“
I think, tribalism is a mental prison…and pride of identity coupled with arrogance is one of the leading factors that limit one’s ability to abandon it.
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Duop Chak Wuol
“
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of 'race' or 'gender' alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
In light of my distanced telescopic exposure to the mayhem, I refused to plagiarise others’ personal tragedies as my own. There is an authorship in misery that costs more than empathy. Often I’d found myself dumbstruck in failed attempts to simulate that particular unfamiliar dolour. After all, no one takes pleasure in being possessed by a wailing father collecting the decapitated head of his innocent six year old. Even on the hinge of a willing attempt at full empathy with those cursed with such catastrophes, one had to have a superhuman emotional powers. I could not, in any way, claim the ability to relate to those who have been forced to swallow the never-ending bitter and poisonous pills of our inherited misfortune. Yet that excruciating pain in my chest seemed to elicit a state of agony in me, even from far behind the telescope. It could have been my tribal gene amplified by the ripple effect of the falling, moving in me what was left of my humanity.
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Asaad Almohammad (An Ishmael of Syria)
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Because people often ask, I’ll say it here directly: I have no intention of running for office, ever. I’ve never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last ten years has done little to change that. I continue to be put off by the nastiness—the tribal segregation of red and blue, this idea that we’re supposed to choose one side and stick to it, unable to listen and compromise, or sometimes even to be civil. I do believe that at its best, politics can be a means for positive change, but this arena is just not for me.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
“
If Americans simply choose to vote for the person who has a D or an R by their name, we will get what we deserve, which is what we have now.
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Ben Carson (One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America's Future)
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Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.
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Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.
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Christopher Hitchens
“
I wonder what it must have been like, what dignity it must have conferred on children of the Iroquois confederacy that any child over three was welcome to speak about matters of group importance in the tribal council.
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Aurora Levins Morales (Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity)
“
The Left believes that right-wing tribalism—bigotry, racism—is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism—identity politics, political correctness—is tearing the country apart. They are both right.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
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Capitalism is unnatural.
Democracy is unnatural.
Human rights are unnatural.
The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumble into it more or less by accident.
The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death.
It was like this for a very very long time.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy)
“
Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades.
Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us–them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics.
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Sam Harris
“
Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. We crave bonds and attachments, which is why we love clubs, teams, fraternities, family. Almost no one is a hermit. Even monks and friars belong to orders. But the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
“
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by “a world of enemies,” “one against all,” that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
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Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)
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Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation's identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition - pure political tribalism.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
“
the struggle to replace “tribal” politics with a more impersonal form of political relationships continues in the twenty-first century.
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Francis Fukuyama (The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution)
“
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
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Jonathan Haidt
“
Becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly.
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Sam Harris
“
We are world citizens, but tribal chiefs won't let us cross the frontier
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Bangambiki Habyarimana (The Great Pearl of Wisdom)
“
Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds—class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don’t merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There’s a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking. We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
“
I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants.
Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?
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Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
“
When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That’s tribalism.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
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Politics was reduced to its most tribal , “us” versus “them,” and “them” grew into a big list: blacks, Latinos, immigrants , liberals , city dwellers, you name it.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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Irish politics are tribal, incestuous, tangled and furtive, incomprehensible even to many of the people involved.
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Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
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Tanga Tanga: The conversation has always been about tribalism We need to change it"
Me: How?
TT: Let's talk about class! Hustler vs Dynasty.
Me: Separatists!
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Don Santo
“
Nationalism, tribalism & patriotism are the playthings of the ignorant and abhorrent.
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R.Patient
“
Balkanization.. had come to denote the parcelization of large & viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian.
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Maria N. Todorova
“
To fret about political, social, or economic inequality in a free society is to fret about the problem of freedom itself, for in the presence of freedom there will always be inequality of some kind.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
“
The 'Manifesto' being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolution in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and the oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin's theory has done for biology, we, both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845.
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Friedrich Engels (The Communist Manifesto)
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Muhammad now translated this concept into political terms. Blending idealism and pragmatism - a master politician's skill if ever there was one - he drew up arbitration agreement that used the tribal principle to reach beyond tribe.
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Lesley Hazleton (The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad)
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Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form of in-group/out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments.
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Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation)
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Nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. There is always a chance for conversion--a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle. ...Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul. This turning is done through one's own affirmation of one's worth--an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.
A love ethic has nothing to do with sentimental feelings or tribal connections. Rather it is a last attempt at generating a sense of agency among a downtrodden people.
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Cornel West
“
Altruism holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only moral justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty. The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man's life and work belong to the state - to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation - and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.
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Ayn Rand (The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (The Ayn Rand Library Vol. V))
“
Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness. As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy. And if you really want to open your mind, open your heart first.
If you can have at least one friendly interaction with a member of the “other” group, you’ll find it far easier to listen to what they’re saying, and maybe even see a controversial issue in a new light. You may not agree, but you’ll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.
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Joseph O'Connor (Star of the Sea)
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I’m afraid most people choose political parties based on the same question they ask about regular parties: Who else is going to be there?
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Tim Kreider (We Learn Nothing)
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A world in which substantial numbers of Americans believe that the duly elected president of the United States is not legitimate is a world in which political compromise becomes substantially more difficult.
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Thomas E. Mann
“
The Africans and the underdeveloped peoples, contrary to what is commonly believed, are quick to build a social and political consciousness. The danger is that very often they reach the stage of social consciousness before reaching the national phase. In this case the underdeveloped countries’ violent calls for social justice are combined, paradoxically enough, with an often primitive tribalism. The underdeveloped peoples behave like a starving population—which means that the days of those who treat Africa as their playground are strictly numbered. In other words, their power cannot last forever. A bourgeoisie that has only nationalism to feed the people fails in its mission and inevitably gets tangled up in a series of trials and tribulations. If nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end. A bourgeois leadership of the underdeveloped countries confines the national consciousness to a sterile formalism. Only the massive commitment by men and women to judicious and productive tasks gives form and substance to this consciousness.
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Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
“
Tribalism is more powerful and dangerous than any political party. People choose to follow and support someone, not because they are good as leaders or they have good credibility, But is because they are from the same tribe .
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D.J. Kyos
“
Extremism stifles true progression in all fields of human advancement; it is a detriment to everything but war, tribalism and the personal power of Nietzschean entities, striving only for the narcissistic vindication of their ego and will. The enlightened mind knows that all is challengeable, ergo questions all and thus, learns and grows; progression. The weak and narrow mind makes its beliefs sacrosanct; fearful of challenge, their creed becomes unalterable, defended with violence. Political extremists, much like religious zealots, are the latter. They destroy what they cannot convert. They annihilate those they cannot control, or force to conform. They have found no peace in life, no love, and so promote war and division, as emotional cripples – inflicting their own pain and misery and malignant stupidity on the world. Their language binds people together, but only by stirring the darkest excesses of the soul; language of hate, and intolerance, fear and conspiracy, and the need for vengeance. In war-scarred Europe, these cripples direct mass-psychology, and would make the world in their own likeness; mutilated by violence and tribalism and hate.
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Daniel S. Fletcher (Jackboot Britain)
“
America’s continued existence as a super-group is under tremendous strain today. America is beginning to display destructive political dynamics much more typical of developing and non-Western countries: ethnonationalist movements; backlash by elites against the masses; popular backlash against both “the establishment” and “outsider minorities” viewed as disproportionately powerful; and, above all, the transformation of democracy into an engine of zero-sum political tribalism.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
“
As much as it's hard to accept, there is hate deep rooted amongst some people using tribe or race as a means to a political end. What makes it dangerous is that politicians have mastered how to weaponise this issue mixing truths & propaganda & religiously defending it.
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Don Santo
“
Both Lincoln and King were appealing to the story—the best story—we tell about ourselves. That our story begins with Americans falling short of the ideals embedded in the Founding is not an indictment of the ideals; it is testament to the nobility of America’s story arc.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
“
Whenever the Naxal issue pops up, people start discussing the politics behind it. Some are on the side of the oppressors and some on the side of the oppressed. But discussions always remain at the circumference. Very rarely do we talk about the centre. The tribal, who everyone is fighting for.
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Vivek Agnihotri (Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam)
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A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron "Maulana" Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called "US." Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was "Wherever US is, We are." It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.
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Christopher Hitchens (Letters to a Young Contrarian)
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We reject the charge of tribalism, particularly from those whose theologies serve to buttress the most nefarious brand of tribalism of all—the omnipotent state. The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural. Tribalism is not the church determined to serve God rather than Caesar. Tribalism is the United States of America, which sets up artificial boundaries and defends them with murderous intensity.
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William H. Willimon (Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony)
“
Tribalism is natural, but it can also be manufactured. Manufactured tribalism is the very essence of identity politics, the heart of aristocracy, and the soul of nationalism. “Identity politics” may be a modern term, but it is an ancient idea. Embracing it is not a step forward but a retreat to the past.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
“
Hannah Arendt once observed that, in every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians: We call them “children.” The family is the first line of defense against this barbarian invasion. The metaphor is inapt, because parents aren’t at war with babies themselves. But parents are at war with the darker side of human nature, which we all work to trim away from for our children by inscribing in their hearts notions of decency, fair play, and self-restraint. When parents fail to do that, other institutions, including the government, try to step in and remedy what they can. But no teacher, counselor, social service worker, priest, rabbi, imam, or police officer will deny that, when the family fails to do its part, the work of every institution downstream of the family becomes that much more difficult.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
“
Even if you believe there is no such thing as free will, it is impossible to live any kind of decent life based on that belief. Even if our personal choices are some deep fiction, we still have to convince ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. We are still obligated as a society to judge people as if they make their own choices.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
“
Sectarianism is tribalism, be it religious, political, ethnic, educational or any other form.
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Abhijit Naskar (Let The Poor Be Your God)
“
That internal beast is human nature. It cannot be killed; it can only be tamed. And even then, constant vigilance is required.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy)
“
I have mentioned the qualitative difference between Christianity as an ethic and Christianity as an identity. Christian ethics goes steadfastly against the grain of what we consider human nature: the first will be last, to him who asks give, turn the other cheek, judge not. Identity on the other hand appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses. It is worse than ordinary tribalism because it assumes a more than virtuous “us” on one side and on the other a “them” who are very doubtful indeed, who are in fact a threat to all we hold dear.
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Marilynne Robinson (The Givenness of Things: Essays)
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Imagine what might happen if you could honestly strip away every label and scrap of tribal identity? What if you were not a Baptist, but simply someone who loved Jesus? What if you weren’t a Republican or a Democrat anymore, but simply a follower of Christ? What if you abandoned your identity as an American and saw yourself simply as a citizen in the Kingdom of God?
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Keith Giles (Jesus Untangled: Crucifying Our Politics to Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb)
“
Here are some things we can expect of the New Tribal revolution, based on the experience of the Industrial Revolution.[...] Three: It will be led by no one. Like the industrial revolution, it will need no shepherd, no organizer, no spearhead, no pacesetter, no mastermind at the top; it will be too much for anyone to lead.
Four: It will not be the initiative of any political, governmental, or religious body.
Five: It has no targeted end point. Whe should it have an end point?
Six: It will proceed according to no plan. How on earth could there be a plan?
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Daniel Quinn
“
The evidence that much of what divides us is rooted in our biology was compiled by the evolutionary anthropologist (and Peruvian political adviser) Avi Tuschman, in his transdisciplinary work Our Political Nature, in which he identifies three primary and relatively permanent personality traits running throughout political beliefs: tribalism, tolerance for inequality, and one’s view of human nature.
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
“
The Constitution is a paper manifestation of a deeper cultural commitment to liberty and limited government, in the same way a marriage certificate is a physical and legalistic representation of something far deeper, mysterious, and complicated. When the marriage fails, the marriage certificate won't save it. And when the American people lose their love of liberty, the Constitution will not save us either.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy)
“
From different perspectives, I will show how political orientations across space and time arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits. The three clusters entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests.
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Avi Tuschman (Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us)
“
Libya, Syria, and Iraq are all, like the United States, postcolonial, multiethnic nations, but none of them has a national identity anywhere close to as strong as ours. In countries like these, it can be a catastrophic mistake to imagine that through democratic elections, people will suddenly rally around a national identity and overcome their preexisting ethnic, religious, sectarian, and tribal divides. On the contrary, in sharply divided societies, democracy often galvanizes group conflict, with political movements and parties coalescing around these more primal identities. America has made this mistake over and over again.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
“
Humanity has been taking off like a rocket since the 1700s, but we have not achieved a stable orbit in the heavens. And even if we did, no orbit is stable in the long run. Eventually gravity claims what is hers.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy)
“
Our prevailing philosophy is “you do you”—be who you were made to be, make your own decisions, and live your best life. We just want you to actually do you—not Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity—based on the experiences that you’re having every day and the values that you want to infuse into your life. And we want you to do you with your friends and neighbors and fellow parishioners and colleagues. Political pundits have become fond of discussing partisan politics as “tribal.” We don’t want your tribe to be your political party. We want it to be the communities in which you live, worship, and work—diverse in thought as they may be.
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Sarah Stewart Holland (I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening): A Guide to Grace-Filled Political Conversations)
“
When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them. In America today, every group feels this way to some extent. Whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, straight people and gay people, liberals and conservatives—all feel their groups are being attacked, bullied, persecuted, discriminated against. Of course, one group’s claims to feeling threatened and voiceless are often met by another group’s derision because it discounts their own feelings of persecution—but such is political tribalism.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
“
The only part of the world where tribalism was fully superseded by more voluntary and individualistic forms of social relationship was Europe, where Christianity played a decisive role in undermining kinship as a basis for social cohesion.
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Francis Fukuyama (The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution)
“
People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations, Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’.
Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read:
This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine]
The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
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Christopher Hitchens (For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports)
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Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies. He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.
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Andrea Wulf (The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World)
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Believing that God is not only watching you but has high expectations creates one kind of society. Believing that getting “likes” on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat (or whatever comes next) undoubtedly creates another kind. The average iPhone user unlocks his or her phone at least eighty times per day, and that number is rising every year. 8 And yet, despite the fact each of us has access to more information in our pockets than any scholar in the world had twenty years ago, we don’t use it. We drown in information but we starve for knowledge.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
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It was inevitable when we stopped looking up to God for meaning and started looking down into ourselves that we would look to find fulfillment, belonging, and meaning in tribes and crowds. “Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God…,” the theologian and pastor Eugene Peterson writes, “through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
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In our foreign policy, for at least half a century, we have been spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. We tend to view the world in terms of territorial nation-states engaged in great ideological battles - Capitalism versus Communism, Democracy versus Authoritarianism, the 'Free World' versus the 'Axis of Evil.' Blinded by our own ideological prisms, we have repeatedly ignored more primal group identities, which for billions are the most powerful and meaningful, and which drive political upheaval all over the world. This blindness has been the Achilles' heel of U.S. foreign policy.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
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The Middle Ages in Europe are traditionally seen as the time of Crusades, chivalry and the growing power of the papacy, but all this was little more than a sideshow to the titanic struggles taking place further east. The tribal system had led the Mongols to the brink of global domination, having conquered almost the whole continent of Asia. Europe and North Africa yawned open; it was striking then that the Mongol leadership focused not on the former but on the latter. Put simply, Europe was not the best prize on offer. All that stood in the way of Mongol control of the Nile, of Egypt’s rich agricultural output and its crucial position as a junction on the trade routes in all directions was an army commanded by men who were drawn from the very same steppes: this was not just a struggle for supremacy, it was the triumph of a political, cultural and social system. The battle for the medieval world was being fought between nomads from Central and eastern Asia.
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Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)
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Understand that all absurdities only have free rein because the European is no longer able to react. For 70 years, it has been put into his head that his people have subjected Africa to the slave trade, colonization, the spoliation of natural resources and all the miseries of the world, and that as such they owe reparations to the African. The European, ashamed, must beat his culp! My book is a book of political combat, intended to free the European from these false accusations which imprison him in this inhibiting repentance. It is also for me to bring the African to reason, instead of abandonment in the comfort of the irresponsibility that has been instilled in him.
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Tigori Ernest Kakou (L'Afrique a desintoxiquer)
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The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and conservatives started to treat racism as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term. With the word itself becoming radioactive to some, passé to others, some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism. “Microaggression” became part of a whole vocabulary of old and new words—like “cultural wars” and “stereotype” and “implicit bias” and “economic anxiety” and “tribalism”—that made it easier to talk about or around the R-word. I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
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Right now partisan tribalism is statistically higher than at any point since the Civil War. Why? It’s certainly not because our political discussions are more important. It’s because the local, human relationships that anchored political talk have shriveled up. Alienated from each other, and uprooted from places we can call home, we’re reduced to shrieking.3
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Ben Sasse (Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal)
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The Biology of Tribalism concerns pushes and pulls between populations, which primarily occur due to tradeoffs between inbreeding and outbreeding. Ethnocentrism and other tribalistic personality facets have evolved to influence mate choice and encourage “optimal outbreeding.” The book will explore these and other tribalistic political phenomena that impact the evolution of populations, including gender inequality, warfare, and genocide.
The Biology of Family Conflict (Parent-Offspring Conflict) is the field of evolutionary theory that explains why the interests of the most closely related individuals do not always align, and thus why different family disciplinary strategies exist. The two opposed disciplinary models are based on egalitarian and hierarchical moralities. These conflicts are linked to the variation in people's tolerance of inequality.
The Biology of Altruism and Self-Interest is the area of evolutionary theory that describes how and why people cooperate with and betray one another; this field sheds light on why some people perceive human nature so differently than others.
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Avi Tuschman (Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us)
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For hierarchy, according to the anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Boehm studied tribal cultures early in his career, but had also studied chimpanzees with Jane Goodall. He recognized the extraordinary similarities in the ways that humans and chimpanzees display dominance and submission. In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm concluded that human beings are innately hierarchical, but that at some point during the last million years our ancestors underwent a “political transition” that allowed them to live as egalitarians by banding together to rein in, punish, or kill any would-be alpha males who tried to dominate the group. Alpha male chimps are not truly leaders of their groups. They perform some public services, such as mediating conflicts.28 But most of the time, they are better described as bullies who take what they want. Yet even among chimpanzees, it sometimes happens that subordinates gang up to take down alphas, occasionally going as far as to kill them.29 Alpha male chimps must therefore know their limits and have enough political skill to cultivate a few allies and stave off rebellion.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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What happens when conspiracy theories become the coin of politics, and mainstream media and educational institutions are discredited, is that citizens no longer have a common reality that can serve as background for democratic deliberation. In such a situation, citizens have no choice but to look for markers to follow other than truth or reliability. What happens in such cases, as we see across the world, is that citizens look to politics for tribal identifications, for addressing personal grievances, and for entertainment. When news becomes sports, the strongman achieves a certain measure of popularity. Fascist politics transforms the news from a conduit of information and reasoned debate into a spectacle with the strongman as the star.
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Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
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In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.
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Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
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Morality binds and blinds. This is not just something that happens to people on the other side. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
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Today each nation flies its own flag, a symbolic embodiment of its territorial status. But patriotism is not enough. The ancient tribal hunter lurking inside each citizen finds himself unsatisfied by membership of such a vast conglomeration of individuals, most of whom are totally unknown to him personally. He does his best to feel that he shares a common territorial defence with them all, but the scale of the operation has become inhuman. It is hard to feel a sense of belonging with a tribe of fifty million or more. His answer is to form sub-groups, nearer to his ancient pattern, smaller and more personally known to him - the local club, the teenage gang, the union, the specialist society, the sports association, the political party, the college fraternity, the social clique, the protest group, and the rest. Rare indeed is the individual who does not belong to at least one of these splinter groups, and take from it a sense of tribal allegiance and brotherhood. Typical of all these groups is the development of Territorial Signals - badges, costumes, headquarters, banners, slogans, and all the other displays of group identity. This is where the action is, in terms of tribal territorialism, and only when a major war breaks out does the emphasis shift upwards to the higher group level of the nation.
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Desmond Morris (Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language)
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Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking. We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry. The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
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Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.
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Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
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We are becoming what we worship, and what we worship is ourselves. Outside of the occasional country-western song, when was the last time you engaged with mainstream popular culture that was dedicated to anything like the greater glory of God? Refreshment of the soul is another matter. But that’s the point. In popular culture, nearly all efforts to refresh the soul fall under the tiresome cliché “spiritual but not religious” or, more likely, “discovering yourself”—not God.
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Jonah Goldberg (Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy)
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… not only the women of the Qurashi aristocracy were highly enough esteemed as a social group to come, like the men, to swear allegiance and to take part in the negotiations with the new military leader of the city, but also that they could express a boldly critical attitude toward Islam. They were not going to accept the new religion without knowing exactly how it would improve their situation. This critical spirit on the part of women toward the political leader remained alive and well during the first decades of Islam. It only disappeared with the onset of absolutism, with Mu'awiya and the turning of Islam into a dynastic system. This meant, on the one hand, the disappearance of the tribal aristocratic spirit with the formation of the Muslim state, and, on the other hand, the disappearance of Islam as the Prophet's experiment in living, in which equality, however merely potential it might be, opened the door to the dream of a practicing democracy.
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Fatema Mernissi (The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam)
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The great Enlightenment principles of modernity—liberalism, secularism, rationality, equality, free markets—do not provide the kind of tribal group identity that human beings crave and have always craved. They have strengthened individual rights and individual liberty, created unprecedented opportunity and prosperity, transformed human consciousness, but they speak to people as individuals and as members of the human race, whereas the tribal instinct occupies the realm in between.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
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Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.)
The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.
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Arundhati Roy
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The world is broken up by tribalism—the British, the German, the Swiss, the Hindu, the Buddhist, are tribes. See the fact that they are tribes, glorified as nations, and that this tribalism is creating havoc in the world, bringing wars in the world. Each tribe thinks in its own culture opposed to other cultures. But tribalism is the root, not the culture. Observing the fact of that is the action that frees the brain from the condition of tribalism. You see actually, not theoretically or ideationally, the fact that tribalism glorified as nations is one of the causes of war. That is a fact. There are other causes of war, economics and so on, but one of the causes is tribalism. When you see that, perceive that, and see that cannot bring about peace, the very perception frees the brain from its conditioning of tribalism.
One of the factors of contention throughout the world is religion. You are a Catholic, I am a Muslim, based on ideas, propaganda of hundreds or thousands of years; the Hindu and the Buddhist ideas are of thousands of years. We have been programmed like a computer. That programming has brought about great architecture, great paintings, great music, but it has not brought peace to mankind. When you see the fact of that, you do not belong to any religion. When there are half a dozen gurus in the same place, they bring about misery, contradiction, conflict: “My guru is better than yours; my group is more sanctified than yours; I have been initiated, you have not.” You know all the nonsense that goes on. So when you see all this around you as an actual fact, then you do not belong to any group, to any guru, to any religion, to any political commitment of ideas.
In the serious urgency to live peacefully there must be freedom from all this because they are the causes of dissension, division. Truth is not yours or mine. It does not belong to any church, to any group, to any religion. The brain must be free to discover it. And peace can exist only when there is freedom from fallacy. You know, for most of us, to be so drastic about things is very difficult, because we have taken security in things of illusion, in things that are not facts, and it is very difficult to let them go. It is not a matter of exercising will, or taking a decision: “I will not belong to anything” is another fallacy. We commit ourselves to some group, to an idea, to religious quackery, because we think it is some kind of security for us. In all these things there is no security, and therefore there is no peace. The brain must be secure; but the brain, with its thought, has sought security in things that are illusory.
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J. Krishnamurti (Where Can Peace Be Found?)
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identity politics endorse the concept that people are essentially tribal, and our differences are irreconcilable, which of course makes diversity and inclusion impossible. This is the toxic dead-end of identity politics; it’s a trap. But even so I didn’t reject people because they believed in this, or wanted to align themselves with a particular candidate. They were free to do as they wanted, and as a friend I supported them. I might not have agreed with them but I wasn’t about to unfriend anyone because of what his politics happened to be.
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Bret Easton Ellis (White)
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America's distinctive history - its ethnicity-transcending national identity and its unusual success in assimilating people from diverse origins - has shaped how we see the rest of the world and has deeply influenced our foreign policy. It's not just ignorance, racism, or arrogance that predisposes us to ignore ethnic, sectarian, and tribal divisions in the countries where we intervene. In the United States, immigrant communities from all sorts of background have become 'Americans'; why wouldn't Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Kurds, all similarly become 'Iraqis'?
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
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Market-dominant minorities are one of the most potent catalysts of political tribalism. When a developing country with an impoverished majority has a market-dominant minority, predictable results follow. Intense ethnic resentment is almost invariable, leading frequently to confiscation of the minority's assets, looting, rioting, violence, and, all too often, ethnic cleansing. In these conditions, the pursuit of unfettered free-market policies makes things worse. It increases the minority's wealth, provoking still more resentment, more violence, and, typically, populist anger at the regime pursuing such policies. All this held true in Vietnam.
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Amy Chua (Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations)
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Sometimes war may become the only resort available, but never try to justify it, by saying that it's the right thing to do, because war is never the right thing to do, no matter how right you feel. When you fire that first shot, you have no idea how many lives are going to be destroyed, no matter how right you feel. Once you fire that first shot you have no idea how many children will be orphaned. Once you fire that first shot you have no idea how many homes will be burnt to ashes. So why not make an effort to break that savage habit of retaliation, and sit down together in order to understand each other beyond the petty little differences born of instinctual tribalism!
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Abhijit Naskar (Fabric of Humanity)
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For two thousand years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of modern-day Tunis) the greater the level of development. Because urbanization in Tunisia started two millennia ago, tribal identity based on nomadism—which the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun said disrupted political stability—is correspondingly weak. Indeed, after the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 B.C. outside Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa regia, that marked the extent of civilized territory. The fossa regia remains relevant to the current Middle East crisis. Still visible in places, it runs from Tabarka on Tunisia’s northwestern coast southward, and turns directly eastward to Sfax, another Mediterranean port. The
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Robert D. Kaplan (The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate)
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Shortly after the Gulf War in 1992 I happened to visit a July Fourth worship service at a certain megachurch. At center stage in this auditorium stood a large cross next to an equally large American flag. The congregation sang some praise choruses mixed with such patriotic hymns as “God Bless America.” The climax of the service centered on a video of a well-known Christian military general giving a patriotic speech about how God has blessed America and blessed its military troops, as evidenced by the speedy and almost “casualty-free” victory “he gave us” in the Gulf War (Iraqi deaths apparently weren’t counted as “casualties” worthy of notice). Triumphant military music played in the background as he spoke.
The video closed with a scene of a silhouette of three crosses on a hill with an American flag waving in the background. Majestic, patriotic music now thundered. Suddenly, four fighter jets appeared on the horizon, flew over the crosses, and then split apart. As they roared over the camera, the words “God Bless America” appeared on the screen in front of the crosses.
The congregation responded with roaring applause, catcalls, and a standing ovation. I saw several people wiping tears from their eyes. Indeed, as I remained frozen in my seat, I grew teary-eyed as well - but for entirely different reasons. I was struck with horrified grief.
Thoughts raced through my mind: How could the cross and the sword have been so thoroughly fused without anyone seeming to notice? How could Jesus’ self-sacrificial death be linked with flying killing machines? How could Calvary be associated with bombs and missiles? How could Jesus’ people applaud tragic violence, regardless of why it happened and regardless of how they might benefit from its outcome? How could the kingdom of God be reduced to this sort of violent, nationalistic tribalism? Has the church progressed at all since the Crusades?
Indeed, I wondered how this tribalistic, militaristic, religious celebration was any different from the one I had recently witnessed on television carried out by Taliban Muslims raising their guns as they joyfully praised Allah for the victories they believed “he had given them” in Afghanistan?
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Gregory A. Boyd (The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church)
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The myth of “artificial boundaries” drawn by ignorant Europeans is one that dies hard. In fact, as the French scholar Camille Lefebvre has shown, colonial administrators went to great lengths to figure out where boundaries should be drawn. In doing so, they made use of extensive local knowledge. Later demands by critics to redraw borders along ethnic lines, she argued, “had the paradoxical effect of erasing the history of African political structures and the role of the local populations in defining colonial boundaries.” This reflected a racist idea “that the essence of Africans is to be found in their ethnicity.”
What is true is that these political boundaries did not always coincide with ethnic boundaries. Many ethnic groups ended up on different sides of borders because carving up “ethnic homelands” would have been both impractical as well as, in Lefebvre’s view, racist. If there is a “high-handed” assumption at play, it is the assumption of later critics that Africans are essentially tribal and need to be organized on tribal lines. Thus borders should be redrawn not based on political, social, and economic logic but on ethnic essentialism. When the apartheid state of South Africa created such ethnic “homelands,” they were roundly derided because they created ethnic ghettos cut off from modern lines of economic and political life. Yet the “artificial boundaries” critique of the borders resulting from the Berlin conference is an appeal for just such apartheid-style “homelands.
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Bruce Gilley (In Defense of German Colonialism: And How Its Critics Empowered Nazis, Communists, and the Enemies of the West)
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It is their usual reaction; they employ not words and reasoned conversation or discourse to resolve problems, but the truncheon, the jackbooted foot, or the gun. Sophistication requires more competence and skill than mere thuggery. It is a harder, loftier charge to be civilised than to let the beast in man devour man. The enlightened mind knows that all is challengeable, questions all, and thus, learns and grows. The weak, narrow mind makes its beliefs – whatever form they take – sacrosanct, defending them with violence if necessary. Political extremists, much like religious zealots, are the latter. They destroy what they cannot convert. They annihilate those they cannot control or make conform. They have found no peace in life, no love, and so promote war and division, as emotional cripples – inflicting their own pain and misery and malignant stupidity on the world. Their language binds people together, but only by stirring the darkest excesses of the soul; language of hate, and intolerance, fear and conspiracy, and the need for vengeance. In war-scarred Europe, these cripples direct mass-psychology, and would make the world in their own likeness; mutilated by violence and tribalism and hate.
They use language in its most evil, twisted form. They appeal to the lowest form of understanding, on a level I hesitate to allow for the term ‘human intelligence’ to be associated.
Children, fertile minds ripe for molestation. Now they will be taught what to think, not how to think. Language, that twisted poison. It scars purity.
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Daniel S. Fletcher (Jackboot Britain)
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The Qur’ān began by criticizing two closely related aspects of that society: the polytheism or multiplicity of gods which was symptomatic of the segmentation of society, and the gross socioeconomic disparities that equally rested on and perpetuated a pernicious divisiveness of mankind. The two are obverse and converse of the same coin: only God can ensure the essential unity of the human race as His creation, His subjects, and those responsible finally to Him alone. The economic disparities were most persistently criticized, because they were the most difficult to remedy and were at the hear of social discord—although tribal rivalries, with their multiple entanglements of alliance, enmity, and vengeance, were no less serious, and the welding of these tribes into a political unity was an imperative need. Certain abuses of girls, orphans, and women, and the institution of slavery demanded desperate reform.
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Fazlur Rahman (Major Themes of the Qur'an)
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In our earliest history, so far as we can tell, individuals held to an allegiance toward their immediate tribal group, which may have numbered no more than ten or twenty individuals, all of whom were related by consanguinity. As time went on, the need for cooperative behavior--in the hunting of large animals or large herds, in agriculture, and in the development of cities--forced human beings into larger and larger groups. The group that was identified with, the tribal unit, enlarged at each stage of evolution. Today, a particular instant in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth and in the several-million-year history of mankind, most human beings owe their primary allegiance to the nation-state (although some of the most dangerous political problems still arise from tribal conflicts involving smaller population units). Many visionary leaders have imagined a time when the allegiance of an individual human being is not to his particular nation-state, religion, race, or economic group, but to mankind as a whole; when the benefit to a human being of another sex, race, religion, or political persuasion ten thousand miles away is as precious to us as to our neighbor or our brother. The trend is in this direction, but it is agonizingly slow. There is a serious question whether such a global self-identification of mankind can be achieved before we destroy ourselves with the technological forces our intelligence has unleashed.
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Carl Sagan
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The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society.
This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.
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Lesley Hazleton (The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad)
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A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations.
The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism. Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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The difference between Plato’s theory on the one hand, and that of the Old Oligarch and the Thirty on the other, is due to the influence of the Great Generation. Individualism, equalitarianism, faith in reason and love of freedom were new, powerful, and, from the point of view of the enemies of the open society, dangerous sentiments that had to be fought. Plato had himself felt their influence, and, within himself, he had fought them. His answer to the Great Generation was a truly great effort. It was an effort to close the door which had been opened, and to arrest society by casting upon it the spell of an alluring philosophy, unequalled in depth and richness. In the political field he added but little to the old oligarchic programme against which Pericles had once argued64. But he discovered, perhaps unconsciously, the great secret of the revolt against freedom, formulated in our own day by Pareto65; ‘To take advantage of sentiments, not wasting one’s energies in futile efforts to destroy them.’ Instead of showing his hostility to reason, he charmed all intellectuals with his brilliance, flattering and thrilling them by his demand that the learned should rule. Although arguing against justice he convinced all righteous men that he was its advocate. Not even to himself did he fully admit that he was combating the freedom of thought for which Socrates had died; and by making Socrates his champion he persuaded all others that he was fighting for it. Plato thus became, unconsciously, the pioneer of the many propagandists who, often in good faith, developed the technique of appealing to moral, humanitarian sentiments, for anti-humanitarian, immoral purposes. And he achieved the somewhat surprising effect of convincing even great humanitarians of the immorality and selfishness of their creed66. I do not doubt that he succeeded in persuading himself. He transfigured his hatred of individual initiative, and his wish to arrest all change, into a love of justice and temperance, of a heavenly state in which everybody is satisfied and happy and in which the crudity of money-grabbing67 is replaced by laws of generosity and friendship. This dream of unity and beauty and perfection, this æstheticism and holism and collectivism, is the product as well as the symptom of the lost group spirit of tribalism68.
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Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
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The difference between a dictator and a true leader, is in intention. Given enough resources anybody can manipulate the minds of the masses and become their chosen authority, for the masses rarely look past the veil of the candidate's charm. And this is more evident today than ever, as a psychologically unfit misogynistic bully has swayed his way into the oval office with nothing but charm and charisma. So, basically we live in a society where a bully can become the authority of a great nation, the history of which is filled with true leaders who were the forerunners of humanitarian glory and real progress - these leaders were not simply the leaders of a country, or a party, but they were and still remain in the heart of the civilized humans as the leaders of humanity. They were the torch-bearers of egalitarianism and their light spread across the globe and touched countless lives with the warmth of humaneness. They lived among the masses but they didn't let the prejudices of the masses become their own, let alone infect the masses with more prejudices, unlike today's so-called leadership in America. They made America truly a great nation, by turning it into a symbol of liberty and acceptance, and today that very greatness is at stake, as the primitive evils of prejudices and discriminations have once again begun to creep into its backbone, through the words and actions of its very so-called leader. This is not a threat to democracy, for democracy itself at our current evolutionary stage, is a threat to our progress, rather it is a threat to the heritage of every single act of kindness, reasoning and acceptance ever committed in the history of humanity. The masses are existentially allowed to talk nonsense and advocate prejudices, but when an authority of the masses begins to talk nonsense and advocate prejudice and bigotry, it is an existential crisis for not just those masses but all humans around the world, with implications of catastrophic proportions. A leader is to take away prejudices from the psychological edifice of a country - a leader is to uplift a country, that is, a people, while warming their minds with the gentle flames of love, acceptance and reasoning. In fact, that's the only kind of true leadership there is, rest are just uncivilized tribalism that brings along more and more conflicts in the heart of the people within a country as well as outside of it.
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Abhijit Naskar (Build Bridges not Walls: In the name of Americana)
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Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking. We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry. The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity. These have been hard-fought battles, waged on uncertain, shifting terrain. Each advance has sparked a strong reaction from those whose interests and beliefs are threatened. Today the changes are happening so fast, in an environment so covered in a blizzard of information and misinformation, that our very identities are being challenged. What does it mean to be an American today? It’s a question that will answer itself if we get back to what’s brought us this far: widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom, and strengthening bonds of community. Shrinking the definition of them and expanding the definition of us. Leaving no one behind, left out, looked down on. We must get back to that mission. And do it with both energy and humility, knowing that our time is fleeting and our power is not an end in itself but a means to achieve more noble and necessary ends. The American dream works when our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences and when together they create endless possibilities. That’s an America worth fighting—even dying—for. And, more important, it’s an America worth living and working for.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)