Notes from ‘Tribe’
As someone who has always believed in the value of community, I found Sebastian Junger’s ‘Tribe’ that not only confirmed my beliefs on the subject but gave words to its value that I never had before.
The author’s thesis seems to be, quite simply, that we are built for community, and being alone and isolated leads to catastrophic problems within our psyche. He begins the book by sharing an experience where he was given a meal by a clearly poor and hungry man who would now go without. Why did that man do that, Junger asks? The answer is ‘tribe’:
Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word “tribe” is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with. For reasons I’ll never know, the man in Gillette decided to treat me like a member of his tribe. This book is about why that sentiment is such a rare and precious thing in modern society, and how the lack of it has affected us all. It’s about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning. It’s about why — for many people — war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It’s time for that to end.
So if we are built to both feel necessary and share our lives with others, what happened? Well:
First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day — or an entire life — mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.
Modern day society with all it’s amenities, Junger argues, is actually making us more and more disconnected from the experience we are literally made to be a part of:
As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it.
…and that experience has ramifications on our belief in right and wrong. For thousands of years, Junger says, those who did a disservice to the tribe would be cast out or even executed. Now, people make a profit off of others, and it’s labeled a success story:
It’s revealing, then, to look at modern society through the prism of more than a million years of human cooperation and resource sharing. Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny. Modern society, on the other hand, is a sprawling and anonymous mess where people can get away with incredible levels of dishonesty without getting caught. What tribal people would consider a profound betrayal of the group, modern society simply dismisses as fraud.
Junger calls this a representation of how “de-tribalized the country has become”, and believes that there needs to be something done to change that from continuing on. Liminal experiences change this. War changes this. Yet it isn’t the untold tragedy we need to replicate, it’s what it does inside us all that we need to better understand:
What people miss presumably isn’t danger or loss but the unity that these things often engender. There are obvious stresses on a person in a group, but there may be even greater stresses on a person in isolation, so during disasters there is a net gain in well-being. Most primates, including humans, are intensely social, and there are very few instances of lone primates surviving in the wild. A modern soldier returning from combat — or a survivor of Sarajevo — goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good. Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society — and they’re nearly miraculous — the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
Selflessness and sacrifice are key:
A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own. Soldiers experience this tribal way of thinking at war, but when they come home they realize that the tribe they were actually fighting for wasn’t their country, it was their unit. It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn’t willing to make sacrifices for you.
…and in a world without selflessness, we feel isolated and all alone. One of the most interesting ways this is exposed, Junger says, is littering:
Rachel Yehuda pointed to littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. “It’s a horrible thing to see because it sort of encapsulates this idea that you’re in it alone, that there isn’t a shared ethos of trying to protect something shared,” she told me. “It’s the embodiment of every man for himself. It’s the opposite of the military.”
One story that he shares that I found absolutely incredible was that of the ‘skinwalker’, and various myths of lone extremists. Junger details the Navajo myth of a man who has, in many ways, assumed the ways of animals, killing women and children viciously and coming for you in the night. This is quite similar to the European belief in werewolves, and it plays an important role in our cultures:
The myth addresses a fundamental fear in human society: that you can defend against external enemies but still remain vulnerable to one lone madman in your midst.
The concept of a man man from within is actually not as present in American myth, but Junger argues that it’s quite real within our American lives. It’s the lone gunman on a killing spree, embodying the principles of the skinwalkers and werewolves the world has always been afraid of, committing what the author calls “murder and mayhem committed by an individual who has rejected all social bonds and attacks people at their most vulnerable and unprepared.”
Yet it’s even more interesting to take a look at where these attacks take place:
It’s revealing to look at the kinds of communities where those crimes usually occur. A rampage shooting has never happened in an urban ghetto, for example; in fact, indiscriminate attacks at schools almost always occur in otherwise safe, predominantly white towns.
It may be worth considering whether middle-class American life — for all its material good fortune — has lost some essential sense of unity that might otherwise discourage alienated men from turning apocalyptically violent.
Could it be that we need to come together, as a people, to instill a sense of unity and togetherness? It’s a shame that this obvious solution seems to impossible, in today’s climate. Politics are playing a role in this, and Junger argues they shouldn’t:
The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system.
Though the answers are simple, the road to process feels extremely long. I can’t say enough about how important I think this book—and the value of community—really is.
