“Racism,” says cultural psychologist Dr. Michael Morris, “has been named the culprit behind everything wrong with the world today, from political polarization to the failure to combat climate change.”
There are certainly many things wrong with our world today, but the problem is not that we have become tribal. In his groundbreaking book, Tribal: How the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together, Dr. Morris goes on to say,
“Tribal it doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Tribalism is as essential to the human condition as breathing.”
In fact, tribalism is what makes us human. In his book, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, Historian Daniel Quinn reminds us that “racial life and no other is the gift of natural selection to mankind. It is to mankind what pack life is to wolves, pod life is to whales, and hive life is to bees. After three or four million years of human evolution, it emerged only as the social organization that works for humans.”
Quinn goes on to say,
“If you observe that hive life works well for bees, that troop life works well for baboons, or that pack life works well for wolves, you will not be doubted, but if not that tribal life works well for humans , don’t be surprised if you are attacked with almost hysterical ferocity.’
Why do we have such a hard time accepting that tribal life is the life we are meant to live? I believe that one reason for our denial of our racial roots is that we live under the mistaken belief that the emergence of what we called “civilization” ten thousand years ago was what saved mankind from a way of life that the English philosopher Thomas O Hobbes saw it as “solitary, poor, ugly, brutish, and short.”
The truth is that what we call “civilization” that began as our tribal way of life was replaced by the advent of agriculture can best be described as the worst mistake ever made. In a 1987 article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” world-renowned evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond said:
“Recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a disaster from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the great social and sexual inequality, disease and despotism, which curse our existence.”
“Tribal life was not something that people sat down and understood,”
Quinn says.
“It was the gift of natural selection, a proven success—not perfect but hard to improve upon.”
What has been called “civilization,” but is better characterized by systems scientist Riane Eisler as the “dominion” system, is a system that is collapsing. Trying to dominate the Earth, instead of learning to live in true cooperation, is a recipe for disaster.
The cause of our current conflict is not because humans are racial, it is because a way of life that has worked for over two million years has been replaced by a system that has made humans disconnected from the Earth, ourselves and others creatures of the Earth as well as the ecosystem that allows us to live without disturbing the climate to a degree that endangers all of humanity.
Thomas Berry was a priest, “geologist” and historian of religions. He spoke eloquently about our connection to the Earth and the consequences of our failure to remember that we are a member in the community of life.
“We never knew enough. Nor were we intimate enough with all our cousins in the great earth family. Nor could we hear the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has come, however, for us to listen or die.”
Back to the Future: Reclaiming Our Tribal Heritage and Reconnecting with the Community of Life
In the book review Tribal by Michael Morris, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University Daniel Gilbert says,
“This original book reveals the facts about our racial natures and shows how the deeply human tendencies that drove us to the brink of destruction could still be used to save us.”
“Early humans were linked by evolution to sharing knowledge in groups and drawing on that shared knowledge to cooperate with each other.”
says Morris.
“Language, literature, law – everything great we have mastered has come from these abilities to see the world through the prism of common knowledge or culture. When cultural codes run wild and ripple out of control, they can drag us into dysfunctional conflict, but understanding racial instincts allows you to break these cycles and harness them for collective action, even social change. They can be our ‘worst instincts,’ but they can also be our best instincts, our best hope for meeting the collaborative challenges ahead.”
One of my favorite public intellectuals, Scott Galloway says,
“There is no future, good or bad, without tribalism. This eye-opening book will change the way you think about why we behave the way we do.”
For at least two million years, the tribal way of life was all we knew. The tribal system has worked well for all people, male and female, in the past and will work well for all of us when we regain our tribal wisdom.
Although some blame men and believe that the patriarchy is the cause of our problems, I do not believe that this is true. Systems scientist and historian Riane Eisler wrote a paradigm-changing book, The Chalice & The Blade: Our History Our Future in 1987, where he described two very different ways of being in the world:
“The first, which I call the sovereign model, is what is popularly called either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity against the other. The second, in which social relations are primary based on its principle login, rather than ranking, it can best be described as the partnership model. In this model – starting from the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female – difference is not equated with either inferiority or superiority.”
Eisler has written several subsequent books describing the two systems, including the most recent, Cultivating Our Humanity: How Sovereignty and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Our Lives, and Our Future written with anthropologist Douglas P. Fry. In it he describes the tribal cultures that have lived in balance with the land for more than two million years as “the original cooperative societies.”
They show that as tribal societies based on partnership principles began to be replaced by hierarchical societies based on dominance, there was an increasing level of violence.
Eisler and Fry say,
“Several archaeological examples show the birth of war in conjunction with hierarchical systems. For example, in the Near East between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, nomadic foraging gave way to the domestication of plants and animals. In this region there is no evidence of warfare or hierarchical social organizations in the archaeological record 12,000 years before today, sparse evidence of warfare until about 9,500 years ago, and then clear evidence of the spread and intensification of warfare after that.”
The trauma of losing our racial roots affects both men and women, but in different ways. Comedian Elayne Boosler captures this difference when she said:
“When women get depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a completely different way of thinking.”
Bestselling author Sebastian Junger gives us insight into the male mindset in his book, War.
“Combat was a game the United States had asked Second Platoon to get really good at.”
Junger says,
“And when they did, the United States had put them on top of a hill without women, hot food, running water, communications with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that the men were complaining, but there are consequences. Society can give its young people almost any job and they will find a way to do it. They will suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will be done. It just means that society needs to be careful what it asks for.”
We should also be careful what kind of society we want our young people to live in. In his book, Tribe: For homecoming and belonging, Junger advocates creating a future based on our racial past.
“Perhaps the most amazing fact about America is that, alone among modern nations that have become world powers, it did so while facing three thousand miles of howling wilderness inhabited by stone-age tribes.”
“We have a strong instinct to belong to small groups defined by clear purpose and understanding – Tribes”
says Junger.
“This racial connection has been largely lost in modern society, but its recovery may be the key to our psychological survival.”
In his last chapter Tribal: How the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together, Michael Morris says,
“For our ancestors struggling to survive in the Stone Age, racial interaction was a way to expand the boundaries of social cohesion, to work in concert as a united force, to cooperate in ways that were not immediately rewarded, and to support and build wisdom of the past”.
He continues on his way,
“Our evolutionary blessing of ‘Us’ has not led us to violence against ‘Them’, but we need an awareness of our racial psychology to guard against this possibility…One thing is certain: we will not overcome today’s challenges as individuals. As even our earliest ancestors knew, we can only thrive together — in tribes.”
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