Your tribe has issues
Tribalism pervades everything these days. That isn't good.
On October 7th of this year, myriads of Palestinian Sunni Muslims, members of the political and military organization Hamas, got out of bed, participated in morning prayers, and then crossed the border into Israel and slaughtered over 1400 Jews who were just going about their daily business without bothering anyone. They did this because they don’t like Jews and are surrounded almost exclusively by others who don’t like Jews.
I’m sure that they all found succor in their Salat al-Fajr.
Now, a few weeks later, the Israeli Defense Force is in the process of turning the Gaza Strip, home of Hamas, into a parking lot. And though I believe that Hamas brought this retribution on themselves and that Israel is far more disciplined when it comes to discerning between combatants and noncombatants, innocent people are still being killed. I’m also quite sure that almost every Rabbi in Israel is onboard.
That’s the way that it is in the Middle East, where the three great tribes—the Jews, the Sunnis, and the Shias—have been at each other’s throats for centuries, with no end in sight. They all hate each other and can find plenty of justification for hatred in the tenets that comprise their disparate belief systems.
In the United States, there are also three great tribes: the left, the right, and the Christians. There is some overlap between them, but they are, in my view, discernible entities with one thing in common: a seemingly endless capacity to embrace hypocrisy and outright BS to justify whatever they want.
Let’s start with the left. Modern-day progressivism, as it is practiced in this country (and much of Europe as well), might as well be a religion. It has all of the hallmarks of faith. The progressive canon consists of DEI, social justice, and a smug belief in their intellectual and moral superiority over the hoi polloi beyond their realms in academia, government, and the media.
Progressive tactics to punish heretics are a hybrid of McCarthyism and the Catholic Inquisition of the Middle Ages. About the only thing progressives haven’t yet comped from the Inquisition is some form of modern auto-da-fé, though I’m sure that it’s a work in progress.
Then there’s the right. Modern-day conservatism in this country is two things, neither good: not really conservative, and just as concerned with rooting out and punishing heretics as the progressives they despise.
The biggest functional difference between the right and the left is that the right actually has an official religion, Christianity. And by ignoring virtually everything that Jesus stood for, the right feels entirely justified in doing all that they can to eradicate the left, starting immediately after they get out of church each Sunday.
Then there is Christianity itself. Christianity is currently far and away the dominant religion in this country, but it’s days appear numbered. Younger people in this country are increasingly irreligious, and to the degree that some still are, their numbers skew towards other faiths. I think that we may be seeing the beginning of a new age of enlightenment.
Religion is the ultimate in tribalism. Almost every major religious denomination of which I’m aware holds, as a basic tenet, that their view of the world is right and everyone else’s is wrong. That non-believers are children of lesser gods. That no one is going to heaven, paradise, or the celestial kingdom unless they get with the program.
This, of course, taken as a whole, is prima facie absurd. There are hundreds of major religious denominations in our country, and they can’t all be simultaneously right. If God does actually exist, she, he, or it must have a robust sense of humor to have made all of this so opaque and difficult for any reasonable person who really wants to know to sort out.
I am, as I have written here before, irreligious. But I’m agnostic, if you will forgive the pun, when it comes to the religious beliefs of others. Some people, in my view, benefit from their faith. But many more do not. And the tribalism on full and proud display by many “people of faith” is less than a great advertisement for their systems of belief. The hypocrisy that I see in many devoutly religious people would be funny, except for the fact that it’s not.
Years ago, I ran a musical production company. In the course of operating this business, I had the opportunity to work with dozens of high-caliber, Grammy-award-winning artists. It was pure joy, and I cherished every minute of it, up until the end.
At one point, I struck up a friendship with an artist with whom I worked during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. This gentleman was a member of a musical group that had won multiple Grammy awards and many other industry honors. He was pleased with how we produced his gospel music show during the Olympic festival and wanted to continue the partnership.
I struck up a deal to bring this artist to a middle-sized community in Idaho later that year to headline a summer festival. A couple of weeks before the show, the organization that was sponsoring the festival asked me to fax them a headshot. About 15 minutes after I sent the fax, they called me in for an emergency meeting.
When I arrived at the meeting location, the entire board was in the room. Suddenly, they had a lot of questions about the show, and in particular about the artist. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was actually going on; they didn’t know that the artist was black until I sent them his photo. That’s what the meeting was about.
I won’t go into this any further simply because it’s still too painful, 21 years later, for me to think about for very long. One of the most gut-wrenching moments of my life, which has been filled with them, was when I realized that they were going to pass on the show because the artist bore the “mark of Cain.”
Perhaps the most difficult phone conversation of my life took place later that day, when I had to call my friend and explain to him what had happened. I wept openly as we spoke. I’m about to do it again as I write this.
The next day, I sold my production company.
Almost every person in that room, except me, was a member in good standing of the predominant local religion. And not a single one of them saw anything wrong with blackballing an artist solely because of the color of his skin. That, in a nutshell, is tribalism for you. And that’s why I think it has irredeemable issues.
Many religious people use the get-out-of-jail-free, forgiveness for faith card as a convenient justification for excusing a lifetime of inconsideration of others and bad behavior. For what it’s worth, I think that those folks had better hope that I’m right and that they are not. Because if there really is a gatekeeper to the afterlife with a book that contains all of everyone’s deeds, just being dead might be a better alternative than what may await.
As I wrote a few columns back, at some level, I actually think many of the religious believe the same things that I do when it comes to spirituality, or they’d behave a whole lot differently. You can’t sincerely believe in an afterlife obtained through good deeds and behave the way that they do. They’re just hedging their bets and counting that the get-out-of-jail-free card is good.
Not every religious person, of course, is like this. I know people of all faiths who are wonderful ambassadors for their beliefs. Who walk the walk. I know a family here in my town who runs a ministry that is everything Christianity is cracked up to be. They are wonderful people. I just wish that I knew more like them.
The thing is, I think that these folks would be just as wonderful if they’d never come across Christianity. They’d make excellent Muslims, Hindus, or atheists. It’s just the way that they are wired. Dogmatic tribalism isn’t in their DNA.
You show me one example of rigid, dogmatic tribalism, be it religious, political, or social, making the world a better place, and I’ll show you ten where it did not. And I don’t even have to go far for examples.
Tribalism is a crutch. It doesn’t matter whether it’s politics, religion, or anything else (except for sports, where it’s kind of fun); it’s an aid for those unable to confront the complexity of life on it’s own terms.
In a world filled with difficulty and things that require patience to grasp, it’s beyond tempting to find something, anything, that’s simple to understand and easy to hang onto. In a world filled with disorder, putting one’s faith in something that superimposes order on disorder, even filled with dogma that is absurd and often toxically antisocial, offers hope and comfort.
That, in a nutshell, is why tribalism exists. It’s surrendering to an external locus of control for things that seem too big to take on. But we have to fight that. Yes, some things are hard to deal with. But learning how to do so is far better than surrounding yourself with those who hope that getting a bunch of people to believe the same nonsense about intractable problems is the same as solving them.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
Martin, I usually like a lot of what you say, but I have to jump in here and say I think you are getting some of the whole tribalism/religion thing wrong--not the importance of tribalism, as you are certainly right there, but it's relationship with religion. As an anthropologist this is in my wheelhouse, as it were. Let me just refer you to one of the best books I've read in the last few years, "The WEIRDest people in the World" by Joseph Henrich. We've agreed that many academics are biased, but this guy has no particular ax to grind, as far as I can tell. He just loves doing good research and proving and disproving theses, and his methods are quite remarkable. Yes, he runs a big lab at that horrible place Harvard, but that shouldn't disqualify him! His point is that the West generated some remarkable changes (science/education, wealth, democracy, etc). centuries ago, and he and a team of scholars tried to find out why the West became so "peculiar" as he puts it. They tested all sorts of theses, combining historical data with info on cultural differences, and figured out why the West became much less tribal than the rest of the world-- why "impersonal prosociality" took off and created large peaceful and wealthy societies. There were several factors, they found, but perhaps the biggest one was the growth of exogenous marriage, esp. after the Catholic church banned cousin marriage late in the first Millennium. People had to marry out. The "Protestant Ethic" (Max Weber) only sped things up later. So now we have a big difference in psychological traits (e.g. individualism) across the world that matches the vast differences in wealth and stability. It's why you have millions trying to go from the Global South (with all its problems) to Europe and North America. (I'm working on an article about this). So a particular form of religion was responsible for the breakdown of tribalism, though not necessarily intended. (The intertwining of tribalism and Islam in the Middle East is another topic anthros have written about). But you are right that we are seeing a re-tribalism as it were, for various reasons, as we lose our connections with each other, as the internet developed , and as particular forms of religion mix too much with politics, yes. There's another guy here, Rene Girard, that adds another piece of the puzzle, but this is enough for now!
Great article.