Tribalism and the Sacred Part II
In last week’s essay, we looked at how ideas of “the sacred,” violence, and suffering congeal into our modern notions of victimhood, and our tendency to grant moral status to “victims.” We would not be confused on this matter: there is such a thing as victimhood, but the idea gets twisted rather quickly when we deal with it abstractly. We must be careful about ascribing victimhood based upon accidental characteristics, particularly when such ascriptions become justifications for using violence against “victimizers” or oppressors. Our tendency to think of persons, or ourselves, simply in terms of group status is one of the bugaboos of modern mass politics.
These essays were prompted by reading Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes’ essay “The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0” Limberg and Barnes provide an analysis similar to the one we laid out last week and apply it to our contemporary politics. Our “memetic tribes,” essentially estranged from one another, with their implicit winner-take-all approach to politics and presumption of innocent victimhood, are willing to sacrifice to their jealous gods members of the other tribe.
We live in a time, the authors argue, not just of crisis, but of six crises. They identify these crises and the underlying causes:
A crisis of meaning, caused by secularization. People need to know what and how the world is and how they are to be in it. Religion provides answers to these essential questions, and without the anchoring of religion, people can quickly slide into moral relativism, emotivism (the idea that my preferences determine right and wrong), or anomie. We now live in a world where we no longer have a comprehensive and consensus view of the world but competing worldviews with no way to resolve the differences in their claims. We feel lost in the world, with no compasses or maps or signposts to guide us -- and even if we had them we have forgotten how to use them -- and membership in a tribe at least gives us a tether to something that can generate a teaspoon of meaning for us.
The reality crisis, caused by fragmentation. In the absence of an overarching, comprehensive, and widely agreed upon story about who we are and what is expected of us arises a panoply of “narratives” that all compete with one another. At its meanest point, we simply refer to it as “my truth,” the word “my” emptying the word “truth” of any sensible meaning. As a result, we no longer inhabit a shared reality but take up residence in comfortable fabricated realities, often constructed by media or tech companies whose main interest is and will always be to sell us something.
A belonging crisis, created by “atomization” (treating each person as a discrete and self-contained part). Rather than seeing ourselves as members of something either by birth or by place – associative life – we see ourselves (as we argued in our Gnosticism series) as prior to and independent of a greater whole. We now experience our freedom as a tremendous burden, often accompanied by feelings of isolation and despair, because our responsibilities and obligations are no longer given in the nature of our place alongside others, but “are increasingly commoditized into transactions with strangers.” The resultant feelings of alienation from ourselves and others and the world around us makes us vulnerable to any kind of grouping that promises “togetherness.” We easily get persuaded to join mobs.
The proximity crisis, resulting from globalization. The more we stretch our communities, the more we pull them, and ourselves, apart. The lines of demarcation between our private and public lives become blurred, especially when we treat everything as politics. “The internet pornifies our private lives, leaving nothing to the imagination.” In a globalized world, there is no sufficient distance between memetic tribes, the walls that would otherwise separate us are now laid flat. In some ways we misunderstand our problem: it is not that we are too siloed, it may be that we are not siloed enough. Or it may be that we have the wrong kinds of siloes.
The sobriety crisis, a consequence of an age of overstimulation. We find ourselves in “an evolutionary trap: adaptive instincts turn maladaptive due to exposure to supernormal stimuli.” We enter these traps because our senses are presented with exaggerated “dummy objects” that are meant to trigger our natural instincts but instead offer no satisfaction and often lead to our destruction. “Whether it be junk food, laugh tracks, pornography, or likes on social media, these artificial triggers addict us and hijack our agency.” We have tech and media companies dedicated full-time to stealing our attention via these unreal, dummy objects.
The warfare crisis, related to weaponization. The ways in which bad actors, such as Russia, will use misinformation and other strategies to erode confidence, destroy trust, and undermine democratic norms and practices. The goal is typically to produce outrage, for “outrage porn is the supernormal stimuli of the culture war.” Our minds are transformed into weapons of war.
When combined, all these crises indicate that we typically misunderstand the nature of our current crisis and thus ways in which we might constructively address it. The “threat to our democracy” cannot be solved by election reform or by making sure that a certain person doesn’t get into office. Nor can we solve it with “can’t we just all get along” platitudes. Worse still is the conviction that your side is the side of truth and good democracy and the other side is the problem. That idea is the very essence of mimetic rivalry. Both sides are equally guilty of stoking the dogs of war that are nipping at our heels, and if you can’t see that it’s because your ideology has blinded you.
Limberg and Barnes do suggest a way forward by looking at Bruce Tuckman’s four stages of group development.
The first stage is forming, when a team first comes together and individuals, mainly focused on themselves, operate with a degree of politeness. The second stage is storming, when comfort within the group allows for conflicting opinions to be voiced. Team members may wrestle for control of the group’s values and goals. The third stage is norming, when “resolved disagreements and personality clashes result in greater intimacy, and a spirit of cooperation emerges.” The fourth stage is performing, where, with “group norms and roles established, group members focus on achieving common goals, often reaching an unexpectedly high level of success.”The authors conclude that our task is to figure out, collectively, how to move peacefully from the “storming” to the “norming” stage. Exacerbated by social media, other technologies, and political mobs, we are now stuck in the “storming” stage with grim prospects for transitioning out of it. They offer eight strategies for doing so:
“A Hippocratic oath for the culture war,” committing us to intellectual humility and good faith dialogue. As we have often put it on this site: “skepticism toward ourselves and charity toward our opponents.”
“Dirty bias to clean bias,” by which they mean coming clean about our biases and our value structures while understanding that opposing value structures are held with equal conviction by others. As Plato long ago realized, we reach a social crisis when moral thinking becomes rote custom and can’t make an accounting of itself when pressed.
“Reinventing debate,” so that it is no longer entertainment but meant to enlighten, inform, and resolve differences. Our partner organization “Braver Angels” has been working on showing us a healthy way of doing this. I’d recommend we begin by eliminating the shock theater of presidential debates.
“Disrupting and emancipating philosophy,” by which they mean reclaiming philosophy as a way of life and providing us with the levels of awareness we need to avoid joining memetic tribes.
“Memetic mediators” who have the ability to communicate across tribes. This is, in my judgment, one of the most pressing needs we have today. How to find actors who are fair-minded and disinterested enough to gain the confidence of all without currying the favor of any is a bedeviling but necessary task.
“Grey pills [relearning the value of questioning and doubt, especially concerning one’s own position] as acid tests,” by which they encourage us to engage in genuine, open-ended dialogue with each other where we start without a goal in mind or a need to vanquish our interlocutor.
The human and emotional skills we need to connect well with another person.
“Workshops for depolarization.” War breeds resentment and grudges, particularly for those who feel as if they keep losing battles. We must learn to accept the legitimacy of alternative viewpoints and work to resolve our differences through persuasion rather than through exercises of power.
Liberalism offered itself as an alternative to the wars of religion that consumed Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. It claimed that a privatized religion, one kept out of public life, could best serve both personal and communal interests. In the place of religion as an organizing principle stood the neutral state, borne out of rational principles and restrained by personal rights. The liberal dream is largely dead now. Very few believe that the state should be or could be neutral on moral questions. The very idea of rationality has been undermined from all quarters. Our notion of rights has become so exaggerated and deformed that it now is offered as a defense of previously indefensible things and as a weapon against previously accepted practices.
Fly over a typical European city with its roots going back to the medieval period, and you will see at its center a cathedral and a city hall, with the rest of the city radiating outward. Fly over an American city and you’ll see a sprawling landscape with no center, or if it does you’ll see only places of commerce and sporting arenas. Once the sheltering canopy of religion was torn down what resulted was not an empty square but competitors rushing in to fill the vacated space. Whatever else is true of commerce and sports, they are essentially competitive enterprises. They are tribal. Once Christendom collapsed different tribes rushed to fill the vacuum left behind. Tocqueville observed that in America religion still performed this essential task. But in our secularized age ideologies rush in to claim the empty space. If the analysis above is correct, these mimetic tribes are essentially religious sects, each competing with one another to occupy the seat of authority once held by the Church.
There is no easy way out of our situation. We must start by figuring out what we need to agree on in order to insure peaceful coexistence with one another. [Someone should produce a mimetic tribe “coexist” bumper sticker.] We must know how to back off when we don’t agree rather than try to force our will upon others. We should be humble enough to recognize our tendency to error while firm enough to hew to principle. We must be patient enough to know that decades of neglect and bad faith don’t admit of magic solutions; that it will take longer to fix our problems than it took to make them. We must be aware of the limits that reality places on us and adjust ourselves accordingly. And we would do well to remember the words of Oliver Goldsmith:
Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
That bliss which only centers in the mind:
Why have I stray'd, from pleasure and repose,
To seek a good each government bestows?
In every government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
Our own felicity we make or find:
With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
The lifted ax, the agonizing wheel,
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel,
To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith and conscience all our own.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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