My topic is of great contemporary interest, but I want to launch our discussion with reference to two giants of modern philosophy. In Book III of his masterwork, The Ethics, Baruch Spinoza says that “Everything, as far as it can by its own power, strives [conatus] to persevere in its being.”[1] Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, shows one possible outcome. He says, “Out of civil states, there is war of every one against every one. . . . and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[2] His solution for this state of universal war is to give absolute power to a single ruler, the sovereign. Individuals can no longer wage war. But in another work, The Citizen, he employs an image that undercuts his claim about the war of all against all. He writes, “Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other.”[3] A vivid image, but not accurate about mushrooms. Because, even though mushrooms appear to stand alone, in fact they are connected in a vast underground network. And, although individualism has a large place in the ethos of our country, human beings are connected in many ways. Here are some of them.
Bill Nye, the science guy, said, “Researchers have proven, scientifically, that humans are all one people. The color of our ancestors’ skin and ultimately my skin and your skin is a consequence of ultraviolet light, of latitude and climate. Despite our recent sad conflict here in the U.S., there really is no such thing as race. We are one species—each of us much, much more alike than different. We all come from Africa. We are all of the same stardust. We are all going to live and die on the same planet, a Pale Blue Dot in the vastness of space.” His conclusion? “We have to work together.”
As we move about on our planet, we share and are connected by the air we breathe and the water we drink and bathe in. Roads, trains, electrical grids, technology webs, and sewerage systems are intended for all. Air taken in by a Neo-Nazi might earlier have been exhaled by a Black Lives Matter activist, and they could give blood to each other.
Since we are one species, everyone we meet, read about, hear about, or imagine is a human being just as we are. We all have the same basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Satisfying those needs requires dependence on others. Consider food, for example. Members of a small tribe depend on the hunters and gatherers. Each day food is brought in and shared by all members. Contrast this with the dozens of workers in our complex modern food industry who bring items from faraway farms to the shelf of Fareway Foods. That takes time, lots of it. And have you read some of those expiration dates?!
Beyond being connected, we also belong. We belong to a family, whether it be one other person, two, a few, or many. We belong to a society; usually we are at birth citizens of a political state. We are immersed in a native language, or perhaps two. We grow up in a culture that includes festivals, music, art, rituals, religion. None of these things are chosen at first, but over time we can choose how to belong or not.
So we do not live simply as a human. Each life takes a specific concrete shape. Hegel helps to make this point. He writes of someone who wants a piece of fruit. When presented with an apple, the answer is, “No; I want fruit.” Same thing for the offer of an orange and a banana;
“Thank you, but I asked for fruit.” That unfortunate person will remain fruitless because every actual fruit is particular. Hannah Arendt makes a parallel point: we are all the same; that is, we are different. If we ever say of someone that they are a real human being, it is because of something specific about them that shows their humanity.
Importantly for our topic, we have a drive to belong. Aristotle said that we are social, political animals. In the current discussion belonging is described under the heading of tribe. Several recent books have Tribe in the title. Let us look at some of them.
The first is Tribes by Seth Godin, an entrepreneur and motivational speaker. He proposes the marks of a tribe: a leader, a group of people (size undetermined, but the tighter the better), a shared interest, means of communication, potential for growth and change, and emphasis on connection, not stuff. His subtitle, We Need You to Lead Us, shows that he aims to inspire leaders. The leader has the idea, tells the story of the tribe, recruits the members, and in the best cases is always curious and encourages questioning. It is also clear that such a leader might quickly move on to another project. Thus, Godin’s tribes would not ask either leaders or members for the allegiance usually associated with a full-fledged tribe. And since Godin evaluates tribes only according to their success, failure, or stagnation, we don’t have a basis for judging the moral worth of a tribe. The philosopher, Josiah Royce, fills this gap with his philosophy of loyalty.
Royce, a Harvard professor, published his book with that title in 1908. He held that loyalty, as both idea and living spirit in human life, is the cardinal virtue. Here is his definition: ”loyalty is a self conscious and willing devotion to a cause that many are seeking together to realize.” I’ll comment on each part of that definition. First, self-consciousness and willing are traits of individual persons, but Royce’s philosophy is not an individualism. For him there are no wholly independent realities, no purely theoretical truths. So, second, loyalty is a community virtue; it is something shared with others, many others. Our identity is not formed by some unique and private trait, but rather by loyalty, the way we are with others. And what do people do when they come together in loyalty? They, third, show their devotion by acting, seeking to realize something. Loyalty is not shown by contemplating, by observing, by commenting, but rather by doing, by seeking to make real. So far we have talked about all the elements of the definition but one, and it is the one I promised to give. I refer, of course, to cause. Loyalty is devotion to a cause. But you will ask, and rightly, Just any cause? How can loyalty be a virtue, let alone the cardinal virtue, if it involves devotion to an evil or destructive cause? Royce needs to put some content into his definition. His answer goes something like this. ‘I didn’t build specific content into my definition because I want the loyalty basket to hold a great variety: the trivial as well as the serious, the small as well as the great, and, yes, the evil as well as the good. By regarding them all as of the same kind, I am able to take the next step of comparing and evaluating them.’ And Royce adds a criterion, namely, being loyal to what advances loyalty. This still appears highly formal, but here is how it works. If loyalty involves people acting together, no cause, no object of loyalty, should be chosen which would break community or do harm to persons. For example, a band of drug dealers loyal to each other and their goals of profiteering from drug sales would not be loyal to loyalty because of the harm resulting from their actions. Similarly, a community based on race hatred would be a case of loyalty to an evil cause.
Now that we have a criterion for tribe, let’s go to the next tribe book. Amy Chua begins her 2018 book, Political Tribes, with these words. “Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. We crave bonds and attachments, which is why we love clubs, teams, fraternities, and families. Even monks and friars belong to orders. But the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude.”[4] She gives examples of how the instinct is destructive and suggestions on how it might be tamed.
She focuses on relations between nations. She calls our nation a super-group since, unlike nearly all other nations, we are made up of many ethnic and other groups: e pluribus unum. But an enduring question for us is whether the one eclipses the many. Chua quotes President Woodrow Wilson’s 1915 speech to several thousand newly naturalized citizens: “You cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect and with every purpose of your will thorough Americans. You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.”[5] Happily, Wilson’s view has not prevailed; think of how we easily speak of Native Americans, African-Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and celebrate those specific groups. There are, however, those that do advocate a mono-culture, and it would not be achieved by kissing.
All of this begs the question, what is the American identity? In the final pages of her book, Chua writes, “To view one another as fellow Americans . . . we need to collectively find a national identity capacious enough to resonate with, and hold together as one people, Americans of all sorts—old and young, immigrant and native born, urban and rural, descendants of slaves as well as descendants of slave owners.”[6]
The conventional answer to the identity question is that America is defined by democracy and a market economy. The bulk of Chua’s book is an examination of how that has played out in relation to other nations. She shows that over and over again we, who should have known better because of our pluralist makeup, have ignored the ethnic forces in countries where we have intervened. We go in to promote democracy and a free economy without getting to know the other country. In Vietnam we ignored Vietnam’s long struggle against China and its resentment of the economic power of the Chinese minority. In Afghanistan, we ignored the centuries-long dominance of the Pashtun. In Iraq we misplayed the relation between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Because these nations were already infected by fierce political tribalism, our interventions turned into catastrophes. Since we had not taken care to learn, we were not able to deal constructively with the situation.
I just used the term tribalism. That is what develops when the tribal instinct goes unchecked. Of course, people want to celebrate their tribe and be proud of it. But often that pride leads to a sense of exceptionalism, the conviction that one’s tribe is superior to others. The others are seen negatively, even as an enemy.
Studies have shown that the drift toward tribalism can be checked if people from different tribes actually get to know one another as human beings. This requires more than casual contact. In the 1950s Gordon Allport of Harvard found that one-on-one engagement can dismantle prejudice and change lives. The point can be put this way. Tribal allegiance can make us blind to our common humanity. Genuine meeting reveals a humanity that has been there all along. My relation to the other is no longer a zero sum game, but a win-win. I can shed my contempt and hate and go back to positive development of myself and my tribe, even cooperation with others.
An example of human engagement is Killer Mike, a rapper and activist from Atlanta. He formed a musical group that included a white nationalist and gave him the final verse in their rendition of “We Are the World.” Here is what he said in a recent interview.
“I have to engage even with people who I disagree with as human beings, to seek understanding, because we’re here. It’s not like we’re not going to see each other at the Kroger. We have different opinions on social things, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize and respect him.”
And here is the key passage. “Usually you feel something, you go to Twitter and Facebook to tell people how you feel. You might then put that feeling behind you. What I want you to do is process your feeling and think. After that you converse with people in your inner circle, people who don’t look like you, and people who do. I want to start conversations. I want to get people interacting and intermingling differently.” Such processing is engagement both within and between tribes that affirms both tribe and human.
Sebastian Junger, in his book, Tribe: on Homecoming and Belonging, gives examples of tribe that do not fall into tribalism. Tribes can offer what Self-Determination theory has shown are the three basic things to a good life. They are: to feel competent, to feel autonomy in one’s life, and to feel connected to others.
One example is a Native American tribe which is modest in size. Everyone has a responsibility; there is no unemployment in the tribe. The tribe works by coordination rather than hierarchy. Lines of authority are loose so that one is free to choose how to accomplish a task. There is a very close connection to others such that all needs are met; food is shared and the elderly are honored and cared for. The connection with others is so important that failure to do one’s job leads to discipline. Both political persuasions might be at home in such a tribe; all contribute as they are able (conservative) and the basic human needs of everyone are met (liberal).
Junger sees soldiers in combat as tribal. One soldier told him, “We could help each other without fear.”[7] There is an absence of competition because soldiers are literally in it together. Many, on return to society, say that they miss the strong human bonds they experienced at war. Being thanked for their service is not enough. They look for an egalitarian alternative to the individualist scramble. They want a chance to contribute. Specifically, it is not helpful to them to see them as victims. International relief organizations during and after the civil war in Liberia did precisely that when they saw soldiers as unfortunate victims and offered them food and job training. Because they didn’t have the chance to process their violent actions, they had difficulty fully integrating into society.[8]
Similarly, Native Americans have been regarded as unfortunate and plagued with social problems. But they have seized the rubric of self-determination for themselves and taken steps to use their strengths to create strong persons and communities. Minneapolis offers one recent example. This December Native Americans were the majority in a homeless encampment near downtown. Because of disease and death, it was feared that public authorities would come in and clear the site. But Red Lake Nation, a tribe several hours to the north, owned city land on which it planned to construct permanent housing. To meet the crisis, Red Lake proposed building temporary housing. Other tribes from reservations soon joined in. Urban Native Americans already on the scene and active became part of the project. Tribes acted and all the homeless, both Native American and other had shelter.[9]
These examples of self-determination show that people have an intrinsic motivation for well-being. We can add another dimension to Spinoza’s insight. We want more than just to exist. We want to live well.
Junger writes, “The beauty and tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.”[10] Catastrophes, however, are such situations. When disaster occurs, self-interest gets subsumed into group interest; people come together. Examples are the German blitz bombing of London and the US saturation bombing of Dresden during World War II; the 1970 earthquake in central Chile that killed 70,000 people; and the siege of Sarajevo which lasted for 1,425 days from April 1992 to February 1996. In each of these cases distinctions of wealth and class simply disappeared. With survival at stake, people became equals and acted selflessly. Junger sums it up this way: “Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community. . . . That sense of solidarity is at the core of what it means to be human.”[11]
The relation between local and universal is particularly vexed when we consider the question of patriotism. Doesn’t morality demand an impartial, universal viewpoint that treats all human beings as equals? Is there room for special allegiance to one’s own country? Professor Gary Gutting of Notre Dame, taking his cue from his colleague Alasdair MacIntyre, says that patriotism and morality are compatible if a country’s ideal is “the freedom of all persons, not just its own citizens.” Gutting finds such an ideal in the Declaration of Independence.[12] The ideal must be lived out in a particular place by a particular people with their own history. This history will be marked by both successes and failures, but as long as the ideal is the guide, patriotism is at once moral and a motivating force.
Senator John McCain’s final statement is pertinent here. He wrote: “We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.”[13]
A beautiful statement of healthy patriotism is found in Lloyd Stone’s 1934 hymn, “This Is My Song,” set to Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia.
“This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
“My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.”[14]
Of course, most of the patriotic work is intramural, done by diverse
groups who flesh out the republic, from the Latin res publica, the public reality. When that is done well we have good transportation, public utilities, sanitary departments, health care, environmental protection, scientific research, and defense. Too often, political tribalism gets in the way. Studies have shown that whereas both Republicans and Democrats agree that climate change needs attention they disagree on climate policy. The embarrassing thing is that both Republicans and Democrats will support a carbon tax when it is proposed by one of their own and reject it when it comes from the other side. It’s the what not the who that counts.
Now let’s come close to home and consider the relation between Monmouth and Knox. A few years after I graduated I was on campus for a visit. I told Sam Thompson something positive that I had heard about Knox. He grumped, “They always think so well of themselves!” No doubt they have said similar things about us. Little darts like these are tossed from a distance.
Perhaps lessons can be learned from athletic contests where the two sides meet directly. Games are played within clearly defined boundaries. Competition is keen; effort is intense. The outcome is simple and clear; one team wins that day, and the other loses. At the end opponents may form two lines and mumble “good game” to each other. (After Senior Softball—Geezerball—games in New Jersey, I go through the line saying “good grief” and no one notices.) Sport at its best can cultivate solidarity among the opposing players. The Boston Cricket Club offers an example. India and Pakistan recently faced the possibility of war over the disputed Kashmir territory. One club member proposed ousting the Pakistanis. The president refused saying, “There is no tension between the wickets.” But the games end at the boundary. Players and fans become students, persons, with all that that entails. New possibilities for meeting arise and can be actualized or not. Things outside the boundary are both more complex and possibly richer. Fighting Scots and Prairie Fire need not contend, but might be content to enjoy a barbeque. In the 1950s when Route 34 was curvy and dangerous there was no academic sharing. Later, 34 got straightened and Monmouth offered Latin and Knox Greek; now Monmouth offers Portuguese and Knox German. Back in the last century, when I gave the Thompson Lecture, I was invited to give it at Knox as well. What else could these two tribes cook up?
We all belong to several groups. The term tribe applies to only some of them, but today let’s call them tribes. Here are some concluding suggestions for how to be tribal.
- Cultivate local and mid-size associations that protect against an all-embracing state. Remember that association is a noun but also a verb. Putting on the badge is not the answer so much as the starting point for thinking and acting.Harry Slochower advises persons to “find . . . organic attachments to the demands of the day.”[15]
- Demand that the goal of your tribe be worthy of your allegiance. Don’t just strive to win; win for a valid reason.
- Remember that if your tribe has an identity it is by definition limited and leaves room for other tribes. And there are other tribes. Do you want your tribe to do well or to be better than? Momentous choice.
- Don’t applaud your ways and denigrate those of others. That will lead to what Professor Anthony Appiah calls identity wars.The Quran says, “We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another.” (49:13) In a recent address Rev. William J. Barber II said, “The humanity and dignity of any person or people cannot in any way diminish the humanity and dignity of another person or people. To hold fast to the image of God in every person is to insist that the Palestinian child is as precious as the Jewish child.”[16]
5) Seek full human meetings within your tribe and outside. Don’t let attitudes get in the way. In a 1962 essay, James Baldwin states the problem this way: “The person who . . . has no touchstone for reality . . . interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it, . . . are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”[17]
Karl Ove Knausgaard, in My Struggle, reflected on Hitler and Anders Behring Breivik, the gunman who killed 69 people in Norway in 2011. His reviewer says that Knausgaard suggests that “What made the inhumanity of the two possible . . . was the fact that their psyches embraced only the first and third grammatical persons: an ‘I’ (the grandiose perpetrator) and a ‘they’ (the dehumanized victims) but never a ‘you’ — the second person, who, in confronting us one-on-one, forces us to engage an ‘other’ as a human being.”[18]
6) Your tribe has a story; keep it fresh and keep it honest. Ask questions and be alert to ways of improving and advancing your tribe.
7) Make room for creative art. Christian Wiman quotes Mallarmé who said that poetry’s duty is “to purify the language of the tribe.”[19]
8) Give to your tribes, but do not lose yourself. Your human spirit is larger than any tribe; you are more than your roles. Take off the sweatshirt. Nothing has changed. But now it is clear that you are free to be you. You
are a one and only. And, you are one of a kind.
Charles Courtney
Monmouth College
March 19, 2019
Bibliography
Chua, Amy. Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. New York: Penguin Press. 2018
Gabel, Peter. The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self. New York: Routledge. 2018.
Godin, Seth. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. New York: Penguin Group. 2008.
Gutting, Gary. “Is Our Patriotism Moral?” in Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments, ed. Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2017, 2016.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott. New York: Collier Books.1962.
Hobbes, Thomas. The Citizen, in Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert. New York: Doubleday & Company. 1972.
Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. New York: Hachette Book Group. 2016.
Slochower, Harry. Mythopoesis: Mythic Patterns in the Literary Classics. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1970.
Spinoza, Benedict de. The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994.
Wiman, Christian. He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith,
The Faith of Art. New York: Farrar, Strraus and Giroux. 2018.
[1] The Ethics, Book III, Proposition 6. A Spinoza Reader, Edwin Curley editor, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 159.
[2] Leviathan, Chapter 13
[3] The Citizen, VIII, 1. Man and Citizen, Bernard Gert editor, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 205.
[4] Chua, p. 1.
[5] Chua, p. 17 (italics added).
[6] Chua, p. 203.
[7] Junger, p. 91.
[8] Junger, pp. 98-9.
[9] The New York Times, December 23, 2018, p. A18.
[10] Junger, p. 59.
[11] Junger, pp. 131, 133.
[12] Gutting, p. 199.
[13] The New York Times, August 30, 2018, p. A17.
[14] United Methodist Hymnal, No. 437.
[15] Slochower, p. 13.
[16] Quoted by Michelle Alexander, “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” The New York Times, January 20, 2019.
[17] Baldwin, “Letters From a Region in My Mind,” reprinted in The New Yorker, December 3, 2018, p. 38.
[18] Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times Book Review, September 30, 2018, pp. 23-4.
[19] Widman, p. 91.