Various authors have characterized the
current political divisions in the West as an emerging tribalism.
I'm sure we all have some image in our minds when tribes
are spoken of, possibly of men
with black and white paint on their faces holding spears and facing
men with green and orange paint on their faces holding spears.
They're likely dark-skinned. A common dictionary definition of tribe
is: “any
aggregate of people united by ties of descent from a common ancestor,
community of customs and traditions, adherence to the same leaders,
etc.”
I
have a feeling that what today's commentators mean when talking about
tribalism is something else. Amy Chua wrote in Atlantic, "At
its most basic, tribalism describes the human instinct to want to
belong to a group of people who are like you."
Tribalism
probably does little harm when we're talking about clubs, church
congregations or sororities and fraternities. The development of
political tribalism, though, can create frightening results,
particularly when components of racial or ethnic prejudices attach
themselves to a political tribe.
What’s true doesn’t depend on facts
in a doctrinaire political tribe. Settling a matter can come
to depend most on who raises the issue and the numbers in the tribe,
facts can be submerged under painted-face, spear rattling.
That’s a kind of harsh view of the
concern being expressed in these days of reactionary politics in the
USA, Canada, Europe and elsewhere.
There was a time when tribal
organization was necessary and dominated the social/political makeup
of entire continents. Everyone had a group to which to belong, and
although the borders occupied by that group might be fluid and
indefinite, the belonging part was not in question. It’s not easy
for us to visualize—now that we are a number of generations into
the “nation state,” and “national citizenship” way of
organizing socially/politically—how a people-hood without a defined
geographic territory could even exist. (It's helpful to think this
through using the current Israel/Palestine standoff as a test case.)
What defined traditional tribal
memberships generally were language, kinship, folkways and customs.
And as tribes grew and evolved, physical characteristics also evolved
and came to exhibit points of differentiation: who appeared to
be alien and who appeared to be kin. People began to look Cree
or Ojibwa, Jewish or Roman, Chinese or Japanese, Aryan or
Mediterranean. In practice, tribalism defined right and wrong, bad
and good: my tribe is good, others are suspect or bad. My kin are
friends, other tribes are potential enemies. Conventional tribal
wisdom was the glue that kept a tribe united enough to survive in a
harsh world.
The demise of kinship tribalism and the
re-patterning of populations into nation state organizations has been
going on for only a few centuries really. Canada as a nation state
went through a few centuries of redefinition until it declared itself
a nation state in 1867, after which parcels were added until it
became one political entity as we see it on maps today. Territory is
fundamental to the nation state and indigenous tribes that were not
bound by territory but by kinship, language and customs were confined
to reserve areas by treaty or by suasion—in North and Central
America and Australia/New Zealand particularly. Although not spoken
of in those terms, people living under kinship tribal consciousness
had to be separated out; old patterns couldn’t co-exist with
land ownership and title as the nation state practices it.
“Corn is the most sacred food in Maskoke society, a gift for which
profound sacrificial thanks is given during the annual ceremonies
called Posketv (Green Corn
Dance) that renew our relationships to the natural world. Since this
sacred food was left to the People by a woman, the descendant Maskoke
caretakers of this crop are women. [...] Regrettably, settler
colonialism deeply severed this sacred connection, as government
appointed Indian agents removed women from the fields and put them in
homes to fulfill domesticated roles modeled by European women. […]
Today, 39% of our women experience domestic violence.” (Marcus
Briggs-Cloud in “Return to the Good” in Heinrichs, Steve, ed.
Unsettling the Word:
Biblical Experiments in Decolonization. Winnipeg:
Mennonite Church Canada, 2018)
It seems always to be on the margins of
things that chaos and conflict find a home. The old adage, “Good
fences make good neighbours,” expresses the thought that we can
only get along if our borders are clearly defined, respected. We
still find ourselves living in the chaotic margin between tribal
consciousness and nation state politics, though, a fact that becomes
clearer as we look at the present in light of the past.
Do you feel yourself to be part of a
group bound by kinship, custom, folkways and/or religion? A tribe, in
other words? I do and I don’t. I’m a “Mennonite,” and when I
think of where in the tribal/nation state border world I live, that
reality continues, although diminished by time. A test of the
strength of such a bond might be in a declaration of loyalty that
exceeds other loyalties: is it my Mennonite tribal consciousness or
my Canadian citizenship to which I go when ethical judgments are
needed, when a choice is required? Clearly, I live in an age where
tribal sensitivity isn’t exclusive; my “tribe” is coming undone
over questions that appear to pit nation-state values against tribal
values. Words from T.S. Eliot’s The Second Coming are
haunting in such a time: “things fall apart, the centre cannot
hold. Mere chaos is loosed upon the world.” Written about World War
I, the words point to the Nation-state/tribal border quarrels that
have been at the centre of all wars in recent history. It’s this
chaotic margin in small or gigantic manifestations that pits persons
against persons, nation-states against tribal consciousness.
Seems to me that
the more the world becomes a melting pot of intermingling people
carrying vestiges of tribal consciousness, the greater the longing
for a lost tribal community becomes. Nation-states are such
mechanical, impersonal entities, unable even in their finest moments
to satisfy the craving for kinship, cultural community. We see it in
the formation of gangs of all kinds, in the multi-culturalism drive
in Canada whereby kinship tribes are encouraged to nourish their
customs and folkways as they evolve into citizens, in the rise of
new, religious tribes while traditional tribes slide toward
disintegration. The “church on every corner” syndrome. Probably
the greatest anxiety of our age is that in the renewal and rise of
tribalisms, the structures of nation-state governance will be torn
down in the melee of competing, irreconcilable factions and we will
succumb to chaos.
Political parties
in Canada today act like loosely-bound tribes, bound not around
kinship so much as around ideologies and policies, like-mindedness
and loyalties, and that's the really scary part of what's going on
today. If at some future time we should follow the US into an
ever-increasing political tribalism, we will need to face squarely
the question of our nationhood as a guarantor of the best possible
life for all who reside in this sea to sea to sea piece of the earth.
There’s enough of tribalism evident in our current reality to make
clear that we are unable to negotiate best ways forward, that
hardened, partisan views prevent the development of a cooperative
polity. The party-system of democratic governance encourages the
conflict between tribalism and the peaceful, commonwealth
nation-state that democracy promised to provide.
The election of Trump as US President and Doug Ford as Premier of
Ontario had one glaring characteristic in common; both concluded that
political-tribalism was strong enough to give them a win without
presenting comprehensive platforms. And so their campaigns focused on
denigrating the opposition, repeating grievances (real or invented)
and not much else. They were right—the pundits are right—political
tribalism in North America is now a fact and elections fought on
thoughtful ideas may henceforth characterize losers.
Our
national government has determined that taxing carbon is the way we
will go as a measure toward combating climate change. Some provincial
governments are balking at this and going as far as to tell us that
taxing carbon does no good. Our national government has decided that
a pipeline needs to be built in the national economic interest; a
contingent of the population believes it to be a bad idea and will
seek to obstruct it in every possible way. The
indication is strong that support for opposing viewpoints is largely
based on political-tribal bonding as opposed to flexible cooperation
in finding solutions to emerging issues.
Liberal bad,
Conservative good, NDP
irrelevant kind of
mentality. Or vice-vice versa. Jobs good,
environment a hoax.
Chaos at the borders of human, social evolution. Wasted ability.
Wasted energy. My tribe is always right. Your tribe is wrong. From
there it’s not a giant leap to, “if you belong to that tribe, I
know exactly what you are.”
Why we must of
necessity belong to any tribe in this age is a very good question. I
suspect the answer is not political, but biological. We can find
persons who seem to be indifferent to inter-tribal jousting, who
smile to watch the quarreling. We see thoughtful people who are able
to understand what it is that’s actually going on and are therefore
able to be objective. Do these exceptions simply prove the rule?
When we come to
think of chaos at the margins, we’re talking about transition
stages in evolution: economic, social, political, biological. I’ve
been making the point that margins between the status quo before a
transition and after, are prone to undergo the chaos of readjustment.
The second point I’d make in this regard is that the speed and
scope of a transition is relevant to the degree of chaos. Seen in
this light, it’s amazing that the human race has survived the
recent past.
It
took until 1804 for world population to reach 1 billion, a time lapse
of arguably 10 billion years. Two billion was achieved by 1927, a
mere 123 years later and the third billion by 1960, or in 33 years.i
Since 1960, the population has risen to ca. 7.5 billion.ii
The speed at which the jostling for space and resources emerged
surely made change in almost everything mandatory, from family
structures to urban structures to agricultural practice to right to
territory. That we should have made mistakes and bad guesses
(consider the folly of Stalinist “collectivism,” for instance, or
the entire practice of colonization) while attempting to regularize
social/political arrangements seems totally inevitable; Chaos at the
margins exacerbated by the speed and depth of the transition.
A more immediate
case in point involves the unbelievable speed and depth at which
communication technology has erupted. I can pick up my smart phone
and engage in a face-to-face conversation with my daughter in Panama
at any time; fifty years ago, airmail letters would have been the
available “technology” and face-to-face out of the question. Our
regularization of world communicationsystems has fallen prey to chaos
at the margins. An acknowledgment of our current hacking woes, social
media “news,” sexting and Twitter malfeasance must surely lead us
to this conclusion, as if the theft of our privacy by providers
weren't bad enough.
As I
write this, men, particularly, are being exposed daily for harassment
and/or sexual assault. Our biology evolved over much time into the
sexual morass of today. Copulation urges once served to ensure
species survival; that need no longer exists with the same survival
immediacy, but the urges linger on as if they did. To determine that
for our time, copulation is for pleasure and not necessarily for
procreation is not adjustment enough. The chaos on this margin should
be proof enough of that. The struggle toward some order, some
understanding of what the future requires of us in the area of
sexuality is exemplified in the women’s equality struggle, in the
“Me Too” movement and in feminism generally. And still, we have
tribes forming whose goal is to stymy progress on this front.
The reality of
tribes together making up the population of a nation gives rise to
unique tensions. Consider the Canadian picture: An Indigenous tribe
(made up of many similar, but different, sub-tribes), a European
tribe (also made up of similar, but different, sub-tribes),
late-comer African, Middle-Eastern, Philippine, Latin American, etc.
vestiges of tribes. Unable to govern our joint nationhood in
compliance with the values of any one tribe, a way must be found to
legislate and organize under the certainty that vestigial tribal
values of many stripes must be brought along with what is almost
always a compromise position. No mean feat. The compromises are never
good enough for everyone: the anti-abortion tribe remains vocal and
persistent even though the issue has been largely—and
permanently?—settled at the nation level.
Canada has chosen a
national polity to ease the transition at the border. Our
multiculturalism policies are attempts at expanding the time
newcomers have to adjust, to ease the stresses at the most critical
margins. Compared to Germany where anti-immigrant, anti-refugee
demonstrations are numerous and violent at times, we could conclude
that Canada has hit a harmonious chord. But young as we are as a
country, we have a substantial population for whom a nationalistic
tribalism trumps policies of diversity, who judge “Canadianess”
by the values and mores with which they've lived for generations, the
most significant component being a consciousness of Canada as a
“European” country, not African, American, Asian, or
Middle-Eastern, and that immigrating people of colour threaten the
essence of their current, tribalized worldview.
So what's the
solution? How can we counter these waves of chauvinistic, misguided
fervour and rage? I wish I knew, but I suspect that the principle of
desegregation must find new ways to bring people into relationships,
to discourage the concentration of like-mindedness into geographical
ghettos. The tendency to imagine all sorts of negatives about people
we don't really know is strong. I also think that old “whigs and
tories” style of party system has to be modified through a more
representative system of election. Most importantly, the training of
our young people in logic, reasoning, debating skills must be
returned to the centre of our curricula; the inability to
cooperatively find a course of action when needed often comes down to
a failure in the ability to identify and collect relevant facts,
discard irrelevant ones and debate amicably the merits and demerits
of suggested responses. The abysmal level of dialogue in a state
that's half a nation and half tribal is appalling enough to make even
children weep.
The conservative,
orthodox mind tends to reason convergently and herein lies the
making of a pathway toward tribalism. Convergent views of humanity
begin with categories, categories assumed from a little or a great
deal of knowledge or borrowed and adopted through the grapevine of
like-mindedness. The convergence happens in the process of
assigning persons to a category and once assigned, assuming that the
person bears all the characteristics belonging to the category.
Denominational names name categories; race names name categories;
places of origin become categories. After three years working and
traveling in Europe, living in Germany, I chatted with a
brother-in-law about the experience, except that it wasn't really a
chat but rather him reeling off the character of Germans he'd never
met from a store of tidbits in his “German category.” Not
surprisingly, he lived in the “born again” category.
For the
categorization of people to lead to its tribal extreme, there needs
to be a groundswell of voices saying the same things. The central
characteristic of tribalism, after all, is the need to be with
like-minded people and as the numbers singing from the same hymnbook
swells, confidence in the rightness of the position grows, the
emotion of being one-with-many kicks in and the tribal dance is on.
I'm amazed at how every viewpoint that isn't conservative in America
has been assigned to the Liberal category, how much hatred is
slung at the Libs on social and tribal media, all with no
regard to the fact that there exists a vast range in liberalism that
defies such a label. But that's how tribes behave.
Donald Trump is not
so much a president as he is a tribal chieftain. It's evident in the
tribal rallies he loves, where opportunity is given to bathe the
chief in adoration. His rude, crude denigration of leaders who govern
democratically (Trudeau, May, for instance) and his praise for
leaders who govern autocratically (Putin, Kim, for instance) is
indicative of his “tribal chieftain,” strong man inclinations.
Heaven help us if
the trend prospers. Political tribalism and democracy are
incompatible and those of us who see democratic structures as
safeguards of the rights of all citizens had better get busy. It CAN
happen here. It IS happening here.
(Sinclair Lewis'
satire, It Can't Happen Here is reviewed by me at:
http://readwit.blogspot.com/2017/01/sinclair-lewis-it-cant-happen-hereimage.html)
i
United Nations Secretariat, Department of Economic and Social
Affairs, The World At Six Billion (1999), p. 8.
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