Social Breakdown

I prefer to insist the problem is cultural, and to describe tribalism as a facet of culture. The reason to subordinate tribe to culture is the identification of tribe is learned, starting at birth, as are most other things.

Human beings are born with many things that are genetically controlled. We are learning more and more about those things every day. The extent and depth of our genetic makeup is astonishing and, to some, overwhelming. I think the large number of articles and books in the last decade about the connection of our biology to our behavior is largely due to the impressive volume of significant results in research about both human genes and behavior. I support those efforts and heartily say "More!"

But, as is a central point in my Moral Agents project, it is equally astounding that all that wiring has led to an organism which is intelligent and capable of voluntary choice. Those now alive are more unlike our remote predecessors than any previous generation in in one crucial way: we can choose our destiny. We are neither robots nor zombies. This point amounts to saying that we make our own culture, and that changes everything.

In his criticism of The Graduate Student's Question, LC asked me "what is culture?" I have grossly defined it as the locus of "beliefs, habits and rituals," but I admit the term is nebulous. It stands for the sum total of what is held in public that "defines" a group as a society. I put "defines" in quotes because this is not a definition in any usual, academic sense; rather, what constitutes a culture has to be learned by examining it. There may be other common elements than beliefs, habits and rituals, although I think those three occur everywhere. (Anyway, they are critically important for my philosophical analysis, but I could deal with another characterization.) Presenting a culture is like telling an adventure story about exotic, far away places, populated with strange creatures and intriguing people. To experience a culture, even to see one's own clearly for the first time, is to have the thrill of the unknown; an irresistible combination of fear and fascination that leads us on. It is to see ourselves outside ourselves, to get an idea of what we really look like.

Mothers and infants are bonded from birth by lactation and a large number of other genetically programmed behaviors. There is very little difference among primates in early maternal-infant behavior, suggesting that how we have babies has been a settled evolutionary question for tens of millions of years. Mother-infant bonding is the most basic social link, and the basis of the family, hence the genetically related clan. I do not know whether there is a biochemical basis for bonding among clan members, but I think it is well established that every human society has clans. Human societies differ in the extent of their clans and living arrangements. In the United States, the nuclear family is the ordinary living arrangement, but the clan extends at least to grandparents and offspring of grandparents wherever they live. In most other societies several generations share close living arrangements, so the clans are usually more extended.

Whether or not a tribe is one clan varies from place to place, but, in the instances I know about, tribes include more than one clan. This inclusion is ultimately necessitated by marriage patterns wherever incest is avoided (which is the dominant pattern). In villages dominated by one clan, brides or grooms are usually imported from another villages to prevent incest. Marriage brokerage creates a common clan interest, hence a tribal association. Tribes are also alliances for the purpose of hunting and war making. Those alliances are almost always made among men, not women, so there is an basic orientation of the tribe toward male functions. While tribes may originate out of biological needs, their organizations serve larger purposes which gradually evolve out of the particular associations and environmental circumstances. In other words, what is a tribe is something learned (acquired), not biologically programmed. Tribes are a social tool.

Culture is a social phenomenon, so occurs the moment we have two or more people interacting. It is what is done in common that constitutes culture, although its content is stored in individuals. Culture is an interactive network of individual nodes. Each person having its own copy of its culture makes culture highly redundant, thus resistant to change in its central tendencies. The redundancy of culture is the locus of cultural inertia. What makes culture seem mysterious is that it is passively learned behavior resulting from interaction. Every time a member of a culture interacts with another in the culture, culture practices are learned, refined or reinforced. That increases the stablity of the culture, and also makes possible the "culture shock" we have when encountering alien beings. Culture shock is a defensive reaction, which shows that culture, like individuals, includes mechanisms of resistance to change and death. It also shows that there is ready identification of 'self' and 'other.' It is that identification, which is learned from clan behavior, that is the basis of the tribe. (Self and other are created in the weaning from maternal bonding, when one becomes two.)

So, at last coming to the point of this essay, there is nothing inevitable about tribes. Tribal formation is voluntary in the particulars, even if biologically mandatory in general. The particular characters that distinguish one tribe from another are cultural, not biological. In fact, in many places where tribes are warring, as in Africa and the Middle East, the tribes are not that distantly related, biologically speaking. They might be, for example, as close as cousins or second cousins. What makes one tribe different from another is almost entirely cultural, not physical. That is very obvious in the case of religious strife, as on the Irish island, in the Balkans and among Arabs in the Middle East. It is less obvious when tribal membership seems defined by race or sex or other bodily markings. But, in the United States where racism and sexism are still prevalent, it is very difficult to identify who belongs to white tribes or black tribes by color or sex alone, as there has been extensive intermarraige for hundreds of years among the races. Moreover, people of minority background are now readily accepted into majority cultures, where they act like the majority. Black or white executives differ in the skin color, but not in their dress, homes, habits, reading materials, and economic, political or social choices. Women still suffer discrimination at the highest levels, but are more like men these days than was once the case, as determined by their social roles. For managerial personnel, it means workers are workers, not us, and that's that. What this means for the Union man representing employees is that bosses are bosses, whatever their color, and whether they wear skirts or pants. (Those who hoped the promotion of minorities would liberalize economic and political organizations and institutions should stop dreaming.)

Finally, then, there is no "natutral" breaking apart of societies into obviously different sub-cultures or tribes. That's because, in the first place, culture is something we created from our associations. It can fall out any which way, depending on what seems convenient at the time. The fact that there are uni-colored or uni-language warring gangs and tribes is not a proof that those definitions are somehow built-in. Put bluntly, the disturbing violence of our times - gang wars, religious killings, suicide bombings, etc - does not support any theory of the natural division of the races or sexes or ethnic groups. We must see what is happening in terms of human choices, not natural necessity. As is the case with all choices, they could be made otherwise.