Tribes

My guess is that most of us hold to the idea that we are rational human beings who are capable, at least once in a while, of handling facts and doing some clear thinking. But what human beings are really about is belonging to a tribe.

When it comes down to a pretty narrow focus we actually do okay accepting facts and doing some clear thinking. Much of our day-to-day living, especially in the complex environment of a first world society, is survived by accurately assessing our surroundings and acting accordingly. We drive cars, handle problems at work, and manage to walk across streets without getting run down...most of the time anyway. My take is that ability to deal with the here-and-now was programed deep into our brains as we evolved in a predator filled world. That same evolution also built in our need for the tribe.

Americans in particular love the ethos of the rugged individual, the lone wolf, the self-made man. It is an enjoyable fantasy that most of us buy into at least a little. But it is still fantasy. Without the tribe none of our ancestors would have survived; and neither would we. Our language comes from the tribe and with it our very ability for abstract thought. The tribe teaches us our skills, protects us when we make mistakes, rewards us for pulling our share of the social load, cares for us when we are ill and, ultimately, honors us when we die. The evolution of humanity is the evolution of the tribe.

For something like 200,000 years human tribes were pretty basic units built on loose family associations. It was likely less than 10,000 years ago that multiple tribes began to cooperate in the first, embryonic city-states based on agriculture. The best guess seems to be there were about 8,000,000 people on the planet when we started to tend crops. Now there are some 7,017,821,327 of us filling the globe. Tribes overlap in camps, communities, towns, cities, states, nations, and alliances. They also overlap in religions, ideologies, guilds, unions, avocations, and hobbies. This maze has obscured the tribal boundaries in our world; but not in our minds.

Some tribes we are born into, other we are swept into by the currents of our lives but very, very rarely do we get to chose one. After all, the tribe has to chose us as much as we have to chose the tribe, and the reality is tribes are not big on accepting outsiders. Whatever the path into the tribe though, in our heads belonging to and being accepted by the others in the tribe is the most important thing. It is more important than accepting facts. It is more important than clear thinking. It is more important than understanding the truth about anything outside of staying loyal to the tribe.

Which makes for some weird realities. The tribe of Christianity I once called mine insisted that women should be subject to men based on the claim that the first woman listened to a talking snake. We insisted that the world was created at roughly the same moment as the stars; that all the plants and animals came into being at the same time and share the same basic history; and that a guy we called Noah built his self a big-assed boat on which millions upon millions of animal species all rode out a flood. The discoveries of science, contradictory stories in the bible, and the observations of my own eyes were all filtered through the ideology of the tribe and were ignored, re-interpreted or explained away as necessary.

It isn't just religious tribes that make for such strangeness. Political ideologies ignore facts and history at least as often as religion. Conservatives believe things about taxes and jobs, governments and regulations, that are blatantly untrue. Liberals believe things about taxes and jobs, government and regulations, that are just as blatantly untrue. But a Conservative needs to be a conservative more than he or she needs to be correct about policy, as does the Liberal, the Libertarian, the T-party rebel, the Socialist and the Anarchist. (Of those my wish would be that the Anarchist could be right and sometimes I think of myself as being a part of that tribe...yet they are probably the most wrong headed of the bunch. The anarchist dreams of free human beings freely associating to their mutual benifit; just about the opposite of tribe. See what I mean?)

Yet we still hold some ability for rational thought, and along that path is the growing realization that tribal warfare could well spell the end of all. We need to figure out how to keep our evolution as tribal animals from killing us all off.

A good start is for each of us to think of the tribe we hold most near. Then, as honestly as we can, review the ideology of that tribe. In there somewhere will be at least one claim, one demand, one detail, that is clearly at odds with the universe as it actually exists. For the young earth creationist it might be the starlight known to have started its journey earthward billions of years ago. For the conservatives it might be the fact that at least some fortunes are held by people who didn't earn them and have little right to claim them as tax free gifts. A liberal might admit that government regulations are often burdensome and counter-productive and that collecting taxes and throwing money at a problem will often make the problem worse. In any case find a fact, a true thing that the tribe dismisses, and accept that the tribe is wrong.

You may have to keep your insight to yourself. A character of tribe is that it doesn't like being called on something but, just because we know our tribe is wrong about this fact or that, doesn't mean we want to be forced out or leave. The idea here is to hold in the very core of one's own heart the knowledge that the tribe is not right about all things all the time. (It may be that staying with the tribe is neither possible or desirable; depending on what one discovered is untrue. Some in the tribe of "Christain" will have nothing to do with me now. Nor would it be honest for me to claim membership in that tribe.)

Lots of good things come from holding on to this basic truth. Knowing that the tribe is not perfect can ward off much evil. People who know the tribe can make mistakes are much less likely to strap on bombs or call for genocide or throw acid in the faces of little girls. Such may even discover useful points of agreement with other tribes usually seen as rivals. Some conservative religious tribes may (for example) decide that the conservative political tribe's disdain for helping the poor is not a match; but that the secular humanist commitment to a fair and just society is. That doesn't mean that the conservative religious person must reject all of the conservative political tribe's positions. But it does mean a conservative religious person might find common ground with some secular ideas and maybe even some point of agreement with more liberal tribes within their own religion. Any maybe, knowing there is some common ground here and there, tribes will eventually learn to disagree with a little more tolerance and a lot less hatred.

If we are to thrive as a people we will have to admit to the power tribal boundaries hold over us while still finding a way to reach across as many of those boundaries as often as we can.