I was writing a piece about patriotism vs. nationalism, and experiencing them as "fake tribalism" over the weekend, and in the middle of it got started into Amy Chua's World on Fire and her "market-dominant minority" meme. Her notion is that economically successful minorities like the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia tend to find themselves cast as the enemy of the impoverished ethnic majority. Well, not exactly. It is more that democratic leaders "opportunistically whip up hatred against the resented minority" and propose to loot them and return the country's wealth to the "true owners of the nation."
Why not just say that all political leaders need to establish themselves as the protectors of "us," our tribe, and thus almost inevitably need to advertise a threat from "them," real or imagined, for which the leaders propose to mobilize us in order to prevent our annihilation by the threatening foe. If you are a nationalist leader of a nation not actually threatened by the Huns or the Mongols or the Commies then you have to invent a threat, otherwise what's the point?
So let us begin.
Humans are tribal. We are tribal because hunter-gatherers needed to protect their "patch of land" (as they put it in the Creation story in Fabian Essays in Socialism) from the neighboring tribe. The way this works is that the tribal leader is the first in a band of brothers that unite to fight to protect the patch of land from the enemy. They must fight to the death because if they lose they will be slaughtered by the enemy tribe next door, and their women and children taken over by the neighboring tribe.
Actually, it turns out from War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley that hunter-gatherer tribes did not have pitched battles, because they could not afford the casualties as we can. Instead they had dawn raids and massacres, both driven, I imagine, by the advantage of surprise. Given that hunter-gatherer tribes had an annual violent death rate of 500 per 100,000, two orders of magnitude greater than our violent death rate here in the good old US and A, you can see that they were right not to go in for pitched battles.
So all the young men in hunter-gatherer tribes were the border police. Their job was to protect the border and stop any dawn raids and massacres. Naturally they developed a warrior culture, and the acme of warrior culture is the concept of Honor, described in Honor, a History by James Bowman as the reputation among men for standing shoulder to shoulder with the tribal brothers to defend their patch of land and not breaking ranks and running away. You can see that this is no accident. Any armed group must be a band of brothers that will always stand together and never flinch when the going gets tough.
Also, each tribe had its shaman, a man that connected the tribe with the meaning of life, the universe and everything through what Jungians would call his connection with the unconscious. So each tribe really had its own religion, as explicated by its tribal initiations, its tribal animal mascot, and the peculiar talents of the local shaman.
The important thing to remember about the tribe is that it was a group of people related by blood. They were all brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts. We all know how, the closer that people are related, the more likely they are to help one another when in difficulty. That would be real helpful in the blood-related hunter-gatherer tribe.
The important thing to realize is that all humans have lived this way from the Dawn of Man down to the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Studies of chimpanzees described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn indicate that they have a similar culture, occupying food-growing land and defending the border by means of young males attacking any border violator in a three-against-one massacre.
So the notion of the tribe united against threats and dangers from without is programmed deep into our DNA. It must be so, because without a defended food-growing territory it is, as Bugs Bunny said, "curtains."
However, in the last 12,000 years, with agriculture, and more recently industry, humans have created a society where the men are not all enrolled into the border protection force. Most men in the agricultural age became farmers, converting their strength and aggression from defense into plowing and reaping. Most men in the industrial age have "jobs" and work in the exchange economy for wages. This is a far cry from the hunting and border defense of the old days, and humans have had to learn to adapt and live in new ways.
But under it all we are still tribesmen; we men still respect men of courage. And we are still ready to rally to our brothers if called by our tribal leaders to face the foe.
It stands to reason, therefore, that as mankind moved into the agricultural era and now the industrial era, we would need to adapt our tribal ways to the new realities.
And the most important thing we did was to adapt our tribes and tribalism to the new order. We invented new ways of belonging, not just to the old tribe of the kindred, but to new "fake" tribes, where people not related by blood came to experience each other as the moral equivalent of blood brothers.
We shall see next how this worked in the agricultural age.
Why not just say that all political leaders need to establish themselves as the protectors of "us," our tribe, and thus almost inevitably need to advertise a threat from "them," real or imagined, for which the leaders propose to mobilize us in order to prevent our annihilation by the threatening foe. If you are a nationalist leader of a nation not actually threatened by the Huns or the Mongols or the Commies then you have to invent a threat, otherwise what's the point?
So let us begin.
Humans are tribal. We are tribal because hunter-gatherers needed to protect their "patch of land" (as they put it in the Creation story in Fabian Essays in Socialism) from the neighboring tribe. The way this works is that the tribal leader is the first in a band of brothers that unite to fight to protect the patch of land from the enemy. They must fight to the death because if they lose they will be slaughtered by the enemy tribe next door, and their women and children taken over by the neighboring tribe.
Actually, it turns out from War Before Civilization by Lawrence H. Keeley that hunter-gatherer tribes did not have pitched battles, because they could not afford the casualties as we can. Instead they had dawn raids and massacres, both driven, I imagine, by the advantage of surprise. Given that hunter-gatherer tribes had an annual violent death rate of 500 per 100,000, two orders of magnitude greater than our violent death rate here in the good old US and A, you can see that they were right not to go in for pitched battles.
So all the young men in hunter-gatherer tribes were the border police. Their job was to protect the border and stop any dawn raids and massacres. Naturally they developed a warrior culture, and the acme of warrior culture is the concept of Honor, described in Honor, a History by James Bowman as the reputation among men for standing shoulder to shoulder with the tribal brothers to defend their patch of land and not breaking ranks and running away. You can see that this is no accident. Any armed group must be a band of brothers that will always stand together and never flinch when the going gets tough.
Also, each tribe had its shaman, a man that connected the tribe with the meaning of life, the universe and everything through what Jungians would call his connection with the unconscious. So each tribe really had its own religion, as explicated by its tribal initiations, its tribal animal mascot, and the peculiar talents of the local shaman.
The important thing to remember about the tribe is that it was a group of people related by blood. They were all brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts. We all know how, the closer that people are related, the more likely they are to help one another when in difficulty. That would be real helpful in the blood-related hunter-gatherer tribe.
The important thing to realize is that all humans have lived this way from the Dawn of Man down to the Neolithic Revolution, the dawn of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Studies of chimpanzees described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn indicate that they have a similar culture, occupying food-growing land and defending the border by means of young males attacking any border violator in a three-against-one massacre.
So the notion of the tribe united against threats and dangers from without is programmed deep into our DNA. It must be so, because without a defended food-growing territory it is, as Bugs Bunny said, "curtains."
However, in the last 12,000 years, with agriculture, and more recently industry, humans have created a society where the men are not all enrolled into the border protection force. Most men in the agricultural age became farmers, converting their strength and aggression from defense into plowing and reaping. Most men in the industrial age have "jobs" and work in the exchange economy for wages. This is a far cry from the hunting and border defense of the old days, and humans have had to learn to adapt and live in new ways.
But under it all we are still tribesmen; we men still respect men of courage. And we are still ready to rally to our brothers if called by our tribal leaders to face the foe.
It stands to reason, therefore, that as mankind moved into the agricultural era and now the industrial era, we would need to adapt our tribal ways to the new realities.
And the most important thing we did was to adapt our tribes and tribalism to the new order. We invented new ways of belonging, not just to the old tribe of the kindred, but to new "fake" tribes, where people not related by blood came to experience each other as the moral equivalent of blood brothers.
We shall see next how this worked in the agricultural age.
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