Tribalism all the way down

"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right"

In an underrated post on Ricochet, I commented that “For over 50,000 years we humans survived by defending our tribe. Not by being logical or loving or dispassionate pursuers of Truth. The first ideologies were religions that focused on tribal allegiance and surviving in nature."

After America and Israel started bombing Iran, I think that I may have underestimated how big a deal the tribe is for people.

Currently several progressive nihilists are abandoning every principle but tribe to support the current regime in Iran. This is the funniest clip that I am aware of, but it is one of many. All of YouTube is awash with lefties like Cenk Ughyur saying that the Ayatollah was alright because he stood up to Israel. There are clips of various ladies with blue hair and piercings saying that Iran isn’t a fascist state like America.

Now, stupid people showing up on YouTube isn’t anything new. I suspect that will be a thing as long as the platform exists. But YouTube is a useful tool to observe humanity in its raw form.

I have observed that mankind very quickly descends into tribalism without a stronger moral or intellectual framework. If Trump is your political opponent, it is easy to imagine him as being your enemy. It is easy to imagine your political enemy as the most evil person in the world. If the Ayatollah of Iran opposes the most evil person in the world, then he must be good.

More and more it seems like politics isn’t really about principles. It’s often about tribe all the way down. I suspect the brutality everywhere in Islamic populations is a simple continuation of mankind’s natural emphasis on tribe above concerns of truth or love. Nobler religions try to mitigate humanity’s darker impulses. But in Islam, if Christians, Buddhists or the wrong kind of Muslim are against your tribe, then they can be killed without compunction.

My scholarship into Islam is quite amateurish, but it seems to be a religion all about tribal loyalty, with justice playing a distant secondary role and the infinite preciousness of the human individual being non-existent. It is not that Islam is a uniquely savage religion. Many pagan and animistic religions are worse. But Islam does not push back against our darker nature.

Regrettably, tribal brutality was the norm. When one Chinese warlord conquered another warlord’s territory, it was about the same as when one Viking Jarl or Scottish Chieftain conquered their neighbors down the river. The head guys of the other tribe were killed along with their direct underlings, and regular soldiers were either enslaved, killed or recruited depending on political circumstances. The peasant farmers who did all the work were usually treated slightly worse by the invading army for a time before things returned to normal. (In China if you treated the peasants better than the other guy, then you were made into a minor deity. Chinese religion is a bit better than Islam in my estimation.)

In the West, chivalry was developed as a way to make Christian armies less savage to other Christian armies and less exploitative of the peasantry. Like all attempts at virtue, it met with limited success. Though the Order of the Knights Hospitaler was pretty based.

What we see in the pro-Iranian Woke left is a return to tribal absolutism. If Trump is your political opponent, then he is worse than the head of a terrorist theocracy that kills peaceful protesters.

Up North humanity is largely the same. Gad Saad is an academic and public intellectual who focuses on psychology. Unlike other academics, he focuses on how people actually are, and he is an interesting figure. He focuses on when people use logic to make decisions and when they don’t.

Quite often his fans say that they loved his work and agreed with him on everything. He then asked them who they were voting for, and they said the Liberal Party. Gad Saad doesn’t believe in anything the left wing party party of Canada believes, and he often complained about Trudeau when he was in power. It is only fitting that an academic would be curious, so he asked why they voted for the Liberals.

“Because my father voted for the Liberal Party.” Gad Saad would say that the Liberal Party isn’t that liberal anymore. Then his fan said something like, “Well, I’ve always voted for them.” Unlike other people, he was not surprised that Mark Carney was elected over Pierre Poilievre.

Canadians who love Gad Saad’s anti-woke stances should vote their values, and gay lefties ought to be happy for the fall of the Iranian regime. Oddly, there has been a long pattern of parties and philosophical movements on the left that initially proposed universal values to all people and then fell into the most savage political tribalism.

The first that I know of is the French Revolution. The Revolution started by focusing on the equality of man, reason and improvements to the French tax system. But eventually the ideology became more removed from both French history and human nature. Eventually, killing anyone who didn’t agree with what a particular party believed in at that specific moment became acceptable among the leaders of the revolution. Many such cases throughout history.

Possibly, North Korea is the most racist country on Earth right now because after failing to provide for its people, the country needed to blame somebody, so it pretends that America and Japan are starving them. North Korean propaganda. It is not surprising to me that a country that started with Maoist ideology descended into the most primitive racial supremacy.

It’s doubtful that we would even want to do away with tribalism absolutely. I’m sure that the Canadian Gad Saad fan had many great conversations with his dad. It’s quite likely that he had a significantly better childhood because of his father’s attention. I’ve heard from New York Irish and New York Jews that attending a local Democratic Party meeting was a nice way to meet people and bring communities together. (The Irish meetings were more fun because they had Guinness.) People who work in political campaigns often form lifelong friendships and even find spouses.

Something of priceless value would be lost if we didn’t have sentimental affection for our family traditions. I myself still root for my grandfather’s sports team, not because I have any interest in sports, but because I really admired my grandfather. But if my grandfather’s favorite sports team bribed a judge, then justice would demand punishment without regard to my sentiments.

What we humans should do is value both family and fairness. Tribe and Truth. As we are human, we cannot be universalists without any particular affection for certain groups. Nor should we descend into absolute tribalism that subsumes all morality. I cannot give the specifics of when to root for your own team and when to hold fast to a universal morality. I can only quote a celebrated Civil War General and Senator.

"Our country, right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; and when wrong, to be put right."