"That is how the glory of the world passes."
In the 1978 movie, "Foul Play", Goldie Hawn plays a character named, Gloria Mundy. I have resisted showing a recent photo of Goldie Hawn as an example of the passing of the glory of the world. That would be unkind.
What brings this nonsense to mind?
I have just read a short essay by Stephen B. Young, in which he argues that our recent political and social divisions have been the consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which produced powerful examples of economic self-interest (enormous concentration of wealth and power), and a need for a correspondingly strong state to offset the effects of such wealth and power in a few hands. Thus, the welfare state.
Now though, Young says, we are seeing a global resurgence of tribalism. Human beings have lived in tribes for thousands of years. In a tribe, values are shaped by the group, the tribe. One grows up defending the tribe against other tribes (those who are different). One absorbs the values of the tribe without great debate. It feels right. Tribalism works at the level of one's feelings. There are no long debates about which values to accept. "Where tribalism prevails," Young says, "goodwill and innovative ideas are scarce."
The alternative to tribalism, he says, is ideology. Ideologies work on our heads, not our feelings. We choose ideologies. We debate ideologies. We compare ideologies, and combine and modify them as we think about them.
Then Stephen Young does something curious. Referring to a well-known psychological theory of Abraham Maslow, who argued that human beings can be described as being somewhere on a pyramid of needs, of which the first and fundamental one is things like air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, which will necessarily require all of our attention until those needs are satisfied. Without them, nothing else is really possible. Maslow's theory went on through other stages--safety needs, love and belongingness, esteem and self respect, to what he called, self-actualization (realizing one's potential and personal growth).
Something like that is going on, Stephen Young argues. Around the world, we are beginning to take basic needs for granted, and people are more and more focusing on a kind of politics of self-identity. And the way we are doing that is by becoming tribal. Young says that in the United States, that tribalism can easily be seen, for instance, by observing the Republican Party, which is pretty much a tribe of white Christians of European descent, with strong Protestant cultural and economic values. Democrats, on the other hand are, he says, no less a tribe, but their tribe is an alliance of three tribes: African-Americans, the LGBT community, and middle- and upper-class white progressives.
I say that is "curious" for two reasons. First, it is a stretch to call the LGBT community a tribe, and a further stretch to call middle- and upper-class progressives (pretty much an intellectual community) a tribe. And second, after having posited two powerful tendencies--tribalism and ideology--one a product of an emotional commitment to one's own group, and the other a swarm of ideas that are independent of and perhaps even antithetical to tribalism, Young reduces everything to tribalism. Young does not say it, but the Fox TV Network tribe, and the MSNBC Network tribe come to mind. It is as if ideologies do not matter; that everything is tribal.
It is like saying that it is not possible to be non-religious; that people who say they are not religious are just exhibiting another form of religion.
There is no doubt that tribalism, or perhaps a particularly current form of tribalism, is not only a good description of much of what is happening around us, and to us. Young offers convincing examples of our almost-instinctive affirmation of it: Scottish and British tribalism, the National Front Party in France, the visceral antagonism between Germany and Greece, the resurgence of Russian identity and aggression, Han chauvinism in China, the tribal dynasty of North Korea, Sunni and Shi'a tribalism, many African hostilities, et cetera.
But Young began by describing the fundamental difference between the gut-level convictions of tribal values and the intellectual, ideological debate that is not simply absorbed, but which is malleable, debateable, and adoptable; arching over tribalism.
Tribalism has served the human community well. In a savage world--not to be simply equated with an ancient one--the instant, not necessarily intellectual recognition of who was, and who was not, a member of one's own group, one's own tribe, was often a survival mechanism. It might not, in fact, in deadly fact, have been safe to turn one's back on someone who did not share your own habits and values. And if skin color, or clothing, accent, odor, or eating habits provided the clues for belonging, or not belonging, it undoubtedly was useful to be able to recognize who did, and who did not, belong.
What is insidious about tribalism in our present situation, is that we know that it is advantageous to reach beyond the unthinking responses of tribal identity. We need, and want, to reach out to people who are different from us in many ways, maybe because we find common cause with them; maybe because we think we can, in conversation, and debate, and argument, come to something better than what either of us is, as we are.
Young ends his essay titled, "The Global Triumph of Tribalism", with the quote, Sic transit gloria mundi. I am not sure what it means, at the end of his essay. What is the fleeting glory that is passing away? Surely not tribalism! The point of his essay is that we are slogging our way into new tribal forms. Does he mean that an ideological approach, a thoughtful analysis, an intellectual overarching of tribalism is lost? He does not argue that.
There is no point in denying our new tribalism. It is apparent. It is lamentable precisely to the extent that it is an affirmation of our feelings and prejudices, and a neglect of arm's length analysis, debate, and a more appropriate value system. What we need, at the level at which Stephen Young is aiming his analysis, is not just a clarification of the ways we are behaving tribally, but of the ways we might, and do, reach out together to commit to a more perfect union. Not a perfect union: just better than what thoughtless, inherited behavior provides us; something thoughtful and better, and more attractive.
In 1977, Carl Sagan published, The Dragons of Eden, to suggest that we carry around multi-layered brains: an evolutionarily primitive brain stem (a kind of lizard brain), a subsequent brain expansion quite like a chimpanzee brain, and a neo-cortex capable of over-riding more primitive instincts and behaviors. We try to control the impulse to lash out like lizards. Or tribes.
If there is grace in the actions of those nine families in Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina, there is glory in knowing that we are not just lizards.
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