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.

Liberal Freakout, Pt. 742

Why are the liberals freaking out about the Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court? Why are they freaking out about Donald Trump? Why are they freaking out about any conservative speech as "hate" speech?

Answer: it is because the liberal project is going wrong.

When a political project starts going wrong (and that goes also for religious and military projects too) the leaders of the movement amp it up. That is why you get Reigns of Terror a few years into a successful revolution. Things start going wrong, and the obvious and only reason must be, in the immortal words of the Bolsheviks, "saboteurs and wreckers."

And when the monster that runs the Reign of Terror dies -- as in Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- then you get rhe "Thermidorean Reaction:" the return, or at least the beginning of a return, to normalcy. That is because, as Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, humans cannot live in the frenzy of an ideological movement forever. Eventually they insist on returning to wiving, thriving, and surviving.

But notice the horrors that all the recipients of modern revolution had to go through. The French had to go through the Reign of Terror and then lose a huge war to the other nations of Europe. The Germans had to suffer through the humiliation of World War II and the guilt of genocide. The Russians had to go through 35 more years of economic stasis after the Death of Stalin. The Chinese finally got to start an economic renaissance after the horrors of Mao.

So I declare that the frenzy of our liberal friends is about the failure of their movement of the last century, in the words of Barack Obama, to effect fundamental transformation, because it was never going to work anyway.

That is because the so-called fundamental transformation has been a Great Reaction trying to resurrect the past, in the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-piracy of high taxation, and the neo-slavery of the administrative state.

And it was always bound to fail, because the modern industrial era needs less politics and government not more as the left honestly imagines. The reason is that the market economy adjudicates outcomes without the need for force, unlike the hunter-gatherer and agricultural era when a tribe's access to food-yielding land was not just everything but the only thing.

I understand why our liberal friends are beside themselves. Their brand of politics, for the last century, has been based on the educated ruling class having the last word about everything, and it turned out that required the educated ruling class should have the power to resolve all issues at the Supreme Court. So to lose power in the Supreme Court is to lose everything, because everything decided at the Supreme Court is a judicial ukase, not a compromise effected with the consent of the governed.

Instead, conservatives argue, the great questions of politics should be determined by politics, not the judges of the Supreme Court. The "originalist" movement that is associated with the Federalist Society proposes that Supreme Court supremacy is not what the founders intended. Nor, I would argue, is it a solution to any political problem.

Actually, I'd say that the doctrine of the "living constitution" and Supreme Court supremacy is an admission that big government is a bust. On the one hand, the results of elections cannot be guaranteed to yield the results desired by the educated ruling class, and thus the ruling class needs to have a way to annul the decisions of the voters. On the other hand the administrative state is a consequence of the ruling class making government a lot bigger than can possibly be supervised by 535 legislators. With gigantic national political programs from pensions to health care to education and welfare there is no way that mere legislation can resolve all the injustices that are bound to occur under the government's clunking fist.So you end up with adminstrative decrees and administrative courts and the whole unjust apparatus of the modern state.

Notice the hypocrisy. The educated ruling class agitates  to make government bigger, because justice.  Then it decides that government is now too big and complicated for the little guy to understand and therefore the little guy and his vote and his representative must be kept out of the loop.

Eventually ordinary people start to get pissed off by a government that looks after its own but does not look after the ordinary Joe and Jane. This is not rocket science.

But when the ordinary Joe and Jane start to object the well-born activists, the children of the functionaries of the administrative state, go wild. Because the rebellion of the Joes and Janes threatens their political power -- indeed their privilege -- and their assumed right to make all the decisions for the rest of us.

Now, I suppose it is naive of someone like me to hope that the old ruling class will give up its power and perquisites quietly in response to a couple of election results. After all, the notion of rule by  educated and evolved people from the right schools is the very faith and religion of our ruling class. So even if the Trump GOP party should win the midterms, as now seems unlikely, the old ruling class is not likely to go quietly.

And that is a pity, because, as illustrated in my Great Enrichment page, and in Factfulness by Hans Rosling and family, the last two centuries of the market economy have created prosperity and peace for billions of humans, and there has never been anything like it, ever. And, I would argue, this has all been achieved despite the best efforts of the educated ruling class.

So expect the liberal freakouts to continue, and expect things to get worse before they get better.

And, of Course, Tribes are Sexist

Just after I posted my Introduction fo Tribalism yesterday I happened to read a bit out of Factfulness, by Hans Rosling and family. And he raised at important point about tribes.

Hans was out in darkest Africa, setting up a test in a remote village, complete with blood analyzers and generators. He "was part of a team investigating an epidemic of the incurable paralytic disease called konzo[.]"

All of a sudden he realized that there was a crowd of villagers outside his tent, men with machetes, and they intended to kill him because he "meant to sell [their] blood." Hey, better be safe than sorry where those white devils are concerned!

Er, no, fellahs! We are just conducting tests!

Bit of a sticky wicket, what?

But it was all resolved by a 50-year-old woman who stepped forward, reminded the villagers about their measles shots a while back, after which the kids stopped dying of measles. Then she bared her arm, and said "Here Doctor. Take my blood." And everyone lived happily ever after.

So what does it mean?

It means that the job of tribesmen is to defend the border to the death against the tribe next door. The job of tribeswomen is to keep our kids alive.

I don't know if you have noticed. I do, now that I am older and spend a lot of time listening to women chattering with each other like magpies. They are interested in healthy food, to keep their loved ones, and especially children, alive and healthy. They are interested in clothes, in part for personal adornment, but mostly to make sure that everyone in the family has the right clothes so they won't get cold or hot or wet or sweaty or shivery: to keep people alive. And, of course, women are passionately interested in healthcare, to keep their family members, and especially children, alive.

So what was going on in that remote village in darkest Africa? The men were saying: kill the stranger before he steals from us. The women were saying: work with the stranger so he can help save our children and let them live.

So here are the basic facts of life at the tribal level. Men are fighters; women are lovers. Male honor is about bravely outdaring the dangers of the time by standing in line with the brothers on the border; female honor is about chastity, being a good little girl that does the right thing. Men are about killing the enemy, just to be safe; women are about saving lives, for the children. Men have a Culture of Insult, which I think is probably about chaffing other men and asking, hey, pal, are you really up to standing with the brothers? And women have a Culture of Complaint, which I think is all about prompting the rest of us to supply the food and clothes and medicine to keep family members alive.

I think that all this is important to realize -- to read, learn, and inwardly digest -- because this is exactly what humans were, up to 12,000 years ago. Since then, of course, things have changed radically, first with the agricultural revolution and second with the industrial revolution. But, if the settled science can be believed, we humans have not yet had a chance to evolve much beyond the instincts of the hunter-gatherer era. So that means that men are still fighters, and women are still lovers.

And that means, at the level of national politics, that men are focused on issues about defending the  homeland from border-crossers, and women are mostly focused on issues about keeping us all alive and well fed and healthy. Men say, like Shakespeare's Casca: Speak, hands for me. Women say, as I argue: I can't believe she said that.

Now, in our modern era, these gender-specific instincts are no longer dispositive; they may note even be socially useful. But that is, Who We Are, and who we will be, for many generations yet to come.

This is important, for anyone interested in politics. Because in a democracy a politician has  to appeal to voters  based on who they are. And who they are, by and large, is tribal men and tribal women.

The Pure Theory of Tribalism

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.

The Dilemma of the Well-born Human

Contrary to the notion that the Big Problem of life, the universe, and everything is The Poor and Marginalized, described in the 19th century as "the Social Question," I argue that the Big Problem is what to do about the Well Born, the child of a prosperous, or powerful, or educated family.

See, if you are the child of, shall we say, "privilege," then any life significantly less notable than your parents is shameful, a descent into anonymity. And that is often demoralizing. And yet, if you are, say, the child of a notable, such as the recently deceased Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), what are the chances that you would ever equal the life and notoriety of your noble father? Pretty low, alas.

Think of it. Suppose you are Prince Hal, son of the Henry IV who seized the throne of England. Why, the only thing to do is to seize the throne of France. At which young Hal failed despite winning the Battle of Agincourt.

Or suppose you are the son of John D. Rockefeller, inventor of the fossil fuel industry. We know next to nothing about him.

Of course, sometimes the son of a local notable goes on to become world-famous. Heinrich Marx was the leading lawyer in Trier, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, in the early 19th century. His son never really amounted to much, except that, with the help of another rich kid, he penned two of the most famous political titles ever: the Communist Manifesto and Capital.

And that is what every progressive rich kid has wanted to emulate, ever since.

In my view, the situation of a young Karl Marx is iconic for well-born young people in our age. What  can they do with their lives to make them special? To be just an ordinary educated bourgeois family man is a humiliation. And now we have the same problem with well-born women, as Christopher DeGroot describes it, in taking apart a lefty analysis of sexism. Here is the problem, as the lefty scholars describe it.

[Their analysis] defines prevailing sexism in a market as the extent to which its residents believe that: (i) that women’s capacities are inferior to men’s; (ii) that the family unit is hurt when women focus on activities outside the home; or (iii) that men and women should occupy specific, distinct roles in society.

They are talking, of course, about the success or lack of success of women in the workplace and in notable careers such as politics, business, and the academy.

These lefty academics take it as Written that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is to have a meaningful career. And they believe (i) that women have the same interest in notable careers as men; (ii) that women's lives are hurt when women focus on activities inside the home; and (iii) that men and woman should occupy, in equal proportion, the various distinct roles in society.

Which is fine for people like them. If you want to believe that the meaning of life is a fulfilling career then go ahead. But what about the rest of us? Suppose there are  people in the world that believe that career and conventional success are false gods? What then?

The consequence of  the ideology of careers for women means that, if a well-born woman in today's world does not create a notable life for herself in addition to marriage and children, she is looked down upon by the other women in the well-born Mean Girls clique. In fact she might herself unwelcome in the well-born Mean Girls clique.

And this is wrong. Whatabout a woman like the Saigon domestic servant I mentioned in my piece yesterday. What she would not give for a responsible husband and a settled home from which she could launch her children into the world! What she would give not to be living on the edge, cadging life from the accidents of fate?

Whatabout the deplorable women in Rust Belt states?  They would love for their husbands to have stable, well-paying jobs so they could attend to children and family and contribute to neighborhood groups and activities!

Whatabout the well-born women that really aren't inspired by a corporate career, or "activism," or advanced degrees? They would love for the traditional roles for women to get a little respect, so the Mean Girls wouldn't look down on them so much.

And this is why we need my reductive Three Peoples theory. See, your academics coming up with another crap theory about sexism would never do that if they had read, learned, and inwardly digested my Three Peoples theory.

For instead of their mindless left-liberal obsession with "sexism" they would say to themselves: I wonder what kind of of life would be considered the best by your average Person of the Subordinate Self, a woman recently arrived in the city from the country and wondering what kind of life she could hope for? What would float her boat? Earth to lefty! I don't think she would be thinking too much about an advanced degree and a professional career. And I don't think that "you priests" should be indoctrinating her with your secular religion to become that kind of person.

And what about our Person of the Responsible Self, a woman that goes to church, that wants a good marriage and several children? Are we to tell her to forget the children and get thee unto a corporation? Is she to be ashamed of her interest in nursing? Or her decision to home-school her children? The truth is that the vast  majority of people are perfectly content to live a quiet responsible live in a network of friends and family, and don't feel the need to get their name up in lights. And I don't think that "you priests" should be shaming her as an ignorant religious bigot.

Finally we come to our Person of the Creative Self. Does such a woman have to fit her life into the strait-jacket of approved left-liberal life trajectories, which always seems to mean a bureaucratic career in a credentialed job that has street-cred among the urban professional classes?

See, I think that the approved life trajectories negate the very idea of the Creative Self. If you go to university and get an advanced degree, and then go into government, or the academy, or corporate life, you are really living as a dull routinist. Peter Thiel points out the issue in the very title of his From Zero to One. He is saying that any creative endeavor represents going from nothing to something, starting in a trackless waste, and then bringing it to order. And that is a very hard thing to do. It is like deciding to become a writer, where the truth is that many people would like to be a writer, but very few people have the chops to do it.

Do you see what I am saying? I am saying that any creative life cannot be a routine thing, mapped out and gridded by routine left-liberal academics, and the acquisition of approved academic credentials. Because creativity is surprise; it is the eruption of the unexpected. It cannot be made to order, and marked out by political activists, and judged according to the self-appointed priesthood of the arc of history.

In other words, Sorry Charlie. You well-born scions of the notable may wish to conquer the world with your educated and evolved "good taste." But the world wants ideas that "taste good." Not the approved notions of the creative class to change the world according to their priestly dicta, but the accidental creations that turn out to change the world.

When you grasp this then the utter failure of the left to realize their vision over the last century and a half makes sense. The left imagines that it grasps the meaning of life, the universe, and everything and that all that remains is to execute on the politics and the ideology to bring this vision to reality. But that is not how the world works. Real creativity, real change, is not a planned or routine thing. It is the eruption of the unexpected, an accident: a resolution, if you like, of the uncertainties of a state function.

And for those, the well-born and the would-be notable, there is the truth that in the field of creativity, many are called but few are chosen.

And so, the Great Question of our age is not the mapping out of the meaning of creativity as "rigidly defined areas of uncertainty and doubt," and the enforcement of diversity and inclusion, but the problem of creating meaning for those millions of would-be creatives that were called but not chosen.

Life as it Used to Be

I was to the dentist today, and the dentist opined about the frightfulness of things. Since I had a cotton wad in my mouth I couldn't contradict her.

Because, even with the ongoing refusal of the Democrats to admit they lost fair and square in 2016, the world is a pretty wonderful place for us deplorables here in the land of the free and the brave.

But Linh Dinh writes from Saigon about life -- as it used to be almost everywhere. Not exactly nasty, brutish and short, but certainly very precarious. For instance, back in the good old days, people either had servants or they were servants. Dinh writes about a servant in Saigon, one of ten siblings, whose father was a drunk and beat her mother.

And my "domestic violence, we are not just  talking about in the house. Neighborhood violence was not uncommon. The servant's relatives got into a meat-cleaver fight with neighbors involving nearly-severed arms, and after that she was afraid to go to school, so she is illiterate.

At age 16 she took the bus to Saigon and eventually got a restaurant job for $23 a month, including room and board. She married a Cambodian, but he soon stopped working and started drinking. So back to the city, and a job for $500 a month working till midnight looking after two kids and enduring the mistress accusing her of theft. Now she's working for $345 a month looking after a baby. But her 15-year-old son has a factory job and her 13-year-old daughter is working as a domestic servant and apprenticing at the same factory. So life is good, as she shows Dinh a picture of her father on her cellphone.

Yeah. Funny thing about that factory work, that is supposed to be so demeaning. Compared to what? Working in the rice paddies? Work as a domestic servant? The fact is that, all over  the  world, for the last 200 years, people have walked off the land to the city as fast as they can, because life in the city is good. They walked off the land in Britain 200 years ago to work in the coal mines. They sailed in coffin ships from Ireland to fall onto the dock in Boston more dead that alive. They took ship from the starving Scandinavia of the 1890s to end up in Minnesota. Life was hard in the city, but by God it was better than starving on the farm.

So life is good in Saigon.

Ỵ has many changes of clothes, tasteful fake eyebrows, persuasive false teeth and a used cellphone, bought for just $15. Two years ago, she purchased her second stolen motorbike, this time for $65. Most domestic servants can only afford bicycles.

Yes, imagine that. A cellphone for a 3rd world domestic servant. Now, back when I was in Thailand in the mid 2000s, they told me that a used 100ml motorbike was $300. But I guess the stolen ones go cheaper. Vietnam per-capita GDP in 2016: $2,185. Compare to US at $57,000.

But, wait a moment. Here we have a poor woman in Saigon. And she has cellphone and a motorbike. What a world!

I remember reading about the workers at a Nike factory in Vietnam. They asked the workers what they liked best about working for Nike. The reply: Working indoors. Next best thing? Getting a job at the Nike factory for their relatives.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Census Bureau reports: "There are no jobs Americans won’t do, poor citizens hurt by illegal immigration." Imagine that!

I know what you are thinking. Is  the Census Bureau allowed to do studies like that?

Wat? Patriotism vs. Nationalism

In the aftermath of the death of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) there are a number of articles out about the difference between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad).

In The American Spectator Ralph Benko, after Adam Gopnik, defines patriotism vs. nationalism thus:

The patriot loves his place and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies; the nationalist has no particular sense of affection for the actual place he advocates for... but channels his obsessive grievances into acts of ethnic vengeance.

Then Jonah Goldberg calls John McCain a patriot (good) and President Trump a nationalist (bad). Actually, it is not too clear to me how Jonah defines patriotism, beyond that

McCain's worldview was, properly speaking, patriotic, not nationalistic, in that it was credal, bound up in democratic principles. 

For John McCain wanted to form an international organization:

[I]n 2007, for instance, McCain proposed creating a League of Democracies to counter the influence of the United Nations and other organizations that do not really care about democratic values.

Here's National Review's Jim Geraghty on America as a war against identity politics.

Identity politics in the American context almost inevitably carries an undercurrent of “we, in this group, are the good Americans; those, in that group, are the bad Americans.” Whether we like to admit it or not, that’s a near-dominant theme in our modern politics and our arguments on social media.

 But America was supposed to be different.

The point of the American experiment, fueled in large part by Europeans fleeing a continent full of rigid class roles, limited opportunities, political and religious repression, was to create a country where you could be whatever you wanted to be, and your group identity didn’t matter.

Well, I'm sorry. This is all so much special pleading for the author's own preferred mode of tribalism, the principle on which the "we" and the "they" is defined.

So let us try to understand what is going on, from my point of  view.

The basic fact is that humans are tribal: we are social animals. We protect ourselves from the rest of the world by defending our patch of land from pirates and plunderers, and we do that by banding together in tribes. From time immemorial this tribe has been a tribe of the kindred, of people fairly closely related by blood, defended from the world by the armed might of their men.

But certainly since the dawn of agriculture, things have been more complicated than that, because the first thing that happened, with the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East, was the agricultural empire. The empire could not really be a tribe of the kindred, so we humans started to fake the tribal thing.

We started to develop the notion that the Pharaoh or the King, or even God, was the Father of us all. So we were not a bunch of warring clans, but really children united into the greater family of the abstract Father. Not the tribe of blood relationship but the abstract notion of relationship, as children of the king, or children of God, created a new sense of belonging.

I tell you what I think of that. I think it is brilliant. Fake tribes! Who would have thought it!

In the feudal era we have the notion that the feudal lord was the father of his vassals. And there was a certain fatherly duty that the lord owed his vassals and his serfs, one of which was to defend them against other feudal lords.

But then came the end of the feudal era in Europe, and the rise of the absolute monarchs, so a new sense of belonging and membership was needed. Enter the nation state, the notion that the basic unit of  human membership was not the feudal principality but the kingdom, with its king, its language, its  people, its history, and its sacred land.

Of course, the idea that Britain or France was a single nation with sacred borders and a divine right of  kings was a bunch of made-up baloney, a new notion of membership that was needed because if you  were not a strong nation in the Europe of 500 years ago you got stomped on.

For instance Germany, in the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. In those days Germany was a collection of smaller states headed by princes and counts and bishops. So the nations of Sweden and France felt free to march all over Germany and strip the German peasants of their food. About a third of Germans died in the war. You can imagine that the Germans really fell in love with the national idea after being tromped on for thirty years by the lovely French, but it look them 200 years and the genius of Bismarck to actually make them into a nation.

Or Austria in 1900. Suppose you were a German speaker in Austria. Austria was a multicultural empire, presided over by the German-speaking Hapsburgs, but it had slowly given more and more autonomy to the various nationalities: Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs. If you were a chap like  the young Adolf Hitler, the outlook for German speakers looked pretty bleak. So why not have a Greater Germany, a Großdeutschland, of all the German speakers?

Cool idea, Adolf, except that where would you stop? At the Austrian Anschluss? At the annexation of German-speaking Czechoslovakia? The German speakers in Poland? Hey, what about western Russia, which had been importing good German farmers for centuries? You can cook up a reason to invade just about anywhere, if you have an army and a mind to do so.

Obviously, the national idea, for all its genius in promoting the idea of all Brits or all Germans or all Americans as one tribe, all in it together, can get out of hand.

Anyway, starting in the mid 19th century a new notion of fake tribal membership began, with the idea of all the workers of the world belonging to an imagined international community of workers. In this formulation, the workers were "we" and the bourgeoisie was "they." Workers of the World Unite!

Cool idea, except that in World War I the various workers of the world fought for their nations, and not for the workers of the world. Plus, we have learned in the decades since, the idea of a workers' state is a bad one, that leads to starvation, mass murder, and secular religious wars.

Meanwhile a new form of membership was growing up with the rise of global capitalism. Lots of people started working for large corporations, and when not angered by layoffs and wage-cuts during recessions and depressions, seemed to like the neo-feudal community of the big corporation. Here is a piece about the relative contentment of Amazon workers.

Meanwhile, the left, that invented the idea of worker solidarity, found it necessary to invent a new form of membership: race and gender solidarity, what we now call identity politics.

In my view it makes sense. The left does not like nation states, because colonialism and imperialism and aggressive nationalism and fascism. But if you are not going to organize politically around the nation, then what? The answer is to organize around sub-national groupings, such as race and gender, what Steve Sailer calls the Coalition of the Fringes.

The problem is, I suggest, that setting all the non-whites against the whites, and all the women and non-hetero-males against toxic white masculinity, means that the defining membership idea is not longer the nation, but the sub-national tribal identity. The assumption of the left is that they can manage all the disputes among their Coalition of the Fringes, especially if it can keep them united against the eevil white heterosexual male. But if you ask me identity politics leads straight to civil war.

Enter Donald Trump. He is proposing to reestablish the nation as the basic membership unit, as in Make America Great Again. But there is a problem. Do you see what it is?

The problem is that politics is division; if there is an "us" then there must be a "them" to unite the "us." In the old nation state this was, for the Brits, the French; and for the French, the Germans. And for the US, since World War II, the Soviets. And latterly the Islamofascists. So there must be an enemy, otherwise politics is not needed.

So Donald Trump came up with the brilliant idea to blame everything on multinational trade deals and immigration. Other countries, or international bureaucrats, were stiffing the American worker. But Trump would fight for the American worker, by renegotiating trade deals, Oh, and on immigrants that were taking jobs away from American workers.

Do you see the genius in this? It unites all Americans, male, female, white, black, Latino, and Asian into one community, of Americans that want to Make America Great Again. And it doesn't propose waging actual war on Mexico or Canada or China in order to do so.

Really, the only people that might be opposed to this agenda would be the international educated elite that can always get a visa to work abroad as visiting professor, or working for an international agency, or getting transferred to a foreign subsidiary of a global corporation. Because the current system runs as though it were designed to benefit people like them.

My point is this. There is always going to be tribalism. The only question is: which one? The old tribalism of the blood kindred is dead and buried. And, believe me, we won't have world government until we detect the Martians coming to attack us. So we humans have to devise a workable abstract tribalism based on some principle other than kinship. So we invent fake kinship.

Personally I believe that nationalism is the best thing going, the idea of a people, living in a sacred space, joined together by some fake national myth. Not because nationalism is so great, but because every other -ism is so stupid.

But the worst thing going is the identity politics of the left, the idea that, after two centuries of the Great Enrichment from $3 per person per day to $150 per person per day, that this group or that group is horribly oppressed and exploited and has nothing in common with the average white middle-class married, patriotic family man.