Tribal Connections

During disasters there is a net gain in well-being.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about tribalism. Tribalism, meaning small groups to identify oneself with, to define oneself by, in opposition to the anonymity of globalism. Great Britain wants to leave the European Union--well, except for some of the smaller, non-England parts, which have proposed leaving GB as a solution. Catalonia wants to leave Spain. Nationalism is on the rise. White nationalism is on the rise. People don't seem content to identify themselves with unifying conglomerations; they want to have narrow, homogeneous political entities that represent them in as pure terms as possible.

It's not just a political and societal dynamic, but all aspects of identity. Race, as with white nationalism, and gender, religion, class, etc. Professions. Interests and hobbies. Fandoms. People want to belong. They want to feel connected. They want their own, personal tribes. And, it seems to me, they are seeking ever smaller, more specifically defined tribes to fulfill those needs. We are splintering ourselves.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.

― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

I'm reminded by the word tribe of Seth Godin's book on marketing, We Are All Weird. When I read it, the book's subtitle was The Myth of Mass and The End of Compliance. A newer edition seems to have revised that to The Rise of Tribes and the End of Normal, which is a better indication of the contents, in my mind. His thesis is that the future--well, present, really--of marketing is to stop trying to appeal to everyone and instead focus on the specific tribe that really identifies with what you have to offer. A few quotes from it:

This is a manifesto about the end of the mass market. About the end of mass politics, mass production, mass retailing, and even mass education.

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My ulterior motive in bringing you this manifesto has little to do with helping you sell more stuff and more to do with allowing (all of us) to embrace the freedom we have. The freedom to choose. The freedom to choose to be weird.

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The challenge of your future is to do productive and useful work for and by and with the tribe that cares about you. To find and assemble the tribe, to earn their trust, to take them where they want and need to go.

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The reason that people are walking away from mass is not so that they can buy more stuff. Material goods and commerce are not the goal, they are merely a consequence. The goal is connection.

The goal is connection. Hold onto that thought.

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The impetus for this post is my reading of the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger. Here is my short review followed by extensive quotes:

During disasters there is a net gain in well-being.

Absolutely fascinating.

A brief, deeply researched book that expands on an article Junger wrote, it examines the evidence that people seem to feel more meaning and contentment during times of catastrophe and war than during ordinary times. Junger's contention is that this is so because it's in these moments people feel most connected to each other. The barriers and classifications that keep us apart in standard society are gone, and we become freer to identify with each other and work together with common purpose, which makes us happier. Whether we know it or not, people want tribes to belong to. Junger makes his case clearly and strongly--though leaves room for a companion volume exploring the implications of the conclusion and what we should do with the information.

It has me thinking.

More from Junger:

Self-determination theory . . . holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money, and status.

Bluntly put, modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result, mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth. The more assimilated a person is into American society, the more likely they are to develop depression during the course of their lifetime, regardless of what ethnicity they are.

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Fritz's theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a "community of sufferers" that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.

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What catastrophes seem to do--sometimes in the span of a few minutes--is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

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If war were purely and absolutely bad in every single aspect and toxic in all its effects, it would probably not happen as often as it does. But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.

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"For the first time in [our] lives . . . we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear. . . . There were fifteen men to a gun. You had fifteen guys who for the first time in their lives were not living in a competitive society. We had no hopes of becoming officers. I liked that feeling very much . . . It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created that thing I loved about the Army."

Adversity often leads people to depend more on one another, and that closeness can produce a kind of nostalgia for the hard times that even civilians are susceptible to.

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There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one's way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community. If the human race is under threat in some way that we don't yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. . . .

Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. . . .  The earliest and most basic definition of community--of tribe--would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. A society that doesn't offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn't a society in any tribal sense of the word; it's just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.

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It's hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two. To make matters worse, politicians occasionally accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country--a charge so destructive to group unity that most past societies would probably have just punished it as a form of treason. It's complete madness . . .

We live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about--depending on their views--the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government. It's a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime, except now it's applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it's a dangerous waste of time because they're both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking "underclass" has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today's terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs--and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought--will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.

And a couple of bonus quotes that aren't key to Junger's central thesis but are nevertheless interesting little nuggets:

Without exception, men who were leaders during one period were almost completely inactive during the other; no one, it seemed, was suited to both roles. These two kinds of leaders more or less correspond to the male and female roles that emerge spontaneously in open society during catastrophes such as earthquakes or the Blitz. They reflect an ancient duality that is masked by the ease and safety of modern life but that becomes immediately apparent when disasters strike. If women aren't present to provide the empathic leadership that every group needs, certain men will do it. If men aren't present to take immediate action in an emergency, women will step in. . . . To some degree the sexes are interchangeable--meaning they can easily be substituted for one another--but gender roles aren't. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it.

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The warrior skills that had protected the Dine [Navajo Nation] for thousands of years were no longer relevant in this dismal new era, and people worried that those same skills would now be turned inward, against society. That strengthened their belief in what were known as skinwalkers, or yee naaldlooshii.

Skinwalkers were almost always male and wore the pelt of a sacred animal so that they could subvert the animal's powers to kill people in the community. . . .

Virtually every culture in the world has its version of the skinwalker myth. In Europe, for example, they are called were wolves (literally "man-wolf" in Old English). The myth addresses a fundamental fear in human society: that you can defend against external enemies but still remain vulnerable to one lone madman in your midst. Anglo-American culture doesn't recognize the skinwalker threat but has its own version. Starting in the early 1980s, the frequency of rampage shootings in the United States began to rise more and more rapidly until it doubled around 2006. Rampages are usually defined as attacks where people are randomly targeted and four or more are killed in one place, usually shot to death by a lone gunman. As such, those crimes conform almost exactly to the kind of threat that the Navajo seemed most to fear on the reservation: murder and mayhem committed by an individual who has rejected all social bonds and attacks people at their most vulnerable and unprepared. For modern society, that would mean not in their log hogans but in movie theaters, schools, shopping malls, places of worship, or simply walking down the street.

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So where does that leave us? How can we find the connection and belonging provided by tribes without splintering ourselves into countless competing--warring--factions?

I suppose Alan Moore provided us with one option in his 1986 book Watchmen. *SPOILER ALERT* Hero Ozymandias is so worried about the prospect of global war that he hatches an elaborate scheme to unify the world against an invented alien threat, killing half the population of New York City to make it real. And it works; after unleashing his evil, he watches the nations of the world unite and cooperate.

So that's an idea.

I hope to soon read Joshua Greene's book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. I learned about it from a Mother Jones article, 6 Surprising Scientific Findings About Good and Evil. According to that article, here are the major takeaways from the book:

1. Evolution gave us morality—as a default setting - One central finding of modern morality research is that humans, like other social animals, naturally feel emotions, such as empathy and gratitude, that are crucial to group functioning. These feelings make it easy for us to be good; indeed, they’re so basic that, according to Greene’s research, cooperation seems to come naturally and automatically.

2. Gossip is our moral scorecard - We also keep tabs and enforce norms through punishment; in Moral Tribes, Greene suggests that a primary way that we do so is through gossip. . . . Thus do we impose serious costs on those who commit anti-social behavior.

3. We’re built to solve the problem of “me versus us.” We don’t know how to deal with “us versus them.” - just as we’re naturally inclined to be cooperative within our own group, we’re also inclined to distrust other groups (or worse). “In-group favoritism and ethnocentrism are human universals,” writes Greene. . . . From an evolutionary perspective, morality is built to make groups cohere, not to achieve world peace.

4. Morality varies regionally and culturally - “There are very different expectations in different places about what the terms of cooperation are,” Greene says. “About what people, especially strangers, owe each other.”

5. Your brain is not in favor of the greatest good for the greatest number.

6. Humanity may, objectively, be becoming more moral - Greene has come to the conclusion that we can only trust gut-level morality to do so much. . . . he believes that something like utilitarianism, which he defines as “maximize happiness impartially,” is the only moral approach that can work with a vast, complex world comprised of many different groups of people.

But to get there, Greene says, requires the moral version of a gut override on the part of humanity—a shift to “manual mode,” as he puts it.

The surprise, then, is that he’s actually pretty optimistic. . . .

To be more moral, then, Greene believes that we must first grasp the limits of the moral instincts that come naturally to us. That’s hard to do, but he thinks it gets collectively easier.

“There’s a bigger us that’s growing,” Greene says. “Wherever you go, there are tribal forces that oppose that larger us. But, the larger us is growing.”

We can only hope the trend he sees is larger and more powerful than the one I do. Let's hope we can use our tribes to connect and not divide.