What are Your Tribes?

The human hierarchy has three basic levels: the individual, the family, and the tribe.

That's a simplification, of course, but it captures the essence of human grouping. We experience life as individuals. We see the family as a natural unit. And we all belong to tribes.

Our tribal loyalties aren't usually a problem. Membership in a tribe is usually healthy, and it helps enhance our lives. But it seems to me that these days we're seeing a lot of unhealthy tribal identification in America.

Here's how it works. I used to play World of Warcraft a lot, and I almost always played as an Alliance character. I hate the Horde, and I enjoy meeting them on the field of battle to teach them bloody lessons.

My "loyalty" to the Alliance and hatred of the Horde is healthy, because it occurs only within the context of the game. In real life, I like Horde players as much as I like my allies, because we're both part of a larger tribe, the tribe of World of Warcraft players. We're also part of an even larger tribe, the tribe of gamers.

Most if not all of our tribes fit into a hierarchy. My city is one of my tribes. My state is a higher-level tribe. My nation is an even higher level tribe. And my ultimate tribe is all of humanity.

Tribal loyalty becomes unhealthy when it breaks that hierarchy, when your identification as part of a tribe becomes an obstacle to your identification with a higher-level tribe. For example, if my Texan loyalty began to outweigh my loyalty to America, that would be an unhealthy situation. Such conflicts lead to bad feelings at best and to violence at worst.

I was thinking about this recently while watching some videos about the social justice warrior movement. I noticed some parallels to the Tea Party movement. I noticed an unhealthy form of tribalism. Some of the symptoms of this problem are:

1. Endless anger. Some social justice warriors and Tea Party members use their anger as a club to try to beat people into agreement. That kind of angry approach doesn't really work, but it can certainly feel good.

2. Exclusivity. People suffering from unhealthy tribalism have a very strong sense of us versus them. They see no value outside their own tribe and thus they see no allies beyond the tribe.

3. Closed-circuit worldview. Unhealthy tribalists usually share a common vision of how the world works, a vision that most of us don't share because it doesn't correlate well with reality. Among the social justice warriors, you'll commonly find the opinion that America is a rape culture. Among the Tea Partiers, you'll commonly find the opinion that America went socialist while they weren't looking.

4. In-fighting. To the average Tea Partier, nobody is "conservative enough" to suit them. Someone who settles for a politician who is less than pure conservative, by Tea Party tribal standards, is no longer seen as a true member of the tribe. Likewise, there's a lot of infighting among social justice warriors over how "pure" their views are and how well they conform to their tribal norms.

I had a personal experience with unhealthy tribalism recently. Even though I've been a gun rights activist for a long time, even though I've put an enormous amount of effort and money into that cause, even though I still have two twelve-inch National Rifle Association stickers on my van, I was dismissed as a phony by an extremist, just because I wasn't as extreme as him.

And that's the worst part of unhealthy tribalism. It puts you on a path of ever-increasing extremism, and that cuts you off from your natural tribal hierarchy. You can probably think of your own examples of unhealthy tribalism. Maybe you see it in white supremacists or radical environmentalism or religious fundamentalism or some other tribe.

Sometimes people can rise above their tribal loyalties. In Florida a few months ago, environmentalists and Tea Partiers found common ground in a fight for sane energy regulation. They found their higher-level loyalty, and that's healthy.
Conservative Groups Battle Over Solar in Florida

How do you keep your tribal tendencies healthy? It's simple. You don't let your loyalty to a lower-level tribe or cause override your loyalty to a higher-level tribe or cause. Fore example, ny loyalty to any of my political or social tribes is always secondary to my loyalty to America as a whole. It's why I left the Republican Party a few years ago. When the GOP changed in 2007, it became, in my opinion, a threat to America, and I could no longer stay in the Republican tribe. The GOP set out on a path of extremism, and that's a path I will not follow.

That's just me, though. What are your tribes? How healthy is your loyalty to them? Do they exhibit any of the four characteristics I listed earlier? These are questions I think we should all ask ourselves, because there seems to be a lot of unhealthy tribalism in American today.