FOR THE GOOD OF THE TRIBE . . .

I will respond to the above post tomorrow. I find it a very interesting subject. However, after reading your post I think we have both misunderstod each other. It would help clarify things if you could identify exactly what you mean by 'tribalism.' I was referring to tribalism on an international scale and it seems that you are primarily talking about tribalism on the smallest scale.

Just a few comments. I live in a city of only - oh, say, 1 and a quarter million - one and a half? - and we are well used to sniping from Sydney folk - (lots of whom are my friends who moved there!) about our country town-ness and such.

Thing is, it is true, in its way. A small city cannot support the diversity of entertainment and artists and cultures and even retail that a large city can. I love visiting Sydney and Melbourne, and having more choices of things to do and art and such. Manhattan is a wonder and delight to me.

Australia itself is considered a cultural backwater by people in larger countries - in some ways this is true, too.

Of course, to balance all swings there are roundabouts..... and there are many here.

This sort of banter/denigration of people in other cities/countries etc reflects, I think, that the tendency to cluster in various "tribes" or affiliations IS inherent. In western countries, we have, generally, replaced actual tribes with different sorts of groups - neighbourhood, friends, city, sports team, political or philosophical affiliations, race....on it goes.

I once surmised, and I sort of agree still, that the average person probably, even in New York, habitually interacts more intimately (ie excluding customers for people working in places with a large, and changing, clientele) with roughly the same number of people as they would have in all but the smallest of traditional villages - ie that there is a comfortable interaction number to which most of us more or less conform and from which we derive feelings of belonging and confirmation.

I think it is natural that, in defining ourselves as part of various "tribes" (non-traditional sense, ILZ! - but reflective of our psychological evolution, nonetheless) we fall into denigrating - sometimes only humorously, members of other tribes - hicks, city-slickers, Liberals, Conservatives, and so on. Some of us, being more mindful of this, seek to avoid it - but it is very easy to slip into - and sort of fun, lots of times - as with football teams and political affiliations.

I note ILZ's point about "re-tribalization" of parts of the world - noteably areas like the former Yugoslavia - and the tendency of this to be very destructive sometimes. I also note the greatly increased spread of ideas, and culture, and even personal acquaintance, that comes with globalization and the net - therefore, I see two forces in dialectical - hence changing - balance. I do not think it true to say that we have not changed - I think that we HAVE - but that it is in the context of often having to deal with opposing inherent impulses - the greatest defence against which I see as the identification, understanding, recognition and appreciation of them of them on the personal and social policy levels.

That we have managed to cluster in lumps as large as nations is, I think, evidence that we HAVE changed - but with difficulty.

Can I add, re the Chinese "thing", that sometimes having been around as a highly developed civilisation for a long time shows - and that we DO transmit culturally as well as genetically!

Eg - see how countries that have been democracies for a long time often react less violently to constitutional crises and changes of government than very new ones do (I KNOW this is a flawed example, but it sort of makes the point).

bookmark

Clans
Wow! Sentena Did you write all of that just for here?

Yes, ILZ, i am speaking of tribalism on the small scale, which is why i adverted at first to what would consider a silly contention about the population of Ohio being "a people," and the silly, parochial comments of New Yorkers in Columbus about being in a "cow town." I haven't the time right now to respond fully to Our Dear Wabbit, who has, predictably, offered thoughtful comments. I would note, however, that although i recognize a human tendancy to form groups which would eventually lead to the tribe, it is my contention, and my hope, that the race would progress to other, larger and more rational groupings, with a desired result of the human race concerned with a world view. Strictly from a point of view of nature, it would be natural for humans to eliminate the competition--such as killing the women and the children to assure your "enemy" does not come back to haunt you. However, we have such things as the Geneva conventions, because we have, ostensibly, progressed socially. I agree with ILZ, that this is an interesting topic, and hope to hear more from you all. You may all rest assured that fingers tire much less rapidly than my mouth, which has been alleged to have a tendancy toward "dieseling."

Yes, Pistoff, i have far too much time on my hands, and often devote it to tormenting this board.

Here is one more roundabout for the bunny....my personal favorite....

I'll be the round about
The words will make you out 'n' out
You change the day your way
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
In and out the valley

The muses dance and sing
They make the children really ring
I spend the day your way
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
In and out the valley

CHORUS
In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky and they
Stand there
One mile over we'll be there and we'll see
You
Ten true summers we'll be there and
Laughing too
Twenty four before my love you'll see I'll be
There with you

I will remember you
Your silhouette will charge the view
Of distance atmosphere
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
Even in the valley

CHORUS

Along the drifting cloud the eagle searching
Down on the land
Catching the swirling wind the sailor sees
The rim of the land
The eagle's dancing wings create as weather
Spins out of hand
Go closer hold the land feel partly no more
Than grains of sand
We stand to lose all time a thousand answers
By in our hand
Next to your deeper fears we stand
Surrounded by a million years

I'll be the roundabout
The words will make you out 'n' out
I'll be the roundabout
The words will make you out 'n' out

CHORUS

I'll be the roundabout
The words will make you out 'n' out
I spend the day your way
Call it morning driving thru the sound and
In and out the valley

CHORUS



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you find some error in Roundabout Lyrics,

sounds like Richard Dawkins new book here. Tribalism is eventually locked in our genomes, whether by skin differences, geography,or religion. the worst of these is religion.
Dawkins is most critical about religions effects on separating a single population (via separate and unique revelations) into two distinctly different tribes. vis northern ireland, The Anabaptists sects, or The results of the Reformation.

youre singin up a sewer pipe set. Why not just remain amused . As the world population grows, I believe that tribal bifurcation will increase, just by mere effects of increasing numbers of people on the planet.

Don't you worry none, FM, once i settle accounts with these here Amish in Ahier, i'm gonna deal with them Paddy and Prod idjits in Norn Iron, next . . . so many idjits, so few axe handles . . .

set

I find this question extremely compelling, both as an intellectual curiosity and as one which we ought to better understand if we are to mitigate some of our most dangerous natural tendencies.

Like deb and others have said, a genetic inheritance is surely at bottom. All primates live social existences, and any particular species, no matter the instance, will organize themselves into groups of similar size and with similar social arrangements.

On top of this genetic propensity, we see some significant variation in sizes and arrangements arising out of cultural inheritances. We can't do anything about our genetics, but clearly whatever inheritances we have at that level are resilient enough to allow a lot of manipulation and tuning.

Logically, we can't have an 'us' concept without a contrasting 'not us' concept. Although obvious, that's not unimportant. And there are some commonalities in here which are most curious. Deb mentions instances where some neighboring community is considered 'backward' or 'unsophisticated'. Those are very common descriptors used by us - it's some species of scapegoating - and we can all think of examples from our own localities. Another common descriptor in here is sexual profligacy, notions suggesting unsophisticated animality and, often, 'perversion'...they probably hump cows when their sisters are busy.

As you suggest, set, it seems that perceived stressors on the group can bring out the most severe instances of us/them, with all the cruelty and irrationality that might attend.

But 'perceived' is a key word in there. Group leaders can, like Iago, poison the groups notions of its neighbors, and suggest threats which are not real at all.

Perhaps one means to identify the worst of ourselves in this area is to look for those instances where difference is promoted, particularly with concepts such as 'evil'.

Sorry, much more to say on all this, but have to run.

just dont let em see you coming. aND for GODS SAKE-dont drool.

I don't have time to write all my ideas now. This is a great thread so far. Very interesting discussion. My thought off the top of my head is that competition and aggression, as dlowan and others have pointed out, is inherent. It's human nature. We all have to find ways to manage our own wishes and tendency to try to out do or win.

I also agree with dlowan that it's sort of true. Manhatten is a very special place, or at least it is to me and many others. Of course, that is based on my own preferences. I know lots of very intelligent people who hate it. They prefer a slower pace. Just because I'm excited and invigorated by people with fast minds and activities, doesn't mean, necessarily that I'm better or more right than others. I am, I think better for me. And maybe it's the opportunity New York or LA provides me that makes it such a special place for me. I need a place to compete and be aggressive. I enjoy aggression and competition as much as I do peace and quiet. Actually, too much peace and quiet makes me go nuts. So it all depends. The idea that my way is the best is a primitive idea that I must learn to control.

farmerman wrote:


I agree with your premise here, farmerman, but I disagree with your conclusion. Aggression and competition will always be with us, however you are overlooking the human ability to manage these impulses. It's the method of management that makes the difference. Some techniques are better than others. Those which include a demand that everyone agree with a certain belief or that include unrealistic paranoia about others are not as effective as those that promote cooperation, understanding and sublimation.

The outlook is hopeful to me. But we won't arrive there without loss and trauma.

Random thoughts...

The us/them concept develops within us as children. When my daughter was very young, she said to me, "Dad, feel this" and then bit down on her tongue. I had to explain that our physical sensations were felt uniquely by ourselves.

The family unit, as Set suggested earlier, is a more expanded sense of identity...then to extended family...to neighborhood...to tribe, etc.

How broad that sense of identity can grow in any individual may itself have some genetic limitation (why not assume variation here as in 'intelligence'?) but that is clearly ammenable to socialization and education too.

Temple societies flourished in the Indus valley, the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates (the semitic "tribe" of the Akkadians were the most remarkable of them all), the Nile valley, the central Mexican plateau, the arid, cold deserts of the Peruvian coastal uplands. In the Yellow river valley the Shang "dynasty" created the bureaucrat, which compliment the Mandarins returned by creating a system of civil service examinations and policy research (more later on the misconceptions expressed here about Chinese policy--from the perspective of the last three millenia), and obviated entirely the need for a literate priestly cast, from which indignity the Chinese, to their credit, have always managed to spare themselves. These societies would have been obliged to submerge clan and tribal bigotry--and the creation of bureaucracy was necessary to the temple societies as well. Succeeding (perhaps beyond their own expectations), the preistly castes were soon hopelessly outnumbered by their burgeoning "flock" (a rather revelatory term to describe one's human responsibilities) and needed clerks (from the French, le clerc, or priest, cleric) to keep track of all baskets of produce and grain, the vases filled with millet or oil, the livestock for slaughter, the fowl, the fabric--you get the picture. Not simply individuals, but polities can and always have seen the advantage of personal and group sublimation to further population, and therefore, resource production and control for the expanding society. I would suspect the first polities began to appear ten- or eleven thousand years ago, and quickly evolved into temple societies or bureaucracies. I have, of course, already referred to the polity of Ancient Rome, with the tribe enshrined as the people embodied, sacrificing for the collective good of the polity. The Mayans had the most charmingly byzantine class of obsessive astronomical-bureau-theocratic oligarchs, who calculated the life of the universe billions of years--as did several civilizations of the Subcontinent and the eastern Indian Ocean.

So may i be left to restate the implicit question: "Is it not absurd, give the amount of practice and success which humans have had in constructing polities with values reaching far beyond the narrow self-interest of the tribe, that we tolerate tribalism in ourselves?"

i see 'tribalism' as a reactive mechanism in the human animal that relates directly to a percieved 'threat'.

as an individual, an imposition to one's identity brings a reaction which is vigourously turned back on the source; this 'attack' is moderated by the intelligence of the individual, in that the lower the intelligence, the more viscerally is the threat percieved, and the more violent the reaction, whereas to a more 'able' (less threatened) person, the reaction is more likely to be suited to the level of the 'slight' and/or tinged with a degree of humour, or irony.

This 'syndrome' migrates to a hierarchy of social groupings, from the immediate family, to friendship groups, neighbourhoods, the 'village', and up to a 'National' response.

Within this response there is a homogenizing effect, in that groups that previously were at odds over lesser 'issues' tend to merge into a common 'front' in oppossition to a greater 'threat'.

Were there a perceived threat from outside the planet, this mechanizm would then serve to group the entire population together (internal squabling notwithstanding) in offering a combined front to the source of aggression, be it a natural, or social phenominon.

'Tribalism' is then, merely a social coping mechanism; frequently blown by its participants into a 'conflagration' (at worst) beyond individual intent, or control.

set

I think you must surely be correct to place the marker at the neolithic when irrigation and domestication of plants/animals allowed human groups to settle in permanent locations (rather than migrate seasonally). The Anatolian site of Catal Huyuk, ca 6000 BC, held a population of perhaps 5000 people, including probably two distinct 'racial types' (this is an incredibly interesting site, possibly an 'origin' point of Indo-European - lots on line). Clearly, some level of bureaucracy above tribe would need to be created for those sorts of numbers, and for the large community tasks (digging irrigation trenches, etc) which would need to get planned and done.

And as you say, there are lots of examples of varied social arrangements which subsumed tribal identification.

But the recent period of some ten thousand or so years is a very teeny sliver of time, so it's not at all surprising that our behavior will tend to look like the million or more years preceding. I think we have to expect a 'tribal' social identity to assert itself almost ubiquitously.

But as we come to understand this whole package better (via history, sociology/anthropology, psychology, etc), we should be better equipped to design or support institutions which promote perceptions of identity broader than the tribal, and to move against those social elements which promote (negatively connoted) differences.

I suspect that our shared distaste for particular religious traditions and for nationalist fervor stems from their tendencies to evoke tribal sentiment. I'd also argue that an economic system so dependent upon militarism functions precisely the same way.

Militarist economies are the most rapidly entropic of domestic economies, expending resources and putting more and more of the capital and credit into government hands, to the point that basic operations such as building and agriculture can collapse at any time the Government fails to maintain their operation.

There were not only a great variation within Temple societies and between such societies and bureaucratic societies, astronomo-mystic societies, etc.; there was also a steep declivity of the functional direction chosen. The Assyrians could imitate and assimilate marvelously well, which gave them centuries of vigorous productivity. But their productivity was concentrated in the support of military adventurism. Certainly they could take and hold Nineveh, sack Babylon repeatedly, sack Ur of the Chaldees, if it so pleased them. But they could not endure, because the inevitable economic collapse rushed down far more steeply and quickly than the fluctuations in an indifferently managed "expansion of domestic production" economy. The Akkadians at their worst did much better than to indifferently manage their domestic economy. When Assyria was a sadly human wasteland, self-expended, totally dominated by the Medes of Persia, Babylon was again a great and independent city, because of healthy practices of the economy of the polity. The Assyrians had "a day in the sun" of perhaps 500 years--Babylon, whether in praise or deprecation, has been a human by-word for nearly 5000 years.

As each succeeding "barbarian" sino-asian tribe took Lou Yang or Peking and made themselves masters of a new dynasty, the Mandarins endured, and sank into a bizarre ancient think tank, sinicizing each of the hu nu, the horse barbarians who had taken control. Han, Chin, Shang, Ming, Manchu--all of them eventually conformed to the pattern, became insular, attempting to believe that the outer world was uncivilized, and not human in character. The Middle Kingdom was in the midst of heaven and earth in their minds, not amidst other nations. China often had no foreign policy other than a prohibition on any commerce with the outside world, most commonly in the senesence (sp?) of each dynasty, when the Mandarin were again in their full glory and power, before the Eunuchs and the Dowagers brought it all tumbling down. A consistently successful management of the domestic economy of the "rice belt" of China over a period of nearly 4000 years, has also made it a battleground for domination of such a valuable resource, usually by the "horse barbarian" dynasts of the northern "wheat belt" of China. Through some of the most disasterous foreign policies, or lack of any, and military management by a society geared to domestic management, the Chinese have endured and prospered in spite of the lack of, and not because any ability look beyond the "Supertribe" of their nation and see a place for themselves in the greater world. In fact, as recently as 150 years ago, in the twilight of the Manchus, China had a foreign policy because the European powers and Japan insisted there would be one, and dictated the terms thereof. If they are using the fantastical lure of the most potentially massive consumer market in the history of humanity, i don't think this makes then particularly calculating--i say, its about damned time.

The lesson i take from the Assyrians/Akkadians and the Chinese/"Barbarians" dichotomies, as well as others i could name, is that the parts of the "nations" which always succeeded were concerned with domestic economy first, and militarism second. What the United States has proven, despite having had the same aversion to standing armies as was long the English tradition, is a domestic economy which is so successful that it can produce the overwhelming military advantage currently enjoyed. It will simply (and simple things are the hardest of accomplishment) be necessary to assure that the proper equation is neither forgotten nor neglected when consideration is given to guns and butter.

set

Your love of historical studies is rather too rare, and the breadth of it is really refreshing.

I'm a fan of Eisenhower, most particularly because of what I consider the wisdom and honesty behind his 'military/industrial complex' warnings. When I look at the present situation of musical chairs between the Pentagon and the huge integrated defence corporations, and listen to the tribal rhetoric (and threat promotion) which issues from this community (war on communism, war on drugs, war on terrorism - the skirmish on poverty long forgotten) I see a powerful and self-perpetuating bureaucracy or plutocracy which will, and does, act offensively (while pretending it acts defensively) and which offers the world a product of death and maiming and which provides for it's constituent members wealth and social prestige.

The balance you speak of between guns and butter is deeply askew.

Indeed . . . all of which is why i revert to the Bear's very pertinent exhortation to make our ability to overcome this tendancy the measure of our success in civilizing ourselves . . .