Tribalism Can Destroy Us

We humans—all of us—stand at a cusp. Our world is going up in flames, literally.

Some of the flames come from our own explosives, deliberately ignited: in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, in Russia, in Sudan, and in Ukraine. Some come from our near-half-century neglect of planetary heating due to our burning fossil fuels. Two summers ago, 5% of Canada’s forests went up in flames, poisoning our American East Coast with life-threatening small-particle air pollution. If that rate of destruction keeps up on average, let alone if it accelerates, all of Canada’s life-sustaining and carbon-capturing forests could be gone in a single generation.

We style ourselves “Homo sapiens”, Latin for “wise man.” But what we’re doing with ourselves and our planet is anything but wise. And I haven’t even mentioned the most horrible form of “fire”—nuclear weapons that can leave our cities in rubble and the land around them poisoned with radioactivity for millennia. The risk of their misuse is greater now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, sixty-two years ago.

We know that, as our species’ population zips by eight billion, there are too many of us. Yet China has abandoned the one-child policy that had raised it from a poverty-stricken third-class nation, despite its size and long history, to the brink of global economic leadership. And the United States, still clinging to first place, is now flirting with forcing women to have babies whether they want them or not. In general, many nations are trying to increase their populations, both to support the rise in their mostly idle seniors and to gain perceived advantages over others.

Meanwhile, we are all, collectively, exhausting the limited resources of our planet on which we depend for modern life. Oil and gas are running out, almost certainly within a generation or two. [See Point 2 in linked source.] Fish and seafood stocks and bird populations are declining, as we deplete them for food, and as rising ocean temperatures—over 100 degrees Fahrenheit off Florida this summer!—decimate them.

What drives this self-destructive behavior? Are we suicidal as a species, what I’ve termed “suigenocidal”?

Maybe. The root cause of all these evils, I submit, is something deep in our species’ DNA: tribalism.

Horrifying examples abound. Russia wants Ukraine’s territory, although Ukraine was Russia’s own “Mother Country.” To get it, Russia is willing to destroy some of the world’s most beautiful cities, massacre civilians at random, idle one of the world’s great breadbaskets, and risk another Chernobyl at Zaporizhzhia. Russia doesn this despite the fact that its language and Ukraine’s, although different, use much the same Cyrillic alphabet are mutually comprehensible, like Spanish and Italian or Spanish and Portuguese.

Israel and Palestine now provide perhaps the bloodiest example. Their two tribes have been killing each other in numbers for over a year, leaving Gaza a broken field of rubble, parts of Lebanon and Northern Israel in ruins, untimely deaths totaling nearly 100,000, and close to two million people homeless and starving. And for what? Because they couldn’t get together like rational beings and share the ample land.

While still mostly peaceful, the two Koreas provide perhaps the weirdest example. They speak precisely the same language, which no one else speaks. They share the same writing system, Hangul, which, according to my analysis, may have the most efficient alphabet of our entire species. They share the same peninsula where they socially evolved. Yet there is a wall between them, a no-man’s-land called the Demilitarized Zone. They threaten each other with war constantly, as if they were not brothers, genetically and culturally, as much as any people on Earth.

Science has discovered the root cause of this insanity, if not a cure for it. It’s tribalism, and it’s apparently innate. Give children as young as three years orange or green T-shirts at random; tell them they are on the “team” of the corresponding color. Then watch them impute hostile and nasty motives to each other as they “interpret” deliberately ambiguous drawings of children with orange and green T-shirts interacting.

Tribalism are us. We divide up and oppose each other, in teams, on the slightest provocation or pretext. It can be language, nationality, religion, skin color, facial features, whom or how we love, where or how we work, or political party. And the divisions can be strong enough to split families, create lifelong enmity, and even motivate mayhem or murder.

If you doubt this for a moment, just take a close look at team sports. Competing “tribes” in football, baseball or basketball—or, abroad, in what we Americans call “soccer”—are an obsession for the vast majority of our species. It may be an “innocent” preoccupation, but it’s the same innate impulse that, pushed to extremes, makes war so bloody and inhuman.

About two thousand years ago, a very wise man warned us about all this. His name was Jesus of Nazareth. He penned two pithy slogans to remind us of his warning. I call them the world’s first “bumper stickers,” though he gave them to us two millennia before there were cars.

“Love thy enemy,” he told us. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Clearer admonitions against tribalism would be hard to find. Yet today we Americans have a tribe of evangelicals, who purport to follow Jesus, but who took a leading role in writing a near-thousand-page manifesto describing precisely how their tribe could dominate others’. It’s called “Project 2025.”

Of course Jesus was right. We can overcome our innate tribalism with another innate characteristic: Reason. Reason and its offspring, Science, have made us the dominant species on our small planet. They now let us prevent disease with vaccines and replace overused joints. They give us hope to reach the planet Mars and maybe, someday, the stars. Wasn’t that what the now-fading Western Enlightenment, which produced our nation, was all about?

Imagine what might happen if Russians and Ukrainians cooperated to harvest the Ukrainian breadbasket and to use Eastern Ukraine’s iron to build ships and trains to export all the food it produces. They could feed all the now-starving Palestinians and Sudanese and much of the world. The now-starving orphans of Gaza and Sudan could be educated and raised to adulthood as evangelists against the very tribalism that now threatens their survival.

Imagine how well the Israelis and Palestinians could make the Middle Eastern deserts bloom if they worked together, rather than trying to kill each other. Imagine how that region would flourish if the Saudis and Iranians helped them, rather than taking sides as if this deadly struggle were a macabre football game.

Imagine what an industrial and scientific powerhouse the two separate Koreas could be if they joined as one. Together, they could rival Japan in advancing science and creating products to enhance human life worldwide.

But today’s most dangerous locus of tribalism is in none of these places. It’s right here in our own country, the United States of America. It’ll be on all the ballots that we must cast in less than a month.

In the document by which we Americans once divorced from England appear the words, “all . . . are created equal.” That’s as clear a rejection of tribalism as Jesus’.

But do we heed those words? Will we heed them enough to vote for the woman who wants to bring us together, with Reason, to solve the many problems that face us? Or will we vote for an aging and increasingly deranged man who seeks to divide us for his own aggrandizement and will set us against each other in so many ways, just has he has in his endless campaigns?

Once our nation was uniquely promising in welcoming the “huddled masses” of oppressed foreigners, from every tribe, “yearning to breathe free.” Will we continue to honor that noble and rational tradition?

Will we all work together to use the Reason that, along with tribalism, is part of our DNA? Or will we Americans degenerate into tribal wars internally, just as our species appears to be dissolving in them globally?

When you think about it, that’s really the only question on the ballot, for it subsumes all the others. All else is mere detail. Reason and cooperation, or raw tribalism leading to mindless hate and destruction: take your pick. As Jesus recognized and told us so long ago, you can’t have both.

P.S.   To underscore the arbitrariness and the “division for division’s sake” effect of Trump’s alternative MAGA universe, WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin has just published an analysis of the many points in common between Kamala Harris’ policies and those of pre-MAGA Republicans.   They include: (1) patriotism over partisanship; (2) a strong national defense; (3) capitalism and free markets subject to reasonable regulation; (4) stable and sensible rules for business; (5) confidence in America’s international leadership and positive impact on the world; (6) faith in democracy as a potent force for good worldwide; (7) strong support for allies like Ukraine and Israel against tyrannical and violent regimes; (8) the independence of the Federal Reserve; (9) a nonpartisan, professional and expert civil service; (10) support for NATO; (11) reliance on scientific expertise; (12) an ethical and nonpartisan judiciary; (13) a healthy middle class; and (14) a fair, efficient and equitably enforced tax code.

 

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