I have praised Mark Weiner’s The Rule of the Clan as the best book I’ve read this year. In the wake of the bomb attack in Boston on Monday, I was thinking about the possibility that Middle East terrorists were responsible. If so, then after reading Weiner, I wonder if the terrorist mindset might be that of the clan. From our liberal perspective, we think of the victims as innocent individuals, and we think that the conflict will be settled when the individual terrorists are brought to justice.
The clan perspective differs. Weiner reminds us of the theory that clans are “shame cultures” rather than “guilt culture.” From a clan perspective, there is no such thing as individual guilt or innocence. If the clan believes that it has been wronged by another clan, then legitimate revenge does not require singling out the responsible individual. Punishing any member of the other clan will do.
With terrorism, we think we are involved in a struggle for justice and order. The terrorists, if they think in clan terms, think that they are involved in a feud.
If I read Weiner correctly, and if the bombing was the work of terrorists with a clan mindset (and I have zero information saying that it is), then “bringing them to justice” will not produce the closure that we would expect from our modern, liberal perspective. Instead, it will be viewed as just another episode in the feud, which the other side will seek to continue.
How do feuds end? My reading of Weiner is that in a clan society, two clans can agree to end a feud. To solidify this process, they hold an elaborate ceremony in which at least one of the clans offers gifts to compensate the other for past wrongs. In order for us to do this, we would have to abandon our modern liberal values and stoop to clan level.
I think that Weiner would say that the only other way to end a feud is for clan society to be suppressed by a strong state. To me, such a path does not seem promising for liberal values, either, particularly if your idea of getting from here to there involves “nation-building” by the United States.
It seemed to me that an act of terrorism is most easily interpreted along the civilization-barbarism axis, which makes it disfluent for progressives and libertarians. But a reader points me to David Sirota’s piece putting white American males and foreign Muslims along the oppressor-oppressed axis. Sirota says that he hopes that the bomber is a white male, which would produce a less xenophobic response. I, too, hope it is a white male. If so, then when he is caught I think it will bring closure to the incident, without other white males taking up his cause out of clan loyalty.
Reading your post and then the Sirota article makes for a interesting juxtaposition. He is lamenting how differently we treat terrorist from the different groups. While the logic from Wiener’s book makes this seem like exactly the right way to treat these different groups with their different motivations. I think they are both right in a sense, people aren’t responding to terrorist from the “other” group rationally based on their motivations and cultural values. However, this kind of cultural immune system that understands that that others are in some way fundamentally different, is showing how adaptive our fear of others is, and completely abandoning it is unadvisable.
Sirota’s a remarkably bold liar. Did we bomb Korea when Cho shot up Virginia Tech? Did anybody even imagine doing so? How about Christopher Dorner? Did anybody want to bomb a black neighborhood?
The response to 9/11 was similar in character to the response to the sinking of the Lusitania by the Germans. Does Sirota buy into the fantasy that white Europeans weren’t considered “white” at that time?
Everything but the articles and prepositions in Sirota’s piece is a malicious fantasy.
I highly doubt that if it’s a white male it will bring closure to the case – it will only fire up our domestic clans – a/k/a aggrieved minorities. If it’s closure you want then the bomber being an African-American bomber would be optimal. The whole affair might well be reclassified as a local crime.
Sad but true. Cf. the DC area sniper shootings…
Sirota wants white bombers precisely because it can be used to advantage by his “clan” of white people in its feud against other white people.
It’s not ironic that the “white privilege” crowd are more clan-oriented in their thinking than anybody short of the capital-K Klan itself. It’s just predictable and sad.
The Sirota article is ideological cant, and putting apple skins around oranges. Al Qaeda and similar groups (I am old enough to remember Abu Nidal) have a long history of coordinated violence towards some broad goal: the creation of a new Caliphate in AQ’s case. Before 9/11 they bombed our embassies in Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi. They attacked the U.S. Cole. There were even credible allegations they trained Aidid’s people in Mogadishu in using RPGs effectively ahead of the Black Hawk Down battle. In short Al Qaeda, at the time of 9/11 anyhow, was a true guerrilla outfit. There isn’t anything remotely similar domestically. Loose coalitions of sociopaths and lone wolves of whatever color can still wreak havoc, but Al Qaeda was a different animal and our policy choices were correspondingly different if not always wise. Sirota is throwing fresh-from-the-fire red meat in the middle of the Peace Studies faculty lounge; nothing more.
I think that what this podcast describes is clan warfare
We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. We went to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. We found so many incredible and surprising stories, this show is a two-parter; you can listen to Part Two here.
It is frustrating to me that USA government is giving so much money to affluent elderly Americans while it does not put enough police on the street to prevent low grade clan warfare. Also they tried to solve this problem by giving money to schools without first securing the streets!
Yet another way for States to deal with their clans, I suppose, is to cut them in, and give them a say. Some might argue Madison was attempting such with the Constitution and using factionalism (which could be thought of as a form of clannishness) against itself to balance liberty and stability.
I suppose I’ll have to read the book, but would Weiner concede Centralized States can fuel clannishness by trying too hard to stamp it out, or that dealing with clannishness in a large diverse country like the U.S. might be a very different exercise than in say Singapore?
There is a lot of clannish hatred for non-elite, middle class white people in this country. If you know of a more hated group I would like to hear it.
So two Jews hope its a white male? I hope it’s a Jew male. I don’t see how that’s different.
What does their ethnicity have to do with it? Did you read and understand why they hope so?
Let’s take an example of a clannish response to an attack, 9-11.
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2003/03/what-is-unusual.html
The author of this response wrote, “In placing responsibility for the failure to confront Hitler, Churchill does not hide behind France or the League of Nations. Instead, he says that his book is about “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm.” To allow the wicked to re-arm – that is what I would call a world-historical gamble.” Notice how the author identifies with Churchill and the “English speaking peoples” and likens this incident to Hitler threatening Europe. This response shows all the hallmarks of clannishness – seeing the confrontation in moral terms, alarmism (“world-historical gamble), demonisation of the opponent (“wicked”). Again, this same author is wishing ill on author group, in this case what he calls “white people.” I would suggest that he refrain from within ill on other groups or seeing this most recent incident with the same mixture of alarmism and fear. It’s not always 1938.
I don’t believe that’s the point. Arnold’s point is this:
IF the hope is that we have a ‘quick resolution’ where ‘justice is served’ and ‘closure’ is achieved, THEN the hope is for a ‘white, unconnected’ perpetrator. As it is, the perps are clearly from a particularly ‘clannish’ part of the world, and the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and the capture/trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev won’t bring the hoped-for ‘closure’, but will be seen as just another chapter in the feud from the clannish perspective.
If anything, Arnold could be accused of jingoism because of his suggestion that Western societies think ‘we are involved in a struggle for justice and order’, as opposed to indulging in clan-like thinking ourselves.
So there used to be clan called the Third Reich, yeah? When it tried to conquer Europe, within a few years another clan called Britain was firebombing innocent civilians by the cityful under a policy known as “dehousing.”
The commenters here don’t seem to be grasping the “clan” concept to well.
No, I think the commenters grasp the clan concept perfectly well.
This post looks like clan thinking to me. Progressives hate ordinary whites, viewing them as lower class, and hope that it was a white guy, so that they can do another Waco and a few more ruby ridges, and maybe re-arrest the entire Church of Latter Day saints, starting with Romney, on charges of ritual child abuse.
We did not bomb the taliban because we were racist, but because they were sponsoring Al Quaeda. We did not refrain from bombing the vatican because they were white, but because they were not sponsoring IRA terrorists.
The rhetoric of “white privilege” implies those awful privileges have to be taken away, but since the privileges don’t actually exist, to “take them away” necessarily requires methods akin to dekulakization or decossackization.
The reason Detroit is down the sewer is not some mysterious economic force mediated by evil capitalist, but because the white working class was ethnically cleansed out of Detroit, with the active collaboration of the police and the national guard. The hope that the bomber was a white male (and, doubtless, a working class white male) reflects the desire for more and bigger ethnic cleansings – clan warfare against the clan that is most threatening to progressive privilege, and thus most hateful to progressives.
Exactly.
> if the bombing was the work of terrorists with a clan mindset (and I have zero information saying that it is)
The targeting shows that it is. Reactionaries or patriots would target government officials or certain universities, anti semites would target Jews, the Klu Klux Klan would target blacks, and so on and so forth. Whoever did this hated Americans generally, therefore, a clan that does not think of themselves as a subset of Americans.
I would say targeting *suggests* that it is, not ‘shows’. The clan theory isn’t ironclad, and humans, for all our clannishness, tend also to resist rigid categorization.
IOW, there’s nothing about the ‘targeting’ alone which 100% verifies a non-American/anti-American clan operation. It’s suggestive, but not evidence per se.
I will acknowledge however that the prediction was correct, as it turns out. Unfortunately that means we merely have another chapter close in the clan’s ‘feud’ mindset as opposed to a ‘one and done’ deal we might have had if the perps were white or black Americans…
The practice of consanguineous marriage is a threat to a free society. This practice has obvious ramifications for immigration policy and those who practice it should not be allowed to move to Western nations.