheons who lived Up There - whether on Mount Olympus or some other cosmic location, with their temples and sacred groves as communication centers with mortals. For the most part, however, the Gods had become too abstract to serve as a locus of tribehood; a human ruler now served as a focal point. The King, or Emperor, now took on the full weight of the tribe's focus, adoration, and expectations. One might argue that the Roman Senate couldn't possibly have kept Rome together as it expanded into an empire, simply because it was too fragmented; the Empire needed one focal point...this may be stretching things a bit, since Imperial Rome only truly arose after Julius Caesar seized power; but I think this is quite reasonable. Having a coin stamped with an image of Roma was all well and good, but it's too abstract, doesn't command as much attention as the image of Caesar, man and god.
Kingdoms and Empires had their heyday; the rise of the modern understanding of Nationhood - a sort of manufactured uber-tribalism - turned the Nation itself into a fetish object, regardless of who sat on the throne. Written Constitutions became the fetishes of democracies, while the figure of the "Emperor" still had power in totalitarian states, whether he be recognized as such.
On a much smaller scale, these LoT's can be difficult to locate. In a family, sometimes the surname itself becomes the locus of tribe hood: "We are Smiths" becomes a sort of mantra, even an incantation at times, to define the family unit. One might argue that the Internet's LoT is the Funny Cat Meme: regardless of political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, or creed, Funny Cat Memes are universally recognized and adored. Even an abstract idea could become a locus of tribe hood, changing a loose affiliation into a more strongly-cemented group.
Tribalism is the essential human social experience. Here I've reduced the phenomenon to four core aspects; in practice, it's often a lot messier. There are tribes-within-tribes, tribes-intersecting-tribes, and individuals can belong to many different tribes. It's rare for a person to belong to no tribe, by strict definition; even "social butterflies" have a home base of sorts, from which they feel a sense of belonging and history.
I generally use "tribalism" in the negative sense, to express my frustration with the way humans lose their reason as they divide along political or religious lines; in Christianity this is especially grievous, as the tenants of Jesus Christ are often thrown out the window as soon as a perceived "enemy of the faith" arises. What happens to, "My Kingdom is not of this world," and, "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood"? The self-sacrifice and unresistance of the Martyrs, and the perfect love and nonjudgment of Christ, is forgotten; all is swept aside by the human instinct to neutralize or destroy the perceived enemy of the tribe.
But it is essential to remember that tribalism is not an evil thing; as always, the way it's expressed is what makes it beneficial or destructive. We as humans must struggle to form a "human tribe", one which embraces and protects its own inner tribality even as it declares we are all Human. Smaller tribes - cultures, languages, traditions - should be protected, since they are precious and unique; our Common Enemies should not be flesh-and-blood people, but destructive ideas, socioeconomic inequality, and natural disasters. Much of this will rely on how well we examine our individual and group beliefs, and judge whether they need to change to accommodate the existence of other belief systems, and whether or not they align with factual reality rather than emotional reactionism. I believe we can build a better world if we build up the positive aspects of tribalism, and work to mitigate the negative, enemy-creating part of our human social instinct.
Rick Out.
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