ILZ has stated:
Quote:The human race has not developed at all in the last few thousand years. Our ideas and institutions may have changed, but human beings remain the same. The same issues still confront us - they just come in different manifestations.
Increasing 'tribalism' is hardly surprising. It is a global phenomenon. As the world moves out of the Cold War era - where identity was based on ideology, and nations/people could choose sides - it moves into a new era defined by cultural identity. Are you familiar with Samuel P Huntington?
The initial paragraph seems to me absurd. I agree wholeheartedly that the constant in any human social equation is human nature--more or less, i agree that human beings remain the same. But i agree with a great many reservations. Assuredly, the same issues
do not confront us, at least to the extent that this suggests that those issues have not changed. The possiblity of nuclear extinction; the threat of a fatal poisoning of the environment; the spectre of global starvation due to overpopulation--none of these issues troubled our ancestors. Hobbes' contention that "life in a state of nature is a war of all against all" is considerably less true now than it was when he wrote those words. Any "war of all against all" which exists in most parts of the planet now is not a product of "a state of nature," but rather of a chosen view of ourselves and others which i have here characterized as tribalism. Therefore, i consider the statements in the first paragraph to be facile--facile statements have a great appeal, as being able to dispense with difficult issues quickly and neatly. I would apply that same judgment to the second paragraph. ILZ posits an increasing tribalism, and claims (perhaps on the strength of Huntington's contentions) that it would follow naturally that tribalism would increase absent the strictures claimed to have flowed from the cold war. Choosing sides in the the struggle between the "free world" and the "iron curtain" certainly had fiscal advantages for the power brokers of subsaharan Africa, for example, but no nation in Africa below the Sahara was ever obliged by political necessity to choose sides. None of those nations was ever within a nuclear "free fire zone."
As for being identified culturally, that is, to my mind, a matter of choice as well. We have the concept of the tribe thanks to the Romans. I don't suggest that the anthropologist or ethnologist is wrong to speak of tribes with regard to peoples with no relation to the Romans--i'm just pointing out that the Romans gave us the tribe as a concept. For the Romans, the tribe was the basic political, civic, military and fiscal unit. The city was initially organized into three tribes. Their Hernican and Latin vassals were organized into tribes as well, in the mind of the
Patres, at least. Whether or not the Latins and Hernicans saw themselves as so ordered i doubt anyone could state with authority. Having been wed to the Romans, in the shotgun style of that ceremony, the Latin speaking peoples were accorded all the "benefits" of the Roman tribe, save only the franchise. The three tribes of Rome were the only voting tribes. When, eventually, the Principiate empire came to accord the rights of Roman citizenship to others, they were organized into tribes.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Iulius Caesar writes of the Helvetii (the first people with whom he felt he had to deal upon taking up his duties in Cisalpine Gaul) as being a tribe. It is not certain, however, that the ancient Swiss saw themselves in such a manner. Having been driven back into their mountain fastnesses by Caesar, they organized themselves into what Latin speaking people of the middle ages were pleased to call cantons--once again, a distinctly Roman idea, and a rather contemptuous one, as a cantonment is the English version of a term the Romans applied to the encampments of "primitives" whom they despised, and specifically relating to the presence of the women and children. But the Swiss themselves saw fit to make distinctions within their own society, writing of the "forest cantons," as opposed to those among them who lived in towns and villages. When the "tribes" of Germans in Transalpine Gaul had been well ground between the upper and nether millstones of the Gothic migration and the Roman expansion, the survivors of the Chattii, the Cheruscii, the Suebii, the Ubii and the Treverii (my apologies to those "tribes" i have failed to include) formed a confederation which, deriving a name from their term for a free man, was known as the Franks. But this confederation itself was not entirely cohesive, the Franks broke into two major groupings known to historians as the Salian Franks and the Ripurian Franks. This is suggestive to me not so much of a tendancy to adhere to cultural identities as it is of entropy. There was no stong distinction of language or culture to have separated the Franks into two distinct groups, simply a matter of distance and geography.
I rather think that as the clan is the family writ large, so the tribe is the clan writ large. The tendancy for groups to fragment seems not stronger than the tendancy of groups to ally and unite. The one might be seen as indicative of a prosperity and absence of pressure which makes the larger grouping seem unnecessary, the latter a response to a perceived threat to survival. The Illiniwek (to the French, the Illinois) recognized among themselves distinct groups known as septs--such as the Mendota or the Tamaroa. Each winter they moved to a "cantonment" at a place high on the Illinois River now known as Starved Rock. Pooling their resources and applying a limited authority to the distribution of food helped to assure the survival through the winter of the greatest number, ostensibly. When spring brought the prospect of plenty through hunting and gathering, and the necessity to disperse for the exploitation of agriculture, disperse they did.
But the dynamics of "tribalism" are not so facile and easily delineated as that. Beginning in about 1640, the Iroquois Confederation decided to engross the fur trade of the Great Lakes region. To accomplish that end, they intended to exterminate all of the competition. They nearly succeeded with the Huron, who were their closest relatives among the peoples of that region--one group, possibly a Huron sept, known as the Cat people, were entirely exterminated. The Jesuits who recorded these events hadn't made any inroads with these people, so we unfortunately know little of them. They wreaked a great slaughter on the Pottawattamie, and drove them from the shores of Lake Erie to the banks of the lower Ohio. They drove the Illiniwek from the valley of the Des Plaines and the Upper Illinois to the western banks of the Mississippi, exterminating the Tamaroa in the process. They did great slaughter to the Outagamie, or "Fox Nation," but met with a decided check from the people among whom Cadillac founded the settlement which would one day become Detroit. In none of this did they simply seek their own survival. From the earliest days of Champlain's exploration, when he and his fellows joined an Ottawa war party in attacking the Iroquois, those people considered themselves in a war to the death with the French. Wealth in St. Laurent valley and the Great Lakes came in the form of beaver pelts. The Iroquois needed to finance their war with the French, and hoped to fund their dream of exterminating or driving off all of the Algonquian peoples. They believed they could exterminate the tribes of the region, and have all of the fur trade to themselves, to trade with the Dutch at Albany, to buy the wherewithal to accomplish their larger purpose of destoying the Algonquian and the French. When Cartier visisted the valley of the St. Laurent in the 1530's, he recorded some of the vocabulary of the aboriginal inhabitants he met there. Parkman tells us that 19th century linguists have identified this as Iroquoian vocabulary. If true, this would suggest that the Algonquian had driven the Iroquois from the region of present-day Quebec to the valley of the Mohawk. Without stating that this is absolutely the truth, i would suggest that this may explain why the Iroquois of the "five nations" formed a confederation, for survival. But having survived, it was their particular cultural choice, and not an inevitability, that they would thereafter dedicate themselves to revenge against the Algonquian, and, when the French intervened on the side of their enemies, revenge against the French.
I would posit, therefore, that tribalism is far more complex than is suggested by simply stating that it is in the nature of the human race. Such a suggestion does not account for why such groupings would organize on a higher level. The racial theories so popular in the 19th century, which eventually were "canonized" by the Nazis, were widely accepted. This was no mere tribalism. A schoolmate of Bismark, John Motley, having completed his studies at Gottingen, began a life-long career with the U.S. State Department. He also wrote a thoroughly researched and invaluable history of the foundation of the Dutch state--the United Provinces which fought an 84 year war of rebellion against the Spanish. In it, he begins with a turgid paean to the racial superiority of the German-speaking peoples of northwestern Europe. His claim is that there is a direct progression from the Dutch rebellion, through the English civil wars to the American revolution. That this is specious can be easily demonstrated, but is not germaine here. What is germaine is that it was so readily accepted throughout the English-speaking world of his time, as well as among the Germans and Dutch. Parkman alludes in his otherwise excellent history of the French in North American to the superiority of the racial traits of the English colonists; Mahan makes no such references, but his
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 provides a long list of Dutch and English "heroes" whose actions upon a watery stage dovetailed nicely with the contention of that superiority. Carlysle's great history of the French Revolution not only repeatedly displays his contempt for the French, it never fails to beat the drum of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. (Curiously, Prescott, in his monumental history of the Spanish Conquest and the Spanish monarchy in the days of its glory, comments that the Spaniard and the Frenchmen treated the aboriginals much more humanely than did the Englishmen of New England--perhaps no one clued him in before he wrote.)
In the period before the Second World War, and therefore before the "Cold War," such notions of racial superiority were common enough to have been bread and meat to Americans and Englishmen, and not just for the Germans. Other people, as well, subscribed to that vicious silliness. A few years ago, as i was reading various survey histories of European nations which i was able to find in the local library, i came across one history of Sweden written in the 1930's, which begins with a completely serious discursus by the author on the "proof" he had that the original "Aryans" arose in what is now Sweden, and that these were the forefathers of the Goth. These are all "extra-tribal" theses. These notions seem to me to be tribalism writ large--from clan to tribe, the bigot then proceeded from tribe to nation, and even to a concept of a superior ethnic "race."
I don't believe that tribalism is the inevitable summit of human cultural organization. I also believe that the human race, being a unitary species (there are no races, there is simply the one race--the human race), is capable of going beyond the concept of tribalism, and capable of doing so without a recourse to the invidious concepts which were so eagerly taken up by Ernst Rohm and Adolf Hitler. And within this thread, i think no one has expressed it better than has the Bear: "We can improve though, and we can define ourselves by the effort to overcome this tendency." Would that we someday will so define ourselves.
