Tribalism in the Agricultural Age

In my Pure Theory of Tribalism installment I wrote about what tribalism really is: the culture and religion of hunter-gatherers in a small band occupying territory and needing to defend it.

But with the Dawn of Agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution about 12,0000 years ago humans started growing food in fields and they started living in bigger communities.

Actually, I imagine that most people still lived in villages, but their villages were no longer independent; they were subordinate to something else, and that something else was very often an agricultural empire. Think of all those Mesopotamian empires in the Fertile Crescent. And the grand-daddy of them all, the Old Kingdom of Egypt where they built the Great Pyramids at Giza to bury their Pharaohs. I suppose that back in the beginning of the fake tribe era it seemed really important to build up the upstart kings with monumental architecture.

In his Sources of Social Power, Volume 1, Michael Mann talks about "rank societies" where there

occurred a series of transitions, to agriculture, to the domestication of animals, and to permanent settlement, which brought humanity much closer to power relations. Stable, bounded, supposedly "complex" societies developed, embodying a division of labor, social inequality, and political centrality.

Obviously the tribe of the kindred was no longer the defining unit of meaning. What happened was that the tribal leader morphed into the great king, and the tribal shaman morphed into a semi-religious semi-secular priesthood that managed inter-village relations and that also came to be the prop and support of the great king. In these larger political units it was no longer necessary for all the men to be warriors. This became specialized into the job of "marcher lords" and their followers who patrolled the borders of empire: think Shakespeare's Harry Percy.

So what did these new rulers and priests do, sitting on top of these new hierarchies? They reinvented tribalism. No longer did each village have its warriors sworn to defend their tribe, but the king had his royal army of soldiers that owed loyalty to him and not to the local tribe. And the temple priests merged religion with kingship and diminished the role of the local shaman. Obviously all this congeries of humanity needed to be formed into a new demos that thought of itself as one people.

And as for the marcher lord and his own private army -- well, he became a problem for kings all the way down to the invention of modern armies and the point where no local baron could afford it.

So in the agricultural age the kings and the priests created a fake tribalism to try and get the local humans to belong to a fake tribe centered around the king, and religion became a routine affair that depended less and less upon the charisma of individual shamans and more and more on holy scriptures. Yeah. Proto-writing started about 9,000 years ago.

Let us develop this notion a little further. It is said that the natural size of a human community is about 120 persons. This is the size of the military company, the Roman century, and also the natural size of a fundamentalist church, where larger church communities tend to split in two. Thus any organization of a hundred people -- military, religious, or economic -- will need to create hierarchy and fake tribalism if it wants to get any bigger than about a hundred people.

An iconic attempt to create a fake tribe is the effort of the Twelve Tribes of ancient Israel to become the Chosen People of God: in other words to create a fake single tribe out of the twelve tribes of the kindred that used to obtain. It is fair to say that this Chosen People project has been a success.

The Roman Empire seems to have developed a balancing act where tribalism is concerned. It developed the cult of the emperor, but also allowed the conquered territories to continue their local affinities -- so long as there was no rebellion! But notice this: the Roman Empire financed itself with conquest and slaves. Each expansion involved loot and plunder and slaves from the helpless victims of the Roman legions, all of which enriched Rome and the soldiers that seized the loot and the slaves. So the old rules of tribalism still applied, only on a more limited scale, since all-in loot and plunder only applied beyond the border of empire.

Of course, all governments, then and now, practice a routine plunder on their own subjects, requiring taxes on anyone that works, and anyone that buys and sells. But we will not speak about that.

The problem then and now is how to invent new concepts of fake tribe to service the power project of the rulers as they propose to increase their rulerdom.

Let us look at two ordinary fake tribal concepts.

There is the notion of "race." In our era we tend to think of race on a very large scale: "whites" means all Europeans; "blacks" means people from Africa. Of course, "race" meant something different in the past. La Wik:

A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society. First used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century the term race began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits. Modern scholarship regards race as a social construct, that is, a symbolic identity created to establish some cultural meaning. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race is not an inherent physical or biological quality.

Translated, "race" is what the ruling class of the time wants it to mean, to categorize people as Ins and Outs, Us and Them. In other words, it is a fake tribalism.

And then there is "ethnicity." La Wik:

An ethnic group or an ethnicity, is a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities such as common ancestry, language, history, society, culture or nation.[1][2] Ethnicity is usually an inherited status based on the society in which one lives. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language or dialect, symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art or physical appearance.

Can you spell fake tribalism?

The problem for any ruler is of course to bring disparate social groups into his power project, to invent a story that will get people to think of themselves as one people. One important means is religion, to get the community of the faithful to think of themselves as One People. It is said that the fierceness of Islam reflects the difficulty of uniting the warring tribes of Arabia into a single unit back in the day. We can understand the temptation of uniting church and state into a single unit, so beloved of all rulers down even to our modern lefties and their desire for the total state.

Now it is my contention that the modern era, industrial and post industrial, has required a whole new dimension of fake tribalism, and we in 2018 are right in the middle of an argument about what kind of fake tribe we want to be.

But that is a story for another day.