The Hierarchy of Tribes

Humans have developed a lot of complicated ways to organize into groups, but the basic hierarchy is simple.

• Individual
• Family
• Tribes

An individual is easy to understand. It's one person. A family is easy to understand, although the definition can get a little fuzzier. It's a group of people bound by biological relationships, like parent/child or uncle/nephew, and by marital relationships. A tribe is a group of families and individuals who work together to survive and thrive.

That's the basic setup. Obviously, things are more complex in the modern world. Family doesn't necessarily mean a blood relationship today, and tribes have evolved into larger social structures.

But we still define ourselves by our tribes. Even though I'm generally anti-social, I have a long list of tribes myself. Some of them are geological.

The Arkansas tribe. It's my native state, so this is a tribe I can avoid but never leave.
The Southern California tribe. If you go by length of residence, SoCal is my second home.
The Texas tribe. My current state. I don't like this tribe so much, but I'll still defend it and try to be a good tribe member.
The American tribe. I'll talk a bit more about this later.

Some of our tribes are formed around common interests.

I'm a gamer. I'm not a great gamer, but I'm a proud one. (Nelf hunters rule!)
I'm a beekeeper. It's only one hive, but it has bees in it, so I qualify for tribal membership.
I'm an agnostic. This is a fun tribe, because atheists and theists alike hate us, and it makes for some good arguments online.
I'm a writer.

That last tribe is really a collection of tribes. Anyone who's interested in writing is part of the writer tribe. There's also a sub-tribe of professional writers, people who make a living by arranging words. There's a sub-sub-tribe of technical writers, people who write instructions and descriptions.

That's one of the big differences between humanity's primitive past and humanity's slightly less primitive present. In the primitive world, you only had one tribe. Today, we have a whole network of tribes. And that brings up the question of tribal loyalty. Which tribe should you be more loyal to?

An example of this is my American tribe. My loyalty to that tribe outweighs my loyalty to a single city or state, because the American tribe is higher up the hierarchy. This is where geological tribalism meets political tribalism.

I was a Republican from 1993 until 2012. I'm no longer part of that tribe, because it went bad, but I'm still a member of the conservative tribe and part of the secular American conservative sub-tribe. By the rule I established in the preceding paragraph, I should be more loyal to conservatism in general than to secular America conservatism.

But I have a problem with that. Today's conservatism has been hijacked. Part of that hijacking was done by the sub-tribe of Christian fundamentalists. These people have declared that the conservative tribal identity must include certain elements that I can't accept. Science denialism is one of those elements. Another is a belief that Christians in America are a persecuted majority. Another is the belief that America has a Christian government rather than a secular one.

While I remain loyal to genuine conservatism, I'm not loyal to what passes for conservatism in America these days. I can't be, because this new conservative tribe puts its own interests above the interests of America, and I'm more loyal to the nation as a whole than I am to any single part of it.

We need to redefine American conservatism. For a starter, we need to recognize that American conservatism is built on a progressive foundation. Remember that Constitution we conservatives claim to revere? That was, and still is in many respects, a progressive document, because it overthrew the old ways of doing things.

We need to recognize that while a conservative might be Christian, conservatism is not defined by Christianity. The conservative role in society is to judge new ideas to see which ones are worth trying, not to promote a specific set of religious opinions.

Finally, we need to recognize that science denialism is not compatible with American conservatism. The place that would become America began taking shape about the same time that modern science began. Science helped turn American into a superpower. It's one of the pillars of American strength.

And no genuine American conservative attacks American strength.