Tribes

Prologue: To Bob and any other readers who don’t like sports … this isn’t really about basketball.    Please read on.

A little over a week ago, when it became clear that the LA Lakers were going to defeat the Boston Celtics in the 7th game of the NBA Finals, I could be found jumping around the family room shouting YES! YES! I watched all the wrap-up shows, basking in our victory, and the next day I read all the online articles and blogs, especially appreciating those written from a Celtics perspective … the whining of a rival’s fans is music to any sports fan’s ears.  Then I began to read the message boards.   I saw players from both sides called every sort of name, from greatest ever to racial slurs I wouldn’t repeat.  And the venom toward players was mild in comparison to the invective hurled at opposing fans.  Now, I love my teams.  But as I was reading, I wondered … why would it be so easy for me to join right in and castigate Celtics fans (for example, by defining castigate for their benefit)?   Why do I care so much?  Do I really want to be associated with this tribe of crazies?  And there it was … the perfect word for the way we were acting … like a tribe.   It’s Top Sites Tuesday #66 and the theme is Two Thoughts on Tuesday … and my thoughts turn to the ways in which we behave like tribes.

I found an interesting article online by Lieutenant Colonel Brendan Wilson of the Naval Postgraduate School entitled Tribal Tendencies, Global Dynamics: Islamic Group Dynamics in the Modern World.  Put simply, the premise of the article is that human beings are innately predisposed toward tribal behavior and that this contributes to international conflicts like the war on terrorism.    Tribal tendencies include: (i) being prone to emotional attachment to rather abstract, large, impersonal marked groups; (ii) motivated by symbols in the absence of any personal knowledge of individuals;  (iii) a tendency to develop cultural markers that distinguish themselves from the outgroup; and (iv) a tendency to see members of outside tribes as inferior or less human.   Now, if you reread my first paragraph with these tribal tendencies in mind, can you see where I’m going?   Rabid sports fans behave like tribes.   But when I think about it, many groups show similar tendencies.    Religions invent names for outsiders like infidels or heathens.   People within recovery programs speak of outsiders as normies or people who haven’t found the program … yet.   Conservatives call liberals communists and accuse them of intentionally dismantling the nation.  I can find the same sort of  invective hurled at Celtics fans by Lakers fans on almost any message board online, especially those related to politics or religion.

So, my first thought is that the increasing polarization of the American culture is in part due to our tribal instincts, perhaps reinvigorated by our increased dependence on electronic rather than face to face communication.   In his paper, Lt Col Wilson suggests that less educated segments of society may be more prone to being influenced by tribal instincts than educated groups.   However, as we become more civilized, sophisticated and, especially, educated, we have a tendency to believe we operate above the instinctual level.  That belief, if false, could lead us to justify or rationalize behaviors that are in fact rooted in tribal instincts.    There’s certainly substantial evidence that sophisticated cultures are subject to instinctual behavior: pornography is the largest business on the internet, a phenomenon that hardly seems to be the product of reason.    Is a society that thinks it’s above instinctual behavior any better off than one that doesn’t know that instinctual behavior exists?

My second thought is this: If we really are prone to following tribal instincts, then at least if we are aware of that tendency, we can choose to channel our tribal behavior into activities that aren’t destructive, like shouting USA! USA! during the Olympics or singing hymns together at church.   If we can’t rise above our instincts, at least we can temper them with an awareness of where they ultimately lead, whether that’s to seeing Celtic fans as cretins, to considering people of other faiths as unsaved conversion-fodder, or to jihad.  Love our tribe but love it wisely.   Can we do that?   Maybe it starts when I decide to skip posting a scathing message on the Celtics message boards.   What do you think?

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