one reason I think a global sense of ethical or tribal solidarity is very difficult to achieve is that one of the key ingredients of tribal solidarity is opposition to an “other.” Global religions still define themselves — in practical terms — as opposed to some other religious view or group. Johnson’s point about cosmopolitanism is a good one, but it overlooks the fact that many of the cosmopolitans, or “globalists,” very much act like a tribe pitted against what they consider to be the populist rubes beneath them. As Ross Douthat notes, the cosmopolitans are a tribe, too.
He is not the first person to make these points. Nor will he be the last. The essay and the several of the links are worth your time.
The rubes say that they feel attached to a particular place. They claim to find value in, and are fond of, whatever it is that makes it somewhere in particular instead of just anywhere.
But there are other people, gifted with the ability to read minds, who can reveal that the rubes are actually just Nazi Klansmen who hate justice and progress and everything good. The mind-readers have figured out that nobody actually cares about “conserving” anything except for the one thing that their kind always wants to conserve, which is the oppressive Nazi power structure.
So if a Frenchman says that he likes baguettes, the mind-readers can reveal that what he actually likes is white male privilege and colonialism, because he’s a French Nazi, and his true motive is to commit male white corporate oppression. You’re either with us or with the Nazis, because those are the only two options. Either cosmopolitanism or Nazism. A Frenchwoman might call herself conservative or communitarian or patriotic or nationalistic, but she’s lying. If she’s not 100% cosmopolitan, she’s 100% Nazi. Those are the rules.
And yet the weird thing is that even the most cosmopolitan of tourists isn’t flying into France and taking pictures of himself in front of those ordinary French suburban homes that he could have found anywhere back in Connecticut or Ontario. The Frenchiest parts of France are particular to France, and even if you’re completely cosmopolitan and enlightened and holier than thou, still, even then, you want to see some typically French atelier and a typically French Mansard roof. You don’t go to Starbucks. You go to a little cafe and talk about how the rubes are only pretending to feel attached to some particular place. And yet you are yourself attached to the sixth arrondissement. You’re fond of it.
Of course, the globalist/cosmopolitans are a tribe pitted against the deplorable rubes. Campaign insiders said that Hillary’s deplorable comment wasn’t a one-off mistake, but a regular part of her private speeches that was a hit with that crowd, but turned into a political blunder when used on the public national stage.
The best post on this subject is: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Also, Samuel Huntington covered this subject better in his essay-turned-book Clash Of Civilizations. That book is old, but absolutely still relevant. He describes the main tribal unit as civilizations, usually greater than a single nation, except in cases like Japan, which are single nation civilizations. Indian civilization is centered on India but there are peripheral nations part of the same civilization. He describes Russia as the capital nation of the Orthodox Christian civilization which was different from Western Christian Civilization featured in Europe/US/Canada/Australia. I suspect this Eastern vs Western Christian divide had dissipated since the book was written. He describes Mexico as oscillating between being a part of Western Christian Civilization along with the US or a distinct Latin-American civilization. He describes Islam as its own civilization that is less defined by geography.
“The rubes say that they feel attached to a particular place.”
Your comment is sarcastic, but I do think the deplorable “rubes” are less tied to a particular place, than a civilization and identity that is vulnerable to being conquered through immigration and demographic replacement.
Of course, the globalist/cosmopolitans are a tribe pitted against the deplorable rubes.
Leaving aside HRC major fuck-up on deplorables, the main thing Democrats missed in 2016 is many ‘Globalist’ voted Republican. (Also the worst aspect of HRC campaigning was she was terrible at coming back from wrong statements where as Trump was the greatest at saying Mexico Immigrants were Rapist but everybody saying he did not mean it.)
Aren’t the Koch Brothers Globalist? They love free trade and pursue it heavily.
I would suggest for the most part Arnold Kling is more on the Globalist Free Trade side than the deplorable tariff side. Arnold supports free trade and generally avoided seeing that as a key part of the Trump victory. (Most of Trump’s rallies centered on the elite failures on Immigration and Trade with Mexico and China.) So the anti-Bobo Trump heavily campaigned against NAFTA, worst deal ever, and China and Trump is close to set off a global trade war. So Democrats missed that Trump blamed the Clintons for NAFTA outsourced as opposed to Carrier or Koch Brother or Apple.
And China is stopping shipments of Soybeans and who knows what that does for Iowa or Minnesota economy. As Arnold likes to say “Have a Nice Day!”
The unfortunate aspect of 2016 is what does a ‘globalist’ mean? So to a lot of people it meant somebody supporting more free trade and more open borders is best for the economy. And that was my defninition above.
And yes, it did mean to some people a very anti-Semitic slur as well that was floated around the interwebs.
Social status is zero sum, and one can’t be fashionable without someone else being unfashionable, which always sets up a contest of rival solidarities between these groups. There is no problem with these classes having global reach, of high fashion being the same worldwide instead of local, but by its very nature, important status signals can’t be ‘global’ in the sense of ‘everybody’.
As soon as the unfashionable start to adopt the last fashion, it’s not fashionable anymore, and something new is required – the distinction, not the arbitrary style, being of the essence.
Likewise, ideological and political ideas can be fashionable, and there is a whole “intellectual fashion industry” with “ideological entrepreneurs” constantly innovating, proposing, and trying to discover new ideas that will gain traction and acceptance among high status people. Acceptance or rejection of these new moral and political ideas tends to erect barriers and raise the social cost of defecting on even one element of the set.
It’s also a viable political formula in a democracy to collect together all the low-status groups in a society into a coalition which promises to use the power of the state to raise their status and improve their life outcomes at the expense of those who would enjoy high status in the absence of such distortions. That’s true whether one is talking about economic class (as in the old Marxist / Socialist days), or whether one is talking about identity groups that tend to have been disfavored or who have disparate and statistically lower life outcomes.
Any feeling of general solidarity within a single polity or democratic jurisdiction (e.g. a general patriotism or civic nationalism) works against this political formula, and so would be discouraged and undermined via a relentless focus on critical agitprop, to heighten the perceptions of rivalry and oppression, and thus the need to stand together and cooperate in allied political coalition. It’s also a formula that can work ‘globally’ in the sense of ‘an ideological movement and party in every nation’.
In such circumstances, widespread solidarity within a whole polity is something that current progressive political leaders tend to use like a throttle – powering down in times of peace and low external threats, to make the political formula work even better – and powering up in times of high external threats, or when domestic discord tends to go into overload in reciprocal escalations in a positive feedback vicious cycle and needs to be calmed down.
Unfortunately, out political-ideological culture is now running on a kind of unmanaged spontaneous autopilot akin to unconscious sleepwalking, and there simply are no leaders in our elite political class anymore who both appreciate all this and the danger it poses, and who are able or willing to throttle solidarity up and rivalry down again.
Unfortunately for this throttling scheme, widespread solidarity needs a foundation of shared cultural capital to be able to be powered up, and powering it down while stimulating rivalry/divisiveness tends to interfere with the processes that offset the natural depreciation of this shared capital, even if it does not actively destroy it. This capital used to be so plentiful that depletion was not of immediate concern and the political gains of the scheme prevailed over long-term prudence if there was any, but these days, the question is whether there is enough of it left to throttle solidarity back up to anywhere near levels that obtained in the lives of those present, given realistic threat levels (i.e. I imagine an alien invasion would still work, but a non-nuclear foreign war definitely wouldn’t, and I’m not too sure about nuclear).
This relates to our discussion of postmodernism and epistemology a few posts down, as it seems to be impossible to have a society without broad agreement on to some set of assertions which are not, objectively, true. A society fundamentally is the agreements by a set of people to live their lives a certain set of ways, and objective truths limit but do not fully define the ways we live (e.g. there are societies where everybody agrees not to eat pork, but no societies where everybody agrees not to breathe). What’s more, objective truth has very little to say about why we should bother living in the first place and what goals we should pursue while we do.
See also: https://samzdat.com/2018/03/07/everything-is-going-according-to-plan/
1. Likewise, ideological and political ideas can be fashionable, and there is a whole “intellectual fashion industry” with “ideological entrepreneurs” constantly innovating, proposing, and trying to discover new ideas that will gain traction and acceptance among high status people.
2. Acceptance or rejection of these new moral and political ideas tends to erect barriers and raise the social cost of defecting on even one element of the set.
Sorry, but these two sentences can’t both be accurate. I think you need to pick one.
Handle’s post suggests that absent the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent three and a half years of near-total war, America would have flown apart. Instead, the conduct of the War gave us the capital that Candide III talks about.
White Nationalists seem to have a trans national tribe going on. I think we will see this more and more.
The Cathedral already has, and has had since after WWII, a transnational tribe going on thousands of times stronger than anything WNs have. It was markedly less transnational between the two world wars, and even less so before WWI, but it was there.
Skepticism about judgments of groups of other people and their thought patterns is never a bad idea. This may well be the case with the current popularity of “tribalism.” I would like to give people more credit for their individual decisions to align with this side or that side, but maybe proponents of the “tribalism” diagnoses are right. I think many more people than not take deeply introspective looks at what they believe and why and come to conclusions thoughtfully. Professor Bainbridge recently made an excellent profession that is undoubtedly more sophisticated and learned that that I or indeed most people could make, but is exemplary of what many people, including myself, would aspire to. The post is entitled “My personal evolution towards a right of center populism” (see: http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/archives.html ) and it provides a detailed analysis of the thinkers and writings that he understands to have shaped his views. It is bold and courageous for taking an unpopular position without a lot of defensiveness and with a lot of credit to others. Most Americans would love to be able to lay their cards on the table in a similar manner but for one reason or another don’t. My personal failing in this regard is that I am motivated by an unshakeable belief that the US’s winner-take-all electoral system forces a lot of people into taking sides when they would much prefer nuanced alternatives. And that we would all be much happier with multi-party proportional representation. A very hard sell that not many are willing to buy so mostly I don’t share political views with anyone in real life and rarely bother reacting to anyone else’s views. I wonder how many others are out there who also just nod quietly when subjected to the arguments of the two sides we are stuck with and wish they would both just go away.
Enlightenment
The introduction of the scientific method transformed society by using science and reason rather than political or religious dogma to explain natural phenomena.
Quoted from history.com seems to be a tribal phenomena, like the old religions. Then we had the quantum mechanical school of physics, a tribe of sorts. I think we might be seeing some new ‘enlightenment’ from advances in mathematics, and that is a tribal affair.
Thanks Handle:
Social status is zero sum, and one can’t be fashionable without someone else being unfashionable
Unlike wealth creation, which can be positive sum, all status is zero sum. It used to be Harvard Yale Princeton, but now it’s Harvard Stanford Yale … and Princeton, tho far more often written without Princeton rather than with. Gold Silver Bronze — plus participation.
Solidarity, tribal or otherwise, is almost always based on objection to some specific injustice. Vietnam anti-war; same-sex marriage anti-homophobe; anti-Klan racists; anti-sexist abusers. These and so many other existing injustices.
It is far more difficult to get agreement on “What Is To Be Done” (Lenin) than on most aspects of the injustice. Justice is a gray area.
Racism is a subset of tribalism. Capitalism & private property help reduce tribalism — I don’t care what tribe you’re in, as long as you buy my stuff — as long as you sell me stuff I want — as long as we can work together.
The new Dem tactic of excluding MAGA hat wearers is a huge, anti-capitalist, tribalist assault on living together in peace. The Dems need to lose more elections, and have a bigger return to prior, normal-supporting tolerant laws plus practices.
Dem KKK tribal members were persecuting blacks for a hundred years after the Civil War; German Nazi tribal members were persecuting Jews. The current Dem tribe wants to persecute Trump supporters in a similarly intolerant way.