Tuesday, August 14, 2018

What's your tribe?



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.


iihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates