I was born and I live in Jackson, Mississippi, near what is known by convention as 90 degrees west longitude, 32 degrees north latitude. (You can look up your own location on this arbitrary scale here.)
As a result of this curious happenstance, and by conventional rights, I am qualified to call myself a citizen of the municipality of Jackson, Mississippi, a citizen of the state of Mississippi, and a citizen of the United States of America. Thus, I could be described as a Jacksonian, a Mississippian, and an American. When it is convenient I use these monikers myself. I apply them to myself and to others. I also use my regional identity as a Southerner when it is convenient.
There is no escaping from these conventions because they are widely accepted as shorthand descriptors for sets of attitudes and outlooks in a convenient, but limited and faulty, tribal identification scheme. For example, folks from rural Mississippi may use the words “Jackson folk” to describe and attribute urban attitudes and problems to the tribe of Jacksonians. Likewise, many who make statements about Mississipians, Southerners, or Americans use these tribal identification schemes to describe their broad views of humans within these geographic boundaries. In some cases, the utility of these modern tribal identification schemes makes their usage nearly unavoidable.
We’ll come back to 90 degrees west longitude, 32 degrees north latitude shortly, but first, I digress:
I am not a paleo-ethno-anthro expert, so when I recently became more interested in the concepts of tribe and tribalism, I googled ‘tribalism’. Amongst the first two or three hundred results out of 1.1 million google hits, there seems to be much discussion about and even acceptance of the idea that all humans are hard-wired to consider themselves a part of some tribe or another. There is also a recent surge of new brain studies suggesting that certain prejudices are hard-wired into our brains. One of the interesting things that I found while researching tribalism was the concept of Dunbar’s Number (yes, I know it is merely a link to the wikipedia, but it will suffice for my non-rigorous purposes).
Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, non-human primates have to maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through grooming. Such social groups function as protective cliques within the physical groups in which the primates live. The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain. This suggests that there is a species-specific index of the social group size, computable from the species’ mean neocortex volume.
In a 1993 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 36 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human “mean group size” of 147.8 (casually represented as 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).
Dunbar then compared this prediction with observable group sizes for humans. Beginning with the assumption that the current mean size of the human neocortex had developed about 250,000 years BCE, i.e. during the Pleistocene, Dunbar searched the anthropological and ethnographical literature for census-like group size information for various hunter/gatherer societies, the closest existing approximations to how anthropology reconstructs the Pleistocene societies. Dunbar noted that the groups fell into three categories — small, medium and large, equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes — with respective size ranges of 30-50, 100-200 and 500-2500 members each.
Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.
…
In its popularization, the research of Dunbar and others is taken as an upper bound of the number of fellow humans that an individual can view as being “truly human”. In this form, …[it] functions as a reductionistic and biologistic explanation for why humans can treat some humans with consideration and other humans indifferently or even inhumanely.[emphasis mine]
I think that Dunbar’s Number is revealing or at least acknowledging something important, but not conveying the whole of the picture for humans. In our most base and animalistic existence, this number is apparently a good one, well supported by paleo-ethno-anthro research on human group sizes.
However, the rise of Agriculture, Urbanization and Nationalization have led us over the past ten thousand years or so to larger and larger tribal identification schemes. The need for care and nurturing of larger numbers of relationships has been stretched and redefined upward time and again. The progression of human population size has not been merely evolutionary, it has been revolutionary. It is no wonder to me that our ability to view billions of other humans as totally human is something that we have to work on constantly.
And therein lies the rub. The need to work to overcome our basic limitations will necessarily preclude some of us from achieving a sense of integrated living with a number of humans that is orders of magnitude larger than our individual animalistic equipage gives us the ability to identify with. We’re only human, after all. But where animalistic equipage ends, abstraction begins. Symbolic substitutions and manipulations are not easy to grapple with, as many who have struggled with mathematics and language know. The creation, manipulation, and maintenance of “truly human” as a symbolic representation of “All Other Humans” is arguably more difficult than doing calculus or learning a foreign tongue. It requires that we supercede the linear projections of Dunbar by realizing the exponential increase that the complexity of our hyper-enlarged primate brain size makes possible.
Some of us will remain tribal, in the negative sense of the word, and be unable to grasp the oneness of humanity or attribute humane motivations to large numbers of others. It is difficult work to stay focused on the fact that in the Universe, we are all much, much, much more alike than we are different. So, tribal words and tribal identifications will persist as convenient tags and imperfect symbols of groups of “Other Humans”. And even though all of human history is written from within the tribal paradigm box, the actual utility of such an outlook is decreasing. The arbitrariness of our conventions of geographical and tribal divisions has never been more apparent than it is today as we are increasingly faced with global human needs and global human interactions.
And now, back to the arbitrary geographic designation of 90 degrees west longitude, 32 degrees north latitude and the various convenient tribal designations used to describe the human inhabitants in the vicinity of that point:
If you look closely at the state flag of Mississippi you might think something like “white Mississippians are racists” and to some degree you would be absolutely correct.
Now, what may surprise you is that rather than getting in a huff about someone who might say “white Mississipians are racists”, I take no offense – even though I am a white Mississippian, but not a racist. How can I be so un-indignant? Because I do not fully embrace the characterization of myself as a Mississippian – I see myself as a part of something larger. I do not own the concept of Mississippi and the concept of ‘Mississippian’ does not own all of me. If I chose to identify myself wholly with and within the concept of ‘Mississippian’, I would be offended by those words, I think. But I do not so choose. I claim a Global Exception – a tribal enlargement – an exercise in symbolic substitution – a projection far beyond the limitations of my animalistic neocortical tribal equipage. I am a citizen first and foremost of the Earth and I can choose to examine tribal generalizations without fear and loathing.
When specifically confronted with that statement – “white Mississippians are racists” – I first surrender my self to the prospect that I may be a racist white Mississippian. After all, I am, by happenstance, a white Mississippian. Then I choose to try to defeat any tribalistic impulse that I find inside my self, and view the statement for what it is – a tribal generalization. There may be a great deal of truth in such a statement and to dismiss it completely because of a tribal attachment would be wrong, in my opinion. If I discarded all such statements reflexively, I might throw the baby out with the bathwater in the process. We all speak in generalizations from time to time, out of force of habit or for convenience or of necessity. For me, a careful examination of my self and my tribal identifications is satyagraha for my soul and the first step to ahimsa toward the speaker of a tribal generalization. The second step is to try to understand why the speaker is saying this and to attempt to identify and understand their underlying need.
Perhaps the speaker’s underlying need is for me to recognize that all Mississippians are valuable, not just white ones. Or perhaps they need for me to recognize that they have personally suffered as a result of the actions or inactions of racist white Mississippians. Once I clarify and acknowledge this need by engaging in a discussion, I can then ask the speaker what they would like for each of us to do about the issue of racism in Mississippi and hopefully reach an agreement about doing something. Compare and contrast the possible outcomes of this approach to one in which I reflexively respond to the speaker with a simple declarative and contrary statement, such as “You are wrong, wrong, wrong, ALL white Mississippians are NOT racists, you reverse bigot you.” Whose needs would be met by that course of speaking? What agreement on positive action could possibly result from it?…
This diary is not intended as a diatribe against tribes. I belong to many tribes. By virtue of my various tribal memberships, I gain common experience with subsets of humanity. My hard-wired brain circuits are not totally useless. I try to use them for my own higher purposes. Nor is this diary intended as denial that members of a tribe have shared responsibilities and culpabilities, though I do believe there is a huge difference in those respects between self-selected tribes and happenstance tribes. Once you make such a distinction between self-selection and happenstance, you can see the internal inconsistency illustrated by the simple declarative and contrary statement in the above example: IF I view myself as a self-selected “white Mississippian”, THEN my culpability for the racism in my state is arguably larger than if I do not so self-select AND I’m more likely to respond with non-productive tribalistic defenses. By self-selecting a larger tribal identity I may avoid some culpability for the partial truth contained in the original generalization, but I do not alleviate myself of responsibility for positive action or for meeting the real human needs contained within or hidden behind the original generalization.
This diary is a diatribe against a type of tribalism wherein one totally surrenders one’s self-definition to a tribe and one’s self to tribalistic response mechanisms. I have never bought into such tribalisms, at least not for long. (Emerson and Thoreau were my first literary philosophical heroes and I’ve tried to practice their interesting skepticisms. If you haven’t read Thoreau and understood him, at least Walden and Civil Disobedience, you are not a real American. ;p )
This diary is also intended as a request to acknowledge the role that tribalisms and tribal instincts play in our lives and in our discussions of politics. The first step toward a cure for overly strong tribalistic tendencies is to know your tribes and tribalisms by whatever means of self-examination you choose. If you would like to find out more about your own hard-wired prejudices and tribal instincts, I invite you to go to the Project Implicit website and take a few of the research tests. You might find out something about yourself. Then the second step is to become an exception. And learn that being tribeless, even in your mind, is very lonely business – like living alone on the side of a pond miles away from the city for a year or two. But it’s good for your soul. I promise. And in the solitude of tribelessness, you may find that your tribe is THE human tribe now, and it is no longer based solely on geographic happenstance and convention. As a result of thinking this way, you may someday find yourself in jail whilst the rest of your tribe carries on in the name of tribalistic responses. The third step? Claim your exception freely, and live it. WE, all of humanity, are the tribe and we are also the exception. As far as we know, we are a rare and special flower of the Universe itself.
I now pass the BooTribe Talking Stick to you.
She said this way was to sit quietly around whatever campfire one came upon, and wait until someone passed you the Talking Stick. Until then, it was wise to listen well with the ears of the heart, to the one who held it. In this way, one could hear their truest song.
When the Talking Stick came into your hands, you could sing your own song, and the other would hear it with their hearts ears. In such a way, many songs can be learned.
She said as we learn to hear and share the songs of others, we are drawn to hear more, and the desire for a bridge between us is born, to be fed and nurtured well for the good of all people. [deep bow to scribe the teacher, and to scribe‘s teacher]
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