ABC of Politics: Tribes

We moderns like to think that we have grown out of tribalism, the way of primitive society. But according to CR Hallpike tribalism is new, dating from the time when humans started to live in towns where they no longer knew everyone.

And the idea that anyone has "grown out of" tribalism is absurd.

Back in the day, humans identified with their kindred, the people they knew that were related to them by blood. But as society has grown in scale humans have started to fake it; we imagine that we are related and are kin to the people around us, by virtue of our common membership in a clan or tribe or nation.

I say that all such identities are fake, an imagined kindred of "people like me." I call this "fake tribalism," an imagined community of kindred that is practiced in all societies larger than one of actual kinship where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows one's blood relationship to everyone.

But why do people create these imagined tribes? I say that every tribe is the expression of the eternal brotherhood of the men who fought to create the tribe and won.

This is most blazingly obvious in the dominant fake tribe of our time, the "nation," which is the tribe of the middle class.

Almost every nation in our time is the product of a victorious war that melded the men of the victorious army into a new fake tribe of a nation.

What made the United States into a nation was its revolutionary war against Britain. What made Britain into a nation was its Second Hundred Years War against France that ended on the battlefield of Waterloo. What made Germany into a nation was Bismarck's three cunning wars, against Denmark, Austria, and France, that conned the various independent states of the Holy Roman Empire into sending soldiers to fight for Bismarck, and thus for the subsequent united German nation.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent the young men of the Great Depression to fight Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific. After the glorious victory, the United States was united for a generation, until the youngsters born to the wives of the returning heroes grew up and rebelled against their fathers.

And what of the tribe of progressives the world over that are soldiers of activism, devoted to bending the arc of history towards justice?

The problem with the current crop of multinational organizations is that they are not brotherhoods of warriors bonding with each other in a fight to defend the homeland from aggressors. They are just privileged earls and barons watching their sons set lances against each other in knightly tournaments of activism. The only way to create a global tribe would be to fight an Earthly war of survival against an alien invasion from outer space, in which the surviving space warriors would form a new fake tribe of the heroes that saved the world.