I'm not sure courage is always called upon in dealing with tribal norms, depending on how much one derives meaning or reinforcement from toeing the party line. If one's standing or self-esteem depends on validation from the tribe, then, of course, the notion of courage takes on more substance.
I belong nominally to nine tribes and regularly disagree with them and they with me. The reason is that we are both right and both wrong from time to time and from topic to topic, no matter what definitions you apply to judgements of truth or accuracy or appropriateness to the issue at hand. If one has a great deal at stake (e.g., employment, income, professional reputation, influence potential, etc.) then risking some of that can certainly manifest courage. When, however, does it become principled disagreement that really needs attention? Sometimes the best service we can offer our tribe is to call it out for its own form of blindness or inconsistency.
If, on the other hand, one seeks resolution of an issue that transcends tribal boundaries (an almost all of a national scale do that), then disagreement or questioning positions becomes an ingredient in learning. The point Tom makes about coalitions is certainly relevant, as well. One can collaborate across "tribal" positions and still be loyal to our tribal identification. No tribe is pure. No individual is pure. Tribes and people have self-defined blind spots--or often, some that they don't even recognize as such.
The context for my observations has to do with the challenges we face as a nation and how we can best achieve our potential despite the divisiveness that now seems to prevail. I offer no opinion on the Wright/Harris discord.
What can we conclude from the different perspectives that show up here that would be of value in our public square and achieve in it some sort of path forward that reflects our potential as a nation?
It strikes me that one way out of the dilemma presented by individual/tribal disagreements, whether they ever get resolved at that level (long may the Hatfields and the McCoys revel in their feud) is moving up a level or two or three in the scale of things in search of points of agreement that can foster "better."
My thought is "assume positive motivation." That was one of the "operating principles" that a company I worked for adopted in a sort of 1990's New Age fad. The thinking was that when Marketing folks didn't get along with Operations folks, they assumed the worst about each other's motivation, and so changing that assumption would produce better teamwork. It struck me that in your example someone was willing to assume positive motivation for both Huber and Rittenhouse.
It often takes a lot of work to assume that the other side has positive motivation. For me, the phrase "assume positive motivation" inclines people to be anti-tribal.
I agree that it’s getting harder and harder to acknowledge seeing things from the perspective of “the other side” because the blowback is swift, merciless, and rabidly partisan.
The hardest thing for me in the Rittenhouse trial, and going back to George Zimmerman, is why these self defense or stand your ground laws can be invoked when the person goes looking for trouble. Both Zimmerman and Rittenhouse may have thought they were doing the right thing, but they both willingly chose to insert themselves into a situation where they didn’t belong, provoked confrontation, and then when it went badly for them, they killed another human being. I am at a loss to explain how that is truly a self defense situation; had Zimmerman obeyed the police, Trayvon Martin would still be alive. Had Kyle Rittenhouse stayed home and stayed out of another state, he wouldn’t have faced trial, and the two people he killed might still be alive.
I've been a bit bothered by the tenor of some of these pieces lately. They seem to be so focused on Twitter in general and people like Sam Harris in specific, as if those really were the focus areas that matter. I don't think that's completely the case across the United States. It makes me think that engaging on Twitter at all, however hard one tries not to be tribal or rather tries to be actively anti-tribal, is still part of the same problem. Maybe better not to engage?
It seems clear that we've ended up with a definition of tribalism that might be technically correct, but is pretty far from the way lots of people would understand it (including myself). That doesn't mean that your definition isn't better, or even technically correct.
But I think I would have reacted differently to an article about Sam Harris that said "Sam Harris engages in coalitional politics". That would seem obviously and uncontroversial and doesn't conflict with my (perhaps simplistic) model of tribalism where it's a more all encompassing thing.
Or indeed writing an article where you start out by saying that your usage of 'tribalism' differs from colloquial usage. But in that case, one would first need to establish that Sam meant your definition of tribalism otherwise you're not actually proving that Sam was wrong, just that he would be wrong if he had meant what you meant by tribalism.
So in Sam's case I can think of two obvious coalitions he's been part of: the New Atheists, and the IDW - in both cases there's an ideological component but also a human component.
But is that also true that we're part of a coalition just because we share a point of view? For example, I'm not sure that Sam is really part of a general anti-Islam coalition. He may have anti-Islam views, but they're very much of the New Atheist variety. The affinity would be with Dawkins (even though their views aren't exactly the same) rather than with Christian anti-Islam people.
Equally I don't feel like I'm in a coalition with you on foreign policy just because I agree with you a lot. Doesn't there need to be something more than just ideological alignment?
Which raises an unsettling Tribal Motives of Woke Apologists Who Should Know Better argument.
Here goes:
Older progressives might not want to align themselves with the anti-woke for fear they will piss off the younger, more powerful, ascendent members of their tribe.
Better to focus on bloviating Joe Rogan guests with ludicrous toupees than what’s happened to the ACLU (& every other liberal charity, foundation & non-profit), the Democratic Party, the NYT (& what’s left of mainstream media), the colleges & universities, hiring practices in almost every profession & field (including VP on Democratic ticket), etc.
Saying you’re anti-tribal when you’re a Republican official is nowhere near as anti-tribal as saying you’re anti-Trump.
And saying you’re an anti-tribal academic, say, is a lot easier (and less upsetting to the tribe) than actually challenging woke rhetoric, practices and totems.
There’s a lot tribes don’t like. But they’re pretty tolerant of broad proclamations of anti-tribalism.
Tribal behavior is inherently human. Think of the many different sorts of tribes one can belong to. Yankee vs. Red Sox fan, employee of Morgan Stanley vs. Goldman Sachs, Methodist vs. Baptist or Catholic, Muslim or Jew, sexual identity, ethnic, geographic or national identity of any sort (e.g., American versus European or German versus French or Southerner versus Northerner, New Yorker versus New Jersey), Club memberships (For example in Palm Beach the Everglades or Bath & Tennis which are all WASP all the time versus the Palm Beach Country club which is Jewish), Union member versus member of management, environmentalist versus industrialist. These tribal identifications are matters of personal identity. They are adopted and absorbed into the personality of the group members who may to a greater or lesser degree value those identifications. All people are members of multiple such tribes and that membership is often sticky. People don't easily switch between being a Yankee and a Red Sox fan and they cannot
switch ethnicities or geographic origins at all or certainly not with ease.
Since people take their identities from such group identifications they cannot rid themselves of their tribal affiliations. You can decide to switch from being a Republican to a Democrat but those changes don't happen very often and usually not more than once or twice in a lifetime even for those who do change. However the tribes themselves are always evolving and expanding or shrinking. (You don't meet many Branch Davidians or followers of Jim Jones anymore although one can find the occasional Neo-nazi or Stalinist.) Our tribal memberships are either adopted or we are born or raised into them and they are difficult to shake-off. as they are chosen from self-interest even if that interest is not offending members of our community. Most people accept the religion they are born into, but as religion is becoming less relevant to our personal interests they are becoming less sticky identifications.
The idea of eliminating tribalism and not being part of any tribe therefore cannot happen. Our identities are constructed from these tribes. I think Bob is really only concerned about deemphasizing political and national tribal differences. He doesn't really care about yankee fans or soccer fans. Bob would like us to adopt a view from nowhere (or everywhere) unsullied by tribal interests and ideologies and focus on humanity as our global tribe. But that "tribeless" view from nowhere does not exist. People think much more locally than globally. Very few interests that we face day to day would need to be made by considering the global tribe of humanity as a whole. Our interests are local, immediate and subjective and involve our immediate group memberships and personal interests and values not humanity as a whole (humanity as a whole doesn't care about who wins a sports event or local political or religious conflict). Arguing for a global human tribe which is really what Bob is doing here is a hopeless task because that isn't where our interests lie and those interests which do have global significance such as climate change are too weak to overcome our immediate interests.
So Bob is really arguing for global tribalism (as he argues for global governance and global rules). This would be sort of a utopian Kantian project of deciding what's objectively best for humanity. And "what's best for humanity" belief systems and projects are ultimately utopian and have never been and are unlikely ever to be widely adopted.
Our moral values are local, tribal, and contextual. They are not universal. They differ from place to place and culture to culture and religion to religion and that is not going to change because people live and experience life locally not globally. People always view the world subjectively in terms of their own interests and values. Bob aspires to and values a more idealistic and global universalist tribal outlook. But it is just as tribal a viewpoint as any other. Sorry Bob, a "tribeless" tribe is no more tribeless than any other and disregards just as many human interests as any other belief system or ideology which purports to look for a "Kantian" objective moral value system to govern the world.
Hi, how are you? To the question of 'Why is courage so hard?' Because courage/bravery is risky. In other words it's dangerous, an actual existential threat. No joke. That's why courage is admired. It's rare.
Were the NAZI a tribe? No. Were all Germans NAZI? No. What would happen to an individual German who betrayed the NAZI and spoke up for, say, freedom to befriend a Polish Jew?
What is war about? Why do we (humans) engage in it?
To divide the world into friendly or hostile is human nature. Is it/they a threat (to my/our existence), an ally, or benign? To inflate potential threats (negativity bias) makes sense from an existential perspective. To test one's allies makes sense, too.
The use of the word tribe to describe affiliations is a sort of threat inflation. It simplifies (makes decision making easy) life - which is hard. Life is suffering? A struggle for sure. Having friendlies makes life less hard. It's the nature of 'men' to try and survive.
To try and transcend our nature, both as an individual and collectively, is very, very hard. Worth it? Easier to just go along, to pretend. Yes?
Bob, I find your summary quite helpful regarding four fundamental aspects of early human selection and development that have a significant meaning for understanding the ongoing human propensity to default to and align perception, emotion, and cognition with an in-group view.
Something that comes up in this piece, and pretty much anytime you bring in an evolutionary psychology perspective, is a point that is challenged by Nicholas Wade in his 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. That point is the ongoing effects of natural selection on humans and for some significant effects the relatively short timeline that this selection and its impact can take place in.
I believe a Robert Wright interview with Nicholas Wade, or someone else who argues for this evolutionary perspective, could be a valuable contribution to your efforts to counter in-group view as well as on the many other topics for which you draw on evolutionary psychology in NZN, the Parrot Room, and the Wright Show.
I'm not sure courage is always called upon in dealing with tribal norms, depending on how much one derives meaning or reinforcement from toeing the party line. If one's standing or self-esteem depends on validation from the tribe, then, of course, the notion of courage takes on more substance.
I belong nominally to nine tribes and regularly disagree with them and they with me. The reason is that we are both right and both wrong from time to time and from topic to topic, no matter what definitions you apply to judgements of truth or accuracy or appropriateness to the issue at hand. If one has a great deal at stake (e.g., employment, income, professional reputation, influence potential, etc.) then risking some of that can certainly manifest courage. When, however, does it become principled disagreement that really needs attention? Sometimes the best service we can offer our tribe is to call it out for its own form of blindness or inconsistency.
If, on the other hand, one seeks resolution of an issue that transcends tribal boundaries (an almost all of a national scale do that), then disagreement or questioning positions becomes an ingredient in learning. The point Tom makes about coalitions is certainly relevant, as well. One can collaborate across "tribal" positions and still be loyal to our tribal identification. No tribe is pure. No individual is pure. Tribes and people have self-defined blind spots--or often, some that they don't even recognize as such.
The context for my observations has to do with the challenges we face as a nation and how we can best achieve our potential despite the divisiveness that now seems to prevail. I offer no opinion on the Wright/Harris discord.
What can we conclude from the different perspectives that show up here that would be of value in our public square and achieve in it some sort of path forward that reflects our potential as a nation?
It strikes me that one way out of the dilemma presented by individual/tribal disagreements, whether they ever get resolved at that level (long may the Hatfields and the McCoys revel in their feud) is moving up a level or two or three in the scale of things in search of points of agreement that can foster "better."
We surely do need a lot of that.
My thought is "assume positive motivation." That was one of the "operating principles" that a company I worked for adopted in a sort of 1990's New Age fad. The thinking was that when Marketing folks didn't get along with Operations folks, they assumed the worst about each other's motivation, and so changing that assumption would produce better teamwork. It struck me that in your example someone was willing to assume positive motivation for both Huber and Rittenhouse.
It often takes a lot of work to assume that the other side has positive motivation. For me, the phrase "assume positive motivation" inclines people to be anti-tribal.
Is @omnitribe available? I like the idea of trying to expand one's sense of tribe to incorporate everyone.
Problem with seeing TribelessTribe in my Twitter feed now is I immediately think it's the aptly named Lawrence Tribe.
I agree that it’s getting harder and harder to acknowledge seeing things from the perspective of “the other side” because the blowback is swift, merciless, and rabidly partisan.
The hardest thing for me in the Rittenhouse trial, and going back to George Zimmerman, is why these self defense or stand your ground laws can be invoked when the person goes looking for trouble. Both Zimmerman and Rittenhouse may have thought they were doing the right thing, but they both willingly chose to insert themselves into a situation where they didn’t belong, provoked confrontation, and then when it went badly for them, they killed another human being. I am at a loss to explain how that is truly a self defense situation; had Zimmerman obeyed the police, Trayvon Martin would still be alive. Had Kyle Rittenhouse stayed home and stayed out of another state, he wouldn’t have faced trial, and the two people he killed might still be alive.
I've been a bit bothered by the tenor of some of these pieces lately. They seem to be so focused on Twitter in general and people like Sam Harris in specific, as if those really were the focus areas that matter. I don't think that's completely the case across the United States. It makes me think that engaging on Twitter at all, however hard one tries not to be tribal or rather tries to be actively anti-tribal, is still part of the same problem. Maybe better not to engage?
It seems clear that we've ended up with a definition of tribalism that might be technically correct, but is pretty far from the way lots of people would understand it (including myself). That doesn't mean that your definition isn't better, or even technically correct.
But I think I would have reacted differently to an article about Sam Harris that said "Sam Harris engages in coalitional politics". That would seem obviously and uncontroversial and doesn't conflict with my (perhaps simplistic) model of tribalism where it's a more all encompassing thing.
Or indeed writing an article where you start out by saying that your usage of 'tribalism' differs from colloquial usage. But in that case, one would first need to establish that Sam meant your definition of tribalism otherwise you're not actually proving that Sam was wrong, just that he would be wrong if he had meant what you meant by tribalism.
So in Sam's case I can think of two obvious coalitions he's been part of: the New Atheists, and the IDW - in both cases there's an ideological component but also a human component.
But is that also true that we're part of a coalition just because we share a point of view? For example, I'm not sure that Sam is really part of a general anti-Islam coalition. He may have anti-Islam views, but they're very much of the New Atheist variety. The affinity would be with Dawkins (even though their views aren't exactly the same) rather than with Christian anti-Islam people.
Equally I don't feel like I'm in a coalition with you on foreign policy just because I agree with you a lot. Doesn't there need to be something more than just ideological alignment?
Which raises an unsettling Tribal Motives of Woke Apologists Who Should Know Better argument.
Here goes:
Older progressives might not want to align themselves with the anti-woke for fear they will piss off the younger, more powerful, ascendent members of their tribe.
Better to focus on bloviating Joe Rogan guests with ludicrous toupees than what’s happened to the ACLU (& every other liberal charity, foundation & non-profit), the Democratic Party, the NYT (& what’s left of mainstream media), the colleges & universities, hiring practices in almost every profession & field (including VP on Democratic ticket), etc.
Saying you’re anti-tribal when you’re a Republican official is nowhere near as anti-tribal as saying you’re anti-Trump.
And saying you’re an anti-tribal academic, say, is a lot easier (and less upsetting to the tribe) than actually challenging woke rhetoric, practices and totems.
There’s a lot tribes don’t like. But they’re pretty tolerant of broad proclamations of anti-tribalism.
Tribal behavior is inherently human. Think of the many different sorts of tribes one can belong to. Yankee vs. Red Sox fan, employee of Morgan Stanley vs. Goldman Sachs, Methodist vs. Baptist or Catholic, Muslim or Jew, sexual identity, ethnic, geographic or national identity of any sort (e.g., American versus European or German versus French or Southerner versus Northerner, New Yorker versus New Jersey), Club memberships (For example in Palm Beach the Everglades or Bath & Tennis which are all WASP all the time versus the Palm Beach Country club which is Jewish), Union member versus member of management, environmentalist versus industrialist. These tribal identifications are matters of personal identity. They are adopted and absorbed into the personality of the group members who may to a greater or lesser degree value those identifications. All people are members of multiple such tribes and that membership is often sticky. People don't easily switch between being a Yankee and a Red Sox fan and they cannot
switch ethnicities or geographic origins at all or certainly not with ease.
Since people take their identities from such group identifications they cannot rid themselves of their tribal affiliations. You can decide to switch from being a Republican to a Democrat but those changes don't happen very often and usually not more than once or twice in a lifetime even for those who do change. However the tribes themselves are always evolving and expanding or shrinking. (You don't meet many Branch Davidians or followers of Jim Jones anymore although one can find the occasional Neo-nazi or Stalinist.) Our tribal memberships are either adopted or we are born or raised into them and they are difficult to shake-off. as they are chosen from self-interest even if that interest is not offending members of our community. Most people accept the religion they are born into, but as religion is becoming less relevant to our personal interests they are becoming less sticky identifications.
The idea of eliminating tribalism and not being part of any tribe therefore cannot happen. Our identities are constructed from these tribes. I think Bob is really only concerned about deemphasizing political and national tribal differences. He doesn't really care about yankee fans or soccer fans. Bob would like us to adopt a view from nowhere (or everywhere) unsullied by tribal interests and ideologies and focus on humanity as our global tribe. But that "tribeless" view from nowhere does not exist. People think much more locally than globally. Very few interests that we face day to day would need to be made by considering the global tribe of humanity as a whole. Our interests are local, immediate and subjective and involve our immediate group memberships and personal interests and values not humanity as a whole (humanity as a whole doesn't care about who wins a sports event or local political or religious conflict). Arguing for a global human tribe which is really what Bob is doing here is a hopeless task because that isn't where our interests lie and those interests which do have global significance such as climate change are too weak to overcome our immediate interests.
So Bob is really arguing for global tribalism (as he argues for global governance and global rules). This would be sort of a utopian Kantian project of deciding what's objectively best for humanity. And "what's best for humanity" belief systems and projects are ultimately utopian and have never been and are unlikely ever to be widely adopted.
Our moral values are local, tribal, and contextual. They are not universal. They differ from place to place and culture to culture and religion to religion and that is not going to change because people live and experience life locally not globally. People always view the world subjectively in terms of their own interests and values. Bob aspires to and values a more idealistic and global universalist tribal outlook. But it is just as tribal a viewpoint as any other. Sorry Bob, a "tribeless" tribe is no more tribeless than any other and disregards just as many human interests as any other belief system or ideology which purports to look for a "Kantian" objective moral value system to govern the world.
Hi, how are you? To the question of 'Why is courage so hard?' Because courage/bravery is risky. In other words it's dangerous, an actual existential threat. No joke. That's why courage is admired. It's rare.
Were the NAZI a tribe? No. Were all Germans NAZI? No. What would happen to an individual German who betrayed the NAZI and spoke up for, say, freedom to befriend a Polish Jew?
What is war about? Why do we (humans) engage in it?
To divide the world into friendly or hostile is human nature. Is it/they a threat (to my/our existence), an ally, or benign? To inflate potential threats (negativity bias) makes sense from an existential perspective. To test one's allies makes sense, too.
The use of the word tribe to describe affiliations is a sort of threat inflation. It simplifies (makes decision making easy) life - which is hard. Life is suffering? A struggle for sure. Having friendlies makes life less hard. It's the nature of 'men' to try and survive.
To try and transcend our nature, both as an individual and collectively, is very, very hard. Worth it? Easier to just go along, to pretend. Yes?
Cheers. Happy Thanksgiving.
Bob, I find your summary quite helpful regarding four fundamental aspects of early human selection and development that have a significant meaning for understanding the ongoing human propensity to default to and align perception, emotion, and cognition with an in-group view.
Something that comes up in this piece, and pretty much anytime you bring in an evolutionary psychology perspective, is a point that is challenged by Nicholas Wade in his 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. That point is the ongoing effects of natural selection on humans and for some significant effects the relatively short timeline that this selection and its impact can take place in.
I believe a Robert Wright interview with Nicholas Wade, or someone else who argues for this evolutionary perspective, could be a valuable contribution to your efforts to counter in-group view as well as on the many other topics for which you draw on evolutionary psychology in NZN, the Parrot Room, and the Wright Show.