The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto
If good is what benefits more people longer and evil is what helps fewer people for shorter periods, how do tribes and civilizations measure up?
Tribes are our blood and history, genetic, cultural and psychological. Tribes reach way back into our Paleolithic past, probably the origins of language, the primary technology that allowed us to organize groups bigger than the multi-family clans that apes and bears also use.
Tribes provide language, religion, crafts and cuisine, as well as family and group support systems, some of which have remained robust over thousands of years. Tribes can also be old-fashioned, close-minded, xenophobic, claustrophobic, incestuous, violent and self-destructive.
Tribes can be injured and die due to invasion, persecution, environmental catastrophe but also their own failures or quirks. When this happens, surviving members, naturally try to save themselves and their immediate families by joining other tribes, either the conquerors or neighbors or more benevolent or like-minded tribes, even if faraway or seemingly different.
Throughout history, individuals, groups and tribes have journeyed long distances searching for a better life, leaving few people in their aboriginal homelands. Such travelers were obliged to traverse difficult environments, the territory of hostile tribes and sometimes the gap between tribe and civilization. In this manner, those tribal people voted with their feet to join civilization.
Civilization is not intrinsically better than tribe, only bigger and more intellectual.
Civilization involves the development of agriculture and cities, which are, after language, the secondary and tertiary technologies of big group formation. This soon accelerates art and ideas, science and technology, trade and communication systems, notably writing. First and foremost, however, is the development of law: rules which would allow two or more substantially different tribes to live together in relative harmony.
Indeed, life is a constant balancing act between uni-structural and multi-structural systems: cells/organ, organs/body, individuals/family, families/tribe, tribes/civilization, civilizations/earth, habitable planets/universe.
Few tribal people will refuse the aspects of civilization they like.
Indeed, regardless of cost, tribes are often overjoyed to trade whatever they have for hooks, horses, guns, penicillin, outboard motors, phones, the internet, more powerful gods or whatever goods or services they find useful or enjoyable.
But they do this only if they can also reject aspects of civilization they don’t like: notably conquest, genocide, enslavement, rape, disease, exploitation and environmental degradation.
To be sure, civilizations have habitually conquered, colonized, enslaved, killed and genocided tribes, not only those outside the civilization but internal groups, as demonstrated in the extreme degree in the last century by Germany, Russia and China.
In fact, civilizations have injured all of us, unless our forebears were part of the founding tribe’s tiny elite, and even many of them were hurt badly.
We are all born free and natural spirits, round pegs who suffer when shoved into the square holes of civilization, with its myriad rules, restrictions and ideals. Civilizational assault is aptly expressed by any outsider kid, after enduring a day of middle school, or in the parable of Adam and Eve. That story tells of a family forced to renounce their former gods and hunter-gatherer paradise to toil in the fields of civilization, oppressed by shame, laws and patriarchy.
We all come from families which had to sacrifice to join tribes, which, in turn, had to sacrifice to join civilizations.
Tribal life privileges childhood — play, close families, simpler symbol systems — while tribal adulthood can be circumscribed by taboos, rituals and obligations that must be honored, even if obviously irrational. Civilizations, conversely, repress child-like human nature until late adolescence whereupon the individual is allowed increased freedoms of speech, movement, business and other creative endeavors, like art or romantic love.
Civilizations can be crippled by demagogues and elites, by the assumption that the educated know best, by inordinate uniformity or outright enslavement, by too much guilt or cynicism or too little physical affection or time for relaxation and enjoyment — on top of the hypocrisy inherent to claims of immense benefit.
Nevertheless, civilization is the obvious object of our journey from forest to city, from emotions to intellect, from simple survival to building more benefit for more people, which is the definition of good, although it is badly blemished by its frequent failures to deliver.
Indeed, the exact same benefits which drove us to join tribes — to share resources and information, to provide back up for our families if they fail, to band together against evil doers and malevolent tribes and, last but not least, to obtain increased mating opportunities, since families will die off if they reproduce with each other — push us to join civilizations.
Given this intrinsic human need, many tribes accrued resources, information and technology and started civilizations, but only upon the realization of civilization’s first rule: End of tribe. As much as traditional elites attempt to maintain power, purity and tribal allegiance, simple logic overrules that to advance the integration of foreign elements of value, from tools and ideas to mates.
A civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization. This is proven irrefutably by all the supposedly-primitive people who hiked in from the hinterlands and contributed great things to civilization, driven by the universally-understood logic that they had an idea, item or skill which could help more people, longer, thereby making it good.
The reverse is proven by the supposedly civilized who degrade civilization by their self-centeredness and restriction of benefits, making them evil.
Even when civilizations retain vestigial tribalism in language, cuisine, culture and status, they must transcend blood and emotions and become an idea-based meritocracy simply to evolve fast enough to feed themselves. In their unabashed quest for cutting-edge concepts or goods, civilizations often locate them among faraway tribes and immediately start the stealing or importing, whichever is easier.
Although tribes are generally the aggrieved partner, some will do business with or, in turn, rob the civilization, notably around hard-to-protect trade routes or storage depots. Either way, the two parties can both inform and supply as well as oppose and rob each other.
In this manner, civilizations become self-feeding collections of races, religions, nations, tribes, clans, families and individuals, all working, not matter how roughly, chaotically or slowly, towards more sophisticated methods of cohabitation and collaboration.
Civilizations are living entities, always changing, sometimes for the worse. When civilizations lose the functionality that inspired their formation and advancement, their citizens understandably assume they might be better off abandoning civilization and returning to tribe.
Indeed, tribal rebellion is the threat that keeps civilization honest; tribal chaos is the threat that keeps civilizations in power. Revolution, the rejection of the long, hard work of accruing civilization, is a weighty matter given the odds of going round and round and landing upright are small and the fact that revolutions are generally led by tribes.
This is the problem plaguing the Middle East, where we have the earth’s oldest civilizations and, therefore, the earth’s oldest dysfunctional civilizations; where we have some the earth’s older tribes and, therefore, some of the earth’s older dysfunctional tribes.
When civilization becomes dysfunctional, weak or abusive, it is eventually usurped by another civilization or a tribe, either from within, by an upper echelon or lower oppressed group, or from without.
Since the invention of agriculture, which enabled us to live in cities, which are the building blocks of civilizations, tribes outside the civilization have sometimes come to believe they should be inside, enjoying the delicious fruits of its gardens.
Such tribes sometimes believe that the civilization has become decadent, or that they are stronger and smarter, or even that they can provide the civilization’s goods and services more efficiently. These positions are central to radical Islamism, Nazism and communism, with their tribe-like uniculture improperly extended to civilization. Such tribes insist their culture, systems and even genetics would better advance civilization.
Hence it bears repeating: A single-tribe civilization is a contradiction in terms and the definition of evil, while a multi-tribal civilization, which provides more benefit to more people over longer periods, is the definition of good.
Ironically, aspects of multi-tribalism are universally adored, even by uniculturalists and racists, who still take anything they find useful or pleasurable from any tribe, even so-called enemies. Witness the profusion of foreign cuisines in almost every city on earth — Chinese, Italian and American leading the way — simply so people can eat something other than their traditional tribal cooking which, night after night for your entire life, is insufferable.
Tribal mixing is essential for evolution, as well as pleasure, as most people well know. Intermarriage is essential to avoid inbreeding, both genetically and intellectually. In fact, culture itself is multiculturalism.
Language was invented not to communicate between identical twins, or hunter to hunter, where simple sign language would suffice. Language was invented to communicate between different people from different groups, starting with the sexes and extending to clans, tribes and foreigners, for the obvious benefit of exchanging goods, services and, of course, genetic material.
All culture is appropriation. Kids appropriate culture from their parents, their teachers, their neighbors, or off the streets, the airwaves, books or other media. Artists steal anything they like from any one, anywhere, although it is a hard theft to prosecute since a simple original idea’s conversion to elevated vision hides its origins so well.
Rule of law is required to restrict robbery, including of cultural creation and benefit. Nevertheless, as soon as culture becomes culture — i.e. the ideas are expressed with grace and logic in a physical form — it is free to inspire, travel, trade, evolve, be reborn.
The only real solution to cultural appropriation is secret societies. Even then, it is impossible to hide quality culture forever. If something useful or pleasurable is created, it will be bragged about or observed from afar and adopted by others, on top of which secret societies inherently stifle cultural creation.
Intertribal cultural communication is essential at all times, everywhere, because all social organizations are marriages between different groups and groups must interbreed to obtain new ideas and avoid degeneration and death. Despite this obvious multicultural rule, some people insist civilization is about rule of law and can be legally unicultural, in terms of the social and scientific laws that govern us.
Civilization is the combination of the best available ideas, regardless of physical or genetic origins, as travelers, traders, artists and consumers have shown over and over since globalization started some five millennia ago. Airplanes, FedEx and the internet have only proved this irrefutably.
Arguably the best available idea is tolerance, a primary tool to facilitate the working and living together of couples, families, clans, tribes, nations and civilizations. This can be labelled doing unto others as you would want done unto you, leading by example to avoid hypocrisy, or following the spirit not the letter of the law.
As Einstein and Darwin pointed out, everything is, and we are all, relative(s).
In point of fact, there can be no uniculture, neither in civilization, nation nor tribe, not even in individuals, who share their biome with more foreign microbes than their own aboriginal cells and sometimes entertain multiple points of view or even personalities.
In point fact, singular entities must maintain multiple internal elements in order to provide fail safes, redundancy and internal competition-improvement mechanisms, the best known examples of which are called Socratic dialogue or democracy.
Admittedly, almost all civilizations came from single tribes, the ones which wanted more goods, services and land, which they acquired by conquest, trade, or the power of brilliant ideas, the true building blocks of civilization.
When tribes are visionary, rich and functional they expand into civilizations, when civilizations are small-minded, poor and dysfunctional, they disband into tribes, as we have seen for centuries in the Middle East and now in the US, England and elsewhere.
One notable symptom of the tendency to reject civilization is the fixation on “Founding Tribe Phenomena.” Tribes are often overjoyed to join a civilization as long as they can be Tribe Number One, even though that contradicts civilization.
And so it goes tribe versus civilization, the big structural problem bedeviling almost all social organizations, from the European Union down to the street gangs of Los Angeles or the universal competition between young and old.
Everything appears new to the young, and even more so today, with so many radical changes in culture, gender, communication, technology and the environment. Nevertheless, people are physiologically much the same as back in the Paleolithic era and the big evolutionary step still remains from sexual immaturity to maturity, from childhood to late adolescence, even though that remains one large step short.
People are understandably drawn to their own tribe and culture, and civilized kids are even more so. Simply to become autonomous individuals, they must both break with their parents’ tribe and find their own tribe, to insulate them against the dehumanizing depredations of modern civilization. With civilization so global, homogeneous and bland, intermarriage and simplistic multiculturalism has left many people feeling tribeless.
Everyone is entitled to be part of a personal tribe or to enjoy multiple tribal memberships in tandem with full citizenship in a civilization.
But to allow and enable this for others as well as ourselves, we have to become intellectually as well as sexually mature. We have to take full responsibility for our actions, words and ideas, a ritual that has been enforce since the beginning of tribes — think of the hero mothers, warriors, shamans and priestesses. Even as tribal and civilized definitions of maturity differ, the self-responsible adult is both well known and the primary building block of both tribe and civilization.
Being more child-friendly and -conscious, tribes have sophisticated rituals and myths facilitating the tough transition to adulthood. Some civilized groups imitate this, but the requisite information, tools and social skills are so large it requires a dozen or more years of study, after which the student is inserted into a world where a lot of that knowledge is already outdated and the only constant is change.
Heraclitus, the 6th century B.C. Greek philosopher, famously said you can’t step in the same river twice because evolution is central to the universe.
Change is impossible, retorted his colleague Parmenides, since the universe is timeless, eternal and unchanging. Late in life, Heraclitus found a middle path: The way up the mountain is the same as the way down.
Both sides are partially right: Heraclitus and Parmenides, young and old, tribe and civilization, and tolerance and compromise are required to reach solutions beneficial to greater numbers of people.
Civilization only works when it endows equal rights, benefits and opportunities for all its tribes — unless their behavior is far beyond the tribal average or civilizational agreement. For example, we no longer allow cannibalism, which was once popular among many tribes. Tribes, in turn, only work well over the long term when they allow the best for their tribal members, which often means access to civilization.
This is easy to observe in microcosm. When people have jobs, culture and a way to trade goods, services and genetics — which requires rule of law, in turn obliging some form of democracy — civilization flourishes. As soon as they start losing their jobs, right of free cultural expression or, of course, their lives, they tribe up.
The solution: knowing the exact benefits and pitfalls of tribe and civilization and engineering an adjustable and tolerant but also gear-like system, where they interlock and empower each other, ever-more efficiently, on all levels to provide more benefit to more people for longer, i.e. what we call good.