Tribalism

My team, my group, my people are great; but you lot are a bunch of losers. Whether it’s sports teams, states, nations, ethnic groups or religions – one’s own are good, and the other lot are not so good, or worse. It’s ridiculously, obviously stupid to take these positions – but many of us so quickly and easily do. Why? In a word – tribalism. Sebastion Junger makes this point in his new book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. In an interview in Time magazine dated June 27, 2016, Junger explains that our sense of connectedness, or identity with, our group is deeply ingrained in us because for most of the last 200,000 years (approximately 10,000 generations) our forebears lived in small hunter-gatherer tribal groups where survival of one’s own tribe was paramount, and often involved being against some other nearby different tribe. Over this long period of time certain aspects of tribalism have become strongly ingrained.

At one point early on the total human population may not have been more than a few thousand. This explains the extraordinary genetic similarity between all humans today.  Which makes this whole tribalism, and feelings of racism, so particularly ironic. But, food was scarce, we lived on the move in small groups, and when one group encountered another there would be both fear and animosity over the scarce hunting provisions, leading often to violent clashes.

As the human population grew and spread, first across Africa and then into other continents, the number of tribes grew greatly. Amongst the many tribes there would be different languages developing; and, as they sat around the camp-fire at night looking in wonderment at the night sky, and fearful of death which was all too present in their short and dangerous lives, religious philosophies also developed.  A more sedentary lifestyle did not emerge until about 8,000 years ago. By then, and in several parts of the world until more recent times, there would have been thousands of tribes, some related through recent descent and bifurcation, but involving literally thousands of different languages, customs and religions. Then over the centuries, either through mergers or more often because of conquerings, the number of different languages and religions have declined. But even today Wikipedia reports 6,900 languages still in existence, and 4,200 religions.

I’m British and was brought up speaking English. My mitochondrial DNA shows that on my mother’s side I am descended from people who have been in the British Isles for as much as 30,000 years!  For much of that time these people would have been hunter-gatherers and at some point speaking various dialects of the Celtic language group. Wonderfully, Irish Gaelic and Welsh and to some extent Scots Gaelic are three Celtic languages still very much in use. When I was young there were still a few older people in Cornwall at the south-west tip of England who spoke Cornish, another Celtic language; but sadly the language has died. There were also rumors of ancient religious ceremonies being carried out rather secretly in Cornwall. I expect that has died out as well.

In Julius Caesar’s diary – I had to read it in the original Latin in school – he writes with disgust of the  naked savages, painted blue, arraigned against his soldiers. Caesar didn’t stay long – we kicked his butt – but nearly a century later the Romans came back and ruled England from 43 – 410 AD. Some of the Celtic tribes cooperated but many didn’t. Recent DNA studies have found evidence of surprisingly little intersex between the Roman occupiers and the Brits. Coming back to tribalism, this is probably explained by a mixture of tribal British hatred of the occupiers, and racial superior thinking by the Italian occupiers.

Towards the end of the Roman rule of England, the Roman Empire suddenly became Christian. The Romans had brutally persecuted the small Christian minority for more than two hundred years when suddenly in 313 AD the Emperor Constantine, who one biographer claims murdered some of his own family to become emperor, declared through the Edict of Milan that Christianity was suddenly the religion of the empire. In his fascinating book Yesterday’s Plague, Tomorrow’s Pandemic? A history of disease throughout the ages, R. Kinsey Dart points out that Rome was hit by a horrifying epidemic during this period, killing many thousands. Dart posits the idea that faced with early and imminent death a religion that promised life after death became very attractive. It surely isn’t a coincidence that the two most popular religions now in the 21^st century – Christianity and Islam - both more clearly than other religions promise life after death – as long as certain conditions are met of course.  

Meanwhile back in England, soon after the Romans left then Saxons and Angles, from what is now mostly Germany, started to come over the North Sea into eastern England. Recent research shows that they came in substantial numbers with their own polytheistic religion, and of course their own language. This might explain why so few Celtic words have survived in the English Anglo-Saxon language of today. One that I’m aware of is ‘combe’ meaning valley, as in the Devonshire town of Ilfracombe, and in a few other place names in Western England. Cymru – pronounced ‘cumri’ (please – my Welsh relatives, forgive any mistakes!) is Wales in Welsh, meaning in effect ‘Land of Valleys’.  As for Christianity, it was re-introduced with the arrival from Rome of Augustine of Canterbury as he became known after establishing a bridgehead in Kent in 596 AD.

One British historian stated that ‘they speak English in America because of a woman with six fingers’!  The woman referred to was Anne Boleyn who Henry VIII took a shine to and so divorced his Catholic wife in order to marry Anne. This grievous sin got him excommunicated by the Pope, and so Henry not only went Protestant but built a big navy to defend England from Catholic European attack. Henry was eventually followed by his and Anne Boleyn’s daughter – Queen Elizabeth I who encouraged her naval explorers Raleigh and Drake to go West, and the rest is history.

Britain used its developing naval power to both expand her empire and along with it her religion of Protestant Christianity. They treated the peoples they conquered, ruled and in some cases converted to their religion, pretty poorly in my view. Much of the British Empire was still in existence when I was in school, and we were all so proud that ‘the sun never set on the British Empire’ (because it straddled so many time zones). European Christians arriving in North America deliberately spread disease in order to kill off the ‘natives who were in the way’. Now, as a Brit, I’m ashamed of my country’s behavior in the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th century in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Our tribalism made us feel racially, and religiously, superior.  I’m sorry.

Now in the 21^st century most of us have improved. There’s more acceptance of people who look or sound different from us, or who have a different religious outlook. There are more marriages across national, racial and religious differences. BUT, we’re also now seeing backlashes. On June 23^rd Britain is holding a referendum to decide whether to stay in the European Union, as many Brits don’t want to have to abide by rules set by a bunch of foreigners. Please Britain – stay with our European colleagues. And here in America one of the candidates for President wants to build a wall between the USA and Mexico, and also keep out all Muslims while keeping a special eye on the several million Muslim Americans. Violence is on the increase, especially in America where it’s easier to buy a machine gun than it is buy some weed-killer chemicals. Much of it takes place in large cities where millions live cheek by jowl with folk who look different, sound different, and behave different. But we’re all humans folks.

Remember that little group of hunter-gatherers gathered around the fire enjoying a nice meal of roast meat brought home by the hunters? They were all closely related, knew each other well, and for the most part enjoyed each other’s company; all the while however keeping an ear out in case some other group crept up on them. Well, we’re still run by some of those same ingrained thoughts and fears. I won’t go so far as to say they’re in our DNA, but all sorts of thinkings, not all of which are that easy to dismiss, are quick to surface when the guy who crosses your path in an unfortunate way, just happens to look or sound different, or dress different, or believe different things. It’s going to take a while for us to grow and adapt; and meanwhile we’re going to need to try a little harder on these points because the next years, wherever we are in the world, are not going to be easy. So I’ll end by asking my friends and family to help me be a little better in this respect. We can and will evolve into something better, and love our neighbor whoever she might be. He was Jewish, and he nailed it when two thousand years ago he said simply ‘love your enemy’. I’m going to keep trying.