I'm going to make a similar suggestion to what I made on Twitter... We need to start reaching out to small groups.
Right now, if you try to present a logical argument on the internet, you're shouting at the sky. It's futile. We're not going to change thousands of lives the way we really want to. We will feel good about ourselves for "owning the libs," though.
I'm reminded of the story of a white supremacists son who went off to college. He was insistent that Jews were evil. Someone decided to show him compassion and invited him over for dinner. Over the course of months, feeding him and letting him get to know the Jewish man who was being kind, he began to see that he was wrong. Not because someone presented a logical argument or because they shouted him down or cancelled him, but because they were kind and they ate with him.
This is the same strategy that Christ used in His time. He would invite the sinners to dine with Him, and then they would turn from their sinful ways.
Our ability to reach out to the world has destroyed our ability to affect change locally. It's all too small. We don't help the poor man on the corner; we give money to the national campaign against homelessness (or whatever). We don't talk to mothers in crisis; we post about Supreme Court justices.
We're all debating everything on a national level or on a worldwide level.
COVID has made this whole thing worse. For nearly a year, for hundreds of millions of people around the world, their association with their fellow man has been limited to what they posted on Facebook or Twitter or (Social Media Platform X). We've dehumanized EVERYONE we meet and put them in categories of either "with us" or "against us."
We need to get off the internet, sit down, and just enjoy some time with other humans without thinking about whether they agree or disagree.
If you can't meet with them face to face, take the discussion away from the public sphere and send messages back and forth. Create a dialog that's more than what you can type in 240 characters.
I cannot help but think this is related to the diminishment of the family.
I grew up with 10 sets of aunts and uncles, dozens of cousins, and an even larger number of great-aunts and uncles, second cousins, third cousins, etc. Just about every philosophy under the sun was represented by people who greeted me with a smile, hug, and kiss each time I saw them. No matter what they sat around the tables and argued over, they all showed up every time to eat and drink and mostly ignore the children running through their midst.
We don't really have to much of that now. My husband and I made a concerted effort to mimic this for our kids since we live away from family, but the best we could do was host regular gatherings for friends. But we choose our friends. Our friends mostly have the same views as us.
Maybe if we had bigger blood tribes we wouldn't seek out ideological ones.
I think it has everything to do with the breakdown of our institutions. From the media to the Church to the government, no one trusts traditional authority structures to uphold the true, the good, and the beautiful or any coherent value system really. For many traditional Catholics (myself included), this means a hermeneutic of suspicion for everything that comes out of the Vatican. And while this is certainly warranted, it means even when it comes to authentic magisterial pronouncements, we’re going to seek out other, lesser authorities whose world views more neatly conform to our own to confirm or reject that Church teaching. When back in the day, we used to just listen to the Pope and our bishops and stop there.
This can be extended to all other areas of life. Science, medicine, geopolitics. Universities, newspapers, research institutions, all of them have been corrupted or are perceived as corrupt by enough people that we cannot refer to them as objective arbiters of truth in order to settle disputes. We seek filters, pundits, to help us know what to think. Part of this is that our institutions themselves have become part of tribalism and the other part is that there’s so much information out there, we need an arbiter to help us discern what’s important and what’s factual.
Then again, perhaps I’m just begging the question. Why did our institutions break down and become tribalized? Perhaps it’s the information glut. Anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and the rest of the soft and hard sciences are only a little over 200 years old in their recognizable form. Perhaps the sheer amount of information available to us is more than we can possibly use and integrate into a coherent viable system.
Thanks for the post, Steve! I’m a longtime 1P5 fan and I love what you’re doing here. God bless.
Well, since you mentioned "tribes"...ha - seriously, I have been reading about Nicholas Black Elk and how he was able to merge his Native religion with the Catholic faith, how the early good Jesuits taught him - it's a long read of many books; how he was defeated, but adapted, and was able to reconcile his old ways pretty much perfectly with the Catholic faith. It is beyond my understanding, but have found my life is not so contentious as it used to be, thinking about the Good Red Road...
Eh, I don't know what I'm talking about, but saw this yesterday to more easily explain: The pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist hopes for a change in direction, and the realist adjusts the sails.
I fall firmly into the camp that tribalism, ingroup / outgroup dynamics, are, if not genetically hard-wired, then a nearly universal feature of human societies. And by societies I don’t mean just civilizations and cultures. These dynamics play out on smaller scales too. The reason these dynamics are pervasive is simple. If your society either cannot or actively chooses not to distinguish friend from foe, then inevitably your society will be destroyed by a society that does make that distinction (and judges you to be the foe). What this means is that the only societies that endure are those that are fundamentally tribal. From time to time there may arise societies that don’t use ingroup / outgroup dynamics but they will always be subsumed into a society that does. In this sense, tribalism is the basic and advantageous distrust of outgroup members until they have proven that they are not a threat to the ingroup.
It is fashionable to talk about the exploits of European explorers and their colonial governments as of late, and I think here too they might provide useful examples. We know that Europeans were not able to colonize every part of the globe. What distinguishes the parts of the globe they were able to colonize, from those they were not? Well, at least in part, their reception by the indigenous society. The European explorers write that in the Americas they were greeted largely with curiosity. In China and Japan, Europeans were greeted with skepticism. The Americas got added to Philip II’s list of titles, China and Japan did not. Now, I well understand that the comparison is not perfect. The Aztecs, for example, were dealing with a good deal of internal societal problems when Cortez arrived, which Cortez exploited (the Aztecs had their own colonies, who were less than happy to be their subjects). Moreover, at least in Early Modernity, the Chinese and Japanese societies were more technologically advanced than any found in the Americas. And, the Chinese and Japanese had the advantage of having Old World disease immunities that the Aztecs and Incas lacked. Nevertheless, the fundamental difference in disposition to the European outsiders aligns with the end result.
As you note, tribal thinking is exacerbated when there is a heightened perception of danger. If you know your enemy is on the warpath you are likely to hear them coming around every corner. In conversation with my brothers, I often fund myself coming back to the idea that 2020 was a year of revelations. At lot of groups, for whatever reason, felt it was time to show their cards. And, a lot of what would have sounded like tinfoil hat conspiracy theorizing in 2019 became revealed as fact in 2020. The “build back better” and the “great reset”, the pet projects of a shockingly small number of the rich and powerful being forced on human society through propaganda and social incentives are but the most obvious. The point here is simply that, if you think that “build back better” is a euphemism for a dystopian hellscape and all those in charge of it have just stepped out onto the stage and into the light, you’re going to be on edge. I was just reading an article from a Catholic news group yesterday talking about the response of a certain Catholic charity to COVID in underdeveloped parts of the world and the quotes from their spokesman were basically verbatim those of the UN. No matter how much good a given Catholic charity does, when you hear them lovingly quoting from one of the Church’s greatest enemies, it sets you on edge. The shields go up, and so forth. Whether you want to or not. You are protecting yourself and others you love from a real and present danger.
Now, there can be disadvantages to tribalism. Ideally tribalism is a filtering mechanism, designed to weed out the harmful while allowing the good or the neutral to pass through and be received by the society. But, when the outgroup appears so corrupt that nothing is allowed to pass through, it leaves the ingroup stunted and stale, unable to undertake a healthy self-criticism, correct its faults, and grow. This unhealthy form of tribalism, I think, ultimately backfires. Eventually the ingroup members discover the outgroup (in spite of the efforts of the gatekeepers) and rightfully come to resent the ingroup for the stunted backward society that it is, and this not because the ingroup’s ideals are wrong but because those ideas have been overshadowed by a formalistic tendency, the appearance being more important than the content. Obviously form and content are intrinsically connected, but if it is perceived that the content is being ignored in favor of the form, people will abandon both. Tribalism doesn’t have to be unhealthy like this, but it takes real wisdom to guide and moderate the tribal tendency and use it well. It also takes real trust on the part of those who are not leaders in society to accept the filtering of the leaders. As usual, wisdom and trust are lacking and so we are left with an iron curtain of sorts.
The claim that society has always been a battle between conservative and liberal camps is only relevant to democracies. That political spectrum is split along such lines (which is overly simplistic but hey) is because democracies are set up to require a “governing” team and one or more “oppositions”.
Democracies are very young, and in their current form you can argue that they mostly were only formed in the 20th century (America is an exception, but it actually proves my point I think). As democracies ‘mature’, they don’t become more aligned, they become more tribal. (America is the model democracy and definitely seems more tribal than other democracies).
Most democracies are set up to operate between two extremes and seek consensus in the middle. Hardly surprising that society takes on the same form - but with societal values breaking down and no firm purpose to society, consensus is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
I'd boil the problem down to one thing that needs to be solved first, though not a magic bullet - self-awareness. The majority of people have no idea why they believe what they do, and more importantly, why are they so angry when someone disagrees with them. This inability (or unwillingness) to look at interior motives closes one's mind to any alternatives, because "accepting another possibility means I'd have to think and that's hard," or "accepting another possibility means what I think might be wrong and that's scary," or "accepting another possibility means [trusted person] could be wrong and I need to feel safe with [trusted person]."
An ability to accept intellectual discomfort through introspection, for the most part, doesn't exist among any creed or political stripe. Solve that, and things get better. How to solve that? Don't ask me, I'm a guy who's commenting on the internet.
I am now way an expert, although like yourself, the the subject interests me a lot. I wonder if perhaps the breakdown of discourse is largely due to an underlying problem that is growing throughout the sciences: the functionality of dialectic itself as a means to discern, discuss and share truth in dialogue. Happy Friday!
Tribal is a misnomer here; a poetic word harkening back to some supposed "primitivism", which for some reason people take to be an explanation... What we're calling "tribalism" here is a modern middle-class ("bourgeois") squabble about who has the right plan for improving the world. Everyone who enters society these days (i.e. everyone who considers themselves a respectable person) thinks it's their duty and calling to know how to improve the world and preach it. Naturally people disagree on the right method, and they can't help seeing those with the wrong method for improving the world as the enemies of all humanity. Stop caring about making the world a better place, stop caring about improving society, stop caring about saving humanity... and see how quickly your "tribal" tendencies disappear.
Quote from Zhuangzi (Burton Watson translation)
The man with two toes webbed together would weep if he tried to tear them apart; the man with a sixth finger on his hand would howl if he tried to gnaw it off. Of these two, one has more than the usual number, the other has less, but in worrying about it they are identical. Nowadays the benevolent men of the age lift up weary eyes,10 worrying over the ills of the world, while the men of no benevolence tear apart the original form of their inborn nature in their greed for eminence and wealth. Therefore I wonder if benevolence and righteousness are really part of man's true form? From the Three Dynasties on down, what a lot of fuss and hubbub they have made in the world!
If we must use curve and plumb line, compass and square to make something right, this means cutting away its inborn nature; if we must use cords and knots, glue and lacquer to make something firm, this means violating its natural Virtue. So the crouchings and bendings of rites and music, the smiles and beaming looks of benevolence and righteousness, which are intended to comfort the hearts of the world, in fact destroy their constant naturalness.
For in the world there can be constant naturalness. Where there is constant naturalness, things are arced not by the use of the curve, straight not by the use of the plumb line, rounded not by compasses, squared not by T squares, joined not by glue and lacquer, bound not by ropes and lines. Then all things in the world, simple and compliant, live and never know how they happen to live; all things, rude and unwitting, get what they need and never know how they happen to get it. Past and present it has been the same; nothing can do injury to this [principle]. Why then come with benevolence and righteousness, that tangle and train of glue and lacquer, ropes and lines, and try to wander in the realm of the Way and its Virtue? You will only confuse the world!
A little confusion can alter the sense of direction; a great confusion can alter the inborn nature. How do I know this is so? Ever since that man of the Yu clan began preaching benevolence and righteousness and stirring up the world, all the men in the world have dashed headlong for benevolence and righteousness. This is because benevolence and righteousness have altered their inborn nature, is it not?
Let me try explaining what I mean. From the Three Dynasties on down, everyone in the world has altered his inborn nature because of some [external] thing. The petty man? - he will risk death for the sake of profit. The knight? - will risk it for the sake of fame. The high official? - he will risk it for family; the sage? - he will risk it for the world. All these various men go about the business in a different way, and are tagged differently when it comes to fame and reputation; but in blighting their inborn nature and risking their lives for something they are the same.
I'm going to make a similar suggestion to what I made on Twitter... We need to start reaching out to small groups.
Right now, if you try to present a logical argument on the internet, you're shouting at the sky. It's futile. We're not going to change thousands of lives the way we really want to. We will feel good about ourselves for "owning the libs," though.
I'm reminded of the story of a white supremacists son who went off to college. He was insistent that Jews were evil. Someone decided to show him compassion and invited him over for dinner. Over the course of months, feeding him and letting him get to know the Jewish man who was being kind, he began to see that he was wrong. Not because someone presented a logical argument or because they shouted him down or cancelled him, but because they were kind and they ate with him.
This is the same strategy that Christ used in His time. He would invite the sinners to dine with Him, and then they would turn from their sinful ways.
Our ability to reach out to the world has destroyed our ability to affect change locally. It's all too small. We don't help the poor man on the corner; we give money to the national campaign against homelessness (or whatever). We don't talk to mothers in crisis; we post about Supreme Court justices.
We're all debating everything on a national level or on a worldwide level.
COVID has made this whole thing worse. For nearly a year, for hundreds of millions of people around the world, their association with their fellow man has been limited to what they posted on Facebook or Twitter or (Social Media Platform X). We've dehumanized EVERYONE we meet and put them in categories of either "with us" or "against us."
We need to get off the internet, sit down, and just enjoy some time with other humans without thinking about whether they agree or disagree.
If you can't meet with them face to face, take the discussion away from the public sphere and send messages back and forth. Create a dialog that's more than what you can type in 240 characters.
I cannot help but think this is related to the diminishment of the family.
I grew up with 10 sets of aunts and uncles, dozens of cousins, and an even larger number of great-aunts and uncles, second cousins, third cousins, etc. Just about every philosophy under the sun was represented by people who greeted me with a smile, hug, and kiss each time I saw them. No matter what they sat around the tables and argued over, they all showed up every time to eat and drink and mostly ignore the children running through their midst.
We don't really have to much of that now. My husband and I made a concerted effort to mimic this for our kids since we live away from family, but the best we could do was host regular gatherings for friends. But we choose our friends. Our friends mostly have the same views as us.
Maybe if we had bigger blood tribes we wouldn't seek out ideological ones.
I think it has everything to do with the breakdown of our institutions. From the media to the Church to the government, no one trusts traditional authority structures to uphold the true, the good, and the beautiful or any coherent value system really. For many traditional Catholics (myself included), this means a hermeneutic of suspicion for everything that comes out of the Vatican. And while this is certainly warranted, it means even when it comes to authentic magisterial pronouncements, we’re going to seek out other, lesser authorities whose world views more neatly conform to our own to confirm or reject that Church teaching. When back in the day, we used to just listen to the Pope and our bishops and stop there.
This can be extended to all other areas of life. Science, medicine, geopolitics. Universities, newspapers, research institutions, all of them have been corrupted or are perceived as corrupt by enough people that we cannot refer to them as objective arbiters of truth in order to settle disputes. We seek filters, pundits, to help us know what to think. Part of this is that our institutions themselves have become part of tribalism and the other part is that there’s so much information out there, we need an arbiter to help us discern what’s important and what’s factual.
Then again, perhaps I’m just begging the question. Why did our institutions break down and become tribalized? Perhaps it’s the information glut. Anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and the rest of the soft and hard sciences are only a little over 200 years old in their recognizable form. Perhaps the sheer amount of information available to us is more than we can possibly use and integrate into a coherent viable system.
Thanks for the post, Steve! I’m a longtime 1P5 fan and I love what you’re doing here. God bless.
Well, since you mentioned "tribes"...ha - seriously, I have been reading about Nicholas Black Elk and how he was able to merge his Native religion with the Catholic faith, how the early good Jesuits taught him - it's a long read of many books; how he was defeated, but adapted, and was able to reconcile his old ways pretty much perfectly with the Catholic faith. It is beyond my understanding, but have found my life is not so contentious as it used to be, thinking about the Good Red Road...
Eh, I don't know what I'm talking about, but saw this yesterday to more easily explain: The pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist hopes for a change in direction, and the realist adjusts the sails.
I fall firmly into the camp that tribalism, ingroup / outgroup dynamics, are, if not genetically hard-wired, then a nearly universal feature of human societies. And by societies I don’t mean just civilizations and cultures. These dynamics play out on smaller scales too. The reason these dynamics are pervasive is simple. If your society either cannot or actively chooses not to distinguish friend from foe, then inevitably your society will be destroyed by a society that does make that distinction (and judges you to be the foe). What this means is that the only societies that endure are those that are fundamentally tribal. From time to time there may arise societies that don’t use ingroup / outgroup dynamics but they will always be subsumed into a society that does. In this sense, tribalism is the basic and advantageous distrust of outgroup members until they have proven that they are not a threat to the ingroup.
It is fashionable to talk about the exploits of European explorers and their colonial governments as of late, and I think here too they might provide useful examples. We know that Europeans were not able to colonize every part of the globe. What distinguishes the parts of the globe they were able to colonize, from those they were not? Well, at least in part, their reception by the indigenous society. The European explorers write that in the Americas they were greeted largely with curiosity. In China and Japan, Europeans were greeted with skepticism. The Americas got added to Philip II’s list of titles, China and Japan did not. Now, I well understand that the comparison is not perfect. The Aztecs, for example, were dealing with a good deal of internal societal problems when Cortez arrived, which Cortez exploited (the Aztecs had their own colonies, who were less than happy to be their subjects). Moreover, at least in Early Modernity, the Chinese and Japanese societies were more technologically advanced than any found in the Americas. And, the Chinese and Japanese had the advantage of having Old World disease immunities that the Aztecs and Incas lacked. Nevertheless, the fundamental difference in disposition to the European outsiders aligns with the end result.
As you note, tribal thinking is exacerbated when there is a heightened perception of danger. If you know your enemy is on the warpath you are likely to hear them coming around every corner. In conversation with my brothers, I often fund myself coming back to the idea that 2020 was a year of revelations. At lot of groups, for whatever reason, felt it was time to show their cards. And, a lot of what would have sounded like tinfoil hat conspiracy theorizing in 2019 became revealed as fact in 2020. The “build back better” and the “great reset”, the pet projects of a shockingly small number of the rich and powerful being forced on human society through propaganda and social incentives are but the most obvious. The point here is simply that, if you think that “build back better” is a euphemism for a dystopian hellscape and all those in charge of it have just stepped out onto the stage and into the light, you’re going to be on edge. I was just reading an article from a Catholic news group yesterday talking about the response of a certain Catholic charity to COVID in underdeveloped parts of the world and the quotes from their spokesman were basically verbatim those of the UN. No matter how much good a given Catholic charity does, when you hear them lovingly quoting from one of the Church’s greatest enemies, it sets you on edge. The shields go up, and so forth. Whether you want to or not. You are protecting yourself and others you love from a real and present danger.
Now, there can be disadvantages to tribalism. Ideally tribalism is a filtering mechanism, designed to weed out the harmful while allowing the good or the neutral to pass through and be received by the society. But, when the outgroup appears so corrupt that nothing is allowed to pass through, it leaves the ingroup stunted and stale, unable to undertake a healthy self-criticism, correct its faults, and grow. This unhealthy form of tribalism, I think, ultimately backfires. Eventually the ingroup members discover the outgroup (in spite of the efforts of the gatekeepers) and rightfully come to resent the ingroup for the stunted backward society that it is, and this not because the ingroup’s ideals are wrong but because those ideas have been overshadowed by a formalistic tendency, the appearance being more important than the content. Obviously form and content are intrinsically connected, but if it is perceived that the content is being ignored in favor of the form, people will abandon both. Tribalism doesn’t have to be unhealthy like this, but it takes real wisdom to guide and moderate the tribal tendency and use it well. It also takes real trust on the part of those who are not leaders in society to accept the filtering of the leaders. As usual, wisdom and trust are lacking and so we are left with an iron curtain of sorts.
The claim that society has always been a battle between conservative and liberal camps is only relevant to democracies. That political spectrum is split along such lines (which is overly simplistic but hey) is because democracies are set up to require a “governing” team and one or more “oppositions”.
Democracies are very young, and in their current form you can argue that they mostly were only formed in the 20th century (America is an exception, but it actually proves my point I think). As democracies ‘mature’, they don’t become more aligned, they become more tribal. (America is the model democracy and definitely seems more tribal than other democracies).
Most democracies are set up to operate between two extremes and seek consensus in the middle. Hardly surprising that society takes on the same form - but with societal values breaking down and no firm purpose to society, consensus is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
I'd boil the problem down to one thing that needs to be solved first, though not a magic bullet - self-awareness. The majority of people have no idea why they believe what they do, and more importantly, why are they so angry when someone disagrees with them. This inability (or unwillingness) to look at interior motives closes one's mind to any alternatives, because "accepting another possibility means I'd have to think and that's hard," or "accepting another possibility means what I think might be wrong and that's scary," or "accepting another possibility means [trusted person] could be wrong and I need to feel safe with [trusted person]."
An ability to accept intellectual discomfort through introspection, for the most part, doesn't exist among any creed or political stripe. Solve that, and things get better. How to solve that? Don't ask me, I'm a guy who's commenting on the internet.
I am now way an expert, although like yourself, the the subject interests me a lot. I wonder if perhaps the breakdown of discourse is largely due to an underlying problem that is growing throughout the sciences: the functionality of dialectic itself as a means to discern, discuss and share truth in dialogue. Happy Friday!
Tribal is a misnomer here; a poetic word harkening back to some supposed "primitivism", which for some reason people take to be an explanation... What we're calling "tribalism" here is a modern middle-class ("bourgeois") squabble about who has the right plan for improving the world. Everyone who enters society these days (i.e. everyone who considers themselves a respectable person) thinks it's their duty and calling to know how to improve the world and preach it. Naturally people disagree on the right method, and they can't help seeing those with the wrong method for improving the world as the enemies of all humanity. Stop caring about making the world a better place, stop caring about improving society, stop caring about saving humanity... and see how quickly your "tribal" tendencies disappear.
Quote from Zhuangzi (Burton Watson translation)
The man with two toes webbed together would weep if he tried to tear them apart; the man with a sixth finger on his hand would howl if he tried to gnaw it off. Of these two, one has more than the usual number, the other has less, but in worrying about it they are identical. Nowadays the benevolent men of the age lift up weary eyes,10 worrying over the ills of the world, while the men of no benevolence tear apart the original form of their inborn nature in their greed for eminence and wealth. Therefore I wonder if benevolence and righteousness are really part of man's true form? From the Three Dynasties on down, what a lot of fuss and hubbub they have made in the world!
If we must use curve and plumb line, compass and square to make something right, this means cutting away its inborn nature; if we must use cords and knots, glue and lacquer to make something firm, this means violating its natural Virtue. So the crouchings and bendings of rites and music, the smiles and beaming looks of benevolence and righteousness, which are intended to comfort the hearts of the world, in fact destroy their constant naturalness.
For in the world there can be constant naturalness. Where there is constant naturalness, things are arced not by the use of the curve, straight not by the use of the plumb line, rounded not by compasses, squared not by T squares, joined not by glue and lacquer, bound not by ropes and lines. Then all things in the world, simple and compliant, live and never know how they happen to live; all things, rude and unwitting, get what they need and never know how they happen to get it. Past and present it has been the same; nothing can do injury to this [principle]. Why then come with benevolence and righteousness, that tangle and train of glue and lacquer, ropes and lines, and try to wander in the realm of the Way and its Virtue? You will only confuse the world!
A little confusion can alter the sense of direction; a great confusion can alter the inborn nature. How do I know this is so? Ever since that man of the Yu clan began preaching benevolence and righteousness and stirring up the world, all the men in the world have dashed headlong for benevolence and righteousness. This is because benevolence and righteousness have altered their inborn nature, is it not?
Let me try explaining what I mean. From the Three Dynasties on down, everyone in the world has altered his inborn nature because of some [external] thing. The petty man? - he will risk death for the sake of profit. The knight? - will risk it for the sake of fame. The high official? - he will risk it for family; the sage? - he will risk it for the world. All these various men go about the business in a different way, and are tagged differently when it comes to fame and reputation; but in blighting their inborn nature and risking their lives for something they are the same.