I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.
That describes the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo divide. But the tribalism among ideological conservatives, progressives, and libertarians also is strong, as I discuss in The Three Languages of Politics.
Read Sullivan’s whole piece, which deals with the social psychology of tribalism.
What are the antidotes to tribalism? Sullivan suggests trying to view yourself and others as individuals, not as tribes. He also recommends mutual forgiveness, rather than wallowing in the offenses committed by the other tribe. Russ Roberts and I also recommend humility, rather than insisting that your tribe is certainly right and that the other side’s view has no merit. We also think that reading TLP can help.
Are we sure one tribe is globalist?
Sullivan’s describing a civil War in his world, among upper class white intellectuals.
But the BLM protestors aren’t motivated by contempt for religion or a globalist world view …
What Dave Smith said…
This is a bleak article that would be very unconfortable for almost everyone to read.
I’m a white, upper middle class highly educated person. I grew up in a red part of a red state. My home town has 300 people. I don’t identify with with my natural tribe on much (I do on some) and I don’t want to join any tribe.
But if what Sullivan is saying is true, I’ll have to join. And from what I’ve seen happen to people like Weinstine and Cristakis I thnk I know which tribe I’d be forced to join.
Get out and build relationships with people in the other tribe. Do it along some interest other than politics. Don’t talk to them about politics. Don’t think about what their politics are. Build real, holistic relationships with real people over real things that you value in your life. Join a club. Start a club. Pick up a hobby and do it once a week with that club. Become a regular volunteer at some non-political spot like the local children’s hospital or animal shelter. Invite your neighbors over for dinner.
In short, rebuild civil society.
This pretty much describes the group I hang out with. It’s a Catholic group that is pretty white for the area, but also really diverse. Certainly diverse compared to most churches, leaving that the diversity is mainly of historically Catholic ethnicities like Filipinos or Mexicans.
Everyone is pretty well adjusted gets along really well. To be honest, we are all college educated middle class people, so while the skin tone is different its hardly very diverse as far as human types go. A lot of the Mexicans are really White Mexicans, the kind where they are so white I didn’t think many were from Mexico at all. If they sent DNA into ancestry.com I bet it would come back 90%+ European.
One of the things I always liked about the group is that it was very apolitical. Nobody ever discussed politics. For years I didn’t think anyone cared either.
However, to an extent I do think this masked some really big disagreements. We had a couple over the other day and they brought up Trump several times, in segways that were really a stretch based on what we were discussing. I kept trying to change the topic and they kept bringing it up. It’s the first time I heard them talk politics in years of knowing them. And it was unhinged. I’ve talked with them before, and sometimes about serious things, but I was pretty unaware they had radical political views. Maybe radical isn’t quite the word. They want everything to be “nice”, but they don’t really seem interested in exploring what it would take to make it nice. They are pretty uninformed on the issues, and I don’t just mean disagree with me but very deficient on basic facts. There was a vague sense that “things must not be nice because bad people are stopping it from being nice, so I guess we have to get the bad people.” Vague on “who” those bad people are and “what getting them” would actually mean, but that’s typical for most peoples politics. I think before Trump they still would have blamed “the system” or “the bigots”, Trump just gave them a focus.
To further clarify, this desire for “niceness” isn’t just limited to politics. I very much get the impression these people would be the kind that ignored the sex abuse scandal in the church, because it involved dealing with realities and confrontations that were “not nice”. There is a sort of niceness addiction which does in fact make them very pleasant to deal with, but also seems to leave them unable to deal with situations where any response or reality that isn’t “nice” is required. I’ve also noted from several stories that they often get walked over at work by people who are a bit more cynical operators because they are afraid of confrontation and not being “nice.”
I think there is a limit to “niceness”. When discussing forming an intentional community the other day with another couple one of the women noted that it was very hard to have deep meaningful relationships with the people in her neighborhood. She’s a well traveled modern cosmopolitan professional that would rather die then be considered racist, but even she noted that while the Indians that had taken over her neighborhood were all nice and you could get along with them, it did seem awfully shallow no matter how many potlucks you went too. You just didn’t have these deeply shared values that make up the meaningful choices we make in life. She tried to say it in as non-racist a manner as possible, referring to faith instead of race, and it was very genuine and not a cynical way of saying “I’m not a racist, but…”. Nonetheless, diversity really does mean we don’t share anything deep and meaningful. Superficial niceness can’t fix that.
*The couple was mixed race but one was non-white. There does seem to be a political divide between the white Catholic and non-white Catholics, its just since we don’t discuss politics it was never a problem.
Among good people, with a willingness to listen to others, even those with whom they disagree, being “nice” is very important, and more comfortable.
With people who do NOT want to listen to you, being “nice” is an early surrender in the culture war. Too many Reps have been too nice for too long; yet the Tea Party types remain pretty nice.
Somehow, more shallow Christians seem nicer than most deep & intense Libertarians; nice is more pleasant to live with.
Sullivan wants the anti-BoBos to lose, “one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global;” shows very clearly who Sullivan’s against.
Trump’s supporters, and even many nicer Reps, are not interested in losing to remain nice. It’s long past time that the Democrats learn how to lose with grace and humility, rather than PC-nazi rage.
To reduce the tribalism — all Universities need to stop hiring Democrats and ONLY hire Republicans, until there is a parity of full professors who are vocally supportive of Republican candidates, and the Rep message of smaller gov’t, with less power, and MORE power to families and civic organizations. But I’m not expecting PC-nazi types to accept the truth that the polarization has been happening because of the successful takeover of Academia and most Media by the PC-nazis who use words like “diversity” to punish and oppress conservative views.
Taking away Federal Funding from universities, including “elite” universities, for anti-conservative actions would be a good first step.
Depoliticization of daily life is indeed a good idea, perhaps the closest thing to a solution.
“Friend who want to remain friends don’t discuss politics or religion.”
Can anyone give a good example of when this has worked?
Bilateral disarmament is usually an improvement. Unilateral disarmament is usually suicide. The quickest way to end a war is surrender.
Politics is on the war spectrum, and a depoliticized zone is like a demilitarized zone – it takes two parties to continue to recognize the truce, to not enter no man’s land and take advantage of the situation to abuse the buffer zone to enable attacks, and to police up their own sides hotheads if they attempt to do so, because otherwise the truce is off and a big fight breaks out.
When fights break out, it doesn’t do much good to point out the obvious, “fighting is bad, we should stop fighting,” unless one can also describe what the terms of a viable cease-fire will look like. The easiest truce is usually, “return to the status quo ante bellum”. That’s not possible if either side is unwilling to put pressure on the original boatrockers for having rocked the boat in the first place, that is, the preservation of peace and the truce has to be held more much important than whatever “cause” was claimed to justify the original provocation.
The trouble is that there is currently a clear asymmetry in terms of the willingness of people on particular sides to self-criticize in this manner, which, again, makes appeals for peace seem less like pacifism and more like naivite, at best.
When has it ever worked? That’s the way I’ve lived my whole life, and I would say it has worked. And I learned it from my father. He always said, never bring up politics or religion. You talk about winning, but this isn’t about winning anything, it’s about living your life, and my preference would be for politics to have as little effect as possible on my life.
It is impossible to depoliticize so much as a bathroom these days, let alone all of “daily life.”
That’s the problem.
This advice sounds like “only cooperate in our prisoner’s dilemma game, don’t defect”. It sounds like a good idea but how do you change the calculation of incentives that cause people to defect rather than cooperate?
Where is where the Obama Red State/Blue State speech? There are loads of Republicans in California etc and so far the anti-Bobo rural WWC has not a major policy victory from Trump. Or better yet, maybe Trump can unit the nation by our nation learning to ignore his twitter feed.
Or maybe our President will unite the nation by blundering us into war with North Korea.
Most racial minorities are affiliated with the Bobo tribe only in the sense that they vote Democrat. I also disagree with Sullivan that each tribes dominates a major political party. The Bobo tribe dominates both.
Generally speaking, minorities are mostly dangerous because of their voting. If you took the vote away from minorities then most of what people fear about them would go away. Even their dysfunctional elements could be mostly tamed under proper governance (not just government but cultural attitudes), but that very governance blacks would never vote for (because it would be ego and status reducing, even if it made life better for them). The Malays in Singapore still vote against the PAP even though its made their lives infinitely better.
As they become a majority the Bobos will no longer be able to control minorities. Once they reach majority you get minority run governance, which looks a lot like Detroit or Baltimore. At least in many other major cities minority votes get channeled toward Bobo governance, which ain’t my cup of tea but at least it doesn’t look like Haiti.
Their being minorities is also important for maintaining economic surplus and a high trust equilibrium. I think proper governance could probably keep a small minority under control (look at Singapore), but the bigger it gets the harder it is to both provide for and control. Colonialism proved untenable, even though it was probably good for the least civilized parts of the world on net.
Bobos had some pretty unpopular ideas about how to run a society. In the 1980s it became obvious a majority of white people rejected the 60s revolution. Since Bobos couldn’t win white hearts and minds they recruited a new electorate so they could impose their will on their fellow whites by force. In the long run this will eat them as well, but they are a bunch of childless godless narcissist who don’t much care about the long run anyway.
“reading TLP can help”
Really?
TLP 1961 – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. – Wittgenstein
??
Nor this old (defunct?) blog: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com (“Who Bullies the Bullies?” – 2014)
The Three Languages of Politics
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Languages-Politics-Talking-Political/dp/1944424466/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506616389&sr=1-1&keywords=three+languages+of+politics
Present company excepted of course, but almost all these articles bemoaning “divisiveness” and hand-wringing over tribalism seem completely intellectually dishonest to me. Really as dishonest as any politician using some trope campaign slogan. Let me explain.
Unity is one of those purposefully vague and ill-defined “abstract art” / Rorschach test value-expressing words like “justice” or “freedom”. When used in that vague way, everyone can agree that the value is good and we should all hope to have things run more in accordance with that value. But the devil’s in the details. As soon as one starts asking, “Well, what do you mean by justice?” one realizes that a lot of people think it means the government must be colorblind, and a lot of other people believe it means the exact opposite, that is, the government must not be colorblind, and instead must have racial preferences.
That’s part of what lets each side blame the other for “divisiveness”, since the details of what we are all supposed to be unified about are so diametrically opposed. Is identity politics “divisive”, or are we all supposed to be unified in terms of caring for members of “oppressed” identity groups? In patriotism “apolitical” or “conservative political correctness”?
I suppose one could argue that a function of good statesmanship (or responsible public intellectualism) in extremely fractious and polarized times like ours would be to do one’s best to exploit these ambiguous tropes and paper over our real and deep differences in order to preserve some shred of social harmony if, though nothing else, than via delusion and ignorance and a kind of “consensual hallucination” about there being more cohesion than there really is.
But there’s no way to do that without a cooperate-cooperate equilibrium in which no side tries to burn our society’s “comity capital” by fomenting discord via politically profitable agitprop.
So a more intellectually honest way to write about solving “division” would be to provide some details of a “truce” and explain what exactly one is willing to give up on one’s own side for the sake of “unity” with the other side. What structural arrangements that may occasionally disadvantage one’s own side that one is willing to tolerate in exchange for the peace. What is one willing to do to take away the currently irresistible temptations to burn comity capital for one’s own political advantages.
For example, one proposal could be to recognize that that the judiciary has arrogated so much legislative and executive power to itself that it is really a kind of supervisor government, the super-legislature and super-executive. And this fact raises the stakes of presidential contests to an extreme.
A potential solution to this state of affairs would be to reorganize the Supreme and Appellate Courts into “bipartisan commissions” with equal numbers of seats belonging to the Majority and Minority parties, with vacancies to be filled by that party, and with those parties having the option for recall and replacement for Justices or judges occupying one of the party’s seats. So, for example, the Supreme Court and each circuit court of appeals would have 4 progressives and 4 conservatives forever. That would create a “filibuster era”-like need for consensus (or at least occasional defection from the other side) to do, well, pretty much anything of regional or national significance. And, in a polarized era, that means nearly nothing gets done, which is exactly what one needs if one needs to absolutely minimize either side’s perception that they are about to get railroaded by the other side in some zero-sum contest.
There are all kind of possibilities and ways to pursue this theme, but notice that nobody actually seems to care about any of that. And to the extent they are willing to “give anything up”, it always seems to be the things they already don’t like, and would like the allies on their own side to give up, as opposed to demonstrating any kind of willingness to forgo some personally valued goal.
So this is what makes me conclude that all this complaining and anxiety about “divisiveness” and “polarization” and “tribalism” is mostly and merely a form of empty virtue-signalling. It is the socially desirable thing one is supposed to say in certain circles. But for 99% of writers, it really seems to be little more than a pose, without anyone’s heart really being in it, that is, really willing to do what is necessary to ensure peace in our time.
I would like to add another observation of intellectual dishonesty to the excellent comment above. Sullivan writes,
It is dishonest to portray what are largely the outcome of the dominant tribe’s actions as some kind of natural process, and then turn around and implicitly demand that the other tribe accept this framing and debate on how to accommodate these outcomes. This might have worked a couple of decades ago, when tribalism was less strong and people would have less resistance to accepting such propositions, as well as less access to information undermining them. Now this gambit serves only to inflame tribalism further.