This is an oldie buy goodie. I first published this in September of ’06 at Power and Control
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The war against Islamofascism is not the first time we in America have faced enemies who loved death more than life. Honor more than victory. We have faced such enemies every time we have faced one of the oldest human cultures on earth. Tribalism.
What we call western civilization is really a series of attempts to get past tribalism and move towards universalism. The Jews with their universal laws (good for Jews and gentiles – the Jews of course were chosen to be burdened with more laws than the gentiles). The laws are (taken from this Wiki):
The seven laws (commonly rendered as Sheva Mitzvot Shel Bnei Noach) are:
1. Avodah zarah – Do not worship false gods.
The universe is a unity. Since it is a unity there can be only one Maker. Tribal gods are null and void. Unity for a nation then becomes possible. Egypt solved the unity problem by incorporating local gods into their religion. They would find in their pantheon a god or goddess that was similar and graft the tribal god to it. The Romans pretty much took the Greek gods wholesale. Eventually Christianity spread the Jewish idea of the unity of the universe and the pagan gods and goddesses were junked. Still the Catholic Church will, if the demand is great enough, incorporate tribal gods disguised as saints.
2. Shefichat damim – Do not murder.
What is special about this law is that it was applied not just within the tribe, but universally.
3. Gezel – Do not steal (or kidnap).
Again what is special about this law is that it was applied not just within the tribe, but universally. There is no such thing as fair game for theft, kidnap, and plunder.
4. Gilui arayot – Do not be sexually immoral (forbidden sexual acts are traditionally interpreted to include incest, bestiality, male homosexual sex acts, i.e. sodomy, and adultery.)
The acts are still forbidden, but the prosecutorial zeal is not what it once was. Except for incest and adult-child sexual relations. That Jesus guy may have had something to do with this. Plus the fact that the status of women has risen from that of property (goats as one of my commenters likes) to people.
5. Birkat Hashem – Do not “bless God” euphemistically referring to blasphemy.
Again the act is still forbidden, but the prosecutorial zeal is not what it once was. Even among the devout, at least in the current western practice.
6. Ever min ha-chai – Do not eat any flesh that was torn from the body of a living animal (given to Noah and traditionally interpreted as a prohibition of cruelty towards animals)
This gives the idea that unnecessary cruelty is not a positive virtue. You can still eat your meat, but the kill must be with as little suffering as possible.
7. Dinim – Set up a system of honest, effective courts, police and laws.
Here is a truly novel idea. Your brother in law or cousin doesn’t get special treatment. Every one is equal under the law.
The Talmud also states: “Righteous people of all nations have a share in the world to come” (Sanhedrin 105a). Any non-Jew who lives according to these laws is regarded as one of “the righteous among the gentiles”. Maimonides states that this refers to those who have acquired knowledge of God and act in accordance with the Noahide laws.
In the west even the most devout secularist adheres to these laws as currently practiced. Exceping for some on the left who wish to devolve back to a state of tribalism in the name of multi-culturalism where certain tribes are to be given special favor. Everyone is not equal under the law. Of course this destroys the unity of a nation and would reduce the nation state to groups of warring factions when the big advantage of the nation is that it eliminates open warfare within a nation thus making the nation more economically advantaged and stronger morally and militarily. United we stand… and all that.
Which is a long lead up to this very interesting look at tribalism in the Middle East.
To understand the nature of the enemy in the Middle East and to evaluate the prospects for democracy and peace, we need to extend our gaze not five years into the past, but five hundred and even five thousand.
I’ve spent the last four years writing two books about Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, 331-327 B.C. What has struck me in the research is the dead-ringer parallels between that ancient East-West clash and the modern ones the U.S. is fighting today — despite the fact that Alexander was pre-Christian and his enemies were pre-Islamic.
What history seems to be telling us is that the quality that most defines our Eastern adversaries, then and now, is neither religion nor extremism nor “Islamo-fascism,” but something much older and more fundamental.
Extremist Islam is merely an overlay (and a recent one at that) atop the primal, unchanging mind-set of the East, which is tribalism, and its constituent individual, the tribesman.
Tribalism and the tribal mind-set are what the West is up against in Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency, the Sunni and Shiite militias, and the Taliban.
It looks like what we are confronting is a very old form of human organization. The problem with this type of organization is that the justice it provides is not universal. The in tribe gets a measure of justice. The out tribes get the leavings.
What exactly is the tribal mind-set? It derives from that most ancient of social organizations, whose virtues are obedience, fidelity, warrior pride, respect for ancestors, hostility to outsiders and willingness to lay down one’s life for the cause/faith/group. The tribe’s ideal leader is closer to Tony Soprano than to FDR and its social mores are more like those of Geronimo’s Apaches than the city council of Scarsdale or Shepherd’s Bush.
Can the tribal mind embrace democracy? Consider the contrast between the tribesman and the citizen:
A citizen is an autonomous individual. A citizen is free. A citizen possesses the capacity to evaluate the facts and prospects of his world and to make decisions guided by his own conscience, uncoerced by authority. A congress of citizens acting in free elections determines the political course of a democratic community.
The citizen is an altogether different animal from the member of a tribe. He lives by a diffeent set of rules. A set of rules the tribalist considers unmanly and without honor. The civilized man rates peace and prosperity higher than honor. Which is not the same as being without honor. A mistake tribalists have been making about the democratically civilized for a very long time. Because the civilized man will allow himself to be dishonored for the sake of peace the tribal man assumes that the civilized man is weak. In fact the civilized man can be more brutal than the tribalist when the civilized man goes into the honor mode. When in that mode it is not just tit for tat revenge he seeks, but the complete destruction of the disturbers of his peace.
The value of the civilized man is the value of the merchant who will take small humiliations for the sake of profit. For the tribalist no amount of profit is worth any humiliation. Which is why merchants and bankers are so despised by the tribalist.
A citizen prizes his freedom; therefore he grants it to others. He is willing to respect the rights of minorities within the community, so that his own rights will be shielded when he finds himself in the minority.
The tribesman doesn’t see it that way. Within the fixed hierarchy of the tribe, disagreement is not dissent (and thus to be tolerated) but treachery, even heresy, which must be ruthlessly expunged. The tribe exists for itself alone. It is perpetually at war with all other tribes, even of its own race and religion.
The tribesman deals in absolutes. One is either “of blood” or not. The enemy spy can infiltrate the tribal network no more than a prison guard can worm his way into the Aryan Brotherhood. The tribe recognizes its own. It expels (or beheads) the alien. The tribe cannot be negotiated with. “Good faith” applies only within the pale, never beyond.
The tribesman does not operate by a body of civil law but by a code of honor. If he receives a wrong, he does not seek redress. He wants revenge. The taking of revenge is a virtue in tribal eyes, called badal in the Pathan code of nangwali. A man who does not take revenge is not a man. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the sectarian militias of Iraq are not in the war business, they are in the revenge business. The revenge-seeker cannot be negotiated with because his intent is bound up with honor. It is an absolute.
Perhaps the most telling difference between the citizen and the tribesman lies in their views of the Other. The citizen embraces multiplicity; to him, the melting pot produces richness and cultural diversity. To the tribesman, the alien is not even given the dignity of being a human being; he is a gentile, an infidel, a demon.
The tribesman grants justice within the tribe. In his internal councils, empathy, humor and compassion may prevail. Outside the tribe? Forget it.
Civilization is a fragile thing because the lure of tribalism is always there. Socialism’s appeal is that the government will take care of you in the way that being a member of a tribe did. The Nazis’ appeal was to the greater German tribe. Sadly in America the Democrat Party is the Party where tribes gather; they just don’t get civilization. Civilization works by encouraging the tribes to make the tribal identity secondary.
I’m going to be looking into this topic further over time. The number one question is how the tribalist can be converted either over time or by generational change to more universal values.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The civilized man pursues happiness. The tribalist pursues narrow justice.
The number one problem for the civilized and the tribalized alike is mirror imaging.
Update: 26 Sept ’06 1651z
Commenter Paul noted in the comments this very interesting piece by a libertarian anthropologist: Observations on Arabs
Update: 27 Sept ’06 1803z
Clayton Cramer comments.
Update: 30 Sept ’06 0059z
Elder of Zion and Liberty ans Justice and Infidel Bloggers Alliance comment.
Update: 02 Oct. ’06 0807z
Captain’s Quarters discusses Afghan tribalism. The comments are especially good. See the one by Dale in Atlanta.
Update: 16 Oct. ’06 1405z
Israel Matzav has a good bit on tribalism in Gaza.
Comments
9 responses to “Tribalism”
Simon,
This is a really good post in that it conveys the realistic picture of the threat we face. The discussion of ‘tribalism’ in the body of the post and in the links is excellent. Lee Harris’s book ‘The Suicide of Reason’ covers this subject in depth. He spends a lot of time discussing how we in the West have become ill-equipped to deal with the deadly threat posed by Islamic radical tribalism. Europe in in a more advanced state of inability to defend against the threat than we but we are moving rapidly in that direction.
Bush is fighting the right enemy but there remain many questions regarding whether ours is the correct approach. Certainly, any direction the liberal leaders support is not going to help. Our country is ‘unique’ for sure and ‘exceptional’ and this exceptionalism is worth defending. We have gone further with individual liberty than Europe and we have a tradition of thinking differently from them. We need to be very wary of turning our leadership over to those who think and act like Europeans because that is the surest way to lose this fight.
Good topic, we need more people to understand this.
Bob,
Thanks!
One of the reasons I reposted it here is that CV gets about 10X as many readers as Power and Control.
Send Instapundit a link. Maybe we can get a few more up to speed.
As if the wingnuts aren’t the most tribal group in America today.
As if.
Well no alphie,
We have a principle, smaller government. Not well honored, but still a principle.
The Democrats have the Black Tribe, the Hispanic Tribe, The Women’s Tribe, The Gay’s Tribe, etc.
In fact the inter-tribal fight between the Women’s Tribe and The Black’s Tribe seems to be creating quite a rift in the Democrat Party. Not that you personally would notice.
There is none so blind as he who will not see.
Am I the only one who notices that the tribal virtues listed above are precisely the virtues that all good soldiers must have? Of course, this is precisely the reason we have civilian control of the military: harness those tribal virtues in the service of civilization.
Civilization may work to make those tribal virtues secondary… or it may work by expanding the membership in the tribe. Liberalism encourages breakdown into tribes based on external characteristics (race, gender, even sexual practice is made as externally obvious as possible). This is the challenge: how do we define membership in the tribe? and how strict are we in enforcing the requirements?
FWIW, there’s a Bnai Noach movement. I believe as it exists in the U.S. its members generally live in the South.
This has a lot of similarities to violence, Simon.
The link is in my name-link.
The citizen is an altogether different animal from the member of a tribe. He lives by a diffeent set of rules. A set of rules the tribalist considers unmanly and without honor. The civilized man rates peace and prosperity higher than honor. Which is not the same as being without honor. A mistake tribalists have been making about the democratically civilized for a very long time. Because the civilized man will allow himself to be dishonored for the sake of peace the tribal man assumes that the civilized man is weak. In fact the civilized man can be more brutal than the tribalist when the civilized man goes into the honor mode. When in that mode it is not just tit for tat revenge he seeks, but the complete destruction of the disturbers of his peace.
I think a core difference is that Western civilization demands that you refuse to kill, even in self-defense or the defense of a loved one, when the tribes say that to be part of their society you “must kill”.
The indoctrination against using violence is so strong in decadent and civilized nations like the US that you often have people willing to be beat to death and never fight back because their experience in life has always been “obey the authorities or receive punishment”.
My post correlates those societal inhibitions in relation to self-defense and why people refuse to fight back when they are being attacked by anti-social people.
This is the challenge: how do we define membership in the tribe? and how strict are we in enforcing the requirements?
All of humanity is our tribe and we enforce that with nuclear fire and military strength. Enemies of humanity, humanity being our tribe, must be exterminated: Such folks as pirates and terrorists. Allies of humanity should be cultivated and integrated into the tribe.
That is the ideal. The civilization that we should be working towards but have not yet reached, not long by a shot.
In this sense, you combine classical liberal values of Greece and Aristotle with the Roman Republic system of phased in citizenship with America’s promotion of individual sovereignty and protection of liberties.
Tribalism creates eternal war, slavery, and suffering because resources are wasted fighting each other. There is no unity, no harmony, and thus no comprehension of the “Other”.
Tribalism developed because no one man or tribe was strong enough to say “here are the rules and we will enforce it”. The tribe is essentially the largest unit that can be governed in any one location, and for most of human history it was amazingly small (think family groups) until the advent of Republics and nations. So why would any individual respond with “okay, we will follow you rules and give up our ways of killing and murdering in return for security and civilized products” when the capacity for universal or even just large security guarantees were false promises? The tribe prefers strong leaders that demonstrate the ability to take charge and maintain order. Because that is what the tribe is for, to protect its members. And it only engages in clanwarfare because it can’t trust the other clans not to stab them in the back if they find it convenient. Under a strong leader that can unite the clans, they no longer have to worry about this because they have faith the leader will make any clan that steps out of bounds extinct. If you show that you are too weak in will to kill every man, woman, and child to maintain order in your lands, every tribal leader will rebel. For why should they cooperate when they have seen the fecklessness, incompetence, and spineless of the United States occupation forces? They get no security in return and they are asked to “give up everything they know” for democracy. That’s a nice bargain.
People want something in return. They don’t want to give you something for nothing.
I’m not sure if this was mentioned or not, but one notable and easily described difference between Xerxes Persian soldiers and the soldiers of the Spartans and Greeks were the value placed on individual life by the Greeks.
The Greek hoplites were far more heavily armored than the Persians because the Greeks placed value on individual life. That’s why they saw courage as such a virtue, because they saw courage as an internal quality of a specific individual. Whereas the Persians saw courage as a function of how well you obey the orders you have been given by your Emperor. Because the Persians did not really value individual life very much, you see. In return for a stable political system, or maybe unstable given the number of civil wars fought in feudal and emperor systems, people traded their liberties and rights away.
The Greeks never really did that, although they had problems like slavery and Helots and women not being allowed the liberties and responsibilities that Spartans gave their women.
The problem of the Greeks was that valuing individualism gave them supreme military ability but it also destroyed their political sense of cohesion. Every city-state in Greece kept arguing over what was “best” for themselves or the citizens they represented. There was no unity like you saw in Persia, because people just wouldn’t knuckle down and give in cause they valued their own lives and thoughts.
We have the exact same problem now. The West has superior military power but we are divided by bickering factions because of the value we place on human life and liberties. The exact same things that provide us our military advantage. Whereas our enemies are united politically or at least ideologically, but their military power sucks precisely because they love death more than life. You can’t really get good soldiers if they keep dying on you all the time.
Which brings me to the synthesis point. The best hybrid is a combination of tribal mentality and civilized mentality. Tribal or barbarian minded people make great warriors and fighters. You’re going to need those kinds of people when you face pure barbarians and steppe raiders. It doesn’t matter what age humanity is living in, every civilization needs its own cadre of killers to stop the natural born killers in the rest of the world.
The number one question is how the tribalist can be converted either over time or by generational change to more universal values.
In the end, I think they can be converted with a simple deal. They provide manpower to fuel wars while the central government or us provide the tribe with medicine, support, money, and all the other stuff that tribes need in trade from civilized factions. This coincidentally was what Alexander did in Persia and Petraeus did in Al Anbar. The tribe feels honored to know that their sons will be leading the fight and be depended upon to fight and kill for the honor and status of the tribe in the eyes of rivals, tribe Al-Ameriki, and the Shia government. We get the benefit of stopping the SUnni resistance to our presence. Everybody benefits, except the enemies of humanity, aka terrorists.
Anyone that knows something about Parthia and the other nomads on the steppes will recall that such people, even though they essentially lived in the saddle, still needed and wanted to trade with civilized cultures for stuff they couldn’t get otherwise. And after a time, they settled because the nomadic life was harsh. Because they settled down and started farming, they lost most of their innate horsemanship skills. It takes a lot of horsemanship to be able to ride a steppe pony and shoot a composite/recurved bow with both hands, in combat even.
The tribes that really hated civilizaton were the ones that were never “softened” by trade contact with civilization. They didn’t know how much their life could be better, so they lived lives of bare bones and did horrendous things for their tribe. That’s why the Gauls oftentimes just gave up to Rome while the Germans fought like demons.
The weird thing is that the West, by subsidizing Arab’s oil, make the Arabs feel like charity cases. Inferior. Tribal folks are supposed to be hardier and stronger and more warriorly than the decadent fools in the West. So their explanation for this is the Great and Little Satan.
[…] From this one might deduce that certain features of morality are innate and require nothing to enforce them other than being human. The Founding of the US was in its own imperfect way an attempt to find that minimum set of laws everyone could adhere to – thus allowing people of a multitude of cultures to live together. In fact the Jews had come up with a similar idea milena ago with their concept of the Noahide laws. The Jews themselves were burdened with 613 laws (about which a body of common law developed). Non-Jews only had seven. I wrote some on Noahide laws here. […]