I've been writing recently about tribalism, and what I call "fake tribalism." I started out with the conventional notion that, in the old days, people were organized in tribes of the kindred, people related to each other by blood. I proposed that everything since then -- empires, nations, class politics, modern identity politics -- is fake tribalism, the transfer of the old idea of belonging from the tribe of the kindred to artificial tribes based on completely new ideas of belonging on a larger scale.
But then, reading C.R. Hallpike's How We Got Here, I realized that tribalism has always been a movable feast. Yes, the hunter-gatherer bands were defined by bands of the kindred, but if you got in a row with your band you could take off and join another one. Ditto with pre-state agricultural villages. Tribes were not cast in concrete, but merely sticky like porridge.
On Hallpike's narrative it was only with the invention of state-based agricultural empires that we get a rigidification of identity, and the mobilization of the various inhabitants of a region into a self-conscious people around whom arbitrary boundaries are set and from whom there is no exit. The boundaries were important, I suspect, because because most of the people in the agricultural era were serfs or slaves, a pretty universal characteristic of agricultural age culture.
Oh dear. That means that full-on tribalism only developed when it had already become fake, the various artificial creations of kings and Nietzsche's pals "the priests" of the great agricultural empires that were inventing fake tribes to match their glorious empires. Back to the drawing board. Now what?
Now what is the "minimal group paradigm" developed by Henri Tajfel. Tajfel discovered that you can set up any kind of artificial group -- say in a research project -- and the people in each group will immediately identify with and favor their in-group. That explains why, e.g., liberals all believe everything they read in the New York Times and NPR and know that everything in conservative land is racist sexist homophobic "hate" and conservative believe what they read on right-wing websites and know that all mainstream media news is "fake news." Liberals know that people like them are outraged by Trump tear-gassing migrants at the border, and conservatives know that without a defended border you don't have a nation. Both groups define themselves in terms of the unconsciously agreed agenda among people like them.
I found this immensely liberating. For it means that you can create identity with anything. Identity doesn't have to be race or gender or class as we have been carefully taught. Identity can be anything. It is up to the founder of the identity to find people willing to identify with the new identity that he just created out of whole cloth. This happens most obviously with the founders of religious cults, a St. Paul or a Luther or a Calvin or a Joseph Smith. It also happens in politics with Marx inventing the new idea of "the workers."
It also happens with the idea of "nation." Liah Greenfield proposes that the idea of the English nation began after Henry VII won the battle of Bosworth Field and created a bunch of nobles from the common folk. Used to be, in the "society of orders," that there were the higher orders like kings and nobles who defined the nation, and then there were the "people" in the lower orders. With Henry VII "people" and "nation" were merged. To put in in terms of my "fake tribalism" notion, Henry VII needed a new kind of fake tribalism to symbolize his new regime, and to define the boundaries of the in-group. He defined his fake tribe as the nation of England. Shortly thereafter Henry VIII completed the job of nation-building by disarming the nobles and creating a national army. Ever since, the national army in a nation has symbolized the nation.
In our time the global educated class wants to define identity as anything-but-nation. So they have invented a new "society of orders" with the educated ruling class as the savior activists, the middle class as the deplorable bigots, and the lower orders as helpless victims who the savior activists are called to save from racism, sexism, and homophobia.
If you want to dish the global educated ruling class you have to come up with something better, a political movement to which you can rally enough people to overpower the global educated ruling class. It is pretty obvious that this is going to be "nation." The only question is whether some damn politician can rally the middle-class deplorables beyond its base of the white male deplorables known for their racism, sexism, and homophobia by hiving off enough women and minorities into a larger identity of nation.
You can see that Donald Trump is trying to appeal to voters on the basis of an identity politics of American nationalism while his opponents want to claim that his American identity politics is really the evil and divisive racist sexist bigotry of which you've heard tell.
The point that I get from the nationalism analysis of Liah Greenfield and the minimal group paradigm of Henri Tajfel is that you can create identity out of anything. Just get a bunch of people together and bind them together with a set of group identifiers. There is nothing that establishes for all time that kindred, or race, or sex, or nation is the natural form of identity. Humans are groupish and it is up to would-be group leaders to define the parameters of the group and create and grow that group.
Simply stated, all politics is tribal, and all politics is about "us" and "them." Humans are designed so that a leader can organize any group of them into a group of "us" and lead them to war against the evil "them." The only question is what works.
But then, reading C.R. Hallpike's How We Got Here, I realized that tribalism has always been a movable feast. Yes, the hunter-gatherer bands were defined by bands of the kindred, but if you got in a row with your band you could take off and join another one. Ditto with pre-state agricultural villages. Tribes were not cast in concrete, but merely sticky like porridge.
On Hallpike's narrative it was only with the invention of state-based agricultural empires that we get a rigidification of identity, and the mobilization of the various inhabitants of a region into a self-conscious people around whom arbitrary boundaries are set and from whom there is no exit. The boundaries were important, I suspect, because because most of the people in the agricultural era were serfs or slaves, a pretty universal characteristic of agricultural age culture.
Oh dear. That means that full-on tribalism only developed when it had already become fake, the various artificial creations of kings and Nietzsche's pals "the priests" of the great agricultural empires that were inventing fake tribes to match their glorious empires. Back to the drawing board. Now what?
Now what is the "minimal group paradigm" developed by Henri Tajfel. Tajfel discovered that you can set up any kind of artificial group -- say in a research project -- and the people in each group will immediately identify with and favor their in-group. That explains why, e.g., liberals all believe everything they read in the New York Times and NPR and know that everything in conservative land is racist sexist homophobic "hate" and conservative believe what they read on right-wing websites and know that all mainstream media news is "fake news." Liberals know that people like them are outraged by Trump tear-gassing migrants at the border, and conservatives know that without a defended border you don't have a nation. Both groups define themselves in terms of the unconsciously agreed agenda among people like them.
I found this immensely liberating. For it means that you can create identity with anything. Identity doesn't have to be race or gender or class as we have been carefully taught. Identity can be anything. It is up to the founder of the identity to find people willing to identify with the new identity that he just created out of whole cloth. This happens most obviously with the founders of religious cults, a St. Paul or a Luther or a Calvin or a Joseph Smith. It also happens in politics with Marx inventing the new idea of "the workers."
It also happens with the idea of "nation." Liah Greenfield proposes that the idea of the English nation began after Henry VII won the battle of Bosworth Field and created a bunch of nobles from the common folk. Used to be, in the "society of orders," that there were the higher orders like kings and nobles who defined the nation, and then there were the "people" in the lower orders. With Henry VII "people" and "nation" were merged. To put in in terms of my "fake tribalism" notion, Henry VII needed a new kind of fake tribalism to symbolize his new regime, and to define the boundaries of the in-group. He defined his fake tribe as the nation of England. Shortly thereafter Henry VIII completed the job of nation-building by disarming the nobles and creating a national army. Ever since, the national army in a nation has symbolized the nation.
In our time the global educated class wants to define identity as anything-but-nation. So they have invented a new "society of orders" with the educated ruling class as the savior activists, the middle class as the deplorable bigots, and the lower orders as helpless victims who the savior activists are called to save from racism, sexism, and homophobia.
If you want to dish the global educated ruling class you have to come up with something better, a political movement to which you can rally enough people to overpower the global educated ruling class. It is pretty obvious that this is going to be "nation." The only question is whether some damn politician can rally the middle-class deplorables beyond its base of the white male deplorables known for their racism, sexism, and homophobia by hiving off enough women and minorities into a larger identity of nation.
You can see that Donald Trump is trying to appeal to voters on the basis of an identity politics of American nationalism while his opponents want to claim that his American identity politics is really the evil and divisive racist sexist bigotry of which you've heard tell.
The point that I get from the nationalism analysis of Liah Greenfield and the minimal group paradigm of Henri Tajfel is that you can create identity out of anything. Just get a bunch of people together and bind them together with a set of group identifiers. There is nothing that establishes for all time that kindred, or race, or sex, or nation is the natural form of identity. Humans are groupish and it is up to would-be group leaders to define the parameters of the group and create and grow that group.
Simply stated, all politics is tribal, and all politics is about "us" and "them." Humans are designed so that a leader can organize any group of them into a group of "us" and lead them to war against the evil "them." The only question is what works.
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