"Strangers what we know" - bloody stupid tribalism
There is an episode in the classic 1958 graphic novel, G. O. Fizzickle Pogo, in which the space race is the all-consuming subject of conversation, and the thought that the terrible Rooshians might get there first, fills the more patriotic swamp denizens with ire. One of the most romantic and impetuous of them vows to get there first, and once there, to patrol the moon, making sure no Communists arrive there, and if they try, to fling them off as they touch down (luring them to the point of the crescent and pushing them off) because no strangers should be allowed to profane the sacred surface of the moon with their foreign feet.
One of the more pragmatic characters points out that the US is also planning a moon landing, and those space travelers will also be strangers, when they arrive. What, then, to do? The principle is in danger: how to apply it?
The dialectic progresses; the crisis is resolved. It is simple, you see:
Strangers what we know is different.There is an old joke of the class of the hirsute canid which has been told a score or more of different ways, but at heart remains the same.
--A man is caught out at night after dark in Belfast during the Troubles, himself not a strong partisan of either side, just someone trying to keep his head down and avoid trouble in all respects. Alas, he is caught while hurrying home late by a couple of armed, masked men, who grab him from behind and hiss, "Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?"
Since he does not know which side these guys are on, not being able to tell whether they're Provos or Paras, and not caring anything much for the idea of dying gloriously for the Cause - any Cause - he can't think what to say, in spite of or because of them pointing guns at him menacingly.
Then he has a brainflash, and answers, "I'm an athiest."
His captors are stumped for a moment.
Then one of them gets his wits about him and asks, "Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist, then?"True story, local story, heard and half-remembered from a couple years ago:
A recently-immigrated family originally from India asked the mother of one of their kids' schoolfriends if she could recommend a good dentist in the area. She did so, enthusiastically, but at his name the Indian mother froze up, and she realized belatedly that their dentist was, oops, Moslem, and while this wasn't a problem for them personally, a Hindu family might feel differently.
Do you know where he's from? the newly-arrived mom asked warily.
It turned out the long-time resident did - she'd asked, and it was Iran or Iraq, somewhere in the Fertile Crescent.
Ah, said the Indian mother, relaxing. --What's his phone number?
The point of all of these stories (well, one point) is the mutability, and the essential meaninglessness of any particular set of signifiers, apart from context. Both aspects are crucial to understanding each of them properly, in themselves, and as signposts to human experience. In the first skit, our stalwart Terran heroes are stirred to impassioned, if imagined, defense of the Moon as a symbol - against other symbols. It is their Moon, they feel a proprietary impulse towards it, not merely in the crass territorial sense but in a protective way, as something which should not be filled up with junk and trash and advertising, at first, and as something to which they, and they alone, have a proper claim towards, above all other nations, as Americans, by virtue of their ipse facto superior virtue. They have a Duty: the Moon must be protected from commercial desecrators and enemy agents alike. The principle seems clear - they will find a way to get there first and drive off all strangers who arrive.
But then confusion is brought upon them, by the simple problem that by doing so as Americans, rather than as a band of random friends with a reverence for the Moon, they admit the authority of the US government, and so any hypothetical agents of America ought to have equal right to be there. The conflict is created now by the apparently-unresolvable premise that No strangers are to be allowed on our Moon being incompatible with Strange federal agents must be allowed on the Moon.
"Pogo" is a work of surrealism, whimsy, and darkly-detached irony by an ex-Disney animator, who well knew how to turn apple-cheeked cuteness into something at once sinister and endearing. The "paradox" which rascally trio Howland Owl, Albert Alligator, and Churchy the Turtle find themselves in is as flimsy and lighthearted in its absurdity as anything in the Marx Brothers, or the old folktale of the Three Sillies - but under this McCarthy era cartoon there is a deep, dark, subversive undercurrent running.
Thus, the conclusion that resolves the hypothetical dilemma touches on the core of American identity in the 1950s - who is we? what gives us special privileges, when at every point, anyone can point to our own particular and collective failings? Why should we trust those in authority over us, when we do not and cannot know them as persons, only abstractions? Why should we assume that they have our own interests at heart, simply because we share a three-thousand-mile wide address?
Strangers what we know are different. They just are. We don't need to think about it more than that. In fact, don't - the illusion that we know them, that they're us, won't hold up to scrutiny.
In the second story, it should be clear - should be, but of course, isn't - to everyone that what is at stake here has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and everything to do with political identity, or politics after a fashion. Dressed up in denominational garb, coded into apparent nonsense, the question still is not gibberish at bottom: "Protestant" and "Catholic" have become signifiers for something else less definable, less tangible, some nebulous-but-meaningful self-separation of ourselves into Us and Other, the only way we have of telling Them when we all look, sound, and dress the same, and share an awful lot of the same DNA, too, despite all systematic and informal efforts to stop people from screwing with strangers. The Paras weren't/aren't fighting over the Doctrine of Transubstantiation versus the Ordination of Bishops in the True Succession from Peter. A good many of them didn't even go to church!
But beyond all that, the fighting dated back to the time when there was no such thing as Protestantism, when all Europe was Catholic, or Cathar, or Albigensian, or Jew. By no logical facility can such a conflict, though enduring into a time when sects have come into existence, be called a conflict over religion - no more than a couple who have been arguing since breakfast over money and then vacation, now at dinner furiously disagreeing over what to have for dinner, are actually fighting about food, no matter what they say and offer as explanation for the quarrel. Beware the False Because: no dispute which predates the existence of and endures beyond the importance of the claimed subject, can actually have that as its generation. It's nothing but an excuse. --As can be seen by the fact that the objects of argument are not religious symbols in the conventional sense, but the heraldry of ancient Houses.
(Like I said, you can always count on some people failing to grasp anything. Those guys burning cars in Dublin the other day weren't doing it to shouts of "In the name of the Blessed Virgin".)
This becomes even clearer, in the third story, which is a real one, and not a fable, except in as much as I am using it as one now. Theology didn't matter - even though you can find it being used on both sides of the argument, far more so than among the Christians of Northern Ireland, in the most heated and immoderate partisan websites. Religious customs weren't at issue - that was quickly cleared up, too. It wasn't even ethnicity, at least not in the narrow genetic sense - having a name that signified Persian ancestry was not the real problem, it was just the raised possibility of the real problem.
--Which started (for X value of "to start") with Babur Shah, or rather with the Rajput kings' kinstrife and rivalries, and the series of political dominoes going back to whosis, Temujin? (not a historian, just play one on the 'net) and the vacuums of power that led to the coalescing of the Mughal empire out of a bunch of restless cowboys and their families. And hasn't ended, because the chances to avert or repair (meaning minimize) the original damage of invasion and conquest were thrown away or mishandled or otherwise lost until it was too late and another bunch of invading conquerers had stepped in Knowing A Good Thing When They Saw It, and proceeded to screw the place up even worse than before, some by accident, some on purpose, on the general principle that if your underlings are busy fighting each other, they won't unite and turn on you. Which is a good policy, as good as the one guy who figured out the solution to riding the tiger was to Roman-ride two tigers at once--
No, that didn't work out very well, either. For any of them.
People don't really fight over old things that happened a long time ago. That's a convenient myth, told by anempathic outsiders who just want to feel smug and superior and justified in ignoring or dismissing the issues, as if by waving one's hand and saying "you two should stop fighting, it's silly to argue over whether rice or potatoes with stake" is going to stop our quarrelling-since-sunrise couple, when it isn't dinner they're fighting over, any more than it was $27 not written down in the checkbook from the ATM yesterday at lunch, it's everything--
It's always about property. Property, and personality. Because property isn't just stuff, when you get down to the thin end of the wedge, not when you're poor. It's time, it's your time, it's life itself - your past hours, and your future. It may be meager, shabby, rags and tatters, but it's all you've got that's tangible. And then there's the intangible, which is more important than all things, self-respect.
From the other end, those who are prosperous can never have enough, let alone too much - anything which even raises the possibility of putting a crimp in potential acquisition is intolerable, thus are mad regimens sold on the basis of "tax cuts", and wars - even if the truth-tellers must be shrieked into silence because we know on the deep level that killing poor people to take their stuff is wrong. And despite claims that ethnic conflicts are all "really" only about class, that is, wealth - that isn't so. Or there would not be such effort (across timespace, knowing no boundaries) to ensure that the "wrong" people didn't move out and up, that the select few right folks weren't forced to give up and move down. How dare they get above themselves/How tragic, that some former aristo of the old regime is now forced to work as a waiter--
Old conflicts ostensibly "about" religion are actually and always tribal battles over territory and authority and privilege. Religion is just one of many overlapping ways of demarcating the line between "us" and "them" more or less visibly - it isn't actually the religious belief, it's the peripherals that are visible, of course - and said peripherals are themselves dependent for their shape on local culture and custom and the changing times. If it were not so, Iberian-descended Catholics would not (some of them) flog themselves and crucify themselves during Holy Week, or other, more northern Catholics would, instead of being horrified at it. And all of us, or none, would be vegans like the Eastern Rites at Lent. And we would still baptise only adults, and in running water, and in the nude. --Just to name a few. And there wouldn't be any schisms or heresies, either.
But obviously cultural change morphs religion along with it, just as culture itself morphs, mutating internally and changing in response to new cultures encountered. Only the utterly ignorant or willfully-blind think otherwise, of their own or outsiders'. We in the Christian West™ don't still have trials by hot iron and combat; we've gotten a lot more serious about the rules regarding disposal of night-soil than we were even a hundred years ago, to the point of being willing to take money away from other things to do so; nobody self-identifies as Langobards or Avars or Visigoths (although people still do as Assyrians, I've met a couple); I haven't seen any men in houppelands or codpieces lately, or women in wimples, except nuns - and that's a conscious "survival" of ancient custom, and they don't look anything the same as the 1300s versions. We don't force Jewish citizens to wear funny hats now, and we don't "hang men and women for the wearin' o' the green." Us/Them changes (and always has.)
Costume/custom are difficult to anchor identity on, because you put them on and off, and without an anchor for them in something else, they don't work - people can put on different clothes. And appearance doesn't work too well either, since there's no such thing as Purity of Blood and never was, because as I said earlier, nobody in all of human history has been able to make people stop fucking (which is why the "just keep your knees together" admonishments to replace contraception are so naive) and no amount of social pressure has been able to stop us from having sex with strangers. Voluntary or not - but from the point of view of the tribalists, voluntary is worse than rape.
[for the following section, insert your own nation, and number of population]
The fiction that "we" are all Americans, or that this means anything - that I should be able, have an obligation to trust people more merely by virtue of sharing a legal class of address 3000+ miles long, trust those strangers-what-we-know more than anyone else, despite knowing all too well that I share that same international legal address with monsters who given the chance will steal my silverware, rape me, rape my children, shoot my cat, run me over and leave me bleeding in the road if they can get away with it. --People who look, sound, dress, worship, and vote just the same as me.
Somehow, knowing all the offenses committed against me and mine and other people in the area, I'm supposed to privilege sight-unseen 295,000,000 strangers with automatic superior trust, and then within that nearly 300 million I'm supposed to additionally privilege subgroups all of them thousands, even tens, hundreds of thousands, based on a variety of factors starting with how much more like me they look, how much DNA we share from more than 20 generations back, how much outward-formal alliegance to a set of rituals and doctrines they profess, how much money and political power they already have --that's tribalism.
That's what Tribalism looks like, taken out of the Bronze Age, given a modern haircut and mousse and a shave and a suit and a briefcase instead of an axe. It doesn't have to be so blatant as making one set of rules for one group, one set for another, or even just applying one set of rules unequally; it's the base from which those things arise.
Tribalism allows you to notice and make much of the sins that others commit, while remaining completely oblivious of and/or silent about your own sides' sins (past and present); or deny that they carry any weight, affect in any way the ipse facto superiority of your chosen primary self-identification. --Which itself changes, even hourly, depending on the rhetorical and emotional need. (This happens all the time in Pogo and is always illustrative: the characters go in their own heads from being first and foremost dogs/gators/possums/turtles/skunks/owls/porcupines to being members of a particular distinguished family to being Southerners indignant at being called "yanks" to being red-blooded Americans to being radical individuals/existential free agents, and back again in the blink of an eye.)
Tribalism allows you to think that emotional fantasies, imaginary constructs, and abstract theories matter more than concrete reality when dealing with the world. To pretend that imbalances of power are irrelevant, and past histories of abuse, and that fictional narratives of victimhood (they made us invade them/expel them/exterminate them!) by the aggressors and power brokers are automatically more reliable, because, well, they're told by strangers what we know.
Italians stab, beat 15 British football fans this week
(In 59 AD/CE, the amphitheatre at Pompeii was closed and Pompeii barred from sporting events for ten years, after neighboring Nucerians were beaten, stabbed and killed in sports riots there.)Tribalism allows you think that you don't need to know the facts about strangers, so long as they're outside your group. They're Other, and you already know everything important just from that. (If the words Hausa, Yoruba, Biafra mean nothing to you, then you probably shouldn't be making any statements whatsoever about Nigeria - except "I need to do some research", not if you want to be part of the reality-based community.) Our own chiefs know best, at least when it comes to walloping on strangers what we don't know.
-Another true story: earlier this week I stopped at the newly-opened Asian market in my neighborhood; unlike the other corner stores in this quadrant of the city, run by Indian or Pakistani families, it sells Indian and Pakistani food and other imports, not Campbell's Soup and Pringles. I spent an hour or so chatting with the owner, Omar, whose family has lived in the state as long as mine, about all kinds of things - how much the local cultural climate has changed in the past two decades, how much more adventurous in terms of food and film, illustrated by a story about how years ago they'd brought a dish to the company Christmas potluck, and the initial fear-of-spices of his coworkers, about the differences in Indian and Pakistani cuisine - because they have Hindu friends and associates they swap recipes with, and what kinds of products they hope to add to their selection, particularly frozen vegetarian meals as well as halal ones. I'll stop by again soon to pick up more naan - but not tonight after work, because it's Friday, and there's a little notice under the hours that they'll be closed for prayers then. --I'll also be careful driving home, because the local city tradition is to start drinking at dawn (or even before, I am told), in honor of the folk-hero whose day it is, and not to stop until bar closing time (which is early tomorrow morning) or even later, at home.
--Tribalism is what allows you to think that you're perfectly sane and reasonable, and so are all those 295 million of your best friends - it's just all those other people out there who are crazy, when your own leaders and their appointed representatives are doing, at a bare minimum, exactly what the "crazy" strangers are doing, and very often much worse.
Sir Rupert Murdoch wants a genocide.
I repeat: Sir Rupert Murdoch of the Hegemony wants a genocide. And we're going to nie wieder right along with it again.
--Have a nice day.
One of the more pragmatic characters points out that the US is also planning a moon landing, and those space travelers will also be strangers, when they arrive. What, then, to do? The principle is in danger: how to apply it?
The dialectic progresses; the crisis is resolved. It is simple, you see:
Strangers what we know is different.There is an old joke of the class of the hirsute canid which has been told a score or more of different ways, but at heart remains the same.
--A man is caught out at night after dark in Belfast during the Troubles, himself not a strong partisan of either side, just someone trying to keep his head down and avoid trouble in all respects. Alas, he is caught while hurrying home late by a couple of armed, masked men, who grab him from behind and hiss, "Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?"
Since he does not know which side these guys are on, not being able to tell whether they're Provos or Paras, and not caring anything much for the idea of dying gloriously for the Cause - any Cause - he can't think what to say, in spite of or because of them pointing guns at him menacingly.
Then he has a brainflash, and answers, "I'm an athiest."
His captors are stumped for a moment.
Then one of them gets his wits about him and asks, "Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist, then?"True story, local story, heard and half-remembered from a couple years ago:
A recently-immigrated family originally from India asked the mother of one of their kids' schoolfriends if she could recommend a good dentist in the area. She did so, enthusiastically, but at his name the Indian mother froze up, and she realized belatedly that their dentist was, oops, Moslem, and while this wasn't a problem for them personally, a Hindu family might feel differently.
Do you know where he's from? the newly-arrived mom asked warily.
It turned out the long-time resident did - she'd asked, and it was Iran or Iraq, somewhere in the Fertile Crescent.
Ah, said the Indian mother, relaxing. --What's his phone number?
The point of all of these stories (well, one point) is the mutability, and the essential meaninglessness of any particular set of signifiers, apart from context. Both aspects are crucial to understanding each of them properly, in themselves, and as signposts to human experience. In the first skit, our stalwart Terran heroes are stirred to impassioned, if imagined, defense of the Moon as a symbol - against other symbols. It is their Moon, they feel a proprietary impulse towards it, not merely in the crass territorial sense but in a protective way, as something which should not be filled up with junk and trash and advertising, at first, and as something to which they, and they alone, have a proper claim towards, above all other nations, as Americans, by virtue of their ipse facto superior virtue. They have a Duty: the Moon must be protected from commercial desecrators and enemy agents alike. The principle seems clear - they will find a way to get there first and drive off all strangers who arrive.
But then confusion is brought upon them, by the simple problem that by doing so as Americans, rather than as a band of random friends with a reverence for the Moon, they admit the authority of the US government, and so any hypothetical agents of America ought to have equal right to be there. The conflict is created now by the apparently-unresolvable premise that No strangers are to be allowed on our Moon being incompatible with Strange federal agents must be allowed on the Moon.
"Pogo" is a work of surrealism, whimsy, and darkly-detached irony by an ex-Disney animator, who well knew how to turn apple-cheeked cuteness into something at once sinister and endearing. The "paradox" which rascally trio Howland Owl, Albert Alligator, and Churchy the Turtle find themselves in is as flimsy and lighthearted in its absurdity as anything in the Marx Brothers, or the old folktale of the Three Sillies - but under this McCarthy era cartoon there is a deep, dark, subversive undercurrent running.
Thus, the conclusion that resolves the hypothetical dilemma touches on the core of American identity in the 1950s - who is we? what gives us special privileges, when at every point, anyone can point to our own particular and collective failings? Why should we trust those in authority over us, when we do not and cannot know them as persons, only abstractions? Why should we assume that they have our own interests at heart, simply because we share a three-thousand-mile wide address?
Strangers what we know are different. They just are. We don't need to think about it more than that. In fact, don't - the illusion that we know them, that they're us, won't hold up to scrutiny.
In the second story, it should be clear - should be, but of course, isn't - to everyone that what is at stake here has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and everything to do with political identity, or politics after a fashion. Dressed up in denominational garb, coded into apparent nonsense, the question still is not gibberish at bottom: "Protestant" and "Catholic" have become signifiers for something else less definable, less tangible, some nebulous-but-meaningful self-separation of ourselves into Us and Other, the only way we have of telling Them when we all look, sound, and dress the same, and share an awful lot of the same DNA, too, despite all systematic and informal efforts to stop people from screwing with strangers. The Paras weren't/aren't fighting over the Doctrine of Transubstantiation versus the Ordination of Bishops in the True Succession from Peter. A good many of them didn't even go to church!
But beyond all that, the fighting dated back to the time when there was no such thing as Protestantism, when all Europe was Catholic, or Cathar, or Albigensian, or Jew. By no logical facility can such a conflict, though enduring into a time when sects have come into existence, be called a conflict over religion - no more than a couple who have been arguing since breakfast over money and then vacation, now at dinner furiously disagreeing over what to have for dinner, are actually fighting about food, no matter what they say and offer as explanation for the quarrel. Beware the False Because: no dispute which predates the existence of and endures beyond the importance of the claimed subject, can actually have that as its generation. It's nothing but an excuse. --As can be seen by the fact that the objects of argument are not religious symbols in the conventional sense, but the heraldry of ancient Houses.
(Like I said, you can always count on some people failing to grasp anything. Those guys burning cars in Dublin the other day weren't doing it to shouts of "In the name of the Blessed Virgin".)
This becomes even clearer, in the third story, which is a real one, and not a fable, except in as much as I am using it as one now. Theology didn't matter - even though you can find it being used on both sides of the argument, far more so than among the Christians of Northern Ireland, in the most heated and immoderate partisan websites. Religious customs weren't at issue - that was quickly cleared up, too. It wasn't even ethnicity, at least not in the narrow genetic sense - having a name that signified Persian ancestry was not the real problem, it was just the raised possibility of the real problem.
--Which started (for X value of "to start") with Babur Shah, or rather with the Rajput kings' kinstrife and rivalries, and the series of political dominoes going back to whosis, Temujin? (not a historian, just play one on the 'net) and the vacuums of power that led to the coalescing of the Mughal empire out of a bunch of restless cowboys and their families. And hasn't ended, because the chances to avert or repair (meaning minimize) the original damage of invasion and conquest were thrown away or mishandled or otherwise lost until it was too late and another bunch of invading conquerers had stepped in Knowing A Good Thing When They Saw It, and proceeded to screw the place up even worse than before, some by accident, some on purpose, on the general principle that if your underlings are busy fighting each other, they won't unite and turn on you. Which is a good policy, as good as the one guy who figured out the solution to riding the tiger was to Roman-ride two tigers at once--
No, that didn't work out very well, either. For any of them.
People don't really fight over old things that happened a long time ago. That's a convenient myth, told by anempathic outsiders who just want to feel smug and superior and justified in ignoring or dismissing the issues, as if by waving one's hand and saying "you two should stop fighting, it's silly to argue over whether rice or potatoes with stake" is going to stop our quarrelling-since-sunrise couple, when it isn't dinner they're fighting over, any more than it was $27 not written down in the checkbook from the ATM yesterday at lunch, it's everything--
It's always about property. Property, and personality. Because property isn't just stuff, when you get down to the thin end of the wedge, not when you're poor. It's time, it's your time, it's life itself - your past hours, and your future. It may be meager, shabby, rags and tatters, but it's all you've got that's tangible. And then there's the intangible, which is more important than all things, self-respect.
From the other end, those who are prosperous can never have enough, let alone too much - anything which even raises the possibility of putting a crimp in potential acquisition is intolerable, thus are mad regimens sold on the basis of "tax cuts", and wars - even if the truth-tellers must be shrieked into silence because we know on the deep level that killing poor people to take their stuff is wrong. And despite claims that ethnic conflicts are all "really" only about class, that is, wealth - that isn't so. Or there would not be such effort (across timespace, knowing no boundaries) to ensure that the "wrong" people didn't move out and up, that the select few right folks weren't forced to give up and move down. How dare they get above themselves/How tragic, that some former aristo of the old regime is now forced to work as a waiter--
Old conflicts ostensibly "about" religion are actually and always tribal battles over territory and authority and privilege. Religion is just one of many overlapping ways of demarcating the line between "us" and "them" more or less visibly - it isn't actually the religious belief, it's the peripherals that are visible, of course - and said peripherals are themselves dependent for their shape on local culture and custom and the changing times. If it were not so, Iberian-descended Catholics would not (some of them) flog themselves and crucify themselves during Holy Week, or other, more northern Catholics would, instead of being horrified at it. And all of us, or none, would be vegans like the Eastern Rites at Lent. And we would still baptise only adults, and in running water, and in the nude. --Just to name a few. And there wouldn't be any schisms or heresies, either.
But obviously cultural change morphs religion along with it, just as culture itself morphs, mutating internally and changing in response to new cultures encountered. Only the utterly ignorant or willfully-blind think otherwise, of their own or outsiders'. We in the Christian West™ don't still have trials by hot iron and combat; we've gotten a lot more serious about the rules regarding disposal of night-soil than we were even a hundred years ago, to the point of being willing to take money away from other things to do so; nobody self-identifies as Langobards or Avars or Visigoths (although people still do as Assyrians, I've met a couple); I haven't seen any men in houppelands or codpieces lately, or women in wimples, except nuns - and that's a conscious "survival" of ancient custom, and they don't look anything the same as the 1300s versions. We don't force Jewish citizens to wear funny hats now, and we don't "hang men and women for the wearin' o' the green." Us/Them changes (and always has.)
Costume/custom are difficult to anchor identity on, because you put them on and off, and without an anchor for them in something else, they don't work - people can put on different clothes. And appearance doesn't work too well either, since there's no such thing as Purity of Blood and never was, because as I said earlier, nobody in all of human history has been able to make people stop fucking (which is why the "just keep your knees together" admonishments to replace contraception are so naive) and no amount of social pressure has been able to stop us from having sex with strangers. Voluntary or not - but from the point of view of the tribalists, voluntary is worse than rape.
[for the following section, insert your own nation, and number of population]
The fiction that "we" are all Americans, or that this means anything - that I should be able, have an obligation to trust people more merely by virtue of sharing a legal class of address 3000+ miles long, trust those strangers-what-we-know more than anyone else, despite knowing all too well that I share that same international legal address with monsters who given the chance will steal my silverware, rape me, rape my children, shoot my cat, run me over and leave me bleeding in the road if they can get away with it. --People who look, sound, dress, worship, and vote just the same as me.
Somehow, knowing all the offenses committed against me and mine and other people in the area, I'm supposed to privilege sight-unseen 295,000,000 strangers with automatic superior trust, and then within that nearly 300 million I'm supposed to additionally privilege subgroups all of them thousands, even tens, hundreds of thousands, based on a variety of factors starting with how much more like me they look, how much DNA we share from more than 20 generations back, how much outward-formal alliegance to a set of rituals and doctrines they profess, how much money and political power they already have --that's tribalism.
That's what Tribalism looks like, taken out of the Bronze Age, given a modern haircut and mousse and a shave and a suit and a briefcase instead of an axe. It doesn't have to be so blatant as making one set of rules for one group, one set for another, or even just applying one set of rules unequally; it's the base from which those things arise.
Tribalism allows you to notice and make much of the sins that others commit, while remaining completely oblivious of and/or silent about your own sides' sins (past and present); or deny that they carry any weight, affect in any way the ipse facto superiority of your chosen primary self-identification. --Which itself changes, even hourly, depending on the rhetorical and emotional need. (This happens all the time in Pogo and is always illustrative: the characters go in their own heads from being first and foremost dogs/gators/possums/turtles/skunks/owls/porcupines to being members of a particular distinguished family to being Southerners indignant at being called "yanks" to being red-blooded Americans to being radical individuals/existential free agents, and back again in the blink of an eye.)
Tribalism allows you to think that emotional fantasies, imaginary constructs, and abstract theories matter more than concrete reality when dealing with the world. To pretend that imbalances of power are irrelevant, and past histories of abuse, and that fictional narratives of victimhood (they made us invade them/expel them/exterminate them!) by the aggressors and power brokers are automatically more reliable, because, well, they're told by strangers what we know.
Italians stab, beat 15 British football fans this week
(In 59 AD/CE, the amphitheatre at Pompeii was closed and Pompeii barred from sporting events for ten years, after neighboring Nucerians were beaten, stabbed and killed in sports riots there.)Tribalism allows you think that you don't need to know the facts about strangers, so long as they're outside your group. They're Other, and you already know everything important just from that. (If the words Hausa, Yoruba, Biafra mean nothing to you, then you probably shouldn't be making any statements whatsoever about Nigeria - except "I need to do some research", not if you want to be part of the reality-based community.) Our own chiefs know best, at least when it comes to walloping on strangers what we don't know.
-Another true story: earlier this week I stopped at the newly-opened Asian market in my neighborhood; unlike the other corner stores in this quadrant of the city, run by Indian or Pakistani families, it sells Indian and Pakistani food and other imports, not Campbell's Soup and Pringles. I spent an hour or so chatting with the owner, Omar, whose family has lived in the state as long as mine, about all kinds of things - how much the local cultural climate has changed in the past two decades, how much more adventurous in terms of food and film, illustrated by a story about how years ago they'd brought a dish to the company Christmas potluck, and the initial fear-of-spices of his coworkers, about the differences in Indian and Pakistani cuisine - because they have Hindu friends and associates they swap recipes with, and what kinds of products they hope to add to their selection, particularly frozen vegetarian meals as well as halal ones. I'll stop by again soon to pick up more naan - but not tonight after work, because it's Friday, and there's a little notice under the hours that they'll be closed for prayers then. --I'll also be careful driving home, because the local city tradition is to start drinking at dawn (or even before, I am told), in honor of the folk-hero whose day it is, and not to stop until bar closing time (which is early tomorrow morning) or even later, at home.
--Tribalism is what allows you to think that you're perfectly sane and reasonable, and so are all those 295 million of your best friends - it's just all those other people out there who are crazy, when your own leaders and their appointed representatives are doing, at a bare minimum, exactly what the "crazy" strangers are doing, and very often much worse.
Sir Rupert Murdoch wants a genocide.
I repeat: Sir Rupert Murdoch of the Hegemony wants a genocide. And we're going to nie wieder right along with it again.
--Have a nice day.